Eclecticity

A new literary quiz at irregular intervals, usually with a theme. This week: Not for the first time, the theme is themelessness .... The only really difficult one is No. 10, because it was inserted especially for Moggie. You other buggers can have a go at it - but you have no chance. The other nine are rendered a little easier than usual because I haven't changed any names! Well, Christmas is coming, and I am getting fat. Have fun, children!

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.

1)

    Hookforce were the only fighting troops in Alexandria. They found themelves called on to find guards for government buildings and banks. They were assigned a role in the defence of the city in the event of a German breakthrough. Early in May Tommy Blackhouse, Major Hound and Guy drove out with a Brigadier from Area Command to inspect the sandy ridge between Lake Mariout and the sea where they were expected to hold Rommel's armour with their knives and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.
    "What's to stop him coming round the other side?" asked Tommy.
    "According to the plan - the Gyppos," said the Brigadier.
    He laughed, Tommy laughed, they laughed all four.



Answer

2)

    The king in his blindness, or out of some notion of abused dignity, resisted; there was more kick in his old body than one would have thought; the crowd chuckled a bit. I could feel, through the pink mists my verbal frenzy had set to swirling in my skull, his sensations, his struggling stiff frailty; I entered in, was pushed and pulled among jostling shelves of muscular darkness, of dazzling not-seeing. My hair was gripped, a hardness knocked against my chin, sun-hot camwood scorched my throat. A smoky smell. The orange in my mind rolled away. The king's head had been arranged on the block. Looking down, I had become perilously tall. The path the scimitar must descend through air appeared a long flaw in crystal. A few drops of sweat glinted in the net of wrinkles on the nape of the old man's neck, bared as Opuku, perhaps rougher than need be (it crossed my mind), tugged forward for me the mass of Edumu's hair, matted and yellowish like a sheep's. I eyed my spot between two vertebrae. Incongruously, there entered my mind from afar the image of a candy apple, such as one buys at county fairs in Wisconsin - its tough glaze, its slender wooden stick, its little cap of coconut. The first bite is the most difficult. The king cleared his throat, as if to address one of us. But his thought went nowhere, a trickle in the hot sands of his terror, and an intense mechanical interest arose like a hiss of steam from the point between two cervical lumps where two wrinkles conveniently crossed. Opuku's hands gripped deeper into the wool, as if the king were tensing to struggle, and I saw that the moment I wanted with all my being behind me was still a fraction of a second ahead. The divine breath grunted into my chest and the scimitar descended. Though the blade struck through to the wood, the noise was clumsier, more multiple, than I had expected.



Answer

3)

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.



Answer

4(Translation)

    At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognises that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."



Answer

5)

    My parents were in a miserable condition of life, and my infant home was a cellar in Preston. I recollect the sound of father's Lancashire clogs on the street pavement above, as being different in my young hearing from the sound of all other clogs; and I recollect, that, when mother came down the cellar-steps, I used tremblingly to speculate on her feet having a good or an ill- tempered look, - on her knees, - on her waist, - until finally her face came into view, and settled the question. From this it will be seen that I was timid, and that the cellar-steps were steep, and that the doorway was very low.
    Mother had the gripe and clutch of poverty upon her face, upon her figure, and not least of all upon her voice. Her sharp and high-pitched words were squeezed out of her, as by the compression of bony fingers on a leathern bag; and she had a way of rolling her eyes about and about the cellar, as she scolded, that was gaunt and hungry. Father, with his shoulders rounded, would sit quiet on a three-legged stool, looking at the empty grate, until she would pluck the stool from under him, and bid him go bring some money home. Then he would dismally ascend the steps; and I, holding my ragged shirt and trousers together with a hand (my only braces), would feint and dodge from mother's pursuing grasp at my hair.



Answer

6)

    Suddenly we are moving fast along a narrow, twisting, brambled path, deep into the massed trees of the Forest. It is from the perspective of someone running, but the lower branches of the tall undergrowth whip and lash and crowd in. On either side, the trees are apparently endless, jostling together, darkening almost to black in the distance. The sounds of the running feet stop, and a hand pulls aside the foliage, to look into a grassy, woodland dell.
    An attractive woman - later identified as Nicola - is on her back on the grass, her skirt pulled up to her hips, her stockinged legs open, her high heels digging into the soft earth, her long black hair spread, being made love to, with crude and hurried vigour, by some man who cannot be identified, his bare backside gleaming. Nicola, aware of a watcher, twists her head to look, and gives a jeering laugh.
NICOLA: Caught me, have you, Marlow?



Answer

7)

    Six months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific - the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potato left; not a single yam. Those glorious bunches of bananas, which once decorated our stern and quarter-deck, have, alas, disappeared! and the delicious oranges which hung suspended from our tops and stays - they, too, are gone! Yes, they are all departed, and there is nothing left us but salt-horse and sea-biscuit. Oh! ye state-room sailors, who make so much ado about a fourteen-days' passage across the Atlantic; who so pathetically relate the privations and hardships of the sea, where, after a day of breakfasting, lunching, dining off five courses, chatting, playing whist, and drinking champagne-punch, it was your hard lot to be shut up in little cabinets of mahogany and maple, and sleep for ten hours, with nothing to disturb you but 'those good-for-nothing tars, shouting and tramping overhead', - what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land?



Answer

8)

    The thought of the laburnum through the long twilight sent thrills through me more disturbing and more delicious (because more forbidden?) than the thought of any tree I have known these twenty-odd years. My hand shook over the baked beans as I prepared Mummy's supper on the gas stove. Only the acrid smell of the charred toast roused me from my dreams, and my distracted snatching of the kettle from the flame long before it had boiled made me curse softly as the dry leaves of the Camomile tea floated to the surface of the pot. I tied one of Mummy's long aprons round me to conceal my excitement and, stooping slightly, carried the Benares brass tray into Mummy's snuggery.



Answer

9)

    Two of the men lying on the blanket that day in 1940 were rich. The third was poor - so poor that he had only recently purchased the first suit he had ever owned that fit correctly - and desperately anxious not to be: thirty-two-year-old Congressman Lyndon Johnson had been pleading with one of the other two men, George Brown, to find him a business in which he could make a little money. So when Brown, relaxing in the still-warm Autumn sun at the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel in the mountains of West Virginia, heard the third man, Charles Marsh, make his offer to Lyndon Johnson, he felt sure he knew what the answer would be.



Answer

10)

    So at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime flowers. Now on the rough water, as I was made free of her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that fierce appetite, cast a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled under, not knowing its nature - now, while the waves still broke and thundered on the prow, the act of possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning.



Answer

1)
Officers and Gentlemen, Evelyn Waugh. Not terribly politically correct, perhaps, but one of the very many funny moments in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Men At Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. But despite the laughs, this is a rather sad work - a mildly depressive masterpiece.


Back to Question 1

2)
The Coup, John Updike. One of this fine writer's finest works. Not many people these days get the chance to chop a king's head off: you could hardly turn the opportunity down. I mean - when would it ever come again?


Back to Question 2

3)
Piano, D.H. Lawrence. I have the feeling I've used this poem before in a Quiz .... No matter. It seems very simple at first, but then gets better every time you read it. That's the single, necessary, and sufficient mark of a great poem.


Back to Question 3

4)
Before the Law, Franz Kafka. You can have your full point if you said it was from The Trial, in which this parable also appears. Of course, this is the Muirs' translation.


Back to Question 4

5)
George Silverman's Explanation, Charles Dickens. You can have a nice big bonus if you knew exactly what this was from - but you should have known it was Dickens! George Silverman's Explanation is one of Dickens's strangest pieces - but then, he was a very strange man.


Back to Question 5

6)
The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter. Many Americans have never seen this masterpiece, the greatest television drama ever made, but you can easily find the DVD. Don't miss it! It makes you realise what television (and only television) is capable of doing and being.


Back to Question 6

7)
Typee, Herman Melville. You should have known it was Melville! As you can see, he had certain familiar annoying stylistic habits all his life - but at least Typee (and Omoo) lack the horrid fibrous masses which almost extinguish Moby Dick.


Back to Question 7

8)
A Melon for Ecstasy, John Fortune and John Wells. Yes, gentle reader! This is an account of his life by a man who is queer for trees! It is also one of the funniest books in the world.


Back to Question 8

9)
Means of Ascent, Robert Caro. The very first paragraph of Caro's magisterial and monumental four-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson (who would have been a hundred this year). It's tough to pick up - but far harder to put down.


Back to Question 9

10)
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (again). Think you got it right? Think again! You only get full marks if you knew that this was from the first version (1945)! Waugh revised it in 1960, but couldn't do anything about the terrible structural faults of this brilliant but awful novel. Well done, Moggers! Moggers! Moggers? Are you there? Damn.


Back to Question 10

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Last Updated: 12 December 2008