One of Those Things
Prison poetry and plays about fancies
The Shop of Perpetual Youth and On the Road to Parnassus by Katherine Morse, and Prison Poems by William Kavanaugh Johnston
Imagine a beauty parlour or something of that kind. The people come in to have frivolous things done: their hair and eyebrows dyed, their nails painted and buffed and polished, their forms powdered. In such a place at the beginning of the last century, there might have been models — busts, from the shoulders up — done in wax. Showing off hairstyles and other things.
Presume now it’s Halloween and the wax models are for some reason permitted to talk. On that day and only on that day.
The old man done in wax — for there is one — is a parody of a gentleman. He cannot refuse a lady, although he can bore one. The older woman — a model that has been melted somewhat in the sun, whose fake hair is getting ungainly tanned by the light — is complaining about the days long past and is also scandalised by the younger model, an inter-war picture of a flapper, with, we are to imagine, daringly short hair and a brash modern attitude.
And now imagine that for some reason, an Elf appears, and asks the models what they would most like to do for their brief moment of sentience each year. They get one wish, so it had better be good. What would those wax models wish to do, and would it, just possibly, be entertaining for the audience?
Now think of another play, not too different, I suppose, that features some girls who are apparently training to be teachers. They are living in the first half of the last century again; they are moderns. And one of them has the strangest idea — that they ought to learn a little from the poetry and poise of the ancients. She says they ought to think of a poetic journey, the journey to Parnassus, where Apollo dwells with the nine Muses.
The other girls don’t buy this, though they are chivvied along with some laboured poetics.
It takes the appearance of Bellerophon, with his tales of the winged Pegasus, to convince them all to visit Apollo in Parnassus and to take part in a knowledge exchange — almost like a sitcom — between the modern world and the ancient world, the mortal plane and the immortal existence enjoyed by Apollo and his Muses.
On another subject entirely, we are perhaps used to tales of prison. Its lonelinesses and its degradations. We watch films and TV series about prisons; we used to read novels and stories about it. Now we flick through supposedly accurate memoirs of prison life and the occasional exposé. The themes are quite familiar. The loss of liberty; time standing still while nevertheless remorselessly rushing ahead. Boredom. Separation from those we love. And so on.
Many autobiographical books are written by prisoners (they have nothing but time) and they also stretch on occasion to the odd poem. This book by William K. Johnston is poetry. It is very short and amateur — these are typewritten sheets, stapled together. And he is very much a prisoner, as he prefaces the work by saying.
But I didn’t do it, Johnston says. I’m a prisoner in Nevada because I killed a man in just self-defence. And I’ll stand before any court, the court of public opinion, the great court at the final judgement, with my head held high and my jaw set firmly and et cetera et cetera.
How are the poems themselves? Not really very good. The themes you can imagine. Sweethearts now gone because one is beyond the great grey walls. The sadness of seeing summer, autumn and spring happen from behind bars. A little talk about the children we prisoners leave behind (this one, a helpful little note tells us, was occasioned by the birth of a cellmate’s child while he was put away). Hopes for justice, hopes for freedom — all the usual things.
The poems themselves are not very good. Some, I almost want to applaud simply because I didn’t think the poet would find the rhyme or make it scan and on occasion he does ir quite neatly enough. The subject matter is, of course, not trivial — but it is pedestrian. And how much can we credit someone who is speaking in his own self-interested self-defence?
We hear stories of psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, all of whom are very convincing, superficially charming, in making their cases. Especially when saying they were wronged. We’d be well warned not to take those people at their word. It would be an error — an error commonly made — to believe everyone who claims to be innocent, especially the ones who go further than most in their inventiveness and artifice in so doing.
How much can we tell about Mr Johnston, so long after his pamphlet was produced, and so long, inevitably, after his own death? I looked in a few places, and despite this pamphlet being reproduced all over by web scrapers and bots because it is out of copyright, I didn’t see anything about him.
We don’t know whether he died in jail or if the governor — of the prison, of the state — took pity on Johnston and let him go.
And we don’t know, because it’s been so long, if he was an innocent man or a guilty one, the poet. It’s just one of those things. One of those things he tried to write about, and mostly failed.