Books: I REMEMBERED SMITHERS . . .

A Parody Sampler THE reader may test his own skill —and the parodist’s—by matching the following paragraphs of parody with their originals. Among the targets, but in different order: Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Rudyard Kipling, Clifford Odets, J. D.

Salinger. For the key to who’s who, see p. 84.

1) It was with a sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? 2) Up East Division Street, on a hot day in late July, walked two men, one five feet four, the other, the taller of the two, five feet six, the first being two inches shorter than his more elongated companion, and consequently giving the appearance to passers-by on East Division Street, or, whenever the two reached a cross-street, to the passers-by on the cross-street, of being at least a good two inches shorter than the taller of the little group.

3) I got a belly full of stars, baby.

You make me feel like I swallowed a Roman candle.

4) It was to be a long weekend, thought Giles Pentateuch apprehensively, as the menial staggered up the turret stairs with his luggage—staggered all the more consciously for the knowledge that he was under observation, just as, back in Lexham Gardens, his own tyrannical Amy would snort and groan outside the door to show how steep the backstairs were, before entering with his simple vegetarian breakfast of stinkwort and boiled pondweed. 5) No, that is how they cannot say, because they are Spaniards and Spaniards are not Americans and some would say they are not even ordinary people as you and I would think of ordinary people, because they are made of iron inside mixed up with their flesh and it is not straight iron or even a No. 2 iron but twisted by the fires that have burned in them for so long.

6) “Does any man come to the house to see your mother when I’m away, that you know of?” Thinking We are mocked, first by the old mammalian snare, then, snared by the final uni-laterality of all flesh to which birth is given; not only not knowing when we may be cuckolded, but not even sure that in the veins of the very bantling we dandle does not flow the miscreant sniggering wayward blood.

1) I wrote it all up once as a theme in school, but my crummy teacher said it was too whimsical. Whimsical. That killed me. You got to meet her sometime, boy. She’s a real queen.

8) In his upturned eyes, and along the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were reflected, creating the illusion of themselves who are illusions.

9) I remembered Smithers—well. As fine, upstanding, square-toed, bullet-headed, clean-living a son of a gun as ever perjured himself in the box.

There was nothing of the softy about Smithers. I took off my billicock to Smithers’ memory.

10) His scooter was out front, the selfsame, the nonpareil, with its paint scabbing off intricately and its scratchedon dirty words and its nuts and bolts chattering with fear, and I got my tricycle out of the garage, and he was off, his left foot kicking with that same insuperable energy.