A PARODY SAMPLER

The curtain has just fallen on William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (Royal Court). Let us now imagine that there steps from the wings the Stage Manager of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Pulling on a corncob pipe, he speaks.

S.M.: Well, folks, reckon that's about it. End of another day in the city of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Nothin' much happened. Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked in, but way up there those far-away old stars are still doing their old cosmic crisscross, and there ain't a thing we can do about it. It's pretty quiet now. Folk hereabouts get to bed early, those that can still walk. Down behind the morgue a few of the young people are roastin' a nigger over an open fire, but I guess every town has its night-owls, and afore long they'll be tucked up asleep like anybody else. Nothin' stirring down at the big old plantation house--you can't even hear the hummin' of that electrified barbed-wire fence, 'cause last night some drunk ran slap into it and fused the whole works. That's where Mr. Faulkner lives.

--Thornton Wilder (parodied by Kenneth Tynan)

When lads have done with labor in Shropshire, one will cry, "Let's go and kill a neighbor," and t'other answers "Aye!"

So this one kills his cousins, and that one kills his dad; and, as they hang by dozens at Ludlow, lad by lad,

each of them one-and-twenty, all of them murderers, the hangman mutters: "Plenty even for Housman's verse." --A. E. Housman (Humbert Wolfe)

That it hardly was, that it all bleakly and unbeguilingly wasn't for "the likes" of him--poor decent Stamfordham-- to rap out queries about the owner of the to him unknown and unsuggestive name that had, in these days, been thrust on him with such a wealth of commendatory gesture, was precisely what now, as he took, with his prepared list of New Year colifichets and whatever, his way to the great gaudy palace, fairly flicked his cheek with the sense of his having never before so let himself in, as he ruefully phrased it, without letting anything, by the same token, out.

--Henry James (Max Beerbohm)

Winter is icummen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, An ague hath my ham. Freezeth river, turneth liver, Damm you, sing: Goddamm.

--Medieval Song (Ezra Pound)

This is my last and best and true and only meal, thought Mr. Perley as he descended at noon and swung east on the beat-up sidewalk of Forty-fifth Street. Just ahead of him was the girl from the reception desk. I am a little fleshed up around the crook of the elbow, thought Perley, but I commute good.

--Ernest Hemingway (E. B. White)

As we get older we do not get any younger. Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five, And this time last year I was fifty-four, And this time next year I shall be sixty-two. And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself) To see my time over again--if you can call it time: Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair, Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.

--T. S. Eliot (Henry Reed)

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