A Gentleman of Leisure

I recently read the memoir written by Carey Elwes about his time working on the set of The Princess Bride.  Aside from being a thoroughly charming book, I was reminded of the movie-related books that I read when I was a teenager.  The Princess Bride is a different case, because that was a book long before it was a movie.*  However, there was a time (perhaps this practice still continues, I don’t know) when publishing houses, or maybe it was the movie studios, commissioned books that were adaptations of movies.  When I was obsess by a certain movie, be it Labyrinth, Ladyhawke, Young Sherlock Homes, or any number of the assorted films that took my fancy when I was at a very impressionable age, I would immediately go out and purchase the soundtrack and the tie-in book.  The part I liked best about the books is that they almost always gave a little more history, a little more insight to the characters and the plot.  It was a nice way to replay the movie in my mind, this at a time when it would take months, if not over a year, for the VHS version of a movie to become available on the open market, thereby allowing me to watch it obsessively in the privacy of my own home.

This month’s Wodehouse, A Gentleman of Leisure, seems to have been an early ancestor of the movie tie-in book.  It was first a play that featured Douglas Fairbanks.  I wish I could say that it captured my imagination as much as those earlier books did.  Sadly, it feels as though Wodehouse was more than done with the story and he wanted to move on and write something different, but maybe he was contractually obliged to write the thing.  The text lacks any of the lunatic flourishes that make his work so universally appealing. 

The plot was all right, and involved the usual cast of characters including burglars, diamonds, the gentry, etc., which was about enough to speed me along.  But everything felt as though Wodehouse had been there, done that.  I don’t know much about the play’s history, but if Wodehouse had been involved with the rehearsals, after seeing the thing a million and one time, maybe rewriting substantial chunks when someone absolutely was unable to remember their shining piece of dialogue, maybe he was ready to wash his hands of it.  Certainly, there is a line in the text which implies a certain sense of the ridiculous.  Our heroine is told: “It isn’t the hero of the novel you want to marry, it’s the man who’ll make you a good husband.”  Of course, she goes on to do just that.  Maybe this was Plum breaking the fourth wall, or being silly, or, perhaps it was way of getting back at a world that was making him spend more time on something that, in his mind, was done and dusted. 

*I do have a slightly embarrassing story concerning The Princess Bride though.  For those who are unfamiliar with the book (and, if you are, I highly suggest that you drop everything post haste, procure a copy, and read it, because you will never spend a more delightful afternoon) it is meant to be an abridgement of a history of two fictional countries, purportedly written by one S. Morgenstern.  My friend Christine and I spent the better part of an afternoon in the late 1980’s searching for the original text, only to be told by some publishing maven, who was reduced to peals of laughter by our question, that it was a farce and no such original text existed.  Although I was mortified, I felt better about the entire episode when we received a mass mailing about the progress of the book’s sequel, Buttercup’s Baby.  Apparently, it is the one book that William Goldman has been unable to write.  This thought pleases me in many ways, because I honestly wonder how he could even begin to compare with his splendid work.  After all, I am one of those people whose high standards has led her to deny that Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull does, in fact, exist.  As far as I’m concerned, it was just a mass hallucination, and a horrible one at that.