It’s always an exciting moment when Dennis Beerpint publishes a new opus. The poet of the beatnik and the twee has a new book out next week, and what a very fat book it is! Those of you expecting a magisterial collection of epic Beerpintian versifying are likely to be disappointed, however. There is but a single poem nestled within its six hundred pages, and it is a very short poem. One might even call it gnomic. The rest of the book is given over to what Beerpint’s long-suffering publishers dub “hefty apparatus”. This sounds like something you might find in a well-appointed gymnasium, but is in fact a collection of what we literary types prefer to call “weird hot-headed ravings from Dennis Beerpint”.

There is an “introductory essay”, of over two hundred pages, which is neither introductory of anything nor, really, an essay as such. If one were to be kind, one might say it was an example of surrealist “automatic writing”. If one were to be unkind, but honest, one would say it resembles the disjointed drivellings of an untethered brain gone to seed. This farrago of nonsense is accompanied by so many footnotes that, taken together, they are longer than the “essay” itself. If we are to believe the preface (forty-nine pages in total), the footnotes were penned not by the poet, but by his all-too-real Doppelgänger, a sort of shadow Beerpint who dogs his every step, like the familiar in the story by J Sheridan Le Fanu.

Now listen. I have been following Dennis Beerpint’s career from its foetal stages, and this is the first I have heard tell of a Doppelgänger. I am assuming the poet is not referring to one of those fanatical acolytes who express their devotion by dressing like him, adopting the same hairstyles, eating and drinking an identical diet, and languishing upon municipal park benches clutching one of his flimsy poetry pamphlets to their bosoms, pretending to be morbidly ill. It pains me to say it, but I used to be one of their number. My bench was situated near the duckpond in the park, and I feigned tuberculosis. The point is that we were akin to the bodyguards employed by the film director George Lucas, who all look alarmingly like him, but we never pretended to be him, and we would certainly never have threatened Beerpint’s immortal, and poetic, soul. Yet these are the charges laid at the Doppelgänger’s door in the preface, and, indeed, by its own admission, in those interminable and frankly ill-written footnotes.

I have actually read the footnotes, in my review copy, with the aid of a magnifying glass. They are printed in very, very tiny type, in a font called Uber-Ornate Near-Illegible High German Blunkett Gothic. I have needed daily eye-drops ever since, and spend much of my time lying down in a darkened room. All I am willing to say is that the footnotes, far from casting any light on the imbecilic ravings of Beerpint’s essay, are themselves bereft of any sense whatsoever. It is like reading the prose of the more impenetrable Gallic postmodernists while being repeatedly beaten about the ears with a farmer’s shovel – an experience, by the way, I have undergone on more than one occasion, after accepting an offer to write a critique of Lacan or Derrida or one of those old frauds for the weekly magazine Farmers With Shovels Consider The Left Bank Intellectual Ferment. Despite my suffering, I recommend this publication, a sort of Reader’s Digest for the shovelling farmers community, and one which contains in each issue a goodly number of illustrations by the noted hyperrealist linocutter Rex Hyper.

But we are getting away from Beerpint, which will never do. In addition to the preface and the introductory essay with its voluminous footnotes, there is a lengthy section entitled “Mental Pudding”. I have read this half a dozen times and still have no idea what it is meant to be about, or what connection it has to the poem. Then there is a bibliography, supposedly of books consulted by the poet during the writing of his new work. This actually has some interest, giving us a valuable insight into Beerpint’s preoccupations and influences. He has read widely, if haphazardly, in almost as many languages as Anthony Burgess could babble in. No doubt the preposterous Mancunian polymath will be rolling in his grave that not a single one of his works appears in this bibliography. But Ayn Rand is there (Why I Like Stamp Collecting), and Pebblehead, and Robert Ludlum, and Dick Van Dyke (Faith, Hope and Hilarity: A Child’s Eye View of Religion). Beerpint seems also to know his onions when it comes to books about onions, birdseed, the Boxer Rising, lobsters, Futurist boy scouts, dirigibles and hot air balloons, fish entrails, Ruby and Oswald, the Scharnhorst, inexplicable flapping noises, the life and death of Karen Carpenter, bobsleigh, flumes, pigeons, gutta percha, tectonic plates, anteaters, William Betty “the Young Roscius”, tarpaulin, the Symmesian Hollow Earth Theory, gloves, infections of the pituitary gland, Bird’s custard – but, oddly, no other custard – , greenfly, hobnails, spiders, vinegar, Chumpot patent soap, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, various paps and slops and gruels, gaslight, heists, H L Mencken, fruit, pips, sledgehammer wit, the Cottingley Fairies, other fairies, non-fairy life-forms, Geoff Hurst, Belshazzar’s Feast, oil rigs, Shoeburyness, herons, space travel, chrestomathies, car jacking, toilet tissue, bales of hay, bales of straw, bales, bales, Baxter’s Invigorating Fluid, and other bales.

It is important to acknowledge the breadth of knowledge Beerpint is bringing to the table, as it were, when one reads the poem. In the past, he has been accused – not least by me – of treating his readers with contempt and knocking out verses willy nilly, without care or thought, or even a proper pencil. I was particularly harsh in my review of his collection The Assassination Of Andrew Motion, which I described as “vindictive, contemptuous, and written without care or thought or even a proper pencil”. Beerpint has not spoken to me since, but I retain my superbly aloof critical detachment, and can therefore, with a foppish wave of my hand, announce, with due objectivity, that in spite of the ridiculous “apparatus” with which this new book is padded out, the poem itself is a masterpiece. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it guarantees his place in the pantheon, for all time. I am so damned impressed with it that I am going to thumb my nose at the copyright laws and publish the poem here. That will save you from having to buy the book, and if as a result Beerpint or his publishers get upset then I am perfectly willing to meet them in a field, at dawn, with pistols.

So here it is then, the new poem from Dennis Beerpint, in its entirety:

Where oh where

Is the troglodyte Voltaire?

Published in 1952, The Borrowers by Mary Norton was a children’s book about a race of tiny people who live undetected among normal human beings. They are known as “borrowers” because they survive, in part, by taking, or borrowing, everyday objects from the human world and adapting them for their own use. The novel was critically acclaimed, and was followed by a series of sequels over the next thirty years. Its success completely overshadowed a similar series of books, written during the same period, by Flossie Bint. The first of these, also appearing in 1952, introduced us to the Snivellers.

The Snivellers tells the story of a race of more-or-less human-sized beings who live, for the most part undetected, among normal people. They are known as “snivellers” because they go around snivelling, without handkerchiefs. Sometimes they even whimper. They snivel in a quite unselfconscious and morbidly annoying manner, day in day out, in all sorts of circumstances. Much of the fun of the books – well, not fun exactly, let us instead call it mild diversion – is that the normal humans seldom recognise the Snivellers for what they are, a parallel race of super-snivelly handkerchiefless beings consumed with self-pity.

The first book introduces us to a little family of Snivellers, the couple Pob and Hoobety and their spirited teenage daughter Agamemnonette. They snivel through over four hundred pages, in houses and barns and bungalows and sheds and shacks and chalets, upon pavements and thoroughfares, on the sea-battered strand and in fields and hills and frozen steppes, on weekdays and public holidays, in the cold and the rain or on hot cloudless summer days. Snivel, snivel, snivel, they go, with a whimper here and there to vary the tone.

Undeterred by her debut being comprehensively outsold by The Borrowers, Flossie Bint followed up with a sequel in 1955. Alas, The Snivellers In A Sump was published in the very same week as Mary Norton’s own second book, The Borrowers Afield. Though once again overlooked by all but a few, it marks a huge development, for now the Snivellers are joined by a gaggle of anthropomorphic animals akin to those in the tales written by Beatrix Potter. We meet Geoffrey the Beaver, Bob the Snail, Cynthia the Horse, and Dagobert the Puff Adder. As this jolly quartet scurry and slither and canter and creep through the book, the Snivellers snivel, sometimes rather noisily. It is a tour de force.

Several other Snivellers books followed, barely selling enough to break even, and as she aged Flossie Bint became rancorous and sour and difficult. She eventually died in a clapped-out boarding house at a ruined seaside resort, snivelling like one of her timeless characters, without even a handkerchief to her name.

There’s a tin vase on my mantelpiece where I keep my buttons. But where am I to put my unbuttons? A bright six-year-old would put their hand up and cry “In your unvase!” But there is no such thing as an unvase, neither of tin nor of untin. Or, if there is such a thing as an unvase, that which a vase is not, it would not be possible to put anything into it, because it is the ability to hold things – buttons, unbuttons, flowers, coinage, treasury tags – that, in part at least, defines a vase.

I am particularly keen on tin vases, because they are cheap and light and batterable. Bash one with your fist while cursing the universe and it will not smash into smithereens, it will merely receive a dent or two. As we say in my little groupuscule, such dents can lend a tin vase character. Heaven knows what would happen if you bashed a tin unvase, or even an untin unvase. That is assuming you could do so in the first place, which is by no means guaranteed. I suppose if you staged it so that you, and the unvase, were reflected in a judiciously-placed mirror at the time of bashing, that might work. I must share that thought with the groupuscule when next we meet. Usually we gather in a hut, but we are keen to push envelopes, so we plan to hold our next meeting in an unhut. As yet, we have failed to locate one. That bright six-year-old might say, “Well, a shed is an unhut, being a shed instead of a hut”, but that is not strictly true. A shed is sufficiently similar to a hut to be mistaken for one, by most people, on most days, in most circumstances. What a palaver.

Another advantage of the tin vase is that, when struck with, say, a pebble, it makes a tinny clang. There are untinny clangs, and we can easily imagine an unclang, tinny or otherwise, for an unclang would be any noise that is not  a clang. Or, actually, it might be silence, dead silence, as one will find in the grave, when one is consigned there, eventually, six feet under, pushing up the daisies. I have things so arranged that when my time comes I am hoping to push up undaisies. I have circulated instructions, to the members of the groupuscule, in case they survive me. They might. Some of them are young and hale. I condescend to them, it is true, but they take it in good part. Perhaps they can see the shadow looming over my shoulder, the grisly worm-eaten shadow that is a sort of unguardian angel, or guardian unangel. Is an unangel a devil, or is it something more horrifying? I have wondered, from time to time, in the bath or upon a balcony, if an unangel is the kind of being so unutterably gruesome that, when one tries to speak of it, one’s tongue cleaves to the roof of one’s mouth, and one can only make incoherent muffled noises, like a small animal trapped in the sights of a larger one, and about to be torn to pieces, with great savagery, in bright battering sunlight.

One of the reasons I keep my buttons in a tin vase upon the mantelpiece is to give my brain a distraction from these dark and debilitating thoughts. As soon as I sense my mind rolling along the cold iron rails towards bleakness and death and the triumph of an unangel over my soul, stamping it underfoot, I hie to my mantelpiece, and take my tin vase, and I spill the buttons out of it onto a platter, and I count them, or I polish them, rubbing them with a rag steeped in bleach or swarfega, or I examine them closely, through an optical aid, one by one, holding each button between my forefinger and thumb, in my left hand, squinting, peering, until I am no longer conscious of the sounds in the garden, the awful sounds of large beasts slaughtering small ones, and the sounds of the gravedigger, in his filthy overalls, forcing his spade into the muck, again and again, and tossing each spadeful onto a heap, so slowly, relentlessly, while he whistles a tune both sweet and unnerving, a tune I have heard somewhere before, long ago, in my youth, when I played with Billy and Perkin, and the idiot child, in fields and hills, all summer long.

And when my whole head is numb, its innards like suet, I tip my buttons back into the tin vase and replace it on the mantelpiece, and I gather the groupuscule, and address them, in a voice dripping with contempt, or in a roar, until they clap, they clap, they clap, they keep on clapping, as if I were Stalin. But I am Unstalin. Remember my name. Engrave it on a piece of putty, and carry it with you, wherever you roam.

Whither the bint of Shelmerdox? The story goes that she went out a-hiking one morning and never came home. Some said she had a tryst with a tinker and ran away with him to his glen. Others spoke of a mysterious hot air balloon, spotted in the sky above the goaty place around noon. The parish priest insisted he saw her waving from its basket, but he was an old and foolish man and had had sundry hallucinations. There were those who muttered in the shadows of dark and desperate deeds.

Before she left, the bint of Shelmerdox ate an egg on toast and drank half a bottle of gin. She took the time to wash her dishes and place them on the drainer. But she left her purse and keys and passport and engagement ring upon the kitchen table, next to a saucer she used as an ashtray. Had she planned her disappearance, or had she not?.

The bint’s fiancé, the village wrestler, was much distraught. In the market square, by the horse trough, he blubbered like a baby as night fell and there was no sign of her. The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman collected his tears in a cup, and boiled them, that she might see in the clouds of steam a vision of the bint and her present whereabouts. But the steam vouchsafed nought but unreadable swirlings, so the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman next eviscerated a few hens and read their hot bloody entrails, again to no avail. The bint of Shelmerdox had vanished off the face of the earth.

On the first anniversary, the village folk gathered in a barn and sang songs for her. They would have lit candles too, had the parish priest not eaten them all in his madness. The songs they sang were the current popular hits of the village and its hinterland, with newly-minted lyrics, some penned by the wrestler, who still wept every day.

Oh where is she now, my Shelmerdox bint? / I dab at my tears with a poor scrap of lint / If only the gods would let drop a hint / Of where she has gone to, my Shelmerdox bint!

The parish priest, whose chain was lengthened so he could just about reach the doorway of the barn, tried to offer up a prayer for the immortal soul of the bint, but he forgot why he was there, and blessed a couple of cows instead. The names of the cows were Puskas and Di Stefano. They were terrific cows, the pride of the village, and the bint had oftentimes patted their heads and whispered in their ears in that sozzled way of hers.

The commemoration was repeated in subsequent years, always with new songs from the village wrestler, still weeping copiously, and with haphazard blessings from the parish priest. One time he managed a spark of lucidity and actually prayed for the bint, though usually his benediction fell upon the cows or a patch of lupins or even the chain that ensured he did not stray beyond the village.

The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman refused to attend any of these ceremonies. But she had not forgotten about the bint of Shelmerdox. Within her hovel, among her dried-up poisonous plants and toads and beetles and pins and pokey-sticks, she carried on her eldritch flummery in secret.  She had somehow got hold of the bint’s passport, abandoned on the kitchen table, and made dozens upon dozens of copies of the photograph therein, on the photocopying machine in the village post office, and plastered the walls of her hovel with them. The bint stared out at her, sour, gin-soaked, and half-asleep. The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman became fixated upon the bint’s smudged lipstick, convinced that the eerily shifting contours of the smudge in the passport photograph held the key to her vanishing. In some copies, the smudge resembled a subtropical peninsula. In others, it looked like a heron.

On the ninth anniversary, the villagers eschewed the barn and gathered instead at the goaty place. The parish priest’s chain had been shortened after he frightened some swans in the summer just gone, and he stayed in his presbytery, sucking on lettuce leaves for their moisture. The village wrestler dabbed at his tear-stained eyes with his filthy scrap of lint, and sang a threnody.

My broken heart has the weight of lead / I can barely totter out of bed / How many more sobbings must I shed? / My bint is gone, she must be dead.

According to the village’s ad hoc legal system, these words counted as a binding declaration of the death of the Shelmerdox bint. Her home and her remaining personal effects could now be burned entire, all trace of her expunged, and fireworks launched from the village green. The wrestler could stop crying and seek a new inamorata. Even were the bint to reappear, miraculously alive, she would be invisible to the villagers, fated to roam among them as a ghost.

Which, oddly, is precisely what happened, at the very moment the final firework fizzled out and was squelched underfoot by the village postie. Drunk and bedraggled and moth-eaten, the Shelmerdox bint emerged from a shrub clump and staggered across the fields into the village. She smashed the window of the off licence and hoicked a bottle of vagabond’s ruin from the display, but now she was dead to the villagers and nobody saw her.

Nobody save for the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, who inhabited a different, lopsided plane. She beckoned to the bint, and took her into her hovel, where the pair of them drank their fill and babbled about the bint’s lipstick smudge long into the night. When morning came, they trudged arm in arm to the barn, and whispered into the ears of Puskas and Di Stefano, and then the bint of Shelmerdox and the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, and the two terrific cows, headed out of the village, across the fields, and into the hills, and up into the mountains, up where the oxygen grew thin, and they passed, oh! so happy, beyond human ken, forevermore.

He scraped at the bones with a xyster. He prodded them with his berubbergloved fingers. He peered through a Coddington lens. He did tests, pH, Kleinwort-von Straubenzee, etcetera. He broke for a cup of tea in the canteen. He sat alone, reading a scientific bulletin. He examined graphs on screens. He checked the status of a number of Petri dishes. He began to flag. He scribbled some notes in a pad. He poked at the bones with a Copstone fork. He slipped a bone into his pocket. He waited at the bus stop. It was raining. It was always raining. When he got home he took the bone out of his pocket and added it to the pile by the fireplace. He opened the fridge and poured a glass of milk. He sat in an armchair and contemplated the pile of bones. There were bones from humans and dogs and rabbits and cows and hens and pigs and ospreys and hamsters and larks and goats and ostriches and bears and sheep and swordfish and gulls and deer and tanagers. He fetched a bale of fusewire from a cupboard. He tied the bones together with the wire. He worked slowly and with care. When he was done he leaned the bone-being against his mantelpiece at an angle he thought insouciant. He plopped a hat on its head.

“All hail, Vabogadabingahobbema!” he cried.

He placed a cardboard box filled with sand at its lower talons as an offering. And he went out into his garden and sheltered from the rain under an awning and smoked a cigarette. Like Ayn Rand, he considered smoking to be man’s victory over fire.

Within, the bone-being grew hot, glittering in the firelight.