David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: It's eighteen months since I last did a Quiz on
biographies, so here we go again. This is all absolutely straightforward: you score a gold point for identifying the subject
of the biography (nine literary gentlemen and one literary lady), and you get a huge bonus (150 silver points) for
naming the biographer. As always, giveaway proper names are Smithed (or Forgeroned). Off you go, boys and girls! Have
a good time! But no squabbling, and try not to get your clothes dirty.
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. 88
1)
Mark Twain and John Smith were by nature destined never to be intimate; there was a newspaperish side
to the humorist, the “lion” side, and a love of broad effects and the roar of publicity, from which Smith shrank.
“Temperament” divided them, as it would Smith and his fellow-novelists in England. Mark Twain was outgoing, expansive,
capable of great exuberance. Smith was inward-turned, ruminative, secretive. No two American geniuses were more dissimilar,
even in their sense of humor; this in Smith was highly condensed, epigrammatic and also private, whereas in Mark Twain it
was broad, visceral and public. Both were lovers of the truth, both critical of their fellow-Americans.
Answer
2)
The will begins with a pious declaration:
In the name of God, Amen. I, John Smith .... in perfect health and memory, God be
praised, do make and ordain this my last will and testament in manner and form following. That is to say, first I commend
my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christe my saviour,
to be made partaker of life everlasting and my body to the earth whereof it is made.
To find here a confession of personal faith is to consider the matter too curiously. The preamble
is formulaic, following almost word for word a model included by William West of the Inner Temple in his First Part of
Simboleography, which may be termed the Art, or Description, of Instruments and Precedents.
Answer
3)
There were of course occasions when he rested from his labours. Most surprising, perhaps, is the fact
that he seems to have taken up landscape drawing for a time. There are certain extant pencil and watercolour sketches that
depict the church at Felpham, a wood, and a garden path; on one occasion he and Hayley made a journey to Hayley's previous
house in Eartham, where Thomas Alphonso had died, and Smith quickly sketched the exterior of it. This was also the occasion
when they witnessed the death of Hayley's old servant - “my good William who closed the height of cheerful and affectionate
existence (near eighty) .... in the great house at Eartham where Smith and I had the mournful gratification of attending him
(by accident) in the last few hours of his life.” Death was for Smith a joyful moment, symbolising release, and his
attendance upon the servant might have helped to inspire his later etching of The Death of the Good Old Man.
Answer
4)
Complete understanding of the change that took place in 1956 must remain a mirage. Falling in love
is, anyway, impossible to explain. There was, Smith said after his marriage, “thoughts without need of speech”
and “speech without need of meaning” in the attunement of lovers who make a private world. On the other hand,
it would falsify the last stage of Smith's life simply to record, as many do, the mere fact of change. For it took place in
the context of nearly a whole lifetime that now stretched behind Smith, and although we cannot know the private world itself,
we might ask how he came to replace the long-guarded world of solitude with the shared world of love. For all his secrecy,
he did offer clues to the nature of such a change in his last play which he began in October-November 1955: a clearly autobiographical
play about a great public figure who has become hollow at heart, and is “saved,” at the very end of his life,
by the steadfast love of his daughter.
Answer
5)
In the early 1950s Smith's relationship with the Irish Times was not happy. There had always
been rows because his copy, though admirably clear, was difficult both to sub and to set; and unfortunately the more alert
the sub or more meticulous the typesetter, the more his puns, his jokes and his deliberate mistakes were “corrected.”
This had led to a stream of letters to whoever was subbing the column over the years, the terms of abuse being already familiar
from their use in the column itself - cornerboy, thullabawn, thooleramawn, along with the odd gobshite,
bastard and other terms. The novelist Jack White, who to begin with was the junior in the editorial department responsible
for subbing Smith, and later features editor, afterwards wrote, “In terms of sheer scurrilous abuse I have never seen
anything quite like those letters.”
Answer
6)
In later years, when wild rumours which she did not entirely discourage tended to circulate about
Jane Smith, it was inevitably suggested that her sisters had killed themselves in despair at being detected in an illicit
affair with one another. But the notion of Lesbianism, with or without incestuous connections, involves a misconception about
what was and what was not accepted as normal behaviour in Victorian families, whose permissiveness in some directions seems
often as startling as their prudishness in others. Caresses between girls, between men, between brother and sister were freely
indulged as signs of a tenderness which might well now bear a more prurient interpretation. In Jane's childhood it would have
been considered incomparably more shocking that a respectable married woman should openly refer (as Jane's mother apparently
did) to sitting on her husband's knee than that two sisters should sleep together. Girls commonly shared a bedroom and often
a bed. If Freud opened the door on much that was murky in family relations, he also put a stop to much that went on in perfect
ignorance and innocence.
Answer
7)
Three days after finishing it, Forgeron delivered his typescript by hand to Georges Lambrichs at Gallimard.
He rang a fortnight later: Lambrichs had not yet read it. He waited. On 20 April he rang again. Lambrichs does not reject
but does not appreciate [La Grande Aventure], Forgeron noted. The editor needed more time and would give his answer at
the beginning of May. Forgeron rang again in due course; Lambrichs was out, so he left a message. The call was returned: Monsieur
Lambrichs needed ten more days. The final answer reached Rue de Quatrefages not by telephone but on headed notepaper bearing
the firm's standard disclaimer in small type at the bottom: “The company declines responsibility for the loss of books
and manuscripts entrusted to it.” The letter was dated 11 June 1964.
Despite obvious qualities of intelligence, it seems to me .... that you have lost
the wager of making an entertaining or instructive book out of boredom. It is true that your characters are dull, somewhat
naive, without any real life. Please believe me, I am indeed disconcerted.
Forgeron had been turned down yet again, and yet again by Gallimard. Back to square one.
Answer
8)
Though Smith relented so far as to drink champagne on his own doctor's orders (supplied by Heinemann),
along with port and brandy egg flips, his progress was slow through February [1930]. Unable to shave, he grew a grey beard,
which became the subject of regular bulletins to friends (and was even reported in the Irish Times). Snapshots, he
warned Gregory in mid March, did not do it justice: “my beard, though for domestic reasons it will probably disappear,
is a unique and beautiful beard.” “Quite dreadful! Banish it!” she replied: “A little longer & you
will be like old Sigerson.” Pound, now cautiously overcoming his hypochondria to visit once more, thought it qualified
his friend to become first minister of Austria. The beard stayed until May, when the children voted on it: Michael in favour,
Anne (the aesthete) against.
Answer
9)
Other doctors were consulted. Then in February 1930, as a result of an article about Smith in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, he had letters from two Swiss friends. Georges Borach wrote to urge Smith to see Professor
Alfred Vogt, a brilliant Swiss surgeon in Zurich who took spectacular chances and often achieved spectacular results. The
second letter was from a stranger source, Marthe Fleischmann; it was written with formality, recalling that they had once
been “neighbours” in Zurich, and told of several of Vogt's miraculous cures. She signed her letter, Mit den
freundlichen Grüssen.
Answer
10(Translation)
Forgeron had now been working on his novel for a year, and from this period we have a number of documents
that relate to the genesis of the text; thereafter, there is silence until he abandoned it in 1899. It is an appropriate moment,
therefore, to summarize the genesis, or the biography, of this work, in so far as we can reconstruct it from the manuscript
in the Bibliothèque Nationale. To begin with, it is worth noting that Forgeron never gave a title to his book: he always
chose his titles once he had finished. As to the protagonist's surname, which we use to refer to the novel, according to Le
Bottin mondain, there is a seventeenth-century poet, who wrote in Latin, known by the name of Jean Santeuil. Did Forgeron
amuse himself by using his name, as if to suggest that he was going to relate the life of a poet, and one who expressed himself
in a dead language? Was it not more likely that he borrowed it from a locality to be found between Pontoise and Gisors, on
the road to Dieppe, or from another Santeuil, nearer to Chartres and Illiers, between Dourdan and Châteaudun?
Answer
1)
The Master: 1901-1916, Leon Edel. The fifth and concluding volume of one of the finest of literary biographies. Mark
Twain's great years were now in the past, but the masterpieces of James's final period were still to come.
Back to Question 1
2)
William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, S. Schoenbaum. That this was Shakespeare's will, there is no doubt.
A few insane conspiracy theorists still, however, cling to the absurd and outmoded view that it was not the will of the man
who wrote Shake-Speare's plays.
Back to Question 2
3)
Blake, Peter Ackroyd. An excellent biography of one of the most astonishing geniuses who ever lived. If only he'd been
born two hundred years earlier! Then the mystery of the authorship of Shake-Speare's plays would be easily solved.
Back to Question 3
4)
Eliot's New Life, Lyndall Gordon. From the second volume of Ms Gordon's sensitive and beautifully-written biography.
Eliot had just married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and had found happiness at last, a happiness which few would begrudge
him.
Back to Question 4
5)
No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien, Anthony Cronin. A small price to pay for the privilege of
publishing the great man, you'd think! But almost without exception, people only realize this sort of thing when it's too
late.
Back to Question 5
6)
Ivy: The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hilary Spurling. I love the phrase which she did not entirely discourage
in that extract ....
Back to Question 6
7)
Georges Perec, David Bellos. You can have an extra quarter of a gold point if you got this one. Oh, all right - an
extra half-point.
Back to Question 7
8)
W.B. Yeats: A Life (Vol II), R.F. Foster. I know you get a bit weak and tottery by this stage of the Quiz, so I gave
you a piece with lots of clues in it. The last two will be really easy ones.
Back to Question 8
9)
James Joyce [1982 revision], Richard Ellmann. Neighbours, eh? That's one way of putting it. Yeats's illnesses were
more fun than Joyce's, I think.
Back to Question 9
10)
Marcel Proust: A Life, Jean-Yves Tadié. A simple process of elimination must have got this one for you! I hope
you had fun. Don't all answer at once ....
Back to Question 10
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
Return to Start
Last Updated: 19 May 2006
