The Wodehouse Code

I know that I’ve read The Code of the Woosters at least on two other occasions.  It is a delightful book, and I can think of no better way to begin the summer season then by considering the theft of a silver cow creamer.  Of course, it is not technically summer yet,* I think, but we’ve relaxed the dress code at work, so it might as well be.  During my eight-year mission to read the collected Wodehouse, I have unofficially decided to reserve Jeeves and Wooster books for the summer.  My uncle, the one who shares my Wodehouse obsession,** only reads Wodehouse during the summer, because he feels as though the novel’s lighthearted qualities can only be fully appreciated during the season of heat and lassitude (and, given that we live in New England, absurd levels of humidity). 

I understand this urge to associate books with different seasons.  Recently, I finished Wolf Hall.  It is an admirable book, and has nabbed noteworthy prizes, but somehow I wish that I had read it during the winter.  Maybe because the Tudor period coincided with a miniature Ice Age I always think of that time as a chilly one.  At any rate, now is the season when I have traditionally taken up books that are light in nature.  That might be a little different this year, because I have, at long last, come to the decision that I really ought to read the Game of Thrones series.  Goodness knows there is little happiness in those books; the only ones who seem to get a kick out of life are the sadistic characters.  That being said, I have seen the three seasons of the HBO production of the show, and I think my long-suffering boyfriend might well and truly burst if he has to keep certain plot developments to himself for very much longer. 

This is not a decision that I have made rashly.  Each of those five tomes is a door-stopper, and what with my laundry list of responsibilities, my reading time is not as plentiful as I would like it to be.  Still, I do not let long works put me off; I did read 1Q84 this year, and that book clocked in at over 900 pages.  The decision to read another Murakami book came easily.  He is, after all, one of my favorite writers, and I never regret time spent with him.  There are some books that I flatly refuse to read.  The most notable is the Twilight series, mostly because I cannot buy into the notion of sparkly vampires.  When it comes to choosing my reading material, I lean toward authors I know, non-fiction works on topics that interest me (mostly biographies of the oddballs who spice up history), and books that I feel will have some lasting importance.  I also belong to a book club, which has induced me to read things, like Gone Girl, that I might not have picked up on my own.  I did, however, refuse to endorse reading a Sweet Valley High books as our summer selection. 

One of the things that I like about Wodehouse is that he is still being read, despite his tone, which is very much a product of the early 20^th century.  The endorsement of a century of readers makes me feel comfortable with devoting years of my life to him.  As much as I would like to say that I simply don’t care what other people think, the truth of the matter is that I do.  And while Plum probably does not have as many readers as George R.R. Martin these days, there is something about having the approving heft of the ages behind me.

*Please note that I write this in mid-June, during was very chilly spring.  My bleeding heart shrub loved it, and is now wilting in sweltering heat.

**I have six uncles, two of whom are no longer with us, and two great-uncles, both of whom are reportedly hovering at Death’s door, however, that news is from my Slavic grandmother, and we Slavs are never truly happy unless our lives are somehow tinged with misery.  As I far I know, only one parental brother has succumbed to Plum’s siren call, although who knows; perhaps those who are on the other side take tea with the master on a regular basis.

Historical Dissonance

Bachelors Anonymous features people concerned with custom made suits and threats of breach of promise cases.  There are Hollywood movie czars and other elements that featured prominently in earlier novels.  The kicker is that the book was written in 1973, hardly a time when young people were concerned with procuring suits from Saville Row.  There could be an argument made that Wodehouse was going for a timeless feeling to his setting, but there were just enough elements present that argue that he was intentionally going for a later period.  One of the most poignant was his description of the heroine’s living quarters in a massive house in Notting Hill.  In earlier Wodehouse books, those houses would have held one family and their considerable staff.  Now, however, he notes that no one has the wherewithal to maintain such a residence, so it is chopped up into a number of rooms and the occupants share communal kitchens and living spaces.  Bertie Wooster would have been appalled. 

It was odd for me reading that novel, mostly because it was published just before my birth.  It’s hard to know if it was normal for breach of promise cases to be threatened; certainly, they do not play a role in modern romances in the UK.  The world of Bachelors Anonymous feels a little foreign, although I constantly have to remind myself that I did not have things such as the internet and mobile phones, and hummus was a hippy food when I was a girl.  One of the few television programs I watch regularly is Mad Men, and I constantly remind myself that the real counterparts to the characters portrayed are most likely still with us, that is, providing that they have not succumbed to lung cancer or cirrhosis.  The past is always with us; goodness knows that I am probably an antiquated fossil in the minds of today’s bright young things. 

While the past is always with us, I was musing the other day about how the points of reference I had when I was younger were slipping away.  What brought this home most to me was a conversation I had with my boyfriend, who referenced a report on NPR which stated that approximately 900 World War II veterans were dying each day.  When I was small, it was normal to encounter World War I vets, and now they are almost an extinct species.  An adult survivor of the concentration camps visited my elementary school; now in interviews I more frequently hear from either the children of those who were liberated from that living nightmare, or those who now, very old, were children at that time.  My son’s historical points of reference will be very different; perhaps his old dusty war will be Vietnam, or Desert Storm.  The former, although concluded when I was growing up, was a recent memory and the latter had a profound effect on me during high school. 

All of which leads me back to contemplating Wodehouse in the years before his death.  He was a living legend, although one best known for writing about a time and a society long since passed.  I cannot fathom what it must have been like for someone who lived through both world wars coping with disco balls, Andy Warhol, and Watergate.  A book of Plum’s letters recently came out, and I hope that there are some from his later years as I am interested to see how he reacted to things as he aged.  Did he embrace the changes, or, as I suspect from reading Bachelors Anonymous, did he try to maintain his grip on things by trying to impose elements of a time long gone in the created worlds of his fiction? 

Why So Serious?

The female romantic heroine of  The Little Nugget surprised me.  Over the course of reading forty-odd Wodehouse books, I have come to expect that the head female, if not a wizened Wooster aunt, will almost always be a strong-willed, intelligent young woman who provides insight and wisdom that our male lead lacks.  She is also easy on the eyes.  Sometimes, she might be from the upper classes and not have a financial worry in the world, but just as frequently I find that she is a working girl, who has to consider her life choices carefully. 

While Audrey Sheridan is all of these things, she is also a widow.  Between her first courtship with our hero, Peter Burns, and their reunion a few years later, she had married some awful man who subsequently shuffled off his mortal coil.  Not only has she suffered this loss, but because of it, Mrs. Sheridan was forced to endure a series of rather trying jobs to sustain herself.  When the reader hears about her past, there is a real sense of suffering and hardship that has not been present in any of the other Wodehouse books, even those set in the depths of the Depression.  While other heroines might have had difficulties in their past, there is a real sense of melancholy and strife that was completely new to me.  Mrs. Sheridan has had a range of experience uncommon in a Wodehouse female.

I had the opportunity to talk about this with my uncle, the one who also suffers from a case of Wodehouse-mania.  We were feeding my son, who is now a boisterous two years old, his dinner when I remarked upon my little revelation.  The back flap of the Overlook edition has a brief biography of Wodehouse, and it stated that he married his wife, Ethel Rowley, in 1914.  Coincidentally, this was also the year of the book’s publication.  I knew that Ethel Rowley was a widow twice-over when she met Wodehouse, and my uncle filled me in a little more about the unfortunate circumstances that ended her two previous marriages.  At this point, I was beginning to think that Wodehouse must have created the character of Audrey Sheridan in honor of Ethel Rowley.  Although the book was published in 1913, I reasoned that they might have met before then and had begun courting when Wodehouse wrote this book.  My uncle agreed that that might indeed have been the case, and we continued to induce my son and heir to finish his cottage cheese. 

What I had not counted on was the fact that our Plum was a romantic.  There are numerous references to love at first sight in his novels, and about half of those infatuations typically end in engagements by the story’s end.  It turns out that our hero might have been a victim of Cupid’s arrow.  He met Ethel at a party that was held on August 3, 1914 and they were married less than two months later on September 30, 1914.*  The Little Nugget was first published in Munsey’s Magazine in August 1913, a full year before the meeting.  Audrey Sheridan is not an ode to Ethel Rowley. 

I could easily speculate endlessly on the reasons why Wodehouse assigned a relatively grave background to Mrs. Sheridan.  Perhaps as Plum developed his comedic style, he realized that his ingénues’ lives should not be darkened by a black cloud.  Perhaps he was in some way affected by the brewing storm that resulted in the outbreak of World War I.  What is without a doubt is that he does have a delight in using strong female characters, and I will end with a quotation that I found on page 228 that I found to be particularly lovely:

“Women have the gift of being courageous at times when they might legitimately give way.  It is part of their unexpectedness.” 

*I’ve always wondered about the typical length of courtships historically.  Have they gotten longer?  My parents met and were married inside of six months 41 years ago and are still going strong.  Conversely, the unmitigated disaster that was my failed marriage was preceded by a two and a half year entanglement. 

P.G. Wodehouse, Management Specialist

Oddly enough, the book in which Wodehouse talks in great detail about the nitty-grity hassles of the working world is set in a school.  Instead of focusing on the faculty, the prefects are the main characters.  There are a lot of Wodehouse novels that focus around work, either in its procurement or loss.  There are also a lot of his novels that concentrate on money-making schemes, but these are never sustained endeavors or anything that can be described as a career.  Up until now, I had not encountered any that presented such a clear picture of the dangers of a micro-manager. 

The action in The Head of Kay’s revolves around an upstart house, or hall of residence, in an English public school.  Each house is named after its headmaster, in this case, Mr. Kay.  He is not someone I would ever want to have in charge of anything involving humans, least of all a house full of teenaged boys.  He is inflexible and unwavering in his approach to discipline, and blames his head prefect, Fenn, for discipline infractions that occurred while he was not present in the house.  There are many time when Kay ticks off the head of house in front of the other students, which is never the way forward.  He is the sort of maddening individual that thrusts his nose into things and makes pronouncements without knowing their full background.  Instead of thinking that he is the problem, Kay is convinced that it is Fenn’s issue and summarily has him replaced by a prefect from another house. Kennedy.  Complicating matters is the fact that the two boys are friends, and at first their relationship is strained under the new management structure.

I have been very lucky in my professional career to have had some excellent supervisors and have been mostly spared form the scourge of micro-management.  Sadly, many of my friends have not been so fortunate, and so hearing about the lack of trust that abounded in Kay’s house was uncomfortably familiar.  The dramatic change of head rang in my head as a prime example of the toxic workplaces that I have read about in the occasional management book that I peruse. 

Part of me was hoping that the two friends would concoct a scheme that would put Kay in his proper place.  The management crisis is only solved completely by Kay leaving the school to become the headmaster of another (good luck to them, I say).  This feels like a much more realistic conclusion that one finds in later Wodehouse books.  The Head of Kay’s was written in 1905, only a few years before Wodehouse left formal employment at the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (now known as HSBC, possibly, although don’t hold me to that because it’s difficult keeping abreast of these banks and their name changes).  I had the feeling while reading this book that Wodehouse had a few managerial demons from his professional life to exorcise.  Would that such an easy solution be had by all of my friends facing challenging managers.

A Wodehouse by Any Other Name

February’s Wodehouse selection, Company for Henry, is a solid enough book.  Not one in the superior rank, but amusing enough to keep me from drifting off into slumber on the morning train.  The plot is not as tight as other efforts, in fact, I detected a sort of late-career malaise had crept in, as though Plum dashed this off to pay a tax bill.

What caught my eye about the book is that it is one of the many Wodehouse novels that has both a US and UK title.  On this side of the pond, it appeared on the shelves as The Purloined Paperweight, while in Blighty it was Company for Henry.  The other noticeable tid-bit is its publication date: 1967.  To my ears. The Purloined Paperweight sounds vaguely old-fashioned.  Even though it was almost 50 years ago, I can imagine it sounding just as square to the habitués of the swinging 1960s.  The title sounds as though it should be headlining a short story written by an early 20^th century Conan Doyle poseur.  I spent the better part of last week, that is, when I was not saving my cats from my toddler’s Reign of Terror, wondering about the publishing house’s intent.  Did they want to appeal to an older crowd, who might have been waxing nostalgic about the good old days whilst being confronted by miniskirts and hippies?  Or was their intention to launch an ironic advertising campaign, akin to today’s hipsters embracing facial hair that not long ago would have condemned them to the lunatic fringe?  So many questions, particularly when Company for Henry works better as a description for a book.*

The vogue for different titles in the US and UK seems to have diminished considerably in recent times.**  Perhaps it can be attributed to the sheer number of British imports that are flooding into this country.  Dr. Who just would not be the same if it was called something like The Adventures of the Tardis.  The internet has also helped to close a number of cultural gaps: I was well and truly spoiled for the most recent series of Downton Abbey, which is admittedly handy because the little television-viewing time I have had seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate (no bad thing that).  Perhaps the next sign of cultural proximity will come when books originally written in different languages will have directly translated titles, meaning that instead of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo history will remember Men Who Hate Women.  Somehow, though, I think that it will take a little while before the American market is quite so progressive.

*It must be said that Company for Henry strikes me as being the title of a folk-song that would be on the B-side of a Kinks single. 

**The most recent example I have seen is the British spy series, which over here is called MI5 and was originally entitled Spooks.  I can envision many a face at PBS blanching upon encountering that potential PC nightmare.