Self-Slaughter

    A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: I come no more to make you laugh .... Anyone who is certifiably insane had better not attempt this Quiz.
    All right - now that I'm alone, I can say that the theme is suicide, more or less: a couple of the unfortunates we will meet (3 and 5) would probably not be denied Christian burial; one of them (1) bungled the attempt, and another (9) changed his mind at the last minute and went on to a long and happy second career. 1 and 10 are intimately connected. There are three points available for each extract - book, author, and character. Some are easier than others, you'll be amazed to hear. Off you 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.

1(Translation)

    He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him, turned it to a loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes, his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he stood with the revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking.
    “Of course,” he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion. In reality this “of course,” that seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had passed ten times already during the last hour - memories of happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the same.
    “Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and pulling the revolver to the left side of his chest, and clutching it vigorously with his whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a violent blow on his chest sent him reeling. He tried to clutch at the edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking about him in astonishment. He did not recognize his room, looking up from the ground, at the bent legs of the table, at the wastepaper basket, and the tiger-skin rug. The hurried, creaking steps of his servant coming through the drawing room brought him to his senses. He made an effort at thought, and was aware that he was on the floor; and seeing blood on the tiger-skin rug and on his arm, he knew he had shot himself.


Answer

2)

    “God damn you,” he yelled at her.
    She smiled her quick reflexive smile.
    “I'll kill you,” he shouted.
    She backed away, step by step.
    He turned and started toward the house. She remained where she was, not going any further away and not following him. At last he reached the fence again. He crept between the wire and into his own field. We were on the Brackett's property, he realized. She still is. Standing on Bob Brackett's field, his forty acres of swamp that we had an option on once and then let go.
    When he got to the patio he looked back. Three men, starting from one of the houses up the road, were coming steadily toward him across the Bracketts' field. Fay hung back beyond them.
    Opening the back door he crept into the house. He locked the door after him and threw down the barbecue fork. And the dead animals, he realized. Proof. All that dead stuff out there. And everybody heard me say it. The doctor. Anteil. The kids saw me hit her, that day. Hell, they all know.
    On the floor by the couch he found the gun. He picked it up and stood holding it. Meditating. Then he seated himself on the couch. The men had halted by the fence; they could see him through the windows, sitting on the couch with the gun.
    He saw Sheriff Chisholm with them, telling them to go back. Sheriff Chisholm passed by the side of the house and was gone from sight. He'll get me in two shakes of a lamb's tail, he thought. He knows his business. Fucking rustic farmers.
    Putting the muzzle of the gun into his mouth he pulled the trigger.
    A light came on. Instead of sound. He saw, for the first time. He saw it all. He saw how she had moved him. Put him up to this.
    I see, he said.
    Yes, I see.
    Dying, he understood it all.


Answer

3)

    He paid the money for his journey to the country-place he had thought of; and was walking to and fro, alone, looking along the lines of iron, across the valley in one direction, and towards a dark bridge near at hand in the other; when, turning in his walk, where it was bounded by one end of the wooden stage on which he paced up and down, he saw the man from whom he had fled, emerging from the door by which he himself had entered.
    And their eyes met.
    In the quick unsteadiness of the surprise, he staggered, and slipped on to the road below him. But recovering his feet immediately, he stepped back a pace or two upon that road, to interpose some wider space between them, and looked at his pursuer, breathing short and quick.
    He heard a shout - another - saw the face change from its vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror - felt the earth tremble - knew in a moment that the rush was come - uttered a shriek - looked round - saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him - was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air.


Answer

4(Two names changed)

    Telford cleared his throat, aware of the interest his news was creating, and tried to marshal the facts in his fuddled brain. “Well, sir, we have traced his movements. He came up here, very unshaven and haggard (Errol tells me) and asked for you. But you had just left. Your secretary says that he sat down at your desk and wrote something - it took him some time - which he said was to be delivered to you personally. He insisted on her franking it 'Secret' and sealing it up with wax. It is in your safe now. Then he appears to have gone off on a .... well, a binge. He spent all day at a tavern on the seashore near Montaza which he often visited. It's just a shack down by the sea - a few timbers with a palm-leaf roof, run by a Greek. He spent the whole day there writing and drinking. He drank quite a lot of zibib according to the proprietor. He had a table set right down by the sea-shore in the sand. It was windy and the man suggested he would be better off in the shelter. But no. He sat there by the sea. In the late afternoon he ate a sandwich and took a tram back to town. He called on me.”
    “Good: well.”
    Telford hesitated and gasped. “He came to the office. I must say that although unshaven he seemed in very good spirits. He made a few jokes. But he asked me for a cyanide tablet - you know the kind. I won't say any more. This line isn't really secure. You will understand, sir.”
    “Yes, yes,” cried Holmes. “Go on, man.”
    Reassured Telford continued breathlessly: “He said he wanted to poison a sick dog. It seemed reasonable enough, so I gave him one. That is probably what he used according to Dr Watson. I hope you don't feel, sir, that I was in any way .... ”


Answer

5)

    It was all true. It wasn't any story. But she could still pretend. She would pretend that she was the sort of person who would not only think of killing herself so that the pain in her heart should be gone for ever, but be the kind of person who would know how to do it, and be brave enough.
    And as she pondered, she slid moment by moment even deeper into a world of make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative girl of many years ago, aloft in her secret life. She had become somebody else. She was someone who was young and beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person do? Why, such a person would stand upon the window sill above this water. And .... she .... would .... and as the child in her was playing the oldest game in the world, her body, following the course of her imagination, had climbed to the sill of the window where it stood with its back to the room.
    For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked back into a sudden consciousness of the world - by the sound of someone knocking upon the door of her room, it is impossible to know, but starting at the sound and finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water, she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drowned her at its ease.


Answer

6(Two names changed)

    She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Nicholas wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath.
    A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Nicholas and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Alexandra was too tired to wait.
    Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Nicholas, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.


Answer

7)

    They looked into all the rooms below: opening the shutters as they went, to admit the fading light: and still finding nobody, and everything quiet and in its place, doubted whether they should go farther. One man, however, remarking that they had not yet been into the garret, and that it was there he had been last seen, they agreed to look there too, and went up softly; for the mystery and silence made them timid.
    After they had stood for an instant, on the landing, eyeing each other, he who had proposed their carrying the search so far, turned the handle of the door, and, pushing it open, looked through the chink, and fell back directly.
    “It's very odd,” he whispered, “he's hiding behind the door! Look!”
    They pressed forward to see; but one among them thrusting the others aside with a loud exclamation, drew a clasp-knife from his pocket, and dashing into the room, cut down the body.
    He had torn a rope from one of the old trunks, and hung himself on an iron hook immediately below the trap-door in the ceiling - in the very place to which the eyes of his son, a lonely, desolate, little creature, had so often been directed in childish terror, fourteen years before.


Answer

8)

    The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam into his unwinking eyes. After a clear daybreak the sun appeared splendidly above the peaks of the range. The great gulf burst into a glitter all around the boat; and in this glory of merciless solitude the silence appeared again before him, stretched taut like a dark, thin string.
    His eyes looked at it while, without haste, he shifted his seat from the thwart to the gunwale. They looked at it fixedly, while his hand, feeling about his waist, unbuttoned the flap of the leather case, drew the revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his breast, pulled the trigger, and, with convulsive force, sent the still-smoking weapon hurtling through the air. His eyes looked at it while he fell forward and hung with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers of his right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked -
    “It is done,” he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood. His last thought was: “I wonder how that Capataz died.” The stiffness of the fingers relaxed, and the lover of Antonia Avellanos rolled overboard without having heard the cord of silence snap in the solitude of the Placid Gulf, whose glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of his body.


Answer

9(One name changed)

    Someone might hear. He must hurry.
    He lit a pool of paraffin on the scullery floor, and instantly a nest of snaky, wavering blue flame became agog for prey. He went up the stairs three steps at a time with one eager blue flicker in pursuit of him. He seized the lamp at the top. “Now!” he said and flung it smashing. The chimney broke, but the glass receiver stood the shock and rolled to the bottom, a potential bomb. Old Rumbold would hear that and wonder what it was!... He'd know soon enough!
    Then Mr. Parrott stood hesitating, razor in hand, and then sat down. He was trembling violently, but quite unafraid. He drew the blade lightly under one ear. “Lord!” but it stung like a nettle!


Answer

10(Translation)

    She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” she tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.


Answer

1)
Anna Karenina, L. Tolstoy. Vronsky has been driven to distraction, and beyond .... The better you get to know this magnificent novel, the more sympathy you develop for the initially repugnant Vronsky and Karenin.


Back to Question 1

2)
Confessions of a Crap Artist, Philip K. Dick. This was the only one of his remarkable series of non-SF novels to be published in his lifetime. We have been present at the last moments of the extended suicide of Charley Hume, unfortunate husband of the feral and terrifying Fay. A million bonus points for this one!


Back to Question 2

3)
Dombey and Son, C. Dickens. James Carker, better known as Mr Carker the Manager, comes to the frightful end he so well deserves - although Mr Dombey would be assessed at a liability of at least one-third, by any reasonable jury.


Back to Question 3

4)
Mountolive, L. Durrell. Telford is reporting the details of Pursewarden's suicide to Mountolive, in the third volume of the Alexandria Quartet. Of course, Dr. Watson is Dr Balthazar. Would you like a hundred bonus points? Tell me Pursewarden's first name!


Back to Question 4

5)
Gormenghast, M. Peake. Poor Fuchsia! An innocent victim of .... Well, actually, a victim of her own determination never to grow up.


Back to Question 5

6)
Ada, V. Nabokov. Poor Lucette! She really is to be pitied. What a horrid fate, to be in love with the appalling Van Veen! No wonder she found death to be preferable.


Back to Question 6

7)
Nicholas Nickleby, C. Dickens. The only way out for Ralph Nickleby. He has some admirable qualities - courage, determination .... All right. Two qualities. But a series of hammer-blows has left him a total wreck.


Back to Question 7

8)
Nostromo, J. Conrad. Martin Decoud, going to the bottom with two ingots of the fateful silver .... If you've looked at more than two or three of my previous Quizzes, you'll have known that an extract from Nostromo would be in here somewhere!


Back to Question 8

9)
The History of Mr Polly, H.G. Wells. You see! You can change your life for the better! It's never too late!


Back to Question 9

10)
Anna Karenina, L. Tolstoy. The better you get to know this magnificent novel, the less sympathy you have for the initially attractive Anna. Ah well - give me a happy smile, Quizzees! Yesterday was a day that will live in infamy, but tomorrow is another day! And, by the way, just in case you were wondering: Pursewarden's first name was, of all things, Ludwig.


Back to Question 10

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Last Updated: 8 December 2006