{"id":105828,"date":"2016-12-14T14:54:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T19:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105828"},"modified":"2016-12-14T14:54:26","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T19:54:26","slug":"a-good-whipping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/","title":{"rendered":"A Good Whipping"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the \u201cMrs Thrale\u201d bit in Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cMeditations in an Emergency.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Sir<\/a>

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hester and Queeney Thrale<\/i>, 1777\u20131778.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Frank O\u2019Hara composed the piece that he later called \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d on or around June 25, 1954\u2014anyhow, that is the date on the manuscript. At that time, the title was \u201cMeditations on Re-emergent Occasions,\u201d which makes O\u2019Hara\u2019s debt to John Donne\u2019s 1624 text\u00a0Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions<\/em>\u00a0much more obvious.\u00a0<\/p>\n

O\u2019Hara\u2019s piece, retitled at the suggestion of Kenneth Koch, was published in\u00a0Poetry<\/em>\u00a0about\u00a0four months later, which is an excellent turn-around time. This was during the five years when Karl Shapiro was editor. You can have a look at the original page layout of \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d\u00a0here<\/a>. Clickers who know the text will find no surprises.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The poem\u2014if it\u2019s right to call it that\u2014is full of agreeable variety. The tonal palette runs from mordant Frenchman (\u201cone of these days there\u2019ll be nothing left with which to venture forth\u201d) to Romantic visionary (\u201cDestroy yourself, if you don\u2019t know!\u201d) to gum-snapping Barbara Stanwyck: (\u201cWhy don\u2019t you get rid of someone else for a change?\u201d). But, for my much-younger self, entering grad school and hoping to specialize in eighteenth-century British prose stylists, one particular passage exercised a special interest. It\u2019s the only thing in there (it appears twelfth out of thirteen passages) that is a quotation. And\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0a quotation:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cFanny Brown is run away\u2014scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho\u2019 She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. \u2014Poor silly Cecchina! or F: B: as we used to call her. \u2014I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.\u201d \u2014Mrs. Thrale.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, given the time and place in which I grew up, it\u2019s not surprising I knew O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cMeditations\u201d a long time before I had any clue who Mrs. Thrale was. Similarly (and relatedly), I knew\u00a0Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\u00a0<\/em>for many years before I knew who \u201cDr. Johnson\u201d was, though I loved the remark by him that serves as that book\u2019s epigraph: \u201cHe who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I was around thirty, I had come a long way, and put in a happy ninety minutes, trying to find the Thrale bit in Boswell\u2019s\u00a0Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em>. It should have been obvious that the Thrale is a diary entry and therefore highly unlikely to appear in Boswell, aside from other objections, but (as so often happens) desire blinded me. There was the lust to find the quote, and there was the lust to diddle at length with the exhaustive index in the Oxford World\u2019s Classics version of Boswell.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember at what point I discovered that the passage is from the\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>, but I know that when I\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0discover this, I didn\u2019t really know what the\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>\u00a0was, though I\u2019d heard of it. Yet, the\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>\u00a0is easily explained. Let\u2019s start with its author, Hester Thrale (1741\u20131821). Any reader of Boswell knows that she was a key member of Johnson\u2019s inner circle. Vivacious, fearless, well-connected\u2014in lots of ways she was the\u00a0other<\/em>\u00a0Boswell. Indeed, she and Boswell were both about the same age (more than thirty years younger than Johnson), both knew him intimately, and both quite clearly got on his nerves. Still, he loved them both, and both wrote about him authoritatively after his death (which occurred on December 13, 1784\u2014just 232 years and a day ago).<\/p>\n

In September 1776, Hester Thrale\u2019s husband, Henry, gave her six handsome quarto blank books, leather bound, each with a label stamped with the title\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>. They were supposed to serve Hester as commonplace books. She did indeed use them for that, at first very intensely (within four years\u00a0she had filled the first three books), but later much less so (it took her almost seventeen years to fill the sixth book).<\/p>\n

The standard scholarly edition of the\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>\u00a0is still Katharine Balderston\u2019s two-volume Oxford edition, which first appeared in 1942 and was superseded by a second edition in 1951. Here is my copy:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

Photo: Nadya Pittendrigh<\/p><\/div>\n

You can see it\u2019s a monster. And the entries simply record, meticulously and ridiculously, whatever happened to pass through Hester Thrale\u2019s consciousness, from jokes to quotes to late news and weather. For example, here\u2019s what\u00a0else<\/em>\u00a0appears in the same entry as the bit quoted by O\u2019Hara (the entry is dated September 1, 1779):<\/p>\n

    \n
  • News about one British Admiral being replaced by another<\/li>\n
  • Comments on the last few months\u2019 weather and the plentiful harvest<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0memory of a visit, three years before, from an Italian verse improviser<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0page of quoted Italian, from a Ferrara newspaper, mentioning the improviser\u2019s return to Italy and boast of having met her husband and Johnson and other English worthies<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0mention of the recent death of David Garrick as the probable prompt for the newspaper piece<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0transcript, twelve quatrains, of the supposedly first draft of Alexander Pope\u2019s \u201cUniversal Prayer\u201d<\/li>\n
  • The bit that O\u2019Hara quotes<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0similar, though much less memorable, catty remark on \u201canother flighty Friend whom I love better than She deserves\u201d (a \u201cMrs Byron\u201d)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    In general, the reader should imagine a large Lego structure, say a miniature city, balanced on a platter. Now raise that structure above your head and smash it on the linoleum. Now sit in the rubble and pick up random squares. This is the\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>. It\u2019s like \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d for eleven hundred pages. And no emergency.<\/p>\n

    But here we get into some speculation. Since Frank O\u2019Hara graduated with his M.A. in English from the University of Michigan in 1951, he probably had easy access to the U-M Library when the \u201951 Oxford\u00a0Thraliana<\/em>\u00a0came out. Perhaps new library acquisitions were set aside on a special table or shelf? This seems to me the most plausible explanation as to how he would have crossed paths with the paragraph in question.<\/p>\n

    I venture to doubt O\u2019Hara read the four hundred\u00a0pages previous to the passage he quotes. My guess is he threw the tome open at random and found, by luck, the delightful nugget. I trust it\u2019s clear why he was\u00a0attracted<\/em>\u00a0to that particular passage? In it, Thrale relishes her own cattiness but is, simultaneously, warm and affectionate. That honest (and honestly petty) manner of processing one\u2019s ambivalence makes Thrale sound a little like the contestants on\u00a0RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race All Stars<\/em>. Lovable beings with weaponized personalities. They that have the power to hurt and do none.<\/p>\n

    If O\u2019Hara did find the passage by chance, it is remarkable that he had the presence of mind to copy it so exactly. \u2019Cuz I can tell you right now: anyone spotting those sentences, liking them, and then closing the book without further ado would have a\u00a0devil<\/em>\u00a0of a time relocating them. So either he copied them very exactly in the first place or he made note of the page number (it\u2019s volume 1, page 407), or took some other preemptory step. Every scenario seems more or less unlikely. I am somehow unwilling to allow that he might have owned the book.<\/p>\n

    Meanwhile, it remains for me to provide one footnote. Hester Thrale calls Fanny Brown \u201cpoor silly Cecchina.\u201d The word is Italian and should be pronounced tcheh-KEE-nah. In modern Italian, a\u00a0cecchino<\/em>\u00a0is an enemy sniper, but the word acquired that sense in the nineteenth\u00a0century. Back in 1779, Cecchina\u00a0was merely the diminutive of Cecca, which is itself short for Francesca. And Fanny is, likewise, a diminutive of Frances, the English\u00a0equivalent<\/em>\u00a0of Francesca. So,\u00a0Cecchina\u00a0is basically\u00a0Fanny\u00a0in Italian. Little Fanny.<\/p>\n

    But there\u2019s more. In the same way that the French supposedly call all donkeys Martin, and we supposedly call all cows Bessie, Italians supposedly call all magpies Cecca. Hence the name is sometimes used to denote a silly chattering woman. This also fits our sense of Hester\u2019s attitude toward Fanny Brown. And get this: The English word\u00a0magpie<\/em>\u00a0is actually formed on the same principle. In Middle English, those birds were just called pies. The mag<\/em>, short for Margaret, got added in the 1500s, when all women were Margaret, in the same way that all American men were Joe in the early twentieth\u00a0century.<\/p>\n

    We observe that the present writer has sufficiently exposed his own magpie DNA, and so, to all enemy snipers out there who are about to set to work, he says, heartily: I wish you all a good whipping and a Guggenheim Fellowship.<\/p>\n

    Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas<\/i>. His poems have appeared in <\/em>Best American Poetry 2013,\u00a0<\/em>Boston Review, <\/em>Fence, <\/em>Harvard Review, <\/em>Lana Turner, LIT,\u00a0and<\/em> Poetry. His first book is called<\/em> I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say\u00a0<\/i>(Canarium Books, 2012).\u00a0He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On the \u201cMrs Thrale\u201d bit in Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cMeditations in an Emergency.\u201d   Frank O\u2019Hara composed the piece that he later called \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d on or around June 25, 1954\u2014anyhow, that is the date on the manuscript. At that time, the title was \u201cMeditations on Re-emergent Occasions,\u201d which makes O\u2019Hara\u2019s debt to John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[22908,13606,17377,26219,17761,26218,7682,3357,26225,26228,6358,26222,26216,2861,11164,6206,503,26221,182,26223,26217,26224,3539,1447,165,26226,53,26227,13720,26220],"class_list":["post-105828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-anthony-madrid","tag-boswell","tag-british-poets","tag-british-prose","tag-close-reading","tag-composition","tag-diaries","tag-diary","tag-fanny-brown","tag-fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas","tag-guggenheim-fellowship","tag-henry-thrale","tag-hester-thrale","tag-history","tag-john-donne","tag-john-ohara","tag-journal","tag-katharine-balderston","tag-letters","tag-lovable","tag-meditations-in-an-emergency","tag-passages","tag-poem","tag-poet","tag-poetry","tag-poor-silly-cecchina","tag-reading","tag-scholar","tag-text","tag-thraliana"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn the \u201cMrs Thrale\u201d Bit in \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How did O\u2019Hara come across it? 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My guess is he threw \u2018Thraliana\u2019 open at random, and found, by luck, the delightful nugget.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"A Good Whipping by Anthony Madrid","og_description":"December 14, 2016 \u2013 On the \u201cMrs Thrale\u201d bit in Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cMeditations in an Emergency.\u201d   Frank O\u2019Hara composed the piece that he later called \u201cMeditations in an","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2016-12-14T19:54:26+00:00","og_image":[{"width":791,"height":593,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/1777-1778-hester-and-queene-2-1.jpeg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Anthony Madrid","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Anthony Madrid","Est. reading time":"8 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/"},"author":{"name":"Anthony Madrid","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ff28732ebcbdac8b865bc16ad5887c2e"},"headline":"A Good Whipping","datePublished":"2016-12-14T19:54:26+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/"},"wordCount":1529,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/1777-1778-hester-and-queene-2-1.jpeg","keywords":["Anthony Madrid","Boswell","British poets","British prose","close reading","composition","diaries","diary","Fanny Brown","Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas","Guggenheim Fellowship","Henry THrale","Hester Thrale","history","John Donne","John O'Hara","journal","Katharine Balderston","letters","lovable","Meditations in an Emergency","passages","poem","poet","poetry","poor silly Cecchina","reading","scholar","text","Thraliana"],"articleSection":["Our Correspondents"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/","name":"On the \u201cMrs Thrale\u201d Bit in \u201cMeditations in an Emergency\u201d","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/a-good-whipping\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/1777-1778-hester-and-queene-2-1.jpeg","datePublished":"2016-12-14T19:54:26+00:00","description":"How did O\u2019Hara come across it? 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