COMPETITION
Cor!
Jaspistos
IN COMPETITION NO. 2141 you were invited to supply a plausible piece of prose incorporating 12 given words in any order.
At the cost of some plausibility, a few of you tried to dazzle me with a surplus of cor-words. I was faced with 'corduroy-clad corybants' and even a 'corpulent Cortes on a peak in the cordilleras'. G.M. Davis sup- plied a neat Holmes and Watson act 'Holmes studied the letter with keen eyes. "The style is hardly coruscating. . . . It's Cortege, the Lyon arsonist. Pah! A feeble adversary. . . — but just misses the money. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bottle of the Macallan Single Malt Scotch whisky goes to A.R. Parrott (any relation to that mighty composer of yore, E.O. Parrott?).
At the core of Wodehouse's corpus, he argued no doubt correctly, but without intellectual bite — are plots and characters of utter corn. Young, wealthy man in town flat is daydreaming about unobtainable girl; unexpectedly he receives sum- mons to help great-aunt find lost corgi in her castle in deepest countryside; girl turns out to be great-aunt's second husband's godchild, and after lots of corking adventures boy gets girl.
The corollary, he continued in his less than coruscating manner, is that Wodehouse fails the Kingsley Amis test of readability in novels. There are no gunshots in the opening sentence. No armed bandits or revolutionaries from Corfu mingling in the funeral cortege of some very dif- ferent kind of godfather, making plans to avenge his murder. No whiff of cordite at all. Just page after page of upper-class twits in check suits and co-respondent shoes.
(A.R. Parrott)
Dear Mater, Corpus rejected me, perhaps because I enunciated correctly to the interview- ing panel and said how corking it would be to read English at Oxford, or maybe my coruscating witticism about 'Corgi and Bess' went over their heads. Next thing, they are on to some Shakespearean corn — not the core curriculum now, of course — you remember the one, about
a soldier chap, one moment up to his dusky neck in military carnage and cordite, the next its home corollary, matrimonial mayhem, ugly scene with supposed co-respondent leading to sad cortege in . . . well, how was I supposed to remember it was Cyprus not Corfu? Could Daddy get me a place at the bank?
Affectionately, Julian. (John Causer)
Waiting on the quay at Corfu to greet us, he wore co-respondent shoes, the brown and white footwear positively coruscating in the sunshine. His blazer buttons blazed. The trilby angled cor- rectly on his head and the corgi beside him were added evidence of the core of English influence remaining on the island. The man raised his hat as we stepped ashore. `Stavros Kipling Lambrakis„ madam, gentleman,' he announced, 'at your ser- vice. What a corking day!' Two large black vehi- cles, perhaps more appropriate to a funeral cortege, awaited us, one for the luggage. Approaching the second, my wife sniffed. `Cordite, my lady,' explained Lambrakis, possibly overdoing it, 'an inevitable corollary of the noon- day gun.' The studied Englishness of his manner was pure corn, but later I warmed to it sufficiently to comment favourably. `Ah,' he beamed, 'there is a small Corfiote corpus which reverences your country. Winston Churchill, Geoffrey Boycott.'
(Fergus Porter) The most peculiar of heroines in Hardy's corpus is Eustacia Vye, who gets her corking looks from her father (a bandmaster from Corfu). She lights Wildeve's cordite, and could practically have been named as co-respondent in the breakdown of his marriage to Thomasin. (You may correctly infer that I think the novel's pure corn.) She imagines Paris to be full of coruscating wit and pictures herself as a dazzler there. The corollary of this daydream is that she treats her husband Clym as a Queen ('of Night', in her case) might treat a corgi. Her mother-in-law and admirer wind up as corpses, and Clym, who at his core is something of an Eeyore, moons about in a supererogatory Book the Sixth. It is as if he is doomed to follow the cortege of both his miser- able mother and his dippy bride for ever. And serve him right, too.
(Bill Greenwell) As black sheep go, Uncle Roland was a corking example. At Corpus in the Thirties he was known for devilish charm and coruscating wit, but went on, in my father's phrase, 'coruscating on thin ice', until cited as co-respondent in a fruity divorce case and forced to abscond to Corfu. Noting that the island's core role had for cen- turies been that of battlefield, he set up a cordite factory on a deserted shore. Peace followed immediately.
When I heard he was to be buried amid the alien corn, I was his sole relative and it seemed a natural corollary to attend his funeral. The cortege consisted largely of women in black. `Widows,' said Makros, his lawyer. The factory went to his chess partner, Makros's brother. I got his corgi. 'Everything is correctly,' Makros assured me. The factory site now supports sever- al hotels.
(Noel Petty)
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