[Vwoolf] Prétentieux, moi?

[Stuart N. Clarke]

“Some previous luncher had left the lunch edition of the evening paper on a chair, and, waiting to be served, I began idly reading the headlines.  A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page.  Somebody had made a big score in South Africa.  Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain was at Geneva.  A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar.  Mr. Justice —— commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women.  Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news.  A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid-air.  The weather was going to be foggy.”



When David Bradshaw and I edited A Room of One’s Own for Wiley Blackwell in 2015 (the very last of the Shakespeare Head Edition that had begun far back in 1992), we attempted to identify all these references.  The easiest to identify precisely was ‘Shameless Women’.  The meat axe and the ‘suspended actress’ defeated us.



I’ve had an aperçu.  Could there possibly be an obscure ref. or nod to the epigraph to “The Waste Land”, which starts with a quote from “The Satyricon” of Petronius:

  'Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere ...” ("Indeed, I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a [two-handled] flask)



Stuart

(Day 134)




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