Short and sweet | 22 May 2010

This little book of limericks, some as hard and glittering as shards of mica but a few surprisingly pallid and limp, at once presents a puzzle: the real name of an author is no more likely to be Jeff Chaucer than the real name of the author of a play would be Billie Shakespeare. The first task that I therefore set myself was to attempt to discover the real identity behind the pseudonym.

Accompanying the title there is also the name of Robert Conquest, writer of an introduction that, while I was reading it, seemed to be familiar, and that eventually turned out to be a revised version of a review for the TLS of a book on the limerick by William Baring-Gould. Briefly I had decided that the limericks themselves must also be wholly the work of Conquest, until I came on one by one of the best and most prolific of all exponents of the genre, Victor Gray (b. 1917). Clearly, then, Conquest, though himself a talented writer of limericks, was not the sole begetter of the collection, even though it contains some contributions by him that also appear in the Penguin Book of Limericks. But he may well be the editor, in addition to being himself a contributor, and so in a position to draw on the talents of such of his colleagues in the Movement as Donald Davie, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin — all listed among his acknowledgments for their ‘collaborations’.

During the Thirties the perennially popular The Weekend Book introduced to readers such limericks, adroitly encapsulating some philosophical or scientific conundrum, as Ronald Knox’s musing on whether a tree still exists if there is no one in the Quad to acknowledge its existence or M.