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unearths some literary gems.
***
Ward felt that each morning Joseph Francis arranged his features and kept them that way, unruffled, unmoved, imperturbable.
***
Uncles, cousins, grandfathers, mothers, they had all come out in a welter of storied incident, mingled with births, deaths and street names. [I like the anticlimax of the ending!]
***
"Tommy had skedaddled and was heading for Liverpool or God's to know where"
[I don't recall hearing before this variation on "God knows where," implying that God doesn't know *yet* but will get the memo eventually.]
***
Bonus: A trio of towns called Ovingham, Hartburn, and Ogle
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unearths some literary gems.
***
Edward watched, fascinated, as the eyebrows, which had bounced upward...came diving down again.
***
The old Co-op grocery shop had been rebuilt, and above it there now rose a tall, ungainly addition like a monstrous wooden box delivered to the wrong address.
***
[The title of the book plays on the fact that the events are set within the Department of Chemistry at University of Cambridge. Thus we have the following wordplay around different branches of chemistry.]
"Was she in love with him?"
"I think their chemistry was physical."
"Organic, surely?" Edward said, grinning at her.
"Depending on which organs. Leave out the heart. Anyhow, it wasn't theoretical, or she wouldn't have been pregnant."
***
She had almost two feet of file cards already. How much was enough? A yard? An ell? A rod? A furlong of file cards. How long was a furlong? The word came from furrow, she knew that. How long was a furrow? She reached for the dictionary, abandoning her file cards.
***
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unearths some literary gems.
***
It is, indeed, just credible that the past is meant to be left behind you, in spite of what the time-experts say, and that I didn’t realize this fact. This must be why people who live in the present are so uniformly contented and easygoing. I see their point.
***
Poor Mell as the elder got the largest jorum, and once whoever mixed it mixed it too strong, and when she tried to say her prayers, got her petitions handsomely mixed up with an old tune on my musical-box and began, ‘Oh Lord, God bless the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’. The nurse tumbled to the situation first (she had brothers of her own) and looked incredulous and then scandalized, and poddled off to inform, as she warned Mell, ‘y’mother or father’, and Mell shouted, ‘Publish and be damned!’, from one of father’s biographies,
***
But one or two houses, quite monstrously closing their eyes to the juvenility of the illustrated invitation, sent stern, adult white squares of printed announcement, to acknowledge which that baffling, treacherous and currishly snapping commodity, the third person singular, had to be resorted to, a medium in which I am not at my best to this day.
***
The Randolph parties were null affairs in which the iced cake of the tea-table made its ravaged reappearance at supper, a circumstance that I found depressing, for if you were faced with the same cake four hours later you lost all sense of time and couldn’t enjoy the fact of still being out of bed at nine o’clock, as the cake still leered at you that it was only four-thirty.
***
I sensed that Mr. Field was licensed to be queer just as some people are licensed to sell wines and spirits …
***
Evelyn Stortford said, ‘I like a party where everything goes wrong, you know where you are with that sort. It’s when only one or two contretemps happen that it’s really frightful’.
***
Even now I can’t overcome my unease at merry-go-rounds. Is it possibly because their musical repertoire is almost never current, but of an era forgotten or superseded?
***
Stiles specialized in horticultural Malapropisms which I was then too young to appreciate; to him an Antirrhinum was an Anteroom.
***
His principal verb was ‘to mystify’. It covered all the ground – literally, just as the house servants employed the word ‘fornicate’ in several connections but the right one. With them to fornicate or to be fornicating signified alternatively insincere flattery, a state of fluster, a waste of time, and a cook’s complaint that the sweep had been fornicating half the morning with the flues was entirely typical. Between the lot of them they have so confused me that I have practically had to eliminate the word from my own vocabulary, not that it ever occupied a prominent place therein, just as in the same way and through a similar abuse of the word on the part of one of my friends who positively ought to know better I have been compelled to jettison ‘criterion’, unless I put in some uncommonly hard thinking beforehand!
***
I succeeded, on the principle that if you sit about looking like a distinctly rusé edition of Emily Brontë and then smash the effect by a catchword or gag, you bludgeon the company into curiosity and interest.
***
And what a company! Never in my life had I seen the pleasantest insincerity brought to a higher pitch, or dreamed that such a percentage of words in one lorn sentence could be only conveyed if in manuscript by italics.
***
'You’re Barbara Morant, and we knew each other’.
‘Ohhh … are you – Trevor Ackworth-Mead?’
‘Not in the least.’
***
To me quite unexpectedly, the ha-ha-ha’s of the laughing lines gave the producer trouble; half-sung and half-laughed he pronounced the effect patchy and muddled: rhythmically laughed by the chorus in unison he swore was artificial and unoriginal and perfectly flat and a little bloody. Painfully and eventually it was threshed out and tried out and finally confirmed that the chorus should only laugh in rhythm on the first line and disintegrate into laughter on the second: that on the repeat, the conductor should be allowed a fractional pause in which to join in, and be followed by the whole orchestra who would cease to play but be privily timed by the first violin who would signal them to resume. This exact calculation took about a day on and off to get smooth.
***
'I shall hope to be honoured by another lyric soon: shall be a better judge of serious toshery – like the younger Strauss and Gipsy Love, for instance. But toshical toshery is, as I say, rather beyond my scope …’
[Cf. Kenneth Williams's "rubbishy" rubbish.]
***
[Nonexistent Songs dept.]
I wrote Well, it’s Something to Know You Can Buy Them, They All Get an Answer from Me, I Began as I Meant to Go On, I Can Get it Much Cheaper Than That and You’d Never Think I was a Lady. They were what I called ‘build-up’ numbers in which the verses from innocuousness grew progressively more blue, if your mind elected to take them that way.
***
‘It’s as though the people in a family album suddenly got up and walked out of their mounts.’
***
[Speaking of "silly pillows" as an epithet]
"You unmitigated Chesterfield sofa of damnable stuffed obtuseness!"
***
A Beatrice Lillie number, I think, sung with dispassionate understatement and almost no punctuation.
***
Bonus:
A reference to cheating at Snakes and Ladders [I think we've encountered that elsewhere]
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unearths some literary gems.
There ought to be a Nostalgics Club. The condition of entry would be a capacity for retrospective hankering.
***
And nostalgia doesn’t even stop there, for the person who suffers from it in its acutest forms can with the greatest ease be homesick for places he has never seen.
***
Sometimes I come across an old overlooked worry-list. The items on one ran:
1 Row with A.
2 No letter from C.
3 Tooth.
4 Look for green overall again.
5 No ideas for magazine story.
6 What D said last week (Wed: 7th).
7 People I ought to be dining.
And I am harassed this time by occasional total failure to remember who the ‘C’ of the missing letter was or what the deuce ‘D’ had ‘said’, which only shows that if you sit tight long enough nothing matters at all, while I know that this particular brand of philosophy is no good and never will be to people like myself. One must live. And worrying is probably a part of the business and a sign that one is still in the swim! It is rather the same thing with old letters that you re-read. Like a rude, whispering couple who exclude you from the conversation, they indulge in allusions you can’t trace, hint at emotions you can’t recall, and make infuriating plans of the outcome of which your mind is a complete blank. ‘Who is this stranger hissing in a corner?’ one despairingly thinks, and it is oneself, as little as five years ago. And as for the letters dating further back, you get well-nigh to the stage of begging the correspondence to let you in on the conversation, to give you at that moment a little of the love expressed for you in the letter of which you are dimly jealous! You almost whimper, ‘It’s Barbara asking my best friend, in those days’, and it’s no good at all. The Barbara of the note excludes the Barbara who holds it in her hand (though you feel she would be miserably remorseful, eagerly, tenderly explanatory, if you did meet again). Meanwhile, you are left hiding a secret from yourself, and a most extraordinary and forlorn sensation it is.
***
Poor Marcus hated his name and said it was like the sound that would be made by a crocodile eating sugar almonds.
***
Once, in father’s office, a male appeared whom father addressed as ‘Ha, Clifford!’...Ha-Clifford was comparatively stricken in years (he must have been quite nineteen),
***
The episode comfortably closed with the caution, ‘– but don’t say it at parties’. The words one must not say at parties included, according to one nurse, Stomach and Flea.
[...]
About the forbidden words, Mell made a verse which we recited in duet, marching round the nursery, fingertips on shoulders, and dipping deeply at the end of each alternate line:
Strumpet and Stomach and Flea
Went for a walk on Salisbury Plain
Walking by three and by three
And they never were seen again:
Oh never, oh never again.
***
When we quarrelled, we would hurl phrases at each other of no known origin but of a quality quite admirably enraging. We knew! Not for us the popular epithets of abuse; to be termed a duffer, fool, ass, pig, left us unmoved. But if Mell wanted to make me cry with impotent fury she would recite abstractedly,
Drink in a Bournemouth cup
With a hat like a bon-bon block!
while Mell could be rendered purple in a moment if I retaliated in a quick-time march,
They called her Thunder Of The Lord!
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unearths some literary gems.
From Frank Sullivan:
***
If the household had consisted of just ourself, the telephone company would have whistled for its dough. We should have written a letter to all the directors of the company stating the amount due from us and asking them to name a day for the whistling. The triumph would have been ours, too, for the chances are that not one out of twenty-five telephone company directors can whistle worth a hoot. Granted that a larger proportion could, that could be fixed easily by parading up and down in front of the whistling ranks sucking a lemon. That would fix their whistles for a while.
[Note that the editorial we's cousin is evidently the editorial "ourself," not "ourselves"!]
***
So you can see why there was no year. Men were too busy with other things to bother with inventing the year. Time existed, but in bulk. It had not been squared and cut, like a pan of fresh fudge. In those days, also, time was rather young and not so snooty as it is to-day. Time was glad enough to wait for men then. But it’s the way with all successful businesses. Once time got a start, it was a case of forgetting the old friends it had been glad to wait for in the old days.
***
Where would America be to-day if it were not for Vassar girls? It probably would be all askew, with the present Atlantic Coast stuck down near the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes bordering on what is now Puget Sound. In fact, that was the shape the country was in early in the last century. The trouble was due to the fact that Oregon and Washington had caught on the edge of Canada.
Who was it braved the perils of a trip across the then trackless waste of the continent and unhooked the United States from Canada so that it could slide around into its proper position? It was two Vassar graduates, Lewis and Clarke, that’s who it was.
***
“By George,” he exclaimed, “I never thought of that.”
“By George who?”
He thought that over.
“By George, I guess you’ve got me there,” he said. “I don’t know what George I say ‘By George’ about.”
“Sloppy diction,” I rebuked. “Lazy mental processes. Don’t do it, my good man. Settle upon one George and stick to him.”
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unearths some literary gems.
From Edmund Crispin's Buried for Pleasure:***"For a time I worked in Boots--the book department. But it didn't suit me, for some reason. I used to get dizzy spells.""Inevitable, I should think, if you work in a circulating library."***[It's not only the wordplay itself, but the way EC has taken the trouble to contrive a bit of apparently incidental dialogue so as to give himself a "natural" opportunity for using it. Moreover, this incidental dialogue takes the form of *banter* (between Fen and an appealing female taxi driver). I'm with him every step of the way!]
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unearths some literary gems.
“Whenever I happen to be alone for a meal, my book is Vanity Fair, and the parts I pick out to reread are lunchy and dinnery. There’s a smear of tomato sauce over Becky casting the Dixonary into the garden, and gravy on, ‘And eh, Amelia my dear, I’ve brought in a pine for tiffin.’”
***
The piano has one note which is dumb....
I’m going (blank)
To dreamy Hono (blank) lu!
Katrine and Sheil and I always sing “blank” now instead of the word or syllable when we practise the ensembles at home.
***
"Is [Charlotte Brontë] alive still?"
"No."
"I thought perhaps she might be one of those sort of writers—like Thomas Hardy—who sounded as if they ought to be dead before they really were."
***
"Why, you unmitigated limb!" [said affectionately]
**
Only one of the comedians had the heart to comeed at such an hour.
***
Katrine’s company is playing at the Hammersmith Palace, and she has to have a terrible, sexless meal that’s too old to be tea and too young to be dinner at about five-thirty.
***
“But, we’ve only Deirdre’s word for it that those were the desiderata,” responded Sir Herbert caustically.
“The what, Toddy?”
Sheil cocked her head. “You do know such uncommon words.”
“I mean, my dear, the objects required.”
“Well, I like the thing you said before, best. Anybody can require objects.”
***
I often think that perhaps there is only a limited amount of memory going about the world, and that when it wants to live again, it steals its nest, like a cuckoo.
***
[The protagonists are just making this all up in real time, the Brontes being among their collective imaginary friends.]
"Any news of the Brontes?"
"Rather. Emily's writing a new book called Swithering Depths."
"Oh my lord! That woman!"
"And it's coming out in the spring. Entwhistle, Lassiter, and Morhead."
[...]
"Just say it again. I must memorise it."
We chanted, "Entwhistle--Lassiter--and Morhead."
"I like Lassiter," decided Lady Toddington, "he's the brains of that firm. We'll have him to dinner."
***
"She's got the sort of face that used to go with being called Gladys, mother says."
***
BONUSES:
"a French Count called Isidore (de la So-and-so, de la Something Else)"
the "eleventh second" instead of "eleventh hour"
"infinite whimsical wisdom"
At the end of this reprint edition of this tale of an eccentric family (three adults and one child) and their imaginary friends is an ad for another reprint by a different author--this one about two adults whose entirely out-of-whole-cloth imaginary friend comes to life. I never realized that comic fiction about grown-ups' encounters with imaginary friends was a mid-20th-c. subgenre! (They also advertise their reprint of Miss Buncle--and Miss Buncle's relationship to the roman à clef she's written involves some blending and confusion, in her own mind, vis-a-vis the real versus imaginary versions of her world.)
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Brontës Went to Woolworths, by Rachel Ferguson:
***I had smugly intended my book to be about a family rather like ours, but, lud love you! it’s already turned into an account of a barmaid’s career in an Edgware Road pub, and I can’t squeeze us in anywhere!***The family is always asking me to read them “bits,” and I always refuse. The general public (if I ever have one) I don’t mind a bit, but reading what one has written is like kissing a lover in a tram.***A jury summons had commanded mother (on a buff slip, ending “hereof fail not,” for which I forgave it everything).***"It's like when people say 'God bless you'; one doesn't know whether to say 'Don't mention it,' 'Not at all,' or "The same to you.'"***"Then we'll be married on the Tuesday, if it falls early in the week, and I'm not laid up with one of my attacks of synopsis of the scenario."***And then I went into the library and had an inferiority complex.***Pipson crated us in his enormous Daimler as though we were glass, or a loan collection of Flemish pictures.***He doesn’t seem to go down a bit, though, and is always telling stories that nobody listens to, so they might be worth hearing.***“The Brontë family has been, like Switzerland, too much stamped over.”***Mother said she hoped Sheil wouldn’t grow up to write novels of the type she calls “lofty leg-pulls.”***“The last time I dropped in, you said hereditament five times, and I thought it a gorgeous word.”
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unearths some literary gems.
From Frank Sullivan, c. 1928:
***
'The result was that we continually wore a charming, wistful, whimsical look, as if to say "Heigh-ho, all of you! I may dash out any moment and write something in the style of James M. Barrie!"'
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