Frozen Assets ~or~ Musing upon Viewing The Grand Budapest Hotel and Reading Wodehouse*

My husband and I recently passed an evening by sharing a much-needed bottle of red, eating pate, and watching the latest Wes Anderson offering, “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”  Our little family had recently gone through a harrowing time from which we had emerged victorious, and our souls were deeply in need of soothing.  We could not have selected a better film to foot the bill.  Wes Anderson has been a favorite of mine for a while, although his last two films have really sealed the deal for me.**  There is something about his mannered, whimsical, melancholy style of storytelling that appeals to me on a primal level.  Regardless of where an Anderson film is set, be it in New York, India, or a fictitious Eastern European country named after a brand of vodka, there is always a similar feeling that for me is akin to plunging into a particularly delightful bath.

While I was reading Frozen Assets***, I discovered that the same could be said of Wodehouse.  Only a couple of characters have appeared before.  For the most part, we are greeted with a host of new people trying to cope with the muddle that is life.  Still, I could expect witty rejoinders from the smart, sane young man and hijinks from his rowdy friend.  This pattern dances all over the woks of Wodehouse.

Although the repetition might not appeal to all, I find it almost comforting, a panacea for life.  The years since I began this project in 2008 have been oddly action-packed.  This period has seen me experiencing my life’s highest highs and lowest lows (the same can, perhaps, be said for the banking industry as well).  Moreover, as I steadily progress into middle age, I am realizing that Change, far from being on occasional visitor, is my constant bedfellow.  While it is gratifying watching my contemporaries come into their own, it is painful to witness the decline of some of my older friends.  People who were a fixture at every gathering are now no longer with us.  Even though there are new, delightful people popping up, things will never be quite the way they were.  One wonders if they ever were that way to begin with.

So it is times like these that I see nothing wrong in plunging into Wodehouse.  Perhaps the glorious familiarity is an element of what made him so popular during his life.  The twentieth century was filled with nothing but Change (as the inhabitants remind us again and again).  His readers suffered two world wars, a massive economic depression, and those free-loving hippies.  Many people probably needed to dip into a world when the outside presented too many unpleasant surprises.  As I write this, I am sitting in a train that has been beleaguered by this historic winter, and I think that humanity will always need its little escapes into worlds that might never have really existed, but feel like they almost could. 

*Read March 2015

**I have similar feeling about Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Minghella.  A former inhabitant of this list was Woody Allen but, unfortunately, I am too conflicted about him.  I have similar feelings about Roman Polanski.

***Given that the world is engulfed by snow, I thought that this title would be appropriate.

Definitive Numbers ~or~ Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves*

I’m reaching the point where I have almost run into my last Bertie and Jeeves book.  It is a bit of an odd feeling, because while it seems as though I should be very close to being done, in reality this project probably has another couple of years left in it.  The root of the matter is that I have no idea just how many Wodehouse books there are.  This might seem like an odd problem to have: since Wodehouse is such a well-known author whose works have been around for some time, a comprehensive list of his works cannot be difficult to find.

And yet, that is precisely the question that I am facing.  The Overlook Press edition of Wodehouse is not only publishing his fiction, but also some of his letters, memoirs, and non-fiction.  While I will buy them all (or have them given to me as presents from my friends and family who by now are more than attuned to my eccentricities) I’m probably only going to count the fiction towards my goal.  Probably.  As anyone who knows me very well can tell you, I don’t like doing things by half measures.  For example, one of my favorite recent television shows is the revival of Doctor Who.  One would think that a normal person who loves the show would try and get caught up with all of the preceding series of the show, given that there are so many of them.  The issue lies in the fact that I like to start things from the beginning when possible, and not all of the Doctor Who shows are still extant.  More accurately, there is a decent likelihood that they are extant, but the BBC in London has not the foggiest where they are.  Occasionally, caches turn up in far-flung corners of the former empire.  It maddens and intrigues me that it might just be possible that all of the episodes do, in fact, exist.  Until then, I waver on the decision to see them. 

This is another part of the Wodehouse problem.  One of the major complicating factors of having a complete list of his works is that it appears that not all of his works are known.  The other day, whilst searching the internet furiously for a comprehensive Wodehouse list, I came into contact with Neil Midkiff who pointed out the Wodehouse Society website to me.  Those industrious people have actually been turning up new stories, most of which were published early in Wodehouse’s career when he was probably more interested in making ends meet than posterity.  I can read them online, thanks to the fact that they are now out of copyright.  And, being who I am, I’ll probably do that. 

However, even when the day comes when I have read everything that Overlook has published by Wodehouse and I’ve gone through the Wodehouse Soc. Trove, I’ll still be wondering.  This morning I read an article in The New Yorker about the discovery of a trunk that was filled with Callot Soeurs dresses.  The sisters presided over a major fashion empire in the 19^th and early 20th centuries, although few of their dresses have survived.  I wonder if the same hold true of Wodehouse’s works, if someday someone will stumble across a trunk filled with even more stories.  The possibility on one had deeply intrigues me and, on the other, deeply concerns my completion-driven soul.

*Read February 2015

Everybody Wants to be Sherlock Holmes ~or~ Tales of Wrykyn and Elsewhere*

 We live in interesting times.  In the past few years, it feels as though my childhood has reappeared on television, although seen through some sort of odd looking-glass.  Both Dallas and Hawaii 5-O have been remade, it sounds as though one of those Aaron Spelling productions from the 90’s enjoyed a renaissance, Twin Peaks will soon be repopulated, and even Agents Mulder and Scully will be back on the case.  It really should not surprise me then that there are no fewer than two interpretations of Sherlock Holmes on our screens, and these on the heels of Guy Ritchie’s cinematic interpretations starring Robert Downey Jr.  Everything that is old is new again** and nothing is as classic as watching the residents of 221B Baker Street solve crimes.

While Edgar Allen Poe and his lot may have invented the detective story, I don’t think that anyone can dispute that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle popularized the format.  His influence is felt not only in the retelling of his stories, but in every crime procedural I’ve ever watched, and believe me, they are legion.  As I’ve mentioned before, even Wodehouse fell under Conan Doyle’s influence while creating one of her most popular characters.  In her book Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes, Kristin Thompson draws a parallel between Jeeves’ thinking process and Holmes’. 

However, it is not Jeeves that drew my attention while reading this collection of early school stories.  Two stories featured a very Holmes-like character called Burdock Rose, who unravels crimes associated with a public school.  I suspect that, like most of the school tales, these were written early on in Wodehouse’s career.  It is easy to tell why it looks as though only two were written.***  They almost have the feeling of some editor desperately wanting his own Holmes spin-off and sticking our Pelham with the job.  The stories themselves are a little peculiar; they have a feel of farce, but they do not go quite all the way.  It is almost as though Wodehouse was working against his own natural instinct to have fun with a form that was probably already growing a bit stale. 

The good thing about the stories though is the lasting inspiration they seem to have given him to have one remarkable, all-knowing figure who can propel a story or act as a deus ex machina.  No matter how he came to write these stories, I’m glad he did, because otherwise we might never have been introduced to Jeeves, hands-down one of the best literary creations of the 20^th century. 

*Read January 2015.

**This is a very appropriate theme for this time of year.  Finally, the snow banks are retreating, uncovering bits of the landscape unseen since January.

***This may not be the case.  In my copious free time, I really need to look at the Wodehouse Society’s excellent website to confirm this.  They are an extremely keen group who have done us all a favor by unearthing some of Plum’s forgotten works.

The Lost Marx Brother ~or~ The Old Reliable*

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in high school, I was involved in a production of “Room Service.”  The play focuses on a band of actors trying to pull off a housing scheme for members of a production.  It is my experience that, at least in high school, the number of female actors is usually surplus to requirement.  Coupled with that is the fact that there seems to be a dearth of plays with largely female casts that do not revolve around some sort of women’s issue (for some reason, they are always dreary too, which does no one any good).  Fortunately, this sort of situation seems to be changing in the cinema, and it is only a matter of time until it trickles down to the stage (unless it has already; I live under a rock these days).

Back to high school.  The director that semester was aware of the gender imbalance and had the brilliant idea of switching the gender of the roles, meaning that the female parts far outnumbered those for males.  Although I was aware of this at the time, it was still a jolt later on to see a man play my role in the Marx Brothers film of the play.  “Room Service” was not written by any of that fabled comedy family, but it is certainly infused with their zany, madcap energy.  I felt the same zing reverberating through this month’s selection, The Old Reliable.

Wodehouse spent some time in Hollywood as a script writer.  This book, which is set in Tinsel Town and features one living and one dead silent screen queen, is sort of a Sunset Boulevard lite.  I mentioned Marx in a rambling preface because the rapid-fire lines and general sense of zaniness made me wonder if someone wearing ill-fitting clothes and chomping on a cigar was going to make an appearance.  The speed of the humor, while still very Wodehousian, had a different spin.  The most notable difference, which is why I mentioned my gender-bending high school theater, is that the title character is a woman, not a man.  While there have been a few fast-thinking female schemers in the Wodehouse universe, e.g. the sisters in French Leave, it really does feel as though Wodehouse originally wrote the part as a man and then, in a later edit, crossed him out and replaced the “he”s with “she”s.

I could make all sorts of observations, perhaps even label Plum a proto-feminist, but instead I find that my enjoyment came from this unexpected twist.  Just as you never know if the secret work in an episode of “You Bet Your Life” will be uttered, you never know what surprises lie ion store between the handsomely designed Overlook Press covers.

*Read December 2014

Surprising Revelations ~or~ If I Were You*

Within the last year, my Facebook feed started to include offerings from The Guardian.  For those who don’t know, that newspaper is the bastion of liberalism in the UK.  They have been embroiled for the last ten years in a lawsuit against the government to release some letters written by Prince Charles to members of Parliament.  The Guardian is of the firm opinion that the content of these letters would demonstrate that the prince, who like all members of the royal family is supposed to be politically neutral, was trying to exert his influence in an improper fashion.  It has been whispered by those in the know that the implications of this could lead to a succession crisis upon QEII’s death, which is bound to happen any decade now.

I would not have thought that Wodehouse had much in common with The Guardian.  After all, a large number of his characters are either aristocratic, well-to-do, or trying to become one, the other, or both.  While Plum does lampoon those people, he does so in a very gentle manner.  It is not as though the members of the lower classes are immune from his light satiric touch.  So I was drawn up short while reading If I Were You.  The plot of the novel, as the back of the book tell us, is a common changeling theme that was popular during Victorian times.  The jist is that Tony Droitwich, the heir of Lord Droitwich, is not Tony Droitwich.  Instead, he was born Syd Price and was switched at birth.  When Mr. Price, the true Droitwich heir, happens upon this piece of news, he turns up at the manor and asserts his rights.

At this point, I would have suspected that, once lives were switched, the real Syd Price would have been miserable taking up residence in a London barber shop, having been removed from wealth and privilege, and the real Tony Droitwich would swoon upon being taken up into the lap of luxury.  Instead, the opposite happens; at the end, Tony Droitwich reluctantly agrees to reassume his identity and Syd Price happily retreats back to London. 

There are some interesting implications behind this.  Wodehouse implies that nature does not necessarily make the man and that a strong argument can be made in favor of nurture.  Taken to its extreme, it can be implied that, given the right circumstances, almost anyone can be an aristocrat.  The other interesting observation is that not everyone is thrilled to be in control of money and estates, and that sometimes, a life in a prosperous business in London is the way to go.  The book was originally published in 1931, which meant that the real effect of the super tax and the heavy death duties that were imposed a decade or so earlier were really beginning to have their effects on landed estates.  Wodehouse was starting to point out that all was not strawberries and cream in the lives of the wealthy.  While Wodehouse certainly was not calling out for the abolishment of the monarchy, he certainly was beginning to share The Guardian’s suspicions that all was not well. 

*This book was read in November 2014.