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David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: As the U.S. economy goes down the tubes, 1.1% of
the population languishes in jail, and torture becomes an American institution, we return to gentler days - in this Quiz,
at any rate. There's a slight change of style: each extract (if there is an extract) is followed by a question. Answer
or perish!
The quotations in these quizzes reflect my own tastes - Dead White Males, for the most part (Jane Austen,
of course, counts as an honorary DWM). There will never be anything wilfully obscure. If you're the sort of person who sneers
at the naïveté of the reviewers in the TLS and New York Review of Books, you'll recognize them at once.
I welcome suggestions and insults. You'll find an e-mail tag lying around somewhere. Please put QUIZ in the subject line.
David J Wilson.
Quiz No. 109
1)
Who "was having a good enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders"? [The answer to this question
will help you with Nos. 2-5.]
Answer
2)
I went down to the front garden and clumb over the stile where you go through the high board fence.
There was an inch of new snow on the ground, and I seen somebody's tracks. They had come up from the quarry and stood around
the stile a while, and then went on around the garden fence. It was funny they hadn't come in, after standing around so. I
couldn't make it out. It was very curious, somehow. I was going to follow around, but I stooped down to look at the tracks
first. I didn't notice anything at first, but next I did. There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to
keep off the devil.
Whose tracks were they?
Answer
3)
Well, he run on, and on, and on, making up stuff about Hicksville and everybody in it he could invent,
and I getting a little nervous, and wondering how this was going to help me out of my scrape; and at last, still talking along,
he reached over and kissed Aunt Sally right on the mouth, and then settled back again in his chair comfortable, and was going
on talking; but she jumped up and wiped it off with the back of her hand, and says:
"You owdacious puppy!"
"He" is Tom Sawyer, of course, pretending to be someone else, as he dearly loved to do. He has given one false name
already (William Thompson, of Hicksville), and is about to give another - what name is that?
Answer
4)
These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever
I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of
these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition
she was having a better time in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick,
and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance.
It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair
all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had -
Well - what memorable features did she have?
Answer
5)
My, you ought to seen old ****** when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a
new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs.
'Fetch up Nell Gwynn,' he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, 'Chop off her head!' And they chop it off. 'Fetch up Jane
Shore,' he says; and up she comes. Next morning, 'Chop off her head' - and they chop it off. 'Ring up Fair Rosamun.' Fair
Rosamun answers the bell. Next morning, 'Chop off her head.' And he made every one of them tell him a tale every night; and
he kept that up till he had hogged a thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a book, and called it Domesday
Book - which was a good name and stated the case.
Who was this interesting monarch?
Answer
6)
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in
North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York - and where there are, among
other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in
contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere,
the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals - like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both
crushed flat at the contact end - but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that
fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
Who turned out to be living next door?
Answer
7)
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains
beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm - frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like
a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat
must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland
ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed
ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals,
and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it! - it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd
blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and
heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you
but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
Who (not the wind) is about to strike a famous blow?
Answer
8)
"I should like to have this over with as soon as possible," said Lee. Grant looked vaguely at Shultz,
who walked up close to him, frowning. "The surrender, sir, the surrender," said Corporal Shultz in a whisper. "Oh sure, sure,"
said Grant. He took another drink. "All right," he said. "Here we go." Slowly, sadly, he unbuckled his sword. Then he handed
it to the astonished Lee. "There you are, General," said Grant. "We dam' near licked you. If I'd been feeling better we would
of licked you."
This might well have happened, if Grant had been drinking at Appomattox. According to which historian?
Answer
9)
An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the uniform concentration of eagerness
they exhibited, might have guessed that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly absorbing criminal
trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng - the hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread
of some adverse decree.
But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have sufficed to shatter both hypotheses.
Here was neither a court of justice nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma Conference of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow, near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently
rubbed the glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing
his task to himself - the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.
Two paragraphs from the first chapter of a genuine American classic. FIVE points if you can identify it, and FIVE more for
the author!
Answer
10)
It kept him before her therefore, taking in - or trying to - what she so wonderfully gave. He tried,
too clearly, to please her - to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before
him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: `"See"? I see nothing but you.'
And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them,
she buried her own in his breast.
I end with the closing words of a great American novel .... Which one?
Answer
1)
Huckleberry Finn, of course. If you said "Tom Sawyer," your score is now MINUS TEN.
Back to Question 1
2)
They was Pap's prints!
Back to Question 2
3)
Sid Sawyer!
Back to Question 3
4)
.... two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon - and
the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before
she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday
come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a
nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.
Back to Question 4
5)
Henry VIII. I like to think that he would have enjoyed this wonderful book, the best American novel ever written.
Back to Question 5
6)
Jay "The Great" Gatsby, formerly Jimmy Gatz.
Back to Question 6
7)
A rare albino form of Physeter macrocephalus: the White Whale, known to his acquaintances as Moby-Dick.
Back to Question 7
8)
James G. Thurber.
Back to Question 8
9)
The Damnation of Theron Ware, Harold Frederic. This sophisticated, gripping narrative, marred only by a rather sophomoric
ending, is warmly recommended by your friendly Quizmaster. Congratulations if you picked up the full ten points.
Back to Question 9
10)
The Golden Bowl, Henry James. And no, you don't get half a point for guessing the author! It's my sixtieth birthday
tomorrow, and apart from an insulting card from my sister, I haven't had a WORD from ANY BUGGER!
Back to Question 10
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
Return to Start
Last Updated: 21 March 2008
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