Competitive instincts.(THE STRAGGLER)

I AM glad to see that The New Yorker has recently started up a reader competition on its last page. The competition is to suggest a caption for a cartoon. Results, however, have so far not been very impressive. A recent cartoon shows a boss type running out of his office with a surfboard under his arm, saying something to the receptionist as he passes her desk. Winning caption: "Tell my one-thirty things got way gnarly." Hmm. Still, perhaps things will improve when competitive-minded readers get into the spirit of the thing. Or perhaps major talents are not being stirred to action, the captioning of cartoons being pretty low down on the scale of difficulty for magazine competitions. Try writing a love poem--minimum sonnet length--using only words of four letters; or a recipe in the style of Paradise Lost; or a book blurb designed to be as off-putting as possible to potential readers.

That is the kind of challenge one faced, and in fact still faces, in the famous New Statesman weekly competition. I spent my late-teen years reading that fine British socialist periodical, then under the editorship of that fine British socialist Paul Johnson. The competition page--as with The New Yorker, it was the last page; there is what anthropologists call a "human universal" here somewhere--was always a good place to start reading. The New Statesman and Nation, to give the periodical its full title (rendered around Fleet Street as "the Staggers and Naggers") has been running a weekly competition for readers since 1934, and this feature has risen to become part of the common cultural stock of middlebrow Britons, some of the items being known to everyone. There is the challenge to offer misleading advice to foreigners, for example: "London barbers are delighted to shave patrons' armpits," etc.

I took that particular prizewinner from a published compilation of New Statesman competitions that I received as a Christmas present around 1978, which reappeared the other day when I was moving a pile of books from one inconvenient place in the attic to a different inconvenient place. Even with only a few dozen books involved, this is really an afternoon's work, as you soon discover a long-forgotten old friend and end up sitting there among the dust and bric-a-brac renewing the acquaintance. I actually turned up two of these New Statesman compilations, the 1978 one and a much older, smaller one printed on "austerity" paper in 1946, the circumstances of whose acquisition I have utterly forgotten. There went my afternoon.

The earlier volume has a period charm about it. Many of the competition entries dated from the war years, and there are some quite savage anti-German jibes here. Under "clerihews on musicians" we get:

 
   Handel 
   Was a Hun, but not a Vandal. 
   The modern Goth 
   Is, unfortunately, both. 

This was the great age of the ...