No. 531: The winners
Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were in- vited to compose an intelligible piece of prose around ten given words, chosen from the open- ing passages of a well-known book. They were, admittedly, rather a strange assortment and entries tended to reflect, variously and for the most part fantastically, the difficulties of incor- porating chaplains, bowels and censors within the narrow confines of a mere 150 words. On the other hand it was a matter for huge delight to find Mr Joseph Heller's wildly conceived Catch 22 furnishing the basic ingredients for numerous pastiches of Barchester Towers, most notably from J. R. V. White. who wins three guineas:
More than once has the Bishop's Chaplain de- clared himself to be 'madly in love'; but we must not allow any suspicion that his avowed passions are more readily aroused by a lady's purse than by the perfection of her person .to jaundice our opinion of him. In the discharge of his duties Mr Slope is upright and fearless. If occasionally he nurses a grievance or seems to lack bowels of compassion, that is the-fruit of his determination to root out malpractices from every corner of the diocese: nowhere is there a more rigorous ecclesiastical censor. For the better preservation of morals certain fair, female volunteers have been enlisted. They lend assistance in the newly-founded Bishop Bar- chester's Sabbath Day Schools and listen to Mr Slope's sermons, which, his detractors claim, prove him to be less an expounder of the gospels than a modifier of their meaning.
Vera Telfer did almost as well, but for a
rather more novel parody five guineas to Peter Peterson, who apologises to Eckermann for an extract from Gesprache mit Goethe: The court Chaplain had been inveighing madly against the rebellious students.
'To the old,' said Goethe, 'everything new looks suspect; just as to a man with jaundice everything looks yellow. But it is best to dis- charge one's bile, as the good Pastor has done. We should follow in this the rule of English nurses, who teach children to empty their bowels daily.'
'He seems to me,' said I, 'too severe a censor, however. For these same youngsters, when the Fatherland was in danger, offered themselves as volunteers, and enlisted in our glorious Army of Liberation. Are they not entitled to fight now for their own freedom?'
'As to that,' Goethe replied, 'I could never myself have been a violent modifier of the exist- ing order of things—that was not my task—but I wish these young people well.'
There was, while we're still on the subject of parodies, a very reasonable attempt at Genet from P. M. Burkley, others on Kafka, Wilde, a letter from Florence Nightingale to Lord Palmerston, and this, from Edward Samson, which I take to be in the manner of our own Mercurius : The good Chaplain, having pronounced young Maister Dunne properlye dead, and his soule returned to God, the runners, they saye, madly rushed his still warm liver to the Physicans and Surgeons, waiting to cure Sir Osis of his jaun- dice, and discharge their unseemly duty of transplante. Their theorie being, that a live bodie willingly nurses the organ of one lately dead. Therefore, themselves lacking bowels of com- passion, expose others' entrayls to perform their unholy mechaniks. What a lack of piety that, neither Parlement nor Church, can find a censor to contemn this robbing of cadavers to prolong a life which God would terminate. Is it not, also, a blasphernie that a man volunteers. albeit in charitye, a good liver to one who is certainlye not? Men who are enlisted for such post-mortem service should know, God not the Surgeons, is the onlye modifier of our tenure here.
Three guineas to Mr Samson; and two to Frances Gomm, from whom an extract:
When Frobisher remarked, in the staff restaur- ant, that matron was suffering from a red and angry Chaplain, I frowned at him; reminding him it was madly indiscreet to discuss such matters publicly. Frobisher, recently laid low with jaundice, secured a too-early discharge from his sick-bed. So I allowed that his state of health was partly responsible for the uncon- trolled utterance. . . .
Finally, a guinea to Peter Regan, whose entry identifying Catch 22 was the first opened.
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