TLS 831 (May 7th)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Other Crosswords
I got off to what I thought was an excellent start to this one, getting 6 of the first 8 acrosses at first look. Unfortunately one of them was wrong, and I ground to a halt. Still, there weren’t any egregious errors for a change, and I finished it off fairly quickly once the books were out.

Across
1 TORQUATO TASSO – (Arts quotas too)*. TASSO is a fairly common crossword poet, and luckily I remembered his first name too.
9 EPISTOLER – i.e. someone who writes letters, as St Paul did in 13 books of the New Testament. Not (W. Harrison) AINSWORTH, who wrote Old St. Paul’s, which is what I put in at first.
10 DEFOE – DE (French of) + FOE
11 IBSEN – Ghosts was an 1881 play by Ibsen, although not one I’d heard of.
12 FLEA – the “modest composer” had to be Modest Mussorgsky, and even I’d heard of The Song of the Flea, so it must be famous.
13 GAZA – Eyeless in Gaza, 1936 novel by Aldous Huxley, which occasionally makes it into the regular Times Crossword.
15 ETERNAL – The Eternal Moment is a collection of short stories by E. M. Forster, which was good enough for me. I had no idea who Paul Tillich was (a theologian and philosopher, I now know), but managed to dig up a 1958 sermon of his where he wrote “The new in history always comes when people least believe in it. But, certainly, it comes only in the moment when the old becomes visible as old and tragic and dying, and when no way out is seen. We live in such a moment; such a moment is our situation. Then later on the same page, “The “eternal” is always old and always new.”
17 ABADDON – A BAD DON, and in Hell the “king of tormenting locusts and angel of the bottomless pit” according to the Book of Revelation.
18 ALDHELM – hidden inside herALD HELMeted. Saint Aldhelm was a 7th-century Latin poet and scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature.
20 CLEMENT – in Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, Gerard Eliassoen takes the name Father Clement when he becomes a Dominican friar.
21 SUSS – US inside S (is) and S(tory)? Jud Süß was a 1925 novel by Lion Feuchtwanger. The Ü should really be transliterated as UE, but the convention in crosswords is to ignore accents so I won’t quibble too much.
22 ONLY – Only Children is a 1979 novel by Alison Lurie.
23 HASSE – hidden in Le Chasseur Maudit, which was actually written by César Franck. Peter Hasse (1585-1640) or Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) would both fit the definition.
26 REAGE – E in RAGE. Pauline Réage was a pseudonym of French author Anne Desclos (1907-98). As she was the author of the sadomasochistic erotic novel The Story of O, this is quite a good clue.
27 THE OUTLAW – 1835 novel by “Mrs S. C. Hall” (Anna Maria Hall).
28 THE FIRE SERMON – the name of part 3 of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Down
1 THE FIRE RAISERS – a 1953 play about arsonists by Swiss playwright Max Frisch (German for fresh).
2 RAINS – The Rains Came, 1937 novel by Louis Bromfield.
3 UNTENANTED – Helen Graham is the eponymous Tenant of Wildfell Hall in Anne Brontë’s 1848 novel. This was the clue that made me realise 9ac must be wrong, almost as soon as I’d entered it.
4 TALEFUL – (Late flu)*
5 TARPEIA – in Roman mythology, she was the daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, commander of the citadel under Romulus. However, she betrayed the Romans to the Sabines for “what they had on their left arms.” She thought this would be their gold bracelets, but instead they threw their shields at her and she was crushed beneath the weight. She was then thrown from the Tarpeian rock.
6 SADE – cryptic definition for the Marquis de Sade.
7 OFFSADDLE – quotation, although in the online Project Gutenberg version this is hyphenated. However, Chambers gives it as a single word.
8 LEDA AND THE SWAN – a sonnet by W. B. Yeats written in 1928, about the Greek myth where Zeus seduced Leda while in the form of a swan.
14 WATERHOUSE – Keith Waterhouse wrote the memoir City Lights: A Street Life in 1994. Not sure why he’s described as an “amusing fellow” though, although he certainly was, but I was expecting to find it as someone’s description of him and I couldn’t.
16 ECDYSIAST – H. L. Mencken was asked to come up with a word for a stripper, and this is what he came up with, from the Greek ekdysis, shedding a layer of skin (like snakes for example).
19 MENOTTI – (in motet)*. Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007), Italian-American composer.
20 CLYMENE – alternative name for Asia in Greek mythology, mother of Atlas. The continent was named after her.
24 SALEM – hidden in univerSAL EMbarrassment, ref. the Salem witch trials of 1692-3.
25 HEBE – Greek goddess of youth and cupbearer who brought the other gods their nectar and ambrosia.

3 comments on “TLS 831 (May 7th)”

  1. 30:00 (5 wrong).

    Like you I started out solving 6 of the first 8 straight off – TORQUATO TASSO, DEFOE, IBSEN, FLEA (The Song of the Flea was my first singing teacher’s party piece), GAZA and ABADDON (this last being the answer to one of my favourite literary clues: “Juan in Hell”) – but then slowed dramatically.

    Unlike you, I made three egregious errors: EPISTOLAR (I was torn between that and EPISTOLER, but had a brainstorm and jumped the wrong way), RUINS (I thought of RUIN, and assumed there must be a misclue – I realised to my annoyance that the answer was RAINS as soon as I came to look through my answers properly after the half-hour was up), and TARPEIA (I’m really annoyed with myself for missing that one, but I thought the “rock” in “rockfall” was going to make the word start with TOR).

    The other two answers I missed were ONLY (which I thought of, but abandoned because I couldn’t make anything out of C-Y-E-E for 20D) and CLYMENE (who sounded vaguely familiar once I’d looked her up, but no more than that).

  2. I’m afraid I turned to the web rather early in this when it became clear to me that I didn’t know and was never likely to guess either 1a or 1d. That’s the downside of this kind of grid – great if you know the long perpendiculars of the gallows, terminal if you don’t.

    It may be a while before I finish one of these unaided (around 20 years on current form). But what’s the hurry?

  3. I am grateful for this rundown of the entire puzzle. I was stumped by five clues: Tarpeia, only, Clement (shame on me for not having read Reade’s novel!), Clymene, and Waterhouse. I like solving cryptics, but being American I don’t know as many English authors as I should and I would have gone mad trying to figure out these answers, having been stumped for four days. The web is sometimes a help, but you are the lifesaver.

    Bless you, solver!

Comments are closed.