Baldwin’s Catholic Geese

Baldwin’s Catholic Geese, by Keith Hutson. Bloodaxe Books, 2019. 128 pages. £12 (paperback). 

Let’s start by saying you can’t do much better as a title than Baldwin’s Catholic Geese, particularly realizing that the geese are in fact geese and not a metaphor. The phrase, the name of a music hall act, appears in a poem about an impresario who wanted to test for rock bottom in theatrical taste. The poem is called “Bad Impresario,” which echoes a bit from an antique Saturday Night Live skit that spoofed BBC-like programs, excuse me, programmes, with the opposite intent of promoting “good” art, not bad. Dan Ackroyd presided with the name Leonard Pinth-Garnell dissecting Bad Conceptual Theater. “Awful, just awful,” Pinth-Garnell chortled as he applauded with appreciation. The bad impresario in Hutson’s poem was one William Paul, late of the 19th century, “with millions to waste.” So:

Two dozen hardened scouts were sent to scour
the land; five hundred flops auditioned for
his troupe; the ten most woeful went on tour

The recruited crew of novelty acts features: “Lady Clock Eye, Baldwin’s Catholic Geese, The Human Mop, Frank and His Dancing Teeth” and they bomb everywhere but “the Palace, Halifax,” where they are asked back.

Each of the poems in Baldwin’s Catholic Geese comes with a further note in the book’s back matter. The one for “Bad Impresario” reads “The Palace, Halifax, where Baldwin’s Catholic Geese received a standing ovation, is no longer with us but, in its heyday, it hosted four music hall shows a night. Lady Clock Eye wished to be buried there, but isn’t.” I hope this suggests that this is an entertaining collection of poems, because it is, capturing a bygone era in its wonder, desperation, tears-of-a-clown tragedy, and respect for the resilience of those who seek fame or simple sustenance by putting themselves in front of a live audience of their peers, rather like a jury.

Hutson was and perhaps is yet a writer of jokes for British comedians and a TV scriptwriter, including for the long running soap opera Coronation Street (1960-present, though currently interrupted by COVID-19) but he also has an MA in poetry and has published two chapbooks  prior to this, his first full length collection. He works in traditional forms but his subject is what bears the greater interest. While there are over a dozen poems that are autobiographical, all but one with a connection to show business, almost all the rest of the 100 poems here are about old time performers, theaters, or audiences connected with Britain’s music hall era, with some dippings into older (the Elizabethan tragedian Richard Burbage and Carlo Farinelli, an 18th century castrato) and more recent times (films like Dr. Zhivago and Mary Poppins, wannabe Batman characters, and a shout out to Tony Warren, one of the creators of Coronation Street).

The poem that precedes “Bad Impresario” is about a venue. It’s called “Glasgow Empire,” which was famous as a tough place to play:  

Even when empty, anger
occupied this auditorium. It bloomed,
silent and black: a storm building to break

Entertainers were often trapped between these two audience extremes: the eager-to-love Halifax Palace and the eager-to-hate Glasgow Empire, and did their best, unless alcohol, injury, cynicism, greed, or boredom got in the way. Although it could also be a too desperate need for love or the inability to cope any longer with rejection that interceded, with a few performers going insane, like the man who played his skull like a xylophone, and a few literally dying on stage, including a young girl whose act was to allow pyramids of men collapse on her and a pregnant wire walker who fell to her death. Some chose their path to escape poverty, some to avoid working in the mines, some after they were injured or diseased from working in some brutal factory or mine and their disabilities become part of their acts, sunny ditties sung by a tubercular boy stocked with quips to allow for his coughing fits. There were singers, actors doing scenes, dancers, acrobats, contortionists, strongmen and strongwomen, animal acts, people pretending to be animal acts, whistlers, sound effects acts, panto acts (not mimes but character skits usually involving cross-dressed perfomers, men as women typically—recalling some of the Monty Python skits, which were a tribute and send up of this genre—but sometimes women as men), a man dexterous enough to kick himself in the arse, acts of performers enduring fasts, dancing Quakers, and more. Many of the acts were not famous even in their day; some were brilliantly so and became wealthy, transitioned to TV when that came along, or later slipped into obscurity to be rescued briefly here.

The book includes some performers who are still famous, such as Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton, and Charles Aznavour. But famous or not, the point of so many of the poems is to honor and Hutson does this well. He celebrates the general and the specific: the role of the straight man or woman, for example, and the work of Edgar Kennedy, one of the great straight men (see Margaret Dumont for the work of a genius straight woman) who appeared in vaudeville, music halls and well over 50 films with Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and more. He honors the desperate, the gifted, the successful and the failed, those society came to revere and those it damaged and left behind.

In the first poem, “The Opener,” and one of the best, he provides guidance on how to start a music hall show:

Do not book a buffoon. People can’t cope,
still finding seats and folding coats, heavy
with home: they’ll barrack or shut down….

See every house, before it settles,
as a beast not full backed into its cage.
Don’t spook the bugger with a premature attack

from Dan’s Inebriated Dart-Blowers; a dose
of Madame Zanza, Boneless in the Buff
unless she’s very, very still.

Aim for warmth, but not The Beneditti Three:
Musicians in Fifty Positions—
they generate too much too soon….

Never let fartistes on till the end;
paper-tearers, shadowgraphists,
omnivores and infant-mimics, not even then.

Play safe, get someone big and jovial
but suitably restrained—unless that’s how
they’ve been described by the police.

There are some life hacks in that. Hutson’s collection is entertaining. There are poems that are better than fine light verse, “The Reluctant Sitter,” for example, which looks at a comedian who is supposed to sit for his brother, a painter, but continually blows it off to go on stage, leaving his painter brother in the dressing room. Eventually the painter’s portrait is the one captured in the vacated comedian’s dressing room mirror—it’s also the cover illustration for Baldwin’s Catholic Geese. “Beyond Belief,” a tribute to British comedian Sid Field, also hints at more depth than its surface observation. Field had a bit where he pretended to be a great trapeze artist, yet never left the ground. The poem wonders:

… Were we blind

to this pretence? Naïve to let such
elevated promises toss reason
to the wind? Or could Sid’s flights of fancy catch
and turn the truth? Can words, well-placed, become
so strong they’re flesh and sinew on the wing:
not less than, but beyond the real thing?

The poems in Baldwin’s Catholic Geese prompt questions, about the past, its manifestations in the present, and what has changed and what remains essentially the same. There is no vaudeville or music hall circuit anymore but there are YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and more, the virtual venues where people seeking an audience go; some of it is just brand- and influence-peddling but some of it is actors, singers, dancers, magicians, and all the kinds of entertainers and one-off talents who seek their path to audiences, income, and fame or notoriety. Hutson might have done more in organizing and developing his poems to wrestle more deeply with these questions or find a stronger and more complex cumulative narrative—the way Tyehimba Jess did in his book Olio—but he has found fertile ground for further plowing. The poet seems to rely too much on the inherent interest of the topics and not enough on the deeper meanings behind the surface ironies or obvious tragedies or triumphs. The poems work individually as entertainments or reflections on individual topics more than they build on one another cumulatively.

In a poem called “Crossing the Floor” about the Tiller Girls, the British precursors of the Rockettes, Hutson writes in the first person: 

So tuck me in and turn me loose among
those level heads and feathers; dress my dreams
with deviance I can depend upon—
extravagant yet safe inside the bounds
adhered to by my sisters—and I’ll be
no maverick but moderately free.

There is more complex truth to be mined from these great sources but it might need more "deviance," more escaping "the bounds," and a more radical freedom.

 
—Reviewer Rick Larios is a reader and occasional writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cara. He reads because it saved his life as a child growing up on the West Side of Manhattan and he'd be a fool to stop now.