TLS Autumn Acrostic (22 October)

Solving time: 50:48

I expect there’s a knack to these acrostics, but clearly I haven’t yet got it! Perhaps I’ll do better next time, particularly if I’m more careful about transcribing letters from one grid to the other. I’ve been told that a couple of great-aunts of mine, both born in the 1860s, were experts at double acrostics, so I have hopes that atavism will prevail in due course.

I don’t recall coming across Bliss Carman before (my knowledge of Canadian poets more or less begins and ends with Robert Service :-); and I was fooled by the emergence of the words “scarlet” and “bugles” into thinking the quotation had a military theme. However, the previous (Summer) acrostic’s quotation was from “Summer” in James Thomson’s “The Seasons”, and perhaps that should have alerted me to this one’s autumnal theme.

Answers
1 BENOIS MADONNA – (One-man band so I)*; a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, aka Madonna and Child with Flowers, in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (the Benois who owned the painting and sold it to the Hermitage was the architect Leon Benois (1856-1928), brother of the artist Alexandre Benois and grandfather of Peter Ustinov)
2 LOLITA/TYPEE – the eponymous nymphette in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel (1955) / E in “type”; the title of Herman Melville’s first novel (1846), in which he tells of the cannibalistic inhabitants of the Typee valley
3 INGRES/HIGH – reigns*; Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) / Desmond Bagley wrote High Citadel (1955) (The Citadel was a 1937 novel by A. J. Cronin)
4 SARTRE/YOUTH – R(eally) T(rue) R(ationale) in SAE; Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) / Joseph Conrad’s short story Youth (1898), with Marlow as its principal character, is a precursor of Heart of Darkness (1899)
5 SEPTEMBER/RYE – a quotation from D. H. Lawrence’s poem Bavarian Gentians:

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

/ J. D. Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye (1951) (you probably knew that 😉

6 CHILLS/HOLLY – John Crowe Ransom’s collection of poetry Chills and Fever was published in 1924 / the reference is to Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) (I’ve read the book and seen the film (and eaten the pie :-), but that was all some time ago and initially the only 5-letter rabbit names that came to mind were Hazel and Fiver)
7 ASPECT – Act 1 Scene 5 (lines 54-5)
8 RECKLESS/ASK – Carl Sandburg’s In Reckless Ecstasy (1904) is another collection of poems that I’m afraid I’d never heard of / Robert Smith Surtees wrote Ask Mamma (1858) (at least I’d heard of it, but I’ve never read it)
9 MOST LIKELY – John Dos Passos wrote Most Likely to Succeed (1954)
10 ATHOS/O’KEEFFE – (A host)*; one of The Three Musketeers (by Alexandre Dumas, père) / OK + EEFFE; I assume the Irish poet is Adelaide O’Keeffe (1776-1865)
11 NIGHT MUST FALL – Emlyn Williams wrote the play Night Must Fall (1935)

Quotation
The quotation is the second verse of A Vagabond Song from Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’s More Songs of Vagabondia (1896):

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by;
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

You can find all three verses here.

4 comments on “TLS Autumn Acrostic (22 October)”

  1. A lot harder than the one before, which I completed without aids. I had to resort to Google when it was only half done, not helped by never having heard of the author. As for technique, I always put the answers into the lower grid as I get them, then guess likely words in the quotation and put those letters back into the upper grid. Didn’t help much on this occasion though…
  2. Didn’t do this puzzle, but enjoy the occasional Acrostic from the US, solving them in the way Andy describes. I think they were in the Puzzler magazine of c. 1973 when I was taking my first steps into crosswords.

    Double Acrostics were rather different puzzles – effectively mini-crosswords with two down answers, and the acrosses of arbitrary length, running from one down answer to the other. The two down answers were related in some way, and the clues rhymed.

    Sample from The Torquemada Puzzle Book (which says “These venerable puzzles are really the ancestors of the Crossword.”)

    UPRIGHTS
    Two kinds of fish at strife
    Together, what a life!

    LIGHTS
    1. Dishonest Editor’s himself, you know.
    2. Shakespeare’s clear out ; his in it isn’t though.
    3. Turn, spectre turn ; and back he had to go.

    Solution:

    1. Crook-eD
    2. A  r   O (in't)
    3. T s o hG
    

    Torquemada says that the “hinted omission of part of a word” in 2 and the “hinted reverse of a word” in 3 are seldom used. Peeking at the answers to his 10 actual puzzles, there’s only one omission as big as “int”. He goes on to try out 3 variations, including “Stumps” where there’s a 3rd down answer from the middle letter of each light.

    1. Forgot to say: Some modern day US acrostics can be found on the “WSJ Puzzles” blog (same place as Cox & Rathvon cryptics) and sometimes on the Wordplay blog for the New York Times puzzle (their “second Sunday puzzle is there for free each week and about 1 in 6 is an acrostic).
    2. Thanks for the info about double acrostics, Peter. Now that you come to mention it, it all sounds vaguely familiar – just another damned thing I once knew about but have forgotten, I suppose.

      Torquemada’s example looks quite tough. (“Turn, spectre, turn” sounds as if it should be a quotation (from Ruddigore or something similar?), but I haven’t been able to identify it.)

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