In Competition No. 2740 you were invited to submit the ten work Commandments of the writer of your choice, living or dead.
There were some cracking entries this week — far more winners than there is space to print. Here is a taste of Brian Murdoch’s Tolkien: ‘1. If a book’s worth writing, it’s worth spinning out to three volumes ... 4. You don’t need many women; it’s a man’s world in Middle Earth and 1930s Oxford colleges’; G.M. Davis’s Patience Strong: ‘Why dwell on thoughts that might give pain?/ Bring joy, like sunshine after rain.’ And J. Seery’s Hemingway: ‘if the writing is not running like a properly punched nose 1. Punch somebody. 2. If that fails, shoot a big, dangerous animal. Try a lion.’
The winners, printed below, earn £30 each. Chris O’Carroll takes the extra fiver.
1. Your very manhood is the quill you dip into the dark, wet inkwell of life and art.
2. Every other writer is your enemy. Strike him down with your fist.
3. Every woman you marry is your enemy. Strike her down with a knife.
4. You deserve the Nobel Prize. But Scandinavians are weak and unmanly.
5. Consort with violent criminals. They grasp some essence unknown and unknowable in leafy suburbia.
6. Those who disagree with you politically are beneath your notice. Treat them with contempt.
7. Those who agree with you politically are beneath your notice. Treat them with contempt.
8. Every sentence you write must throb rampant, not sag limp on the page.
9. Literature is your doxy and your succubus. To possess her is your task. To conquer her is your glory.
10. Manhood. Dark. Wet. Life. Art.
Chris O’Carroll/Norman Mailer
First, remember you’re a Poet, and all’s grist.
Then, regard the National News, and all subjects enlist.
Address your reader as though he is in the room
For this will help your stature over him to loom.
Fourthly, give every reader all of the Pertinent Facts
Because these always give substance to Dramatic Acts.
Give space to Tragic Death, because men think about it a lot
although they may appear to care not a jot.
Six, glorify Scotland, the land of your birth.
Be serious: high-minded Poetry is no place for mirth.
Do not read critics who might you abuse.
Ninthly, do obeisance and hommage to the Muse.
Finally, above all, make every ending rhyme
So that your readers know you’ve worked hard and spent a long time
In making your poem into a Proper Ode.
These Ten Commandments show the true and Poetic Road.
D.A. Prince/William McGonagall
To write or not to write? That’s the first question;
Dost fear that knotty verbal indigestion
Engendered by entangled thoughts impacting?
If thou hast doubts, content thyself with acting.
Invent thy proper words; two such of mine
Are ‘consanguineous’ and ‘incarnadine’.
Be pithy, witty, smutty when ’tis needed.
Scorn writer’s block; true minds are not impeded.
Yet shouldst thou falter, scruple not to borrow,
Or e’en repeat — ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow ...’
Of bawdy sonnets mayst thou write thy fill,
Especially if thy given name be ‘Will’.
Endeavour to acquire a noble patron.
Seek thou a Muse; ’twere well ’twere not a matron—
A pretty boy or girl shall do the trick,
And make thee feel sweet inspiration’s prick.
Record thy thoughts; ensure that thou hast taken
A scrivener to note them. (Mine’s called Bacon.)
Brian Allgar/Shakespeare
1. Genius is pain. Alcohol and laudanum serve to palliate it.
2. When writing criticism of others’ work, to be flattering or kind would be self-betrayal.
3. When reading adverse criticism of your own work, never forget that the writer is a brainless liar. 4. Without a patron you will have to descend to the marketplace, where shock, sensation, fanciful conundrums and the like will make your work palatable to the mob.
5. But remember you are always an Artist nonetheless.
6. Editors and publishers are villainous cheats who will suck your blood. Never show them gratitude or expect it from them.
7. Plagiarists are everywhere. Watch out.
8. The most poetical subject is the death of a beautiful woman. Dead, dead, dead, I tell you.
9. The true author of macabre tales understands that the horror is not out there. It is in here, within the human psyche. Heh heh heh.
10. Never let them stop you.
Basil Ransome-Davies/Edgar Allan Poe
1. Use obliquity as a direction to the heart of things.
2. Have trust that the opaque will be regarded as a veil.
3. The line of a plot is essential. Like Theseus’ thread it will give the reader confidence to enter your labyrinth.
4. Embrace adverbs for all they so beautifully are.
5. Season lightly with French to add saveur.
6. Continue to draw from both sides of the Atlantic: it is a benison that neither side quite knows what to ‘make’ of your sensibility.
7. Art is at bottom artifice: let others pretend otherwise.
8. Never let the world know that you think of William as your Mycroft. Be glad that you will be a footnote in his biography — and he in yours.
9. However well you may think they perform, don’t put your offspring on the stage.
10. Ignore parodists and pasticheurs. Theirs is ultimately the grin of Yorick.
W.J. Webster/Henry James
No. 2743: cooking the books
You are invited to submit a recipe as it might have been written by the author of your choice (please specify and 150 words maximum). Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 11 April.