Competition No 3900
Set by Didier d'Argent, 19 September
You ask two or three great writers to dinner. Your own contributions to the ensuing discussion were to be included.
Report by Ms de Meaner
Ah, but you had fun with this one, as I rather thought you might. I was sad to lose Bill Greenwell, if only for the T S Eliot line: "Im Tesco sind sie werden immer mit Fischen gefullt." It's just that the end somehow faded away a bit. But an hon mensh for effort, young Beel. £20 to the winners, the best of whom (Bazza) also gets the Tesco vouchers.
Silverman: Twiglet, Marcel?
Proust: Merci . . . Mmmm. What is this delicious sensation, this transcendent joy which consumes, overwhelms, transports me to another place, another time? What is this tantalising taste that recalls a thousand
balmy days at Combray, the pen of my aunt,
the bureau of my uncle, memories of happy
hours spent staring at lingering camera shots of trees and fields and pondering the true significance of my existence . . . ?
Silverman: That'll be the Marmite. Like another? Jean-Paul? Twiglets? Nuts?
Sartre: Hmmm. Twiglets or nuts. I am free to choose and free not to choose. Free to be free but not not to be free. Tricky one. Got any of those cheesy Quaver things?
Silverman: Er, no. Samuel? I don't suppose I could tempt you with . . .
Beckett: No.
Silverman: Nothing?
Beckett: Can't. Nothing to eat. Nothing to be done. Just sit. And wait . . .
Silverman: Oh.
Beckett: Got a turnip?
Silverman: This is going to be a fun evening.
David Silverman
Hemingway turned up drunk and wanting to arm-wrestle. He never learned. Afterwards he mumbled: "You are mucho hombre, El Basilio."
"I obscenity in the milk of thy father," I told him. I hate to see a grown man cry. But he pulled himself together when Scott Fitzgerald arrived, also wasted.
"Ernest has the work ethic," he announced. "I squandered my talent on high living."
"Right," I told him. "The dutiful and the bombed."
I left them to get it while I answered the doorbell. Mailer was in bad shape, but still talking non-stop bullshit. "Ya gotta hear this, Baz. This is what the Washington liars have been hiding _ cancer is the existential nothing!"
"Nothing is the existential nothing," I told him. "But social democracy is the vegetarian option on the menu of life."
"Wow," he said.
You can tell Norm anything.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Cregan: I understand you've recently got a job, Oscar.
Wilde: I . . .
Cregan: If so, I'm sure you'll soon find that the problem with work is that it's never art; whereas the problem with art is that it's always work.
Wilde: I . . .
Cregan: And you, Harold? How's life?
Pinter: I . . .
Cregan: No, it's all right. I know you'd prefer to give us one of your long, tantalising pauses. So you just sit quietly.
Pinter: I . . .
Cregan: And yourself, George? How's it going?
Shaw: I . . .
Cregan: Don't you agree that a play without a political or social moral is like a pencil without lead? What's the point?
Shaw: I . . .
Cregan: Well, thank you all for coming. It's nice to talk, isn't it?
Wilde:
Shaw (simultaneously): I . . .
Pinter:
Cregan: Of course it is. Now what was I saying? Ah yes . . .
Michael Cregan
No 3903 Set by Keith Norman
Jane Collier's An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) has been republished by Oxford World's Classics. Collier describes methods for "teasing and mortifying" one's intimates and acquaintances in a variety of social situations.We want an essay on the same subject for the 21st century.
Max 200 words by 20 October. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
