On national projection

On St George's Day I want to celebrate a remarkable and visionary civil servant named Stephen Tallents (1884 - 1958) who, in 1933, published a slim volume called The Projection of England in which he set out what amounts to a manifesto, addressing Britain and the British Empire as a hypothetical client. 

It's a fascinating document, couched in the language of the time yet strikingly modern in its description of a global village, of sovereign interdependencies and the vital importance of communication within and across borders. This publication was produced at a time when a quarter of the world's surface and a quarter of the world's population were under British rule, and is offered as a guide to how England (that is to say, the United Kingdom) can effectively promote its values  to the rest of the world.

There is an urgent need, Tallents asserts, to produce and disseminate material reflecting 'the English characteristics in which the outside world is most interested', and this can best be achieved by 'breaking up of the fame of England into its primary colours', by which he means both national institutions (he cites the Monarchy, the British Navy and the English Bible, Shakespeare and Dickens) and national virtues. Of the latter he offers the following patriotic litany of 'reputations':

In international affairs - a reputation for disinterestedness

In national affairs - a tradition of justice, law and order

In national character - a reputation for coolness

In commerce - a reputation for fair dealing

In manufacture - a reputation for quality

In sport - a reputation for fair play

Less buoyant appraisals of the national character were in circulation at the time yet these ideals, despite accumulating evidence to the contrary, had - and until recently continued to have - a tenacious appeal, although the fact that they were not self-evident but had to be asserted by Tallents may suggest a wobbly foundation for his claims. But they were certainly not without validity for the Establishment .

Tallents supports his thesis with examples of other British (or English) traditions and institutions that he believes exercise an imaginative appeal to overseas audiences: 

          At the other end of the spectrum might be found such events as the Grand National,        

          the Trooping of the Colour, the Boat Race, Henley, Wimbledon, the Test Match and the 

          Cup Final. 

          But between these two extremes comes a medley of institutions and excellencies, which 

          every man may compile for himself according to his humour and his ingenuity. 

         My own list would include:

Oxford and St. Andrews

Piccadilly, Bond Street, Big Ben and Princes Street, Edinburgh

The English Countryside, English villages, the English home and English servants

The Lord Mayor of London

The Times, Punch and the Manchester Guardian

The Metropolitan Police and Boy Scouts

The London omnibuses and Underground Railways

Football and Foxhunting

English bloodstock and pedigree stock

The arts of gardening and of tailoring

As a list this 'medley of institutions' is, shall we say, partial. Some of his choices - not only fox-hunting and English servants - will certainly strike the 21st century reader as parochial, smug, reactionary and class-bound. Some contemporary critics were also unimpressed, but we have to acknowledge that, for Tallents and his peers, these were precisely the qualities that could and should define Britain to the Empire and the other nations of the world. He avoids such abstractions as democracy and tolerance, he doesn't mention the Church of England, free speech or democracy. He also, and tellingly, avoids any mention of the Empire itself, of its origins and history. 

The 'special assets' he believes Britain can count on to manage a projection of these values are the English language and 'the dispersal of British citizens around the world, with whom a common history is shared'. He then launches into a rousing description of Britain's international role:

She controls or can influence the machinery of government, including the service of education, in the Colonies and close/sympathetic contacts with the sister Governments of the Dominions. She provides a market for the produce of countless countries, with all the net- work of commercial and personal relationships and needs, the interdependence in well-being, which that provision involves. Her cable companies and news agencies girdle the earth. Her shipping companies control one-third of the world's tonnage, and have their agents in every part of the globe. Her steel rails bind whole countries together. Her bankers and merchant houses, her insurance companies and chartered accountants operate the world over. Englishmen are at work in most of the greater English-speaking newspaper offices. Wherever ships are steered or metals won from the earth, there the ships' engineers and the mining engineers of England are posted.

Tallents was the driving force behind the formation of the Empire Marketing Board (which later became the celebrated Post Office Film Unit) and we can see many of the documentary movement's future subjects here, pitched in language designed to appeal to government sponsors. It is only Russia, Tallents points out, that expresses its point of view and purposes seriously through film, the greatest modern medium of international expression. By the mid-1930s Russian film in particular enjoyed a cultural prestige equal to that of Russian ballet and literature before the Great War. Tallents was a Film Society regular and Russian films were a mainstay of Society screenings, not least because few suitable English films were available. He cites as examples The Cruiser Potemkin [sic], Pudovkin's Storm over Asia, Turin's Turk-Sib and Dovjenko's Earth, adding that Britain is capable of taking such subjects from home and Empire and improving on them. The central themes of such films would be 'English adaptability, industry, industrial quality, modernity.' 

In promoting this initiative to sceptical Whitehall mandarins Tallents really hits his stride:

We need, I suggest, to create, in the borderland which lies between Government and private enterprise, a school of national projection. They must have something of the sense of responsibility, the prestige and the opportunities of Government, and entry to the fields of Government activity; but they must be more free to make experiments and, like all experimenters, to make mistakes, than the ordinary Government Department dares to be. It must seek to inspire, but never to regulate them (i.e. the agencies).

There is a need to balance prestige and creative experiment, to offer this 'school of national projection' a freedom to explore the medium without restraint and interference by its government paymasters, the Whitehall officials who are sure to take a cool view of an activity with no objectively measurable benefits. Tennant concludes by setting out the conditions under which such films would be produced, anticipating the workplace atmosphere of the Unit as it developed under Grierson:

  

[T]he only sensible prescription is to pick out the best team that can be found, to put them to grips with their problem, and to leave them, free of undue pressure or interference, to follow, like Socrates, withersoever it leads, the argument in which their own intimate handling of the material all quickly engage them.

Tallents was a public relations genius, although his role in the creation of the Post Office Film Unit and his subsequent influence over its direction has been either undervalued or wholly overlooked. Without him the Unit, had it ever come into existence following the closure of the Empire Marketing Board, would have been a very different entity - churning out tub-thumping propaganda rather than films that, more than eighty years later, continue to attract our attention and admiration.

What would a modern-day equivalent to Tallents do to address the chaotic identity of 'this country of ours, where nobody is well'?

Spring Journal Canto V by Jonathan Gibbs

A Leap in the Dark is a twice-weekly online gathering of writers, poets, musicians, performers and others on Fridays and Saturdays.

A regular Friday highlight is the reading of the latest canto of Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes.

Prompted by Louis Macneice's Autumn Journal (1939), Jonathan's work-in-progress is a poetic response to the coronavirus crisis and, like the original, combines private and public themes in a humane, generous and intensely moving way. This is poetry as social commentary, urgent and necessary, and it's an uncanny experience for the reader to be living within the events navigated by Jonathan in this work - one feels part of it, and somehow accountable. Nothing in my reading life quite matches the sense of engagement I feel with the poem and the world it describes. This is an important work and one that future readers will turn to if they want to know how things were for us, here, now.

You can read the first four cantos here and below, with Jonathan's kind permission, is Canto V. Join us on Friday 24th April for Canto VI.

Spring Journal
by Jonathan Gibbs  
(after Louis MacNeice)

V

Easter weekend was beautiful, the sky a warm considerate
    Blue, the best for weeks and weeks,
And though there were egg hunts in the gardens there were no
    Family visits, no trips or excursions; our techniques
For living have turned inwards, now we try our hand
    At sourdough starters, high-impact online workouts
And improvised obstacle courses for the kids,
    And all this frantic activity just to crowd out the doubts.
For the question on everyone’s tongue is:
    Will life ever be the same again?
Or no: not everyone’s tongue, because for some life is already
    No longer the same: it is utterly changed,
And in no cases for the better. My sourdough starter
    Is your food bank voucher. My obstacle course
Is your daily navigation round a partner with quick fists.
    Life will not change itself; it will only change through force.
And in the park for my morning run the cherry blossoms
    Cheer me on, pink as pompoms, and the parakeets,
And the posters reminding us to keep our distance
    And on the radio Trump speaks, Trump speaks
From the Rose Garden, and if you can bear his voice you’ll hear
    The US has pulled its funding for the WHO,
And in Ukraine the forest fires are closing in on Chernobyl
    And in Indonesia lava spews from Krakatoa.
And if this seems like proof that nature continues despite the virus
    Then let that be a corrective
To the videos of goats in Llandudno, and boars in Barcelona.
    Nature’s operations are not so interconnected
That wildfires will stop, and floods cease, just because
    We’ve got other plates to juggle, other issues to arrange,
The drop in air pollution is a blip; we have not
    Flattened the curve of climate change.
And we laugh it off and meet for Zoom drinks in the evening,
    And this, we say, is on me;
Something out of the usual, a store cupboard cocktail, or a new local craft ale —
    But did you see
The latest? You mean whether Dylan’s dropped another new track
    Or that old lad’s hundred laps of his garden on his zimmer frame
Or d’you mean so-and-so’s face mask post on Instagram—
    No, we don’t mean anything like that again.
No, what we mean is Covid, Contact Tracing, CFR,
    Self-Quarantine,
The heavy panic that cramps the lungs and
    Twists the spine into the spleen.
And when we wake in the morning and reach for our phones
    The feeds are the same as the day before,
And we compare the national data sets, and we compare the graphs,
    And for all this wealth of information we cannot be sure
What it all means for us; as individuals we are used to choice,
    But the choice here is no game-changer:
The choice is simply to stay at home or, for those that can,
    Go out to work, and ever-present, grossly unintelligible danger.
The newspapers and websites are racing to deliver what news there is,
    And hoping to get paid,
The Bank has extended the Government’s overdraft
    And you and I are afraid.
And perhaps it is that fatigue has set in, as they said it would. For what can we do?
    We cannot march in the streets, as for Brexit, and Iraq,
We can email our MP, clap the NHS,
    And go for our daily run in the park.
But there are cretins setting fire to telephone masts,
    And politicians repeating their dull refrain on PPE,
And the bloody, bloodless frontier is always converging
    But never arriving; the future state of the economy
Is a problem for better minds than ours,
    We only ask that the old order be overturned
And things remade in a fairer, nobler fashion, and this new more thoughtful way of living
    Be maintained, and the things I’ve earned
Stay mine. It is no good saying
   ‘Take away this cup, bring me a new cup, with a handle and a spout’;
Having helped to fill it ourselves it is hardly just
    That we should simply get to throw it out.
And we can hide our heads in the sand, Louis, for there is always more
    Sand, cascading down,
And it’s no good relying on the woodpigeon for a sure critique
    Of the values of the town,
The bins are being collected, the milk delivered,
    And yet the crystal ball remains opaque,
And if we are sleeping through the world’s dream of its own death and rebirth, then
    Today is not the day when we awake.

Letter from Mexico City by Paulette Jonguitud

Paulette Jonguitud is the author of the brilliant novella Mildew published by CB editions, which I wrote about here.  Last Saturday she joined us in A Leap in the Dark with a live Letter from Mexico City. She has kindly allowed me to publish this powerful and moving text in full.

We were on a high wave. We’d done it. Mexico City was half-empty. We’d been told it was impossible. You can’t hurt our economy like that, you’re being selfish. But we carried on. And, for a day, it seemed to work. Our offices were empty, our cubicles, our desks, our classrooms. It was March 9th and a country-wide feminist protest was in full swing. Un día sin nosotras. One day without us. 

10 women are killed every day in Mexico. Many more swell the ranks of Las Desaparecidas, The Disappeared, The Vanished. An euphemism not to call them The Dismembered, The Taken, The Broken.  

We wanted to make a point: what would happen if we disappeared all at once? Who would teach children? Who would care for the elderly? Who would manage universities? We wanted to create a void where every woman stood, a vortex that would suck everyone around it into nothingness. 

So, on March 9th we disappeared for a day: we stayed home, we didn’t buy anything, we didn’t work, we didn’t even engage in social media because Las Desaparecidas don’t go on Instagram. Not a girl in our schools. Not a teacher. Nurses had a pass, of course, and doctors, but those women who had to work wore purple that day. It was beautiful. 

A day before, on March 8th, 100 thousand women had marched together, wearing purple, green scarfs, white handkerchief. ¡Nos queremos vivas! We shouted. We want us alive. Verga violadora a la licuadora. (Rapist dick goes in the kitchen blender). Ni una menos. All 100 thousand of us marched behind the families of Las Desaparecidas and through tears and torn throats we chanted: No están solas. (You are not alone.) We became a purple wave and we thought this time was it, we’d done it. Today you see that we are a wave, tomorrow we disappear. It will work this time. Something needs to happen.

Many women took their daughters to the march. It was so crowded that one girl lost her mother. She began to cry. The women around her quickly found a way to reunite them. It was simple, elegant, even. Everyone sat down. We all sat down on the floor, at once, and called the girl’s name out loud. Only the girl and the mother remained standing, so they could find each other. 

Few media outlets reported on the march, and those that did soon found another pressing matter to publish: there’s a virus coming our way. You’re being selfish. This is more pressing. Wait for your turn. We’ll get back to you once this blows over. It would still take a few weeks for the virus to hit us, but the purple wave was expediently erased from news casts. 

Soon, too soon, we were alone. Confined, the city was once again empty, but it wasn’t for us. Las Desaparecidas were left behind, for another emergency was looming, there’s no shortage of emergencies on this land. 

We were on a low. Most femicides occur within the family circle. We were on a low now that women were confined with their abusers. The country was paralyzed by a pandemic that still had a much lower death rate than ours: Female while in Mexico. The virus pandemic would grow, of course, and so would ours. We were told not to compare. We were told one thing at a time. 

We’d been on a high tide. Now we wait, once again we wait, those of us who remain, those of us who survive this contingency, we wait for the next purple wave to take us where we need to go: we want us alive. 

On translating a Beckett poem

At a recent Leap in the Dark, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo delivered Beckett's original poem and shared her thoughts (as a bilingual French speaker) on the attempts at translation. Here are the notes I would have referred to if I'd managed to print them out in time for the broadcast.

In 1978 Samuel Beckett published Poèmes, suivi de Mirlitonnades, the latter consisting of around forty verses (a vers de mirliton is French for doggerel, from mirliton, a penny whistle). They’re all very short and deceptively simple, like this one:

imagine si ceci

un jour ceci

un beau jour 

imagine

si un jour

un beau jour ceci

si ceci

cessait 

imagine

 copyright The Estate of Samuel Beckett/Faber and Faber

21 words in nine lines, or rather just 7 words (alphabetically beau, ceci, cessait, imagine, jour,  si, un) carefully repeated, and it’s a metaphysical epic. The dying fall of si ceci/cessait is wonderful, with its background English exhalation of 'cease' (upon the midnight with no pain?) and we'll return to it in a moment.

Much of Beckett's French poetry has never been translated. Much of it is regarded as untranslatable, and especially the mirlitonnades.

The Collected Poems, edited by Sean Lawlor and John Pilling for Faber runs to an astonishing 500 pages, although around half of that is the editors' exhaustive Commentary. It certainly earns its bulky place next to the 1977 John Calder edition (147 pages) and the notoriously slipshod Poems 1930 - 1989 (Calder again, but expanded to 226 pages, with one of the 'newly discovered' poems attributed to Beckett actually by Robert Browning). In a Guardian review of this edition Christopher Ricks  compared two translations of this mirlitonnade. The first, by Kevin Perryman,  appeared in Babel magazine in 1990:

just think if all this

one day all this

one fine day

just think

if one day

one fine day all this

stopped

just think

'The hinge', says Ricks, 'is the turn "ceci / cessait", and Perryman's "all this / stopped" is abrupt and jagged where the original is shady stealth.'  The second version, by the American poet and translator Marcia Karp, comes closer to the original, but not very close:

imagine yes this this

one day this this

one fine day

imagine

yes one day

one fine day this this

dissolves

imagine

I'm not sure about that 'this this' though. Try saying it aloud. Where should the stress fall? I'm sure I couldn't do any better but, prompted by the Ricks review, I decided to have a go. 

I think it's best to replace 'imagine' in English with the more diffident and idiomatic 'say'. (The word 'imagine' in English carries an echo of John Lennon and, more horribly the celebrity take on that rotten song that has done so much to lower the tone of the plague). 'Say' keeps the sense if not the sound or rhythm, but allows something approximating the euphony of si ceci/cessait admired by Ricks.

say all this

one day all this

one fine day

say

if one day

one fine day

if all this

ceased

say

Mneh. Not quite there. 'Ceased' is better than 'dissolved' in the second version, I think, because it conveys an abruptly temporal meaning. Dissolution suggests space as much as time, and I don't like the tongue-twister sibilance between 'this' and 'ceased'. So what if, instead of 'this' in the first line, we use 'lot', as in 'A policeman's lot is not a happy one'? 'Lot', in other words, in the rather fatalistic sense of one's allocated span or condition, one's fate or destiny, with a faint echo to the Old Testament figure fleeing the ruins of Sodom, a place where things 'ceased' abruptly. This works if we adopt the Perryman approach and substitute 'stopped' for 'ceased'. Here's my final version, or at least my latest draft:

 say this lot

one day this lot

one fine day

say

if one day

one fine day

all this lot

stopped

say

Does lot/stopped work? The past tense verb has a /t/ end sound, so it's a good approximate rhyme. All the words are monosyllables, which have a pared-down quality true to the spirit of the original and of the other mirlitonnades. Nine lines still, although using eight different words, not seven as in the original. Twenty-two words in total. Perhaps I should cut the 'all' in line 7? I'm tempted to render that last word ('imagine' in the original, 'say' in my draft version), as 'as it were', echoing an earlier Beckett novel title: Comment c'est / How it is (1961). So here they re side by side, Beckett's original and my attempt at a rendering:

imagine si ceci                    say this lot

un jour ceci                        one day this lot

un beau jour                      one fine day 

imagine                              say

si un jour                           if one day

un beau jour ceci              one fine day

si ceci                                 all this lot

cessait                                stopped

imagine                              say

The Lawlor/Pilling Collected Poems tells us that 'imagine si ceci' was first published in Hand and Eye, a limited edition homage to Sacheverell Sitwell (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1977). The original line 7 ('si ceci') appears in three manuscript versions in Beckett's hand but was omitted in the version he produced for Editions de Minuit, which has perpetuated this omission ever since. Was the omission an error? In the penultimate version, written by Beckett for Josette Hayden on the back of a cigarette packet, the stealthy lines admired by Ricks are replaced by 'pouvait / s'atténnuer'. That's problematic. 'Atténnuer' can mean to lessen, or to palliate (both very Beckettian words), to mitigate and so on, and on. Any suggestions?  

Poem copyright The Estate of Samuel Beckett / Faber and Faber

The Pale Usher's Unusual Literary Quiz

Last night's Leap in the Dark featured an all-woman line-up, with contributions from Susanna and Liliane Crossman in Brittany, novelist Paulette Jonguitud in Mexico City, Italian film-maker Chiara Ambrosio in London and musician/composer Helen Ottaway in Somerset, who played some of her luminously delicate Wave Songs on a mahogany musical box. Aea Varfis-van Warmelo read Beckett's mirlitonnade in French and English and came up with her own deft rendering which put all other attempts in the shade. And, least of all, The Pale Usher launched, to universal indifference, his first Unusual Literary Quiz. And here it is. 

Answers will be revealed at the next Leap, on Friday 24th April. Get weaving.

The Pale Usher’s Unusual Literary Quiz

This will take you perhaps 20 minutes to complete, or to fail to complete. 

There are 23 questions and 100 points to be earned. Of course you could use the internet to find the answers, but where’s the fun in that? Please resist the temptation to do so because it will be much more satisfying if we tackle this together as an analogue exercise. (You could, of course, collaborate with friends, family or one another . . .)

You’ll be expected to mark your own papers with scrupulous honesty when the answers are revealed at A Leap in the Dark on Saturday May 8th. So you’ll need a pencil and paper to hand to keep your score (and perhaps to compose a few lines of poetry, if so inclined). 

Ready?

To warm up, match the title of the novel on the left to its author on the right. One point for each correct match

Cold Comfort Farm Jilly Cooper

Malarky Iris Murdoch

The Young Visiters Claire - Louise Bennett

Some Tame Gazelle Bernardine Evaristo

The Notebook Flannery O’Connor

Riders Stella Gibbons

Girl, Woman, Other Anakana Schofield

A Good Man is Hard to Find Daisy Ashford

Nuns and Soldiers Agota Kristof

Pond Barbara Pym

Total 10 points.

Now on to round one.

Round 1

1. 

For two points what, apart from their varying degrees of celebrity, connects the following?

Lord Byron

Charlemagne

Gabriele D'Annunzio

George Formby

J. G. Farrell

Sigmund Freud

Lilian Gish

Napoleon

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Total 2 points.

2. Curious deaths of noteworthy writers.

Two points for each correct identification. Which writer gave up the ghost . . .

a) after swallowing a martini olive toothpick on a cruise liner? 

b) after choking on the plastic cap of an inhaler?  

c) after being felled by a tree struck by lightning in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées the day after expressing a fear of meeting precisely such an unlikely end?

d) in 1973, after walking into the sea in Brighton? 

e) after claiming to have drunk 18 straight whiskies? 

f) suddenly, at the age of fifty-two, in digs, while drinking brandy to celebrate a BBC commission? 

Total 12 points.

3. Man of letters.

Virginia Woolf described him as 'more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain'; Lytton Strachey called him 'a worm' and F. R. Leavis thought him 'the epitome of all that men mean by the word philistine'. 

Which influential 1920s editor and critic attracted such obloquy? (Two points)

For a bonus point: The editor in question was also an acknowledged expert on what indigenous dairy product?

Total 3 points.

4. What do poets know?

Which distinguished 19th century poet believed that railway engines ran in grooves and that all cigars, regardless of size or quality, cost the same? 

Total 2 points.

5. A handy coinage.

'Kitchen sink' was the critical term applied to downbeat realist writing of the 1950s. Where did this useful phrase originate? (Two points for a complete answer)

Total 2 points.

6. Best. Limerick. Ever.

For two points, which eminent historian wrote the following?

Seven ages, first puking and mewling,

Then very pissed off with one's schooling,

Then fucks, and then fights,

Then judging chaps' rights,

Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

Total 2 points.

7. Alliteration dept. (1)

With a nod to Nemo’s Almanac . . .  Two points for each author you correctly identify:

a) Academics, actors who lecture,

Apostles of architecture,

Ancient gods-of-the-abdomen men,

Angst-pushers, adherents of Zen,

Alastors, Austenites, A-test

Abolishers.

b) We had chaw chaw chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chicken-

      pox and china chambers

Universally provided by this soft-soaping salesman.

c) Lock the door Lariston, lion of Liddisdale,

Lock the door Lariston, Lowther comes on,

The Armstrongs are flying,

Their widows are crying

The Castledown's burning, and Oliver's gone.

d) I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

        dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air.

e) Womanhood, wanton, ye want;

      You're medelying, mastres, is manerles;

Plente of ill, of goodness slant,

        Ye rayll at ryot, recheles.

Total 10 points.

8.  What a camp Jungian chum of mine calls 'a coinkidinky'.

The wildly creative television cartoon series Adventure Time has two lead characters introduced in the credit sequence song of each episode as "Jake the dog and Finn the human".  Here they are:

Jake and Finn share their names with two characters in which debut novel by which twentieth century Dublin-born author? (One point each for the title of the novel and its author.)

Total 2 points.

9. Playing Possum.

Perhaps Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett had T. S. Eliot in mind when they named the gorilla companion of the enigmatic shaman Naboo in the telly series The Mighty Boosh. What's the connection? (Two points)

(from left)  Barrett, Naboo’s gorilla, Fielding

 (from left) Eliot, Eliot, Eliot

Total 2 points.

10. Handsome tribute, unsolicited.

Which poet said to which man of letters, after the memorial service for which other poet: 'Sir, you formed me!' (One point for each)

Total 3 points.

Running total 50 points

Round 2

11. Ouch.

Which poet wrote to another poet about a third poet on 5th September 1946? Name all three poets, with one point for each.

'I used to think that he knew how to put down good words. And now I have been reading […], a poetry book. And I find in the words of this book there is a lot of poll lis sill ab bick fuss sin ness (“the total generosity of original unforewarned fearful trust”), and a lot of ad dough less scent sew dough Smith oller gee (“Oh, which are the actors, which the audience?”), and a lot of Europe-falling-about-our ears and Oh-my-dearest and playing with abstractions […] and your- eyes-are-mineshafts -to-your-heart and HELPLESS GESTURES  […] because HE CAN’T THINK WHAT TO SAY.'

Total 3 points.

12. Nasty, very.

Which modernist English writer and painter reminded which modernist American writer of 'toe jam'? (One point for each writer, and a third point if you identify the volume in which the unflattering description appears.)

Total 3 points.

13. In praise of . . .

Through who or what is Christopher Smart (1722-1771) expressing his reverence in these lines? (2 points) 

For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. 

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. 

For a bonus point, what was the category of Smart’s accommodation when he wrote the poetry (A Song to David and Jubilate Agno) by which he is remembered? 

Total 3 points.

14. Book of the film.

In the French novel D'entre des mortes by the writing team of Boileau-Narcejac, a wealthy businessman named Gévigne employs an ex-cop called Flavières to follow his troubled wife  around the boulevards of pre-Occupation Paris.

In which film, adapted from the novel, are the two male characters named, respectively, Gavin Elster and 'Scotty' Ferguson (one point) and in which city is the film set (one point)?

Total 2 points.

15. Mind the gap.

Source the following breathless phrases (Two points for each)

a) 'coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeer
     lemonadesodawater—'

b) Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptdumpwaultopoofooloodera
     maunsturnup

c)  I'veneverbeensoinsultedinallmylife (clue - it's in the only novel by a writer already featured in this quiz)

Total 6 points.

16.  Audience reaction. 

Who was transfixed by what may have been ‘a hair in the gate’ during a matinee screening of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, later writing about the experience for an American magazine.

Caligari: A Room of One’s Owner (clue)

Total 2 points.

17.  Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree

Writer/director Armando Iannucci once observed that Milton's opening lines from Paradise Lost can be sung to the theme tune of which popular American cartoon series? 

Total 2 points.

18. A three-pipe problem.

What precise London address was home to Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective? 

Holmes' Sweet Home

Total 1 point.

19.  Little known fact.

For two points, which celebrated poem, written in 1935, originally began in an early draft:  

North, north, north 

To the country of the Clyde and the Firth of Forth.  

For a bonus point, what’s the next line (which appears as the first line in the published poem)?

Total 3 points.

20.  A link to bygone days of yore.

To date ten British writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first was Rudyard Kipling in 1907 and the most recent Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. Name the other eight (with one point for each).

Total 8 points.

21.  Noms des plume.

Which eminent Victorian author published under the pseudonyms George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Théophile Wagstaff and C.J. Yellowplush, Esq. ? (One point)

And which equally eminent American author published as, among others, Silence Dogood, Anthony Afterwit, Alice Addertongue and Polly Barker? (One point)

Total 2 points.

22. What do the initials stand for? 

Two points for each complete name. (One point if you get only one)

a) W. H. Auden

b)  J. M. Barrie

c)  P. D. James

d) C. S. Lewis

e)  J. K. Rowling

Total 10 points.

23. Dead trims

Each of the following celebrated authors has interesting hair. 

One point for each one you correctly identify.

(a) Survived a William Tell incident in the roaring ‘20s

(b) His London landlady said she thought he looked like ‘Our Lord’.

(c) A combover beginning just south of his left hip.

(d) The doctor will see you now.

(e) You looking at me?

Total 5 points.

Cumulative total 100 points.

Fin

That’s it. Join us at A Leap in the Dark  on Friday 24th April to get the right answers.