In Competition No. 2580 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘New Year Letter’, concluding with the words ‘under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state’. This couplet opens Auden’s long and oft-maligned verse epistle ‘New Year Letter’. Writing in the New Statesman in 1941, G.S. Fraser complained that he’d read the poem ‘five times with a mixture of astonishment, boredom, pleasure and increasing scepticism’ and had still been unable to fathom the author’s philosophical position.
A large and varied entry puzzled and occasionally bored but overall it made for a pleasing read. There were star turns from William Danes-Volkov, Andrew Mason, Shirley Curran and D.A. Prince, who followed Auden’s lead with a tale of New Year woe written in octosyllabic couplets. They were narrowly squeezed out by the winners, printed below, who are rewarded with £25 apiece. The bonus fiver goes to Adrian Fry.
Dolman takes poison pen and wantonly unrecyclable paper and, as every New Year’s Eve, writes his resignation. It is less composition than bilious tirade and does not contain the word regret. He outlines (as if they didn’t know) the futility and folly of a life spent cajoling the long-term unemployable to apply for jobs at which Stakhanov would have turned up his nose. He laments the transparent inadequacy of every government scheme he has been compelled to push and his admiration for the effortlessness with which even his least educated clients see through them. He conjures an optimistic vision of his future, doing something useful, though tellingly unspecified. Passion subsiding to realist melancholy, he closes with magnanimous pity for his colleagues and clients. He envelopes the letter, slipping it into a drawer with its 25 yellowing precursors, heart heavy under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state.
Adrian Fry
‘Dearly beloved,’ wrote the Reverend Wroth in his New Year epistle where the usual well-worn pearls of wisdom were invariably offered, although not on this occasion. Wearied by another winter in a chilly church and having nothing new to say about Epiphany or any other festival throughout the coming church year, his thoughts had wandered during a recent service to the numbers on the hymn board. ‘Dearly beloved, God moves in mysterious ways,’ he wrote, ‘as He did when I memorised the hymn numbers last Sunday. For years I have longed to be pointed in new directions and, by Grace, it seems that I have been. Thanks to the numbers on the hymn board corresponding to the winning numbers in yesterday’s Lotto, I intend to retire forthwith to the Seychelles where I shall finally rejoice and languish no longer under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state.’
Alan Millard
‘Pardon the handwriting,’ Julia scrawled. ‘I’m beginning the year with a journey on one of these marvellous atheist buses and …’ At which point, lightning struck the big bendy vehicle, and it swerved into a lorry. Her letter was found, and eventually presented to her grieving family. The tabloids roared: ‘This is God’s thunderbolt!’ Relatives of most other victims demanded the public stoning of Richard Dawkins. Her own family remained steadfast: ‘She was an atheist, whose death was random circumstance. To understand it, we need no God hypothesis, only a smattering of chaos theory.’ Britain’s secularists clamoured to provide memorials. Birmingham’s unbelievers sent a carved allegory depicting a world frozen by religion; Norwich offered a huge marble representation of the atheist conscience wrestling with Rowan Williams; Newcastle’s sculpture symbolised a joyfully god-free utopia. The family gratefully accepted all; Julia sleeps peacefully under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state.
George Simmers
There was the professor who despaired of his post-graduate students. The following is an example of how he floored them. ‘You know your Auden,’ he would say. ‘Of course you do. His propensity for writing poems in letter form or vice versa. But were you aware that Byron did the same? Probably that’s what started Auden off. Byron’s first New Year Letter was in Jan 1813, a depressing time when you consider what 1812 had been like: the Luddites, his stormy maiden speech in the Lords, the Peninsular War, the ongoing Napoleonic campaigns, to say nothing of complications in his affairs with Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford. At least ‘Childe Harold’ was favourably reviewed. And before you use your intended quotations in your thesis, I suggest you check for plagiarism. I feel sure Byron was the original author of ‘Under the familiar weight/ Of winter, conscience and the state’.
Alanna Blake
No post on New Year’s Day meant the letter arrived on 2 January, along with three belated Christmas cards and a leisurewear catalogue. It was the opposite of the hangover cure I needed, announcing that I had been found out. Someone knew. The writer named the price of silence and included a contact number. A week later, amid the snowy isolation of the rendezvous he had chosen, I squeezed his windpipe and shoved him under the surface ice of a Cumbrian tarn. I at once had a surprisingly direct insight into what mad old Nietzsche had been banging on about. I felt irradiated by power in a frozen wilderness, so far beyond good and evil that the law would never catch me. The second killing balanced out the first, ended a decade of guilt and rescued me from under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state.
Basil Ransome-Davies
As he strolled in the bitter cold of early January, Jeff Balend tried to guess what that letter meant. The likeliest explanation was ‘cauliflower’, since that was what he had failed to include in his shopping basket yesterday. Or perhaps it was ‘chicken’, which had also skipped his mind. ‘Checklist’? ‘Chump’? It might even be ‘cash’, the shortage of which was acute under the worsening credit crisis. Jeff knew his wife wanted to see change in him, so it would not be surprising if that what she had meant by sticking a large ‘C’ on the fridge. But surely not ‘coward’? As laughable as that was, he couldn’t eliminate the possibility. Then he remembered their marriage pledge: Yes We Can Chat. Jeff quickened his step and made his way home to Virginia under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state.
John O’Byrne
No. 2583: You must be kidding
You are invited to provide an extract from one of the following chapters which appear in a real work of modern literary criticism: ‘Noddy: Discursive Threads and Inter-textuality’; ‘Sexism or Subversion: Querying Gender Relations in The Famous Five and Mallory Towers’ (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2583’ by 12 February or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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