From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - F

FACE-MAKING. Begetting children.
NO FACE BUT HIS OWN: a saying of one who has no court cards in his hand.
FAGGOT. A man hired at a muster to appear as a soldier.
FAITHFUL. One of the faithful; a taylor who gives long credit.
FART CATCHER. A valet or footman from his walking behind his master or mistress.
FAULKNER. A tumbler, juggler, or shewer of tricks; perhaps because they lure the people, as a faulconer does his hawks.
FEAGUE. To feague a horse; to put ginger up a horse's fundament, and formerly, as it is said, a live eel, to make him lively and carry his tail well.
FELLOW COMMONER. An empty bottle: so called at the university of Cambridge, where fellow commoners are not in general considered as over full of learning. At Oxford an empty bottle is called a gentleman commoner for the same reason.
FICE, or FOYSE. A small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs.
FINGER POST. A parson: so called, because he points out a way to others which he never goes himself. Like the finger post, he points out a way he has never been, and probably will never go, i.e. the way to heaven.
FLASH THE HASH. To vomit.
FLY SLICERS. Life-guard men, from their sitting on horseback, under an arch, where they are frequently observed to drive away flies with their swords.
FOGEY. Old Fogey. A nickname for an invalid soldier: derived from the French word fougeux, fierce or fiery.
FOOTMAN'S MAWND. An artificial sore made with unslaked lime, soap, and the rust of old iron, on the back of a beggar's hand, as if hurt by the bite or kick of a horse.
FRENCHIFIED. Infected with the venereal disease.
FRIBBLE. An effeminate fop.
FUSTY LUGGS. A beastly, sluttish woman.

Neglected Author - Gérard de Nerval

“Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.” - Gérard de Nerval
 
Gérard de Nerval was the nom de plume of the French poet, essayist and translator, Gérard Labrunie, born in 1808. He influenced not only the Surrealists but also many British writers such as Wilde, Dowson, Yeats and Symons.
 
His father was a military doctor in Napoleon’s army. When de Nerval was two his mother, accompanying her husband on service in Silesia, died of a fever contracted after crossing a bridge piled with corpses. De Nerval was consequently brought up by his maternal great-uncle in the Valois area of France.
 
He studied intermittently as a medical student but made an early name for himself in 1828 with his translation of Faust, a translation that was much admired by Goethe himself. He had become friends with the writer and dandy Théophile Gautier (famous for shocking the establishment by wearing a red waistcoat). In the 1840s he joined Gautier in a society known as the Club des Hashischines, a group devoted to the exploration of drug-induced experiences. Another club member, Charles Baudelaire, actually wrote Les Fleurs du Mal in the Club’s attic.
 
For a while de Nerval kept a pet lobster which he took for walks in Paris on the end of a blue ribbon. He regarded them as "peaceful, serious creatures, who know the secrets of the sea, and don't bark".
 
In true decadent poet style de Nerval fell in love with first a music-hall singer, Jenny Colon, and then a courtesan, Sophie Dawes, who was rumoured to have murdered her lover. Needless to say, nothing came of these infatuations apart from several nervous breakdowns. De Nerval did, however, build his inamoratas up into the status of the “Eternal Female”.
 
De Nerval’s masterpiece is probably his Journey to the Orient (published in 1851), a strange hybrid of a book, part travelogue, part recounting of Arabian Nights type tales. It came out of an extended trip he made in 1842 to the Levant, travelling to Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople in search of hashish, new and wondrous experiences, the occult, and (naturally) further pursuit of the Eternal Female”.
 
He rented a house in Cairo but was soon told he was offending Muslim etiquette by living without a woman. He was given two choices: convert to Islam and marry; or buy a slave girl. He chose the latter, visiting various slave bazaars before plumping unusually (most slave girls were Abyssinians) for a Javanese called Zetnaybia. He lived the life of a Muslim dandy with her for a few months and then, before moving on, gave Zetnaybia her freedom.
 
De Nerval returned to Paris after his travels but suffered increasingly from bouts of depression. He died on 26 January 1855, hanging himself from a window grating on a snowy street in Paris with an old apron string that he believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s garter.
 
Journey to the Orient is published by Peter Owen, and Penguin publish his Selected Writings.
 
(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

 

Book Review - 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann

The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon by David Grann

 

Born in 1867, Colonel Percy Fawcett is described as “the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.” Like most Victorian explorers he was also mildly bonkers. His family motto, Nec Despera Terrent – “Difficulties be Damned” – gives an idea of the man.

 

He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1886, and served in Ceylon where he was given a map purporting to show the location of lost treasure in a cave system. He found no treasure but the map sparked his life-long obsession with lost cities. After leaving the army he enrolled at the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) “explorers’ school”, proving a dab hand with the sextant and theodolite. His first expedition was ostensibly to map parts of Morocco, but he had in fact been sent as a spy.

 

Between 1906 and 1924 Colonel Fawcett made several expeditions to the Amazon region, at the behest of the RGS, mapping the area around Brazil and Bolivia. Such was his energy and drive that he often completed his surveys well ahead of the allotted time, despite the harshness of the terrain and the dangers therein. He was unusual for the time in that he dealt with the native Indian tribes through courtesy and diplomacy, rather than shooting them. Colonel Fawcett soon became famous, described in the press as the “Livingstone of the Amazon”.

 

He broke off exploring to serve in World War One, winning the DSO. He also became friends with Sir Henry Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the latter basing his novel The Lost World on Colonel Fawcett’s exploits.

 

After the war he returned to the Amazon and became obsessed with the tales he’d heard from local tribes of the ruins of lost cities hidden in the jungle. Such tales were not new. In the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh and Gonzalo Pizarro had launched disastrous expeditions in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. Colonel Fawcett became convinced of the existence of such a city, code-named “Z”, to be found on the Upper Xingu river.

 

In 1925 he launched his expedition. He turned down Lawrence of Arabia’s offer to join him (fearing a clash of egos) and was accompanied by his son Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimmell. Both were chosen for their pure, manly qualities: “… the three chief agents of bodily degeneration – alcohol, tobacco and loose living – were revolting to him [Fawcett].” As with previous expeditions, this was not going to be an easy journey. “Anyone who broke a limb or fell sick deep in the jungle would have little chance of survival… the logic of the jungle dictated that the person be abandoned – or, as Fawcett grimly put it, ‘He has his choice of opium pills, starvation, or torture if he is found by savages.’”

Among their provisions were a ukulele and a piccolo, music proving a good way of pacifying hostile savages.

 

Colonel Fawcett’s party was last seen in May 1925. There were numerous expeditions afterwards to find Fawcett, and although a few objects (his compass and signet ring) turned up, no remains were ever found, and no satisfactory explanation made for his disappearance. There were rumours he had become the chief of a tribe of cannibals, or was worshipped as a god in the jungle.

 

David Grann not only gives an excellent summary of Colonel Fawcett’s life, but also of the subsequent quests to discover what became of his expedition. After hunting through the archives for clues, Grann decided to travel to the Amazon himself in 2005. He visited the Kalapalo tribe, who described how they had warned Colonel Fawcett not to proceed eastwards as “fierce Indians” would kill them. They saw the expedition’s campfires for five days, and then they disappeared. Grann, quite reasonably, assumes that they were killed by a hostile tribe.

 

Grann tells a rattling good yarn about one man’s fatal obsession.

 

(A version of this book review first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

 

From My Commonplace Book

"Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed-wire handle." Jim Thompson

Things I Miss #6

Before the days of email and Facebook, people used to have to hand-make their party invitations, and either dish them out by hand or through the post. In the days before use of word processors was widespread these were lettered by hand or, if one wanted to be flash, with a typewriter. The office photocopier was surreptitiously used to make copies, sometimes with an amusing photograph or drawing added. I remember using a photograph of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (where she's using a long cigarette holder) and inking in "LOVE" and "HATE" on her knuckles. For cocktail parties I always used this Osbert Lancaster cartoon.

I remember using the standard abbreviation "PBAB" on an invitation in California and getting concerned phonecalls from American friends asking what it stood for.

Random Memory #8

 In Vienna in the early 1980s my family rented the bottom half of a large two-storeyed villa in Döbling. The villa, painted in Schőnbrunn yellow, had been the childhood home of our landlady, a millionairess in her own right who had married money and, more importantly in Viennese society, married up rather well in terms of the millimetric view of social class that pervades le bon ton  in Vienna. Being freed of the problems of money, she could afford to keep the house and its substantial garden intact (imagine a house in Hampstead with a two-acre garden). The wizened gardener came with the rent, as did a coach-house halfway down the garden, about the size of a semi-detached in Chiswick, wherein the gardener kept his rake and stuff. There were several walnut trees in the garden which I used to harvest out of boredom by hurling heavy bits of wood into the trees, trying not to hit the red squirrel which thought it held domain. The downed walnuts were covered in a green husk, so I had to put them in an annexe of the coach-house to ripen. A month later I went to check on my walnuts to find they were gone. I found the gardener watering one of the rose gardens and asked him what he’d done with the/my walnuts. He told me the millionairess had turned up on a snap inspection of her property and claimed them. 

 My father nicknamed the millionairess "die Gräfin" and my mother, not knowing German, used to refer to her as “die Griffin”.

Book Review - 'Hatless Jack' by Neil Steinberg

Hatless Jack: the President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat – by Neil Steinberg
 
“How can a hatless man properly greet a lady?” the British trade journal Tailor & Cutter demanded of President John F Kennedy in 1963. Kennedy was the first American president to go bareheaded, and hat manufacturers apparently cite this fact as the reason why their industry failed. Or so it is popularly believed. In Hatless Jack, Steinberg examines why Kennedy was so reluctant to wear a hat in public - was it really because Khrushchev always did wear a homburg? Was Kennedy really that powerful a symbol to American men that they would go hatless in droves just because the president declined to wear a fedora? Steinberg charts the attempts of the hat-makers of America to persuade their new, charismatic leader to save their declining industry. Along the way, he also uncovers the now nearly-forgotten rituals of hat-wearing, including hat-check girls, straw-hat riots, and ways of stopping the wind from blowing one’s hat off.
 
Blaming Kennedy was the most complicated of three flawed theories given for the death of hats: "One is that men grew tired of being compelled to wear hats in the military during World War II, and abandoned the fashion when they returned to civilian life. The second is that the growing popularity of automobiles, with their isolation, heaters, and low roofs, killed off men's hats." As Steinberg laments, “In the past a man could, physically, go into the street hatless, and some did. But those all-important passers-by would certainly notice such a man and wonder about him. Maybe he was deranged, or penniless, or drunk.”
 
Steinberg doesn't confine his musings to twentieth-century America. He also provides fascinating insights on male hat customs the world over from a number of eras. For instance, Kemal Atatürk banned the fez in Turkey in the 1920’s, and the Mussolini made straw hats compulsory in fascist Italy. In the 1930’s the Hat Style Council (an industry body) agreed that the well-dressed man must own a dozen hats to be “exactly right [for] every occasion”. Mr Steinberg offers many gleaming nuggets of information. He tells us of the social history of the collapsible opera hat; of Abraham Lincoln’s habit of storing papers and letters inside his stovepipe hat; he gives us a fascinating economic history of the lucrative hat-check concessions in restaurants and nightclubs in the 1920’s and 1930’s; and h explains the peculiar craze in the early days of aeroplane travel of dispatching one’s hat on a world tour.
 
Neil Steinberg has written a captivating and enthralling book, one that will appeal to anyone with an interest in hats and hat-lore.
 
Hatless Jack by Neil Steinberg. Published by Granta Books.
 
(A version of this book review first appeared in The Chap magazine.)