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. 

The Code of the Wodehouses ~or~ The Prince and Betty*

“‘I’m so tired of money - money - money.  Everything’s money.  Isn’t there a man in the world who won’t sell himself?’” (The Price and Betty, p. 105).

My longstanding practice of not beginning a post with a quotation is now over.**  The line is delivered by a woman who believes that the man who makes her heart go pitter-pat is only interested in her for financial gain.  Fortunately for our heroine, this is not the case.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

This is yet another play that was adapted into a novel, this time in 1912.***  There is a bit more evidence of this than I would like, mostly in the form of long descriptions of the inner lives of the main characters.  Although I have not made an exhaustive study of it, my memory seems to tell me that the straight-on novels had little of this inner turmoil and got straight on with the zippy dialogue and plot.  The plot is a wee bit thin, but the again, I suspect I cannot really expect too much complexity from what I suspect was meant to be a light-hearted stage production .

What is most typically Wodehousian about this book is its obsession with money.  It has been interesting for me to take on this project at this time in the world’s financial history.  We have been witness to epic losses, and are now hopefully living through the long slow recovery that I, for one, was praying for.****  Wodehouse also lived through some interesting financial times, what with two world wars and the Depression.  His use of money as a catalyst to action is a constant, perhaps replaced only later by requests from demanding aunts, although even these sometimes have a financial motivation. 

What only struck my dense mind now, eighty-odd books into this project, is that there seems to be an underlying code to Wodehouse’s feelings surrounding the acquisition of wealth.  It’s perfectly all right to suddenly inherit it and acceptable to live off of an allowance.  Those who have earned their fortunes are sometimes suspect, but they generally turn out to be good sorts in the end.  The same, however, cannot be said for those who plot to come by money by nefarious means.  This being Wodehouse, the meaning of the word nefarious can be a little tainted.  Sometimes, it seems that this does not apply to thieves, who as far as I can tell about the Wodehousian money code belong with the earners.  No, the worst of the lot are perfectly distilled into the character of Lord Arthur, who is only interested in marrying the heroine because she is related to a moneybags.  One can steal, one can scheme and be all right in Plum’s universe, but shame on those who would betray emotions.  Wodehouse might be one of the last bastions of chivalry. 

*Read May 2016

**This was not, precisely, intentional, but I just discovered it to be the case, so I’m leading with this bombshell.

***The observant amongst you will note that my reading order is not strictly chronological, given that last month’s book was published in 1916.  I blame the fatigue that reigns in my household, which has bene brought on by endeavoring to keep four small beings – two human, two feline- alive.

****This is because I am, by training and by temperament, an historian, and if there is one thing that drooling over dusty tomes has taught me, it is that one does not want things to happen too quickly.  Things that flare up quickly have a nasty habit of going horrifically wrong.  Just look at the Arab Spring movement. 

Alternative Realities ~or~ Uneasy Money*

Since taking a chronological approach to the remaining titles in my Wodehouse challenge, I’ve had a sense of foreboding hanging over me for the past few months.  While I was reading The Luck Stone there was a claxon blaring away in my head, because it was difficult not to remember that, for all of their derring-do, the valiant schoolboys I was reading about would most likely be WWI cannon fodder.  That is, of course, if they were real human beings.

The odd thing is that, aside from a nod to Prohibition and the Depression, the real world seems not to have intruded much into Wodehouse’s novels.  This did not stop Plum from mocking the current political situation.  Earlier books have shown him to have a deeply satirical side, and the character of Spode in the Jeeves and Wooster novels shows that he did have a sharp political awareness.  It seems that our author only judiciously applied real world evets as he deemed necessary.  Take, for instance, the many trips over the Atlantic during the action of Uneasy Money.  This book came out in 1916, at the height of WWI, and yet there is no mention that it was a slightly dangerous thing to do. 

Maybe it was a method of coping with the situation.  If my memory serves me, Wodehouse was not resident in the UK during the war because he was busy with musical comedies on Broadway.  Perhaps the war’s horrors would not have been immediately felt at such a remove, told only through the newspaper and letters.**  A novel which overlooked the international situation might have well suited an isolationist US at the time.  Given that Wodehouse experimented with a few genres, I always wonder why he did not continue down some routes.  Maybe it was as simple as money, or what amused him.  Honestly, I could speculate endlessly about his motivations, but the simple fact of the matter was that while the war raged on, Wodehouse gave his readers a delightful bucolic romp to sink into, much like an ostrich burying its head in sand.

*Read April 2016

**I was living abroad when some fairly horrible things happened in the US, not the least of which was 9/11.  It is very strange to be so far away when such things happen in your native land, or at least I thought so.  I felt as though I ought to be doing something, although exactly what that was did not make itself immediately apparent.  Of course, I had access to things like television and the internet and could following developments as they happened.  I cannot even begin to imagine how receiving news at a slower pace would have felt.

The Luck Stone ~or~ Ripping Adventures with Plum*

This book was completely unexpected.  It’s a school yarn, but it is unlike the earlier entries into the same genre amongst the Wodehouse oeuvre.  For the most part, I find that Wodehouse’s school books tend to be centered on a great sporting rivalry, be it boxing or cricket or one of a thousand other diversions that seem to capture the imagination of our youthful heroes.  The sporting obsession is so great that I often find myself wondering if these boys had any time for their studies, what with the required practices, the strategy sessions, and general to-ing and fro-ing.  Part of me is tempted to liken the obsession of winning a match with the need for the Empire to conquer half of the globe, but frankly, it’s a lovely spring morning and I suspect that the marco-historic implications of cricket have been done to death. 

While there are the occasional sporting contests in The Luck Stone, they are not the central pivot around which the entire plot is hinged.  Without giving too much away, there is a MacGuffin that everyone is trying to either protect or purloin.  It finds its way to a school, and from there Wodehouse sets off with a plot replete with danger and intrigue.  Being a fan of Indiana Jones, Tintin, and other such things, I was pleasantly surprised.  For whereas the later Wodehouse books have MacGuffins such silver cow creamers, this one has implications for the ruling house of a certain part of the Empire.  Although I love the later books, part of me wishes that he Wodehouse had gone the cloak and dagger route with just a couple of later novels.  He was very good at it indeed.

Since I have a background in history, I cannot but help to point out two things that intrigued me (aside from the macro-political implications of cricket.  I have a feeling that there is at least one doctoral thesis on this moldering in a library somewhere.).  The book was originally published as a serial that ran from 1908 until 1909, meaning that it came out before the outbreak of World War I.  This would explain why one of the more sympathetic schoolmasters was a German.  He might have been mocked for his funny accent, but he was the only one who really connected with the action and helped our heroes fulfill their missions.  I wonder if such a character would have been viable just a few years later.  The other character that caught my attention was an Indian student who was there with the intent that he would go on to study law at University.  My mind immediately went to Gandhi, but of course he had not yet achieved his notoriety at this point.  Both characters are portrayed using massive stereotypes, but, because both had roles that supported the main story, Wodehouse was not merely laughing at foreigners.  There was a respect there that almost makes the jeers palatable, almost. 

*Read March 2016