Bachelors Anonymous features people concerned with custom made suits and threats of breach of promise cases. There are Hollywood movie czars and other elements that featured prominently in earlier novels. The kicker is that the book was written in 1973, hardly a time when young people were concerned with procuring suits from Saville Row. There could be an argument made that Wodehouse was going for a timeless feeling to his setting, but there were just enough elements present that argue that he was intentionally going for a later period. One of the most poignant was his description of the heroine’s living quarters in a massive house in Notting Hill. In earlier Wodehouse books, those houses would have held one family and their considerable staff. Now, however, he notes that no one has the wherewithal to maintain such a residence, so it is chopped up into a number of rooms and the occupants share communal kitchens and living spaces. Bertie Wooster would have been appalled.
It was odd for me reading that novel, mostly because it was published just before my birth. It’s hard to know if it was normal for breach of promise cases to be threatened; certainly, they do not play a role in modern romances in the UK. The world of Bachelors Anonymous feels a little foreign, although I constantly have to remind myself that I did not have things such as the internet and mobile phones, and hummus was a hippy food when I was a girl. One of the few television programs I watch regularly is Mad Men, and I constantly remind myself that the real counterparts to the characters portrayed are most likely still with us, that is, providing that they have not succumbed to lung cancer or cirrhosis. The past is always with us; goodness knows that I am probably an antiquated fossil in the minds of today’s bright young things.
While the past is always with us, I was musing the other day about how the points of reference I had when I was younger were slipping away. What brought this home most to me was a conversation I had with my boyfriend, who referenced a report on NPR which stated that approximately 900 World War II veterans were dying each day. When I was small, it was normal to encounter World War I vets, and now they are almost an extinct species. An adult survivor of the concentration camps visited my elementary school; now in interviews I more frequently hear from either the children of those who were liberated from that living nightmare, or those who now, very old, were children at that time. My son’s historical points of reference will be very different; perhaps his old dusty war will be Vietnam, or Desert Storm. The former, although concluded when I was growing up, was a recent memory and the latter had a profound effect on me during high school.
All of which leads me back to contemplating Wodehouse in the years before his death. He was a living legend, although one best known for writing about a time and a society long since passed. I cannot fathom what it must have been like for someone who lived through both world wars coping with disco balls, Andy Warhol, and Watergate. A book of Plum’s letters recently came out, and I hope that there are some from his later years as I am interested to see how he reacted to things as he aged. Did he embrace the changes, or, as I suspect from reading Bachelors Anonymous, did he try to maintain his grip on things by trying to impose elements of a time long gone in the created worlds of his fiction?
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