Tuesday, March the 14th, 2006

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

He Preened, Eating Bloaters

Task: describe a typical Dobson breakfast scene.

On the face of it, this sounds like a simple enough assignment. It is, of course, anything but. Those who have even a passing acquaintance with the titanic out-of-print pamphleteer Dobson know that the words typical and breakfast can never be crammed together. It is an understatement to say that he had mixed feelings about breakfast. There were times when he was up and about before dawn, gobbling down a huge bowl of porridge. Thereagain, he sometimes stumbled downstairs at noon, bleary and fractious, waving his arms in dismissal of a proffered slice of toast. From one day to the next, there was no knowing how Dobson would greet the day, and howsoever he did greet it, no knowing with what foodstuffs, if any, the day would commence.

I cannot in all honesty, then, describe a typical Dobson breakfast scene, as is required of me. Instead, I propose to examine two Dobsonian breakfasts, from different stages in his life, to which I will add some observations on a pamphlet he planned, but never wrote, on this important topic. Will that do?

The first breakfast scene I wish to evoke is one that took place when Dobson was living around the corner from the notorious flapper Popsie Shadrach. Popsie's well-kept secret at the height of her flapperdom was that she was the devoted mother of an infant. Her daughter grew up to become the daredevil adventuress Tiny Enid. At the time of this breakfast, however, Tiny Enid was not even a twinkle in her mother's eye. Popsie was returning from a gin joint at dawn, and crashed her jalopy into Dobson's hedge, waking the pamphleteer, who leapt out of bed, thundered out into his front garden, carried the stunned demimondaine into his parlour, and sought to revive her by winding up his gramophone and playing the Adagio from Bohuslav Martinu's Concerto for string quartet and orchestra at ear-splitting volume. With Popsie sprawled on the couch and the music moving inexorably towards its sonorous B minor climax, Dobson busied himself in the kitchen. Outside it began to pour with rain, and steam hissed from the jalopy's smashed-up engine, so much steam that the hedge was obscured. This was the inspiration for Dobson's tremendous pamphlet Hedges Hidden From Sight By Steam (out of print), the only one of his works to be illustrated with watercolours. When the music stopped, Dobson bid the groggy but only slightly injured flapper to join him at the breakfast table. He preened, and ate bloaters. Popsie contented herself with a tumbler of gin, sucked from a straw, for her wrist was sprained and she could not hold the glass.

We move forward four decades to consider a second Dobson breakfast scene. Bloaters have their place here, too, but there is no gin, no Popsie Shadrach, no Tiny Enid (by now an adult famed wherever people speak of daredevil adventuresses) and no hedge hidden by steam. In fact there is no hedge at all, for Dobson has moved on, as we all must, sooner or later.

The second breakfast I invite you to ponder was prepared and consumed in an anteroom on the sixth floor of a palace belonging to the Plenipotentiary Oberstraung General of a disputed territory south of the Great Frightening River. What in heaven's name was the impecunious pamphleteer doing in such sumptuous surroundings? I should point out that he was only there for three days, having been invited under the mistaken assumption that he was a tuner of pianos, an easy error to make, given that his most recent pamphlet was entitled I, Piano Tuner! Dobson's host had clearly not read beyond the cover page, for even a cursory reading of the text would show that the pamphleteer was wholly ignorant of his subject. It is one of his most mystifying tracts, being largely concerned with the unrelated topics of soup and buttons. But let that pass.

There is Dobson, muffled from the workaday world in a suite of rooms hung with rich brocade tapestries while embarrassed arrangements are made for a special sealed train to whisk him away, leaving the Plenipotentiary Oberstraung General's piano untuned. Morning sweeps across the sky on the pamphleteer's final morning. The train is due at ten. A factotum enters Dobson's temporary boudoir, bearing a tray, and upon the tray is the territory's traditional breakfast, a dish of boiled marrow steeped in honey from rare bees, a block of dry cocoa bread, and a piping hot beaker of a local decoction into which a raw egg has been broken. The factotum places the tray on a side dresser and flings open the heavy curtains, flooding the room with milky light. Turning, the lackey is about to awaken the snoozing pamphleteer, but Dobson is nowhere to be seen. The bedclothes are rumpled, discarded pyjamas are strewn on the floor, but the breakfastee has vanished. Eventually, the factotum tracks Dobson down to an anteroom adjoining the palace's sixth floor kitchens, where he is sitting alone, having helped himself to his breakfast from astonishingly well-stocked larders. Dobson is preening, and eating bloaters.

I said I would end this piece by mentioning an unwritten Dobson pamphlet. He planned at one stage to compile a list of every breakfast he had ever eaten, from infancy onwards, and made some preparatory notes. To the bald listing, he intended to add observations on place-settings, tablecloths, cutlery and crockery, and general ambience. We should be thankful that he never actually wrote this work, for it would have been as dull as ditchwater, but not the fearsome ditchwater that was the main ingredient of the palace breakfast decoction. That ditchwater was by no means dull, for when the factotum poured Dobson's untouched beakerful down the sink, it sizzled and hissed and corroded the piping, it corroded the piping of the palace, and the palace collapsed.