If Summer Don’t (1921)by Barry Pain

Here’s an odd one, It’s a parody, by the humorist Barry Pain of that mighty best-seller of 1921, If Winter Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson. My copy of Hutchinson’s novel was printed in March 1922, six months after the first publication in August 1921. It is the twentieth edition (which maybe means impression, but it’s still […]

G. F. Bradby

Last week, as I mentioned, I was impressed by this Kipling parody, which I found in the conscientious objectors’ magazine, The Tribunal Processional Lord God of battles, whom we seek On clouds and tempests throned afar, When, tired of being tamely weak, We maffick into deadly war. If it should chance to be a sin, […]

The War as a marker of age

I’m getting things together for my talk on Evadne Price (Helen Zenna Smith) at the Marginalised Mainstream conference this weekend, and I’ve been struck by something. In 1930, Price’s publisher Albert E. Marriott (alias Netley Lucas,  swindler and con-man) had asked her to write a spoof war book, All Quaint on the Western Front (under […]

The Wipers Times (and Wodehouse?)

Next week on BBC TV there’s a promising-looking film about The Wipers Times. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman are the authors. It will tell the story of how they found a printing press under the blasted ramparts of Ypres, and put it to use to create a very witty paper.  I Like Newman’s comments on […]

‘One of England’s Broken Dolls’

Joanna Bourke, in Dismembering the Male mentions ‘a popular song’ about a maimed soldier: “A man and maiden met a month ago; She said there’s one thing I should like to know; Why aren’t you in khaki or navy blue; And fighting for your country like other men do? The man looked up and slowly […]

Faulks

From time to time I have a go at the Spectator literary competition. A couple of weeks ago the set task was based on the fact that Sebastian Faulks has been roped in by the Wodehouse estate to write a new Jeeves novel. We were asked to imagine the reaction of the characters on discovering […]

Rupert Brooke, competitor

I’ve just been alerted by Bill Greenwell to his new blog, about the history of the New Statesman competitions (of which he has been the monarch for several decades). It’s very much a work in progress, and so far he hasn’t got much beyond some general thoughts and accounts of the earliest comps. It’ll be […]

‘Blast’ parody

Thanks to Rosie Snajdr for her comment on my recent parody post, alerting us to C. E. Bechhofer’s parody of Blast in The New Age. Click on this thumbnail, and you should be able to read the parody, which is rather amusing. Pound was, of course, a notable contributor to The New Age, so there […]