Mulliner Nights ~or~ Sustainable Literature*

Given that Plum wrote over 90 books, it is probably no huge shock to reveal that there are a good many repeated tropes.  His skill lies in making them seem new, or, at the very least, not unwelcome.  So we have Mulliner Nights, with Mr. Mulliner taking over numerous conversations to regale the assembled masses with tales of his family. 

There are not many writers who get away with this successfully.  My all-time favorite comic strip is Bloom County.  For Christmas a couple of years ago, my husband got me the collected strip** and I spent a couple of years reading them on and off just before bed.  Because I had read (and re-read, countless times) one of the earlier collections, a number of the strips were familiar to me.***  This year I received the collected works of Bloom County’s predecessor, Academia Waltz.  While I had always heard about it, the editions were rare and I never made the effort to acquire one.  My guess is that the company who came out with the Bloom County strip did a bumper crop of business and took a chance on the earlier lot. 

I did not know quite what to expect.  Knowing that this was Berkely Breathed’s early work, his juvenilia if you will, I decided to brace myself for some truly sophomoric humor and almost nothing that would remind me of Bloom County.  Early on, I encountered Steve Dallas and prepared to meet other Bloom County residents.  What I was not prepared for was the fact that a remarkable proportion of Academia Waltz was reprinted under the Bloom County moniker.  It felt as though when the cartoonist had an off day, he would dip into the well of his past, change a few characters, and call it a day.

Part of me was horrified by this revelation.  The practical side was of me admired the fact that he was not bound by any sort of copyright laws.  I am still intrigued that what does not bother me about Wodehouse raised some questions with Breathed.  Perhaps the lesson here is that we should not expect too much originality from our comic authors (or all authors, which would explain the 1,001 re-imaginations of Jane Austen’s works).  Given the choice between no new offerings and the old stuff in new wrapping, I would take the latter, for Wodehouse, anyway. 

*Read October 2016

**The main Bloom Country only; I am not a fan of Outland and was only moderately interested in Opus.  I am, however, enchanted by his daily strip on Facebook because I think that world works best when everyone is included, creating an unholy balance that some writer can only dream of.

***There are a number of phrases form Bloom County that have made their way into my vocabulary.  The most notable addition is “higgledy-piggedly” which, in our current political climate, is more useful than one would first think.

Barmy in Wonderland ~or~ Wit and Brevity*

This is yet another of the Wodehouse efforts that began life as a play.  I feel that I have read enough of them to definitively say that I don’t like them as much as the books and short stories that did not begin their lives flooded in limelight.  My problem might be that I simply do not like the feeling that bits of exploratory text have been shoe-horned in.  It does not feel effortless, and the thing about Wodehouse is that his writing should be very much like a meringue**: light and effortless, because any hint of over-beating would leave you with a tough, inedible lump.  We’re far from inedible lump territory with Barmy, but everything is relative.

Even with a mediocre Wodehouse, the good news is that it is soon over.  I wish I could say the same about the latest book that was inflected upon me by the well-meaning ladies in my book club.  My book club history has been relatively successful as there are maybe only two books I’ve been compelled to finish that have not been to my taste.  In fact, it is thanks to a now defunct club that I encountered one of my favorite books.***  But back to this literary monstrosity.  What troubles me the most is  that quite a few people world-wide are fans of the book, The Night Circus.  In fact, some of my nearest and dearest adore it.  For the life of me, I could not admit to similar feelings and still be able to look at myself in the mirror. 

The subject matter, time period, etc., are all things that would normally intrigue me  But if there is one thing that will raise my ire, it is someone who, not content with telling the reader something in a particular way, goes on and basically spends sentence upon sentence repeating the same thought.  I’m not a patient person, and much less a patient reader.  Perhaps this is yet another reason why I chose Plum.  For good or for bad, everything is over within 300 pages and off you pop.  Very thoughtful.

*Read September 2016

**The more appropriate analogy might be a soufflé, but, to my culinary horror, I don’t believe that I’ve ever had one.  I’ve a doctor’s appointment looming, and if on the off chance I discover that my world is about to come to a crashing end, I will make up for that deficiency post haste.  Actually, I should probably do it regardless, but there is something that tells me that minding two small children and being concerned about egg whites does not mix. 

***The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters for the curious. 

Hot Water ~or~ Hot Toddy*

There is no doubt in my mind that this book shows Wodehouse at his most nimble.  It is a rush of things- from people being mischievous, to assumed identities, to jaunts across the Channel, to theft- that made my head spin in a delightful manner that was not unlike having a glass of champagne.  If someone was to ask me to recommend my favorite non-Jeeves and Wooster , non-Blandings Castle Wodehouse, it would be this one.  As a stand alone book, it is deeply satisfying without the crutch o previous knowledge of the characters, etc.  It is not often that one encounters such a level of satisfying entertainment.  The last time I had this feeling was watching the season 6 finale of Game of Thrones, but, in order to earn that, I had to cope with five seasons of violence and degradation, with just enough amusing characters and intrigue to keep me going.  Wodehouse asked much less of his readers, bless him.

Speaking of champers, there was an interesting dose of temperance-talk in this one.  One of the characters is an American senator who is publicly against alcohol, although he quaffs it merrily in his private life.  This left me to wonder if Wodehouse noticed any difference between the US and the UK at the time concerning drinking.  The book was published in 1932 and prohibition was not repealed until the following year.  To say that the US had a disjointed drinking culture at the time must have been an understatement, especially if the portrait of the Senator bore any resemblance to reality.  It reminds me of politicians who make a big thing about their family values and are subsequently revealed to have been chasing their intern around the office or some such thing. 

The entire encounter hinted at the difference in attitudes towards drinking that prevail on the different sides of the Atlantic. Maybe it is because of our past, but there seems to be such an extreme reaction to it in the US, from nothing to the Mad Men era of the five-martini lunch, to now when it seems to depend very much on circumstances.  There is an entire sociological thesis buried here, I’m certain, but I’m trying not to write one.  Instead, I am going to wander down memory lane a little.  We do not have pubs over here in the truest sense.  Just last night, I was thinking about the number of pubs I would walk past in my daily life when I resided in England.  A good number of them would have been a fine place to take kids to for a casual meal.  We don’t have that in the US, at least not where I live.  They are more bars, and children are not allowed in.  This is not to say that I am dying to take my kids into a bar, what with their lurid environments, sticky floors, and the vague smell of the previous night lingering in the air.  But I do wish we had a comfortable casual place to be, and it would not hurt if it was a vaguely historic building instead of something awful festooned with cartoon characters.  One can dream.**

*Read August 2016

**One of my favorite pubs is in the North, just outside of Leeds.  I was introduced to it by a medievalist called Simon Yarrow (now an eminent presence on the academic scene at the University of Birmingham) when a group of us were there for a conference.  The pub had been around for centuries, so long that it had functioning priest holes that were used to hide the Catholic clergy during the Protestant reformation. The pub was beautifully nestled into the countryside, and I will never forget the evening that I had there.  In fact, my mind sometimes wanders there when I am in need of a nice memory.

Humane Doppelgangers ~or~ The Clicking of Cuthbert*

There are going to be a lot of “last time”s coming up in the next nine months of this project.  The obvious one will be the last Wodehouse book that I read, which, if everything goes well, will be next April.**  This month, I think, marks my last encounter with a golf-based Wodehouse book.  I will admit that I groaned a little when I saw what title was awaiting me on my bookshelf.  Golf, as I have discussed earlier, is not my game.  Reading about golf, even if the author is one of my particular favorites, I place on the same level as watching golf matches with my father: I enjoy the company immensely even if the subject matter is not completely gripping. 

When I was thinking about this post, I was struck by the thought that, unless there is a golf tale lurking among the pages of the last nine books, this will also probably be my last encounter with the Oldest Member.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the character, the Oldest Member is a man who is a denizen of the clubhouse of his golf club, too old to play, yet too enamored of the game to be separated from its atmosphere.  His primary purpose is to cheer up the younger generation with tales illustrating the morsels of wisdom that he imparts on the populace.  The problem is that you can always see the young person wince with boredom. 

There are many occasions in life when I have felt like the Oldest Member, particularly as I get older and have to give context to the young when I talk about the olden days, aka The Regan Era (and, even more worryingly because it makes me feel that much more ancient, The Clinton Era or The Elder Bush Moment).  That thought made me realize that I have written about identifying with other Wodehouse characters at different times in this blog, leading me to think that I might have hit upon one of the essentials about the enduring popularity of these books.  The thing about Wodehouse’s characters is that, despite their outward absurdities, there is always a kernel of humanity that the reader can latch on to.  Then, despite the fact that these people live in a world we cannot hope to inhabit, they become familiar.  I know for a fact that I often miss hearing from Jeeves, even though I have never met him.  Hardly a ground-breaking thought, I know, but something to consider when you think about what makes an enduring classic.

The good thing about this book is that it was a group of short stories.  Perhaps Plum knew that a sustained tale about golf would be unbearable, and that a group of his previously published works would be the way forward.  So, given that, I will leave you with some short thoughts of my own:

-There are a couple of references to the Writer’s Lot.  The first feels as though Plum was allowing himself a Cathartic Experience about the reputation of the English writer: “ ‘Nonsense, who wants an English writer to be English?  You’ve got to be Russian or Spanish or something to be a real success’ “(p. 18).

-Then Wodehouse gets his own back in via the words of a revered Russian novelist who is enlightening a literary society: “ ‘No novelists anywhere any good except me.  P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad.  Not good, but not bad.’ “ (p. 26).

-There was a reference to someone being a blot on the landscape on page 28.  Being a fan of the Tom Sharpe novel of the same title, I wondered about the origin of the phrase.  My first thought was Shakespeare.  This was the wrong answer, as the correct one is that it is from a 1912 letter by T.E. Lawrence, or so the internet told me after an exhaustive search that lasted all of five minutes.  Now I know.  Now I also know that Wodehouse might have read Lawrence, although I always have wondered about people who published their letters.  I suppose that a blogger should not be throwing stones at a glass house though.

-There is a motif about men using golf games to decide who would be the won to win the attentions of the women desired by both.  What amused me was not the hunt, but the fact that Wodehouse was able to use so many variations on this theme.  Given the rest of his work this should not surprise me, but it is still remarkable and perhaps one of his greatest talents.  Also, Tiger Woods might have avoided many personal problems if he had simply resorted to solving them via a golf duel.

-I need to learn what a niblick is.

-Carrying on from last months’ selection, there were a couple of more variations of the phrase “regrettable incident.” The first was a close cousin: “…I could see that on the whole they regarded me as one of those things which should not happen.’ “ (p. 123)  Here it is again: “To such a man women are merciless, and it speedily became an article of faith with the feminine population of the locality that Ramsden Waters an unfortunate incident and did not belong.’” (p. 183)

*Read July 2016

**Providing that the world does not end before then.  Given the global feeling of instability that has reached a crescendo over the past year, I’d currently lay even odds of me being around to finish this.  Sorry for the gloom; I’m afflicted by a cold that has knocked both me and my husband sideways and I tend to get a bit morose when I’m not feeling at my best.

When Bridget Met Sally ~or~ The Adventures of Sally*

I’m not generally a fan of romantic comedies.  There is something about them than that makes me twist uncomfortably inside, or, even worse, brings out my inner realist who wonders how on earth a particular couple could even think that things would work out given either a disparity in age, geography, or the various commitments they have to others.  Every Christmas though, I have annual viewing of two romantic comedies that have continued to tickle me: Love, Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary.**  I cannot remember how I got sucked into Love, Actually but I know that I initially watched Bridget Jones because that book is one of the few that has reduced me to a puddle of hysterical laughter and I wanted to see if the same held true for the movie.***

One of the things that I like best about Bridget Jones is that she’s not perfect.  She’s astonishingly human and makes some very poor decisions, but with a certain amount of intelligence so that you don’t completely give up on her.  I found myself thinking the same about the heroine of this month’s Wodehouse, the aforementioned Sally.  She goes through a series of events, including one massive downturn in her romantic life where she learns that her fiancé has married another woman.  Her reaction rang a bell in me: she responds by acknowledging that she should not have any feeling about the event, but then allows herself to go a little wobbly.  Emotions are sneaky suckers and, if you think that you’ve managed to cope with a situation without having them, they have a rather nasty habit of hitting you when you least expect it.  Sally meets up with this desperado fiancé later on and, while she gives him a hand, she does not melt back into his arms.  Bridget has a similar scene also, and both times I found myself liking these women even more.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to call Wodehouse a feminist, but he certainly has a great deal of sympathy for women.  In particular, he seems to have a lot of time for American women, which is always a nice thing to hear.  The emotional truths of Sally reminded me so much of Bridget (and some of the women from Love, Actually, most notably Karen, the one played by Emma Thompson) that I would pay to see them together, and it is this element that has rocketed The Adventures of Sally into my list of Favorite Wodehouses, which is unusual for a one-off.

Some things that amused me:

-Sally’s description of a would-be suitor: “ ‘You remind me of one of those portraits of men in the eighteenth century, with wooden faces, who look out of heavy gold frames at you with fishy eyes as if you were a regrettable incident’ ” (p. 71).

-Another description of the same character, who really seems to have lit Plum’s creative fire: “He was the sort of man who always has a pencil, and the back of old envelopes never entered his life” (p. 74).  I sympathize, as the last list I made was on the piece of cardboard that had formally hosted a pad of paper.  I have also been observed making notes in programs during concerts.

-On page 80, we meet a dog named Toto.  Since The Wizard of Oz is a childhood favorite, I was a little amazed because I always thought that it was unique to that story.  maybe it was and this is merely a reference to it, but it is something that bears further investigation in my copious free time.

-Such is Wodehouse’s natural sympathy towards women that, when Sally’s brother utters this line: “ ‘My dear child, as I said before, women cannot understand these things…’ (p. 147)” I knew that his business would be a flop, which it was and continued to be until he married a sensible woman. 

*Read June 2016.  There have been a number of horrible events that have rocked the world in the last week (writing on July 11, 2016).  While I want to note that these are indeed times that have tested the populace’s soul, I am going to take a page out of Wodehouse’s book, so to speak, and not dwell on them in this blog.  I have noted that while he wrote during two world wars, a global economic depression, and a host of other depressing events, he rarely mentioned them in the action of the books.  This is a blog about an entertaining author.  For those who require other topics to be discussed, I would direct you to the multitudes of other places that provide more astute analysis than I could ever hope to offer. 

**Sometimes, The Holiday makes this list.  There is something about Cameron Diaz in this movie though that irritates me.  Then I get to wondering how she could ever hope to make her business work in the UK, what short of permissions she would have to obtain, etc., and would she really be happy leaving California for the English countryside (I mean, I would be ecstatic, but I think that I’m beginning to gain the title of “noted kook” in my advancing years).  Perhaps I was a bureaucrat in a former life. 

***In case you’re wondering, I refuse to acknowledge that the other Bridget Jones films exist.  I have the same mentality for the Sex and the City movies and, increasingly, the seventh installment of the Star Wars saga.