A second Listener from Shackleton but he is more familiar to me as one third of the Mango team. I do not know exactly how they divide the labours there; one would have thought it wasteful for each to write a full set of clues and then vote on the best; but judging from this, Shackleton is a master at adapting themes to the crossword format.
I was struck by the parallels between this puzzle and Mr E’s recent Listener: a long and impenetrable preamble with competent but unremarkable clues. An early breakthrough was to guess the subject of the quotation in the ODQ almost immediately:
There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.
Francis V. O’Conner Jackson Pollock (1967)
The two messages from misprints in definitions were revealed as:
Down clues (painting instruction): State to south red green blue
Across clues (two real paintings according to the quotation): ummertim (Summertime) and utumnrhyth (Autumn Rhythm)
The unclued across entry (?NT?RP?ONE) might be interphone if a single real word.
At this point I was all but finished had I known it but inexplicably had got it into my head that our forgery was a real painting by a second artist – something like Winter Piones perhaps. I wasted an awful lot of time on Google before the penny dropped that Pollock was the only artist involved here.
He was born in Cody, Wyoming (WY) in 1912 and the state to the south is Colorado or color ado in the language of the artist, explaining the title. To my eye, color lost a great deal of colour with Webster’s spelling reform or standardisation as he would have called it. You might wonder why he did not go further and spell it cullor except for that being an even uglier word and possibly the reason why reforms such as definit, examin, fether (feather) and ile (isle) never caught on (ref: David Crystal’s Encycl. of the English Language). Here is my final solution (I didn’t bother rubbing out the letters in the grid):
Earlier, the ambiguity of where to place coda and Cody was resolved by considering the grid to be a map of Wyoming:
A stunning dénouement, placing this among my favourite Listeners of 2009 to date, albeit not too difficult. I have heard it suggested that a lengthy preamble is a weakness in a puzzle but unravelling the incomprehensible is a favourite pastime of mine and it has certainly been a common feature of the Listener for as long as I can remember. When I started attempting the Listener in the mid eighties (Penguin books, 1970 & 1980), grid entries were often referred to as lights, adding to the mystique but which now looks quaintly archaic.
It is nit-picking but I think that I would have preferred the preamble to say that we were painting a fake (with the meaning pretend piece) rather than forgery (counterfeit) since Pollock’s Winter Phoney does not exist. It would do me no good to forge a million £3 coins for example. There again, I must concede that Winter Phoney might well be a lost and forgotten work.
