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.
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