Besides, one must not confuse the writer and the book, especially when the writer is a translator. The Rubaiyat is a collection of quatrains, expressing a free, unsentimental yet lyrical and definitively alcoholic view of the universe, which quite captured the Victorian imagination. They were a serious people and here was a reprobate old poet who cared for no one, with no philosophy and no religion, apart from wine, women and song. The Rubaiyat is exotic, positively reeking of the mysterious Orient, with towers and minarets and bulbul, but familiar enough in its sentiments to be easily applicable to everyday life. It is easy to remember because the verse is so beautifully scanned and rhymed.
Its most famous stanza made beautiful and poetic and luxurious the consumption of sandwiches and cordial under a tree with one’s favourite boy.
From being relatively unknown, FitzGerald became an instant celebrity and old Omar Khayyam kept him comfortable for the rest of his life, which is always nice to hear. In his introduction, FitzGerald informs us that Omar Khayyam was born in the latter half of the eleventh century and lasted until the first quarter of the twelfth. His poetic name means Tentmaker, possibly a family profession. He achieved his loafing, lazy life by being a schoolmate of a future Vizier. The four boys pledged that when one of them became powerful, he would give the others whatever they wanted. Nizam Al Mukh succeeded and gave the other two power and place.
All Khayyam wanted was an independent income and he got it: enough money to please himself. Not that he wasted his time in continuous drinking. He was an astronomer, a mathematician and a scientist. He was amongst the group of wise men who reformed the calendar. He wrote a treatise on algebra. But fortunately that left him a reasonable amount of time for lounging around under trees with houris. FitzGerald in his introduction comments:
Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding no Providence but Destiny, and any World but This, he set about making the most of it; preferring to sooth the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as They were, rather than to perplex it with vain mortifications after what they might be. It has been seen that his Wordly Desires, however, were not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous Pleasure in exaggerating them…
I first found The Rubaiyat in Grandmother Greenwood’s bookcase.
When I was a child there were three sets of significant bookcases in my life, as well as the ever-present scatter and pile of ordinary books all over our house. The first was Grandma McKenzie’s bookcase, a glorious collection of Edwardian books bound in pressed cardboard with wonderful covers and titles like Ida Pfeiffer and Her Travels In Many Lands and Adventures in the Land of Ice and Snow and The Fairchild Family, the only book that my mother ever removed firmly from my grasp and would not return, even though I begged her to. At the time I sulked briefly and then grabbed another book. It was the three-volume novel The Rosary by Mrs Florence Barclay and Mother never said a word.
When I read The Fairchild Family as a grown up I understood why my mother had taken it away from me. It is a grim, severe and merciless book of Victorian morality that I would snatch out of the hands of anyone under thirty, even now. The chapter where the parents take their children to look at (and smell) the body of a murderer hanging on the gibbet to show them how crime does not pay is worthy of Edgar Allen Poe. Or Stephen King.
The second bookcase was a large and beautiful cedar construction with glass doors in my parents’ house. It contained wedding present sets of books, fragile and precious. I read all of them: Myths of Many Lands, The Collected Plays of GB Shaw, The Collected Works of Charles Fort, The Children’s Encyclopedia by Arthur Mee, The Works of Dickens.
Bookcase number three belonged to Grandma Greenwood and also contained wedding present sets, this time of Trollope and Thackeray. I read them, too. My mother specialised in poetry, so when I was at Grandma’s one Sunday as usual, I was surprised to find a lovely little book bound in limp, violet suede, containing poems I had never seen, in a form with which I was unfamiliar. I remember sitting down in Grandpa’s comfy brown leather chair, reading it in one gulp.
The grandparents were in the garden with my father, showing him something to do with a new rose. Grandpa was an accountant, who grew glorious roses and loved Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan. My father was totally uninterested in gardening and loved big bands and jazz. They had nothing in common, except us, but they maintained a polite and guarded truce. By the time they came inside and I had to go home, I had engulfed Omar Khayyam and adored it, so I asked very politely if I could borrow it. Grandma asked me if my hands were clean and told me to be very careful and put The Rubaiyat in a clean white envelope, which is what she always did with a book. I never lost or damaged one of them, not even the wedding present Trollope with pages as thin as rice paper, very easy to tear when reading under the blankets with a flashlight.
Thereafter I read Omar to my mother while we were cooking or peeling potatoes. We all liked him, even my little brother. The poems were, as FitzGerald said, a ‘Strange Farrago of Grave and Gay’. My favourite was:
Or possibly:
The Rubaiyat was a particularly appropriate book to find in Somerton Man’s possession, I would suggest, because it was both commonly available and undeniably secular. (A Communist carrying a bible, for instance, would instantly draw attention.) Beautiful editions of The Rubaiyat with hand-painted illustrations, bound in limp, purple leather, abounded. Cheap editions were everywhere. It became a good gift for someone you did not know very well. Indeed, Saki Reginald remarks, ‘I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyam. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald’s notes, to his aged mother’. It continues to be in print, with a last surge during the 1960s, when it was read while stoned to appreciative audiences.
The Rubaiyat found in the car near to Somerton Man was a first edition, published in 1859 by Whitcombe and Tombs. This is curious in itself. If Somerton Man or his colleagues wanted a throwaway book to use for a book code, one would have thought that they would have chosen one of the commonly available editions. In fact, there are substantial differences between the editions of 1859, 1868 and 1872, which could have an effect on decryption.