After the competition page was hijacked from The Week-End Review, “absorbed” by the New Statesman in 1933, parodies have a formed a regular feature of the magazine’s back pages. In 1946, Faber and Faber published an anthology of the best entries, edited by NS literary editor GW Stonier, with illustrations by Nicolas Bentley. In his introduction, Stonier wrote:
It will never do, in this atomic age, to be a wit. Let the witty journalist beware, he is in danger of insulting his readers; the witty politician is a self-confessed enemy of the people; the witty parson – but he vanished long, long ago. To be dull – hugely, incontestably dull – has become a hall-mark of sincerity, and woe to him who tries to improve the occasion. Insect! Anti-democratic! But there are crannies where the nimble-witted lurk, signalling distractedly and indulging a frivolity they daren’t display. Given an excuse, finding the signal returned, they will even publish a little.
A competition page, with its aura of party games, provides such an excuse. The demands are light: an epigram, an anecdote, a letter, a limerick, a parody, verse or prose for an occasion. Light but not necessarily easy, as the would-be competitior discovers…
Perhaps the most notable addition to the anthology is “Chard Whitlow”, written by the poet, translator and dramatist Henry Reed. The poem is sur-titled Mr Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript, and will be republished in full next year as part of the New Statesman’s centenary proceedings. However, to tide you over until then, here, reading with all the stolid grace of Mr Eliot himself, is Dylan Thomas, who will celebrate an anniversary of his own next year – having laid in a cemetary in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, since 1953.
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