How to Make the Parlour a Torture-Chamber

Recent Manifestations of the School-Marm Complex in the Drawing-Rooms

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

UNSUSPECTING visitors to New York should, perhaps, be warned at once that, during the strange and faintly ominous calm which began when Mah Jongg followed Lotto and Parcheesi into limbo, the hosts and hostesses have ignobly given way to old and long-suppressed desires to play school. The guests no sooner settle to what they ludicrously think will be an hour or so of idle and pleasant talk across the coffee, cigarettes and cointreau than they are dragged from their comfort, marshalled into the library, furnished with paper and pencils and thereupon subjected to tests which, thus publicly and painfully, reveal to themselves and their delighted friends how slight is the difference between their state of culture and common or garden illiteracy.

On my desk as I dash off this embittered comment, is a copy of the very questionnaire to which a lot of us were exposed the other evening and if any reader's interest in this article has survived as far as this comparatively early paragraph, he will find the list reproduced immediately to the right of the spot at which his eye is at this moment riveted. The morbidly curious will find the answers on page 110 of this issue.

Over this list I saw such innocent bystanders as Kathleen Norris, Charles Norris, Rebecca West, Alice Duer Miller, Montague Glass, Neysa McMein, F. P. A. and others of their ilk, all chewing their pencils, tearing at their respective locks and writhing in a state of absorption indistinguishable, to the mere uninformed onlooker, from mortal agony.

The ensuing casualties were appalling. I am inclined to think that the Valedictorian achieved a score of something like 48. Of these mental giants, only Miss West, I think, knew the answer to Question Fifteen. Only F. P. A. was a good enough Latinist to skirt the obvious pitfall in the meaning of "alumnus". And it must be recorded that Mrs. Norris is in a greater state of confusion on matters of geography than one likes to think possible in the case of so motherly an author.

THE host, a fellow of mild and disarming aspect who, as a lad, I am beginning to think, must have been accustomed to while away the tedium of rainy afternoons by pulling the legs off flics, had arranged a complete mental track-meet of a half dozen events, with score-keepers, prizes and all that sort of thing.

There was, of course, the spelling bee. This buzzed around the twenty words also recalled (with considerable difficulty) for the purpose of this treatise. And there were memory tests. Memory of thingsseen. Memory of things heard.

Thus a tray was brought in, and for one stretch of sixty seconds, unveiled so that we might see its motley contents—a button-hook, a jade pendant, a carving-knife, a pipe-stem cleaner, a withered violet, a box of matches, a ginger-snap and what have you? . . . and we were expected then to write down all twenty of those objects. A fat chance.

Next our host, who by this time, was fairly glistening with the heady satisfactions of his sadistic nature, read aloud a list of preposterously unrelated words such as this:

cloudburst semaphor

dementia wastrel

applesauce gunwale

dynasty toothache

effusion culprit

HOW MANY OF THESE CAN YOU ANSWER?

1. What is the capital of Abyssinia?

2. What horse is generally credited with having run the Epsom Derby in the shortest time?

3. Who was the wife of Uriah, the Hittite?

4. Where is the pineal gland?

5. What is the sub-title of The Mikado?

6. Name an English common noun of one syllable in eight letters without recourse to plurals.

7. Name six of the Nine Muses.

8. Name the wives of Henry VIII.

9. What is the capital of South Dakota?

10. What is an alumnus of a school?

11. Where is the popliteal space?

12. Who wrote the incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream?

1 3. What were the names of Columbus's three ships?

14. Name a peninsula extending north as Florida extends south.

15. Where did Browning get his line about Childe Roland and the dark tower?

16. What is the cube root of 343?

17. Where did Hardy find his title for Far From the Madding Crowd?

18. What is the quotation involving the name of Sir Hubert Stanley?

19. Who used to be known as the Sage of Esopus?

20. Who wrote The Jackdaw of Rheims?

HOW MANY OF THESE WOULD YOU HAVE SPELLED

CORRECTLY?

1. medallion

2. battalion

3. vermilion

4. shibboleth

5. desiccated

6. Wedgwood

7. judgment

8. iridescent

9. abandoned

10. harassed

11. philippic

12. lavender

13. colander

14. calendar

15. embarrassed

16. siege

17. seize

18. sieve

19. hemorrhage

20. forbearance

and we were expected (or at least asked) to recall that list when it was finished and write it down, maintaining the order as given. This is extraordinarily difficult. It is the rare memory which can recapture as many as fifteen such words. At Hamilton College when 1 was a Freshman, they still told the tale of a student from Cohoes who, at such a test, had been able to recall no less than 149 such words. I wonder what ever became of him.

But the real holocaust set in with the Glibness Test. This is the game of seeing how many words beginning with a given letter you can say in a minute. It may sound simple enough but wait until you arc placed in a conspicuous chair with a scorekeeper on one side and a stop-watch on the other and then, at the drop of a hat, a letter is flung at you. T, for instance. You start off briskly enough. "These, that, this, those, them, they, there." A pause. It lengthens. There must be other words beginning with T but you can, at the moment, recall none of them. The sands run steadily against you. Then, abruptly, up out of your subconsciousness a word wells. It begins with a T. You grab it. "Themistocles": you shout. Bang. The minute is up.

THERE is no discoverable relation between success in such a contest and richness of vocabulary, although one's contemplation of that consoling fact is somewhat confused by the odd circumstance that the Adelphi Terrace championship in this game is held by Sir James Barrie. But, though your own stock of words may lie somewhere midway between the vocabulary commanded (sternly) by the late Woodrow Wilson and the set of syllables which satisfies the simpler verbal needs of Babe Ruth, what words you do have are never around when you want them.

Manifestly, it is unfair to hold this test in mixed company. For, just as you are rattling off a fine string of words, a singularly foul noun —a word you may not have had occasion to use since you were a clear-eyed, rosy-cheeked lad at boarding-school—will suddenly lift its ugly head. You halt it on the brink of utterance. You falter. You blench. You grow moist. A horrid silence ensues while you grope for some word which is house-broken. No use. The ostracised one stands sulkily to block the way. "Hot or cold", it seems to whisper, "I leave these lips tonight."

It is extraordinary how the nerves interfere with one's fluency on such an occasion. I have seen a man who would not bat an eye-lash if called on to mount the platform at Carnegie Hall and deliver an hour's discourse, .blurt, strangle and collapse when asked to say 35 words beginning with F in sixty seconds. Thirty-five is a high mark for the average contestant with any letter, yet some there are who can escape from the clutch of embarrassment and soar to sixty and even sixty-four.

But then it is extraordinary what lapses occur at these games in the most familiar equipment of fact. The man who, at any University Club in this country, springs an abrupt offer to bet every member present $100 that he cannot, in ten minutes, write down the names of the States of this indissoluble union, will make money. They will all start scribbling away with the utmost confidence only to slow down as the time runs out and come to a miserable halt with only 46 or 47 in their list. Certain states—Arkansas, for instance, and Wyoming and West Virginia—are enormously forgetable. The same cautious sport can then safely offer odds of four to one that these assembled Bachelors of Art and brothers in Phi Beta Kappa will be unable to name the 48 capitals of the aforesaid commonwealths. It's really a shame to take the money.

(Continued on fage 124)

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

The answers to the annoying questions printed on page 42 are hereby supplied:

1. Addis Abeba.

2. Spion Kop.

3. Bathsheeba.

4. In the head.

5. The Town of Titipu.

6. Strength.

7. Thalia, Euterpe, Clio, Calliope, Polhymnia, Melpomene.

8. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of

Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr.

9. Pierre.

10. Any student who has ever matriculated.

11. Between the tendons back of the knee.

12. Mendelssohn.

13. Santa Maria, Nina, Pinta.

14. Jutland.

15. King Lear.

16. Seven.

1 7. From Gray's Elegy.

18. "Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed."

19. Alton B. Parker.

20. The Rev. Richard Harris Barham.

Beginning next month Vanity Fair will publish a series of such annoyances and may even continue the series until discouraged by the protests of infuriated subscribers.

(Continued from page 42)

I would not have it thought that we were let off with only the above instruments of torture. We were also asked to tell who made the following depressing utterances:

"Roll up the map of Europe."

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

"Après nous, le déluge."

"Let us have peace."

"To err is human; to forgive divine." "The child is father to the man."

And we were allowed to indicate, by accent marks, the proper syllable to stress in these words: nomenclature . apotheosis research magazine address

hypochondriacal

Thus did the merry evening speed on its way. And there have been many such. Their popularity (with hosts and hostesses) has its obvious explanations. The thing is simple and inexpensive. All you need is a good supply of white paper, plenty of pencils, an Encyclopedia Britannica, a World Almanac and a bland indifference to the wistful desire of your guests to play something else. But there is still another explanation. Each guest who has been put on the rack at such a party can hardly wait to do a little entertaining under his own rooftree where he can get at that host and ask a few questions of him.