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David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: It's a long time since I did a quiz on biographies,
so - let's have another quiz on biographies! One point each for the Great Persons: three more points if you can name the biographer.
You may notice a vague sub-theme to the extracts, as well. In each case, the biographee will be referred to as “Smith.”
Get ready, get set, GO!
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. 53
1(Translation)
For some time, and probably ever since 1911, Smith had complained of new health problems: “some
terrible heart seizures that had left him between life and death.” Asthma and its development into emphysema were having
an effect upon his heart, as was his excessive use of medicaments such as adrenaline and caffeine, as well as psychosomatic
complaints. “The problems outlined probably derive from a chronic pulmonary heart condition that results in breathing
difficulties and spells of dizziness.” He did not consult an eye specialist and reading became more of a strain for
him. Drawing some advantage from his misfortunes as usual, he informed his friends who were writers that the condition of
his eyes prevented him from reading their books. It was as if the various instrumentalists were taking their places one by
one to play a funereal symphony: with increasing frequency Smith announced his forthcoming death.
Answer
2)
As with many undergraduates, the effects of alcohol proved a revelation to Smith. “Do let me
most seriously advise you to take to drink,” he wrote to [a sinister friend] in the summer of 1922. “There is
nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill next day. That
is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach.” The painful self-consciousness of his schooldays was lost in a hazy sense
of well-being and conviviality. Only one thing irritated him now: the quite reasonable demands of his tutor that, as Senior
History Scholar, he should do some work.
Answer
3)
It's also not unreasonable to point out that bouts of intense paranoia are a known common side effect
of amphetamine abuse, and that Smith was abusing amphetamines - Dexedrine, Benzedrine, and god knows what awful street shit
thrown in - to the hilt. In the refrigerator he kept cartons of protein-fortified milkshakes side by side with large jars
of white crosses - $100 for a jar of a thousand, which Smith consumed by downing unmeasured handfuls with the milkshakes ....
Smith and others in the house would stay up three or four days or even a week straight without sleep and then would crash
out into forty-eight hours of bed immobility. And when you're speeding that long on large doses, a sense of high energy and
utter awareness can - and usually does - turn into watchfulness, suspicion, fear.
Answer
4)
Some time just before 13 February, his regular feature failed to appear in The Manchester Evening
News “due to Mr Smith's illness”: he had had a haemorrhage. Susan Watson heard him go down the corridor in
the middle of the night. He simply said, “Ice and cold water in a cloth, please, and put it on my head.” He was
in bed, she remembers, for about a fortnight; but possibly longer, for his Manchester column also did not appear on 14 March.
His regular fortnightly piece appeared a week late in The Observer, but somehow he kept going his weekly contributions
to Tribune. He would not allow Susan to bring in a doctor. But he was ill enough to stay in bed, not to shave and not
to eat, except semolina pudding flavoured with lemon and vanilla, of which he was very fond.
Answer
5(Translation)
.... Shortly afterward, while he was trying to set an example of the joys of physical labour, he
had an accident: he was carting hay for a peasant's widow, was thrown off balance by a false movement, fell from the cart
and hurt his leg. He paid no attention to the wound and it became infected. Periostitis developed. Bedridden, the patient
reverted to his wife, who set rapturously to work nursing her bearded baby as he lay shaking with fever. She delighted in
the most intimate and repugnant tasks, and in his weakened condition he found her touching and let her do as she pleased.
For the first time, he was not afraid of death: “I am dying of a leg injury,” he wrote to [an associate]. “The
river of life has dwindled to a tiny rivulet.”
Answer
6)
[On crutches because of an infected bone in his foot, Smith had fallen downstairs and broken his arm.]
As he predicted, this was the first of several accidents over the next eighteen months that were to keep [his wife's] anxieties
well exercised and Smith himself largely convalescent. His fall, aggravated by an abscess, a stye and a tormenting nettle
rash, plunged him back into the abnormal condition following his operation the previous May. “I am now slowly pulling
round,” he reported to Karl Pearson on 4 July, “but the foot has to be kept open for the bit of bad bone to exfoliate
& come away; so I am crippled hand & foot.” On 27 July an illustrious bone specialist named Bowlby, attended by three
doctors, came down to perform a double operation. He dug out most of the bad bone from the instep, charged Smith sixty guineas
and instructed him he would be healed in three weeks. Then he went away: but - he had forgot the arm. “I am so
unspeakably tickled by this triumph over the profession that I cannot resist the temptation to impart it to you,” Smith
wrote the next day to his vegetarian friend Henry Salt.
Answer
7)
The event that immediately preceded Smith's illness was a long-awaited visit from his mother, accompanied
by his sister, Marian, and brother, Henry. He had not seen his mother for six years. He feared that Charlotte, now seventy-seven,
would be old and weak, but when they met he was taken aback by her formidable energy. The real strain was having to keep his
marital problems out of sight and [his wife] quietly in the country. At the end of the summer, after his mother left, he collapsed.
When overstrained, he said, he used to suffer from a vague but acute sense of horror and apprehension. In late September he
went to see a nerve specialist. “I really feel very shaky,” he wrote to [a friend], “and seem to have gone
down rapidly since my family left.”
Answer
8)
And there was also Smith's inherent strangeness, his susceptibility, his uniqueness - like the time
in January of the new year when he was so overcome by being a member of a jury at the inquest into the death of a young child
that he had “a most violent attack of sickness and indigestion” which would allow him neither sleep nor rest;
as a result he and [his wife] sat up all night. (It ought to be recorded of this incident that it was as a result of his own
intervention on behalf of the mother that the child was declared stillborn rather than murdered.) And there is also the strangeness,
too, of his sudden obsession with the young Queen who was about to celebrate her marriage - “The presence of my wife
aggravates me. I loathe my parents. I detest my house.” Of course this was part of the “fun and raillery”
of which he so often speaks, but one notices here the way in which his fantasies chafe at the banks of reality, and how quickly
he slides into a dream of discontent.
Answer
9)
In May 1917 Smith had appendicitis and was operated on at the Kaufman clinic, the best private hospital
in [a large city]. While under ether on the operating table he saw himself vividly
in a sailor suit mounting a freshly emerged emperor moth under the guidance of a Chinese lady who I knew was my mother.
It was all there, brilliantly reproduced in my dream, while my own vitals were being exposed: the soaking, ice-cold absorbent
cotton pressed to the insect's lemurian head; the subsiding spasms of its body; the satsfying crackle produced by the pin
penetrating the hard crust of its thorax; the careful insertion of the point of the pin in the cork-bottomed groove of the
spreading board ....
After this experience he decided he would never let anyone anaesthetize him again. He dreaded the
loss of consciousness as the foulest of his most fearful nightmares.
Answer
10)
Smith's memory for the words of his own compositions and for those of all writers he admired was prodigious.
He knew by heart whole pages of Flaubert, Newman, de Quincey, E. Quinet, A.J. Balfour and of many others. Most human memories
begin to fail at midnight, and lapse into the vague and à peu près, but not that of Smith. It was while
we were at Locarno that we returned once to our pension at about midnight, and sat for a while in Smith's room. We
had been talking about Milton's Lycidas, and I wanted to quote some lines of it that pleased me. My memory gave out,
but Smith said the whole poem from beginning to end, and followed it up with L'Allegro. I wonder if Macaulay could
have done as much at midnight after a litre of Nostrano?
Answer
1)
Marcel Proust, Jean-Yves Tadié. Well, even if you didn't get this rather easy starter, at least you know that
the obligatory “Proust extract” is over and done with!
Back to Question 1
2)
Evelyn Waugh, Martin Stannard. Many have made the same discovery, and received the same check .... Sigh. The sinister
friend was the amazing Tom Driberg (1905-76): homosexual, Member of Parliament, spy, Life Peer, gossip columnist, Chairman
of the Labour Party, etc., etc.
Back to Question 2
3)
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Sutin. Hey Fiddle-dee Dee! A writer's life for me! as Jane Austen
might have said, had she read this biography.
Back to Question 3
4)
George Orwell, Bernard Crick. Coughing up blood is never a good sign, I believe. But I reckon it was the semolina that
killed him in the end.
Back to Question 4
5)
Tolstoy, Henri Troyat. Only Shake-Speare and Dickens challenge his claim to be the most powerful genius ever to hold
a pen. He was indeed dying: twenty-five years later, he was in his grave.
Back to Question 5
6)
Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd. Thus Shaw occupied himself on his honeymoon .... The marriage, though unconsummated,
was an unusually happy one, only terminated by Charlotte's death forty-five years later.
Back to Question 6
7)
Eliot's Early Years, Lyndall Gordon. Poor Eliot! Of course, you have to remember that this was 1921, and he was heavily
gravid with The Waste Land.
Back to Question 7
8)
Dickens, Peter Ackroyd. The lasting impression, for me, of Mr Ackroyd's fine biography is how often he ascribes “strangeness”
to Dickens, and how convincingly he documents those ascriptions.
Back to Question 8
9)
Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd. Too easy, I know! It's strange that more writers haven't been lepidopterists: no two
passions could go better together.
Back to Question 9
10)
James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’, Frank Budgen. I began with Proust (the Happy Hypochondriac), and
end with Joyce (the Wizard of White Wine). Budgen's pleasingly artless book shows its author to have been somewhat feckless,
but entirely charming. It's easy to see why Joyce liked him - but A.J. Balfour? Some mysteries will never be solved
this side of the grave. However, I can certainly answer Budgen's closing question about Macaulay. A litre of vin blanc
would have been as nothing to him.
Back to Question 10
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
Return to Start
Last Updated: 12 November 2004
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