A World Elsewhere Read Online Free Page A

sullen, silent member, a chastising sight to others with a mind to challenge Landish. And he sangalong when they started up “What shall we do with a Druken sealer?” which they usually did late at night when all were drunk.
    Landish defended Van when the others mocked him for writing “Vanderbilge.” Landish called him “VanPun” and wrote puns for him which Van passed off at the salons as his own. He continued to do his best to be seen as something of an enfant terrible and Van managed to look as though he wrote the lines that Landish merely delivered, standing at his shoulder, not smiling, impassively savouring what his mouthpiece said. They put many a nose out of joint, Landish noting that Van could do so without much regard for the consequences.
    One night, even as he was laughing at his own cleverness, Landish was told that he and Van were being called sodomites by their professors.
    Landish sometimes took out of his attic closet his box of Princeton compositions, the only writing of his he had not burned. They—mainly Landish—wrote a roman à clef musical under the pseudonyms Filbert and Mulligan, which they called Nutstewyou . It was a great hit among those who were not the models for their characters. Among the ragged sheets and scrolls of paper, he found the main creation of the Umbrage Players, which had been called Who Consumed Keats?
    It began with a corpulent character named Stilton who was at work on an “epicurean poem” called “Parodies Lost.” Stilton, around whom everyone holds their nose, tells the audience that his purpose is to justify “the weight of man to God.” The characters were all major English poets and were all portrayed as corpulent with enormous bellies and backsides. Alfred Lord Tennyson became Well-fed Lard Venison. Coleridge and Wordsworth were the hybrid Cramyouwell Curdsworth. Shelley, groaning and clutching his belly, spent the entire play writing “Ode to the Worst Wind.” A rotund, burstingly buxom Mary Shelley was carried onstage by Frankenstein. A caricature ofRudyard Kipling, Rhubarb Nibbling, nibbled on shoots of rhubarb and every so often roared, “My gun comes up like thunder/On the bed where ’Manda lays.” Ne’er Hard Unmanly Hopkins danced about, lisp/singing “It seems I’ve sprung rhythm.”
    The play stirred most of the audience to protest, especially the professors who shouted “ENOUGH” and “TOO MUCH.”
    Soon nailed to trees on the quad were copies of an unsigned rhyme called “The Ballad of Lotus Land.”
Van can’t well
Or moderately well.
In the Vanderluyden Bordello
They say the poor fellow
Can’t even manage at all.
Can it be that poor Van
Is in need of a man?
They conferred in the hall:
“I’ve seen this quite oft,
We’ll get him aloft.”
“Just wait till it rises
They come in all sizes,
Though not many come when they’re soft.”
“Begging your pardon
They’re bringing the Bard in.
He’s saying, ‘This time he won’t fail.’
He’s in the Garden
Trying to harden
And make of Van’s Moby a whale.”
    “It seems that I’ve started rumours by trying not to,” Van said. “It seems that one is presumed to be that way unless one consorts with prostitutes.”
    “Never mind,” Landish said. “I’ll write and plaster all over Princeton a rhyme called ‘The Enormous Endowments of the Vanderluydens.’ ”
    “It would only make things worse,” Van said, “no matter how clever it was. I should never have come to Princeton. I should have kept on with my tutors in New York, where I was dogged by so many rumours I hardly took notice when a new one came along.” Van paused. “Do you think it odd to grieve for one’s sister, Landish, even if one’s grief goes on for years?”
    “No,” Landish said. “But Vanderland will not bring your sister back.”
    “It is not in the lunatic hope of resurrecting the dead—”
    “I’m sorry,” Landish said, “but it seems to me that you are suffering more from