Meeting Old Friends for the First Time

Something Fresh is the first book about the inhabitants of Blandings Castle.  It is not, however, the first Blandings novel I have read.  Lord Emsworth and his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, are far from being novel acquaintances.  It was very strange then to have him introduced for the first time.  As a character in this book, he had the tendency to float off to the side.  He is not a major presence in the other books, his being does not loom large as, say, as one of the Wooster aunts.  However, in the later books he is made to be a more sympathetic character; in this book, I felt as though having set him up as a dotty old man with a scatty mind, that Wodehouse wrote himself into a corner.  Perhaps part of this lack of motivating force behind the character is that his grand passion, the Empress herself, has yet to arrive upon the scene.  There needs to be something driving a character, even one who is perceived to be away with the fairies most of the time.  When Wodehouse introduced the pig, it probably felt as though everything clicked into place.

I had a situation recently where I encountered earlier manifestations of people I know quite well in the current day, and it reminded me of my encounter with Lord Emsworth in this novel.  Reading the book, I felt as though I was meeting someone I had already met for the first time, and that everything had not been developed.  It must be the sort of thing that time-travelers are subjected to, if that really exists.  My parents’ 40^th wedding anniversary occurred last month.  As part of the celebrations, I put together a large photo montage documenting them through the years.  I had a good laugh looking at the many stages and phases that my parents’ hair went through, documenting my father’s glorious long locks from the 70’s that skimmed his shoulders to today, where he has what can probably most politely be termed a streamlined look.  My mother was not immune to the whims of the ages, as I was reminded that she was afflicted with a perm for a good portion of the Regan years.  Despite these follicular changes, it was very evident that they were my parents, even in their more youthful, carefree incarnations.

The oddest part of it was looking at pictures of me during my first year of life, and then comparing them with pictures of my son from the same time of his life.  We share the same chubby round face, blue eyes and bow-shaped lips.  It is almost like seeing a Xerox, but of course, a closer inspection revealed the differences, much the same as reading further into the Blandings series shows the development of Lord Emsworth’s personality.  My son’s nose is entirely different, and I’m convinced he either stole it from my father or his.  Then there are the differences in temperament and interests.  For instance, in his short life he has already shown more interest in balls used for athletic purposes than I have in my almost four decades on this planet.  He also has a merry twinkle that I’m certain skipped my generation.  Yet there are bits of myself that I do recognize in him, and help me to understand him and not be so anxious about his development. 

Catching up with Lord Emsworth after initially meeting him mid-stream was a little confusing.  After I finished the book, I found myself appreciating how Wodehouse went about modifying him, and finally hitting upon his eureka moment that led to the Emsworth that is more instantly recognizable by Wodehouse nuts (or are we fanatics, or perhaps there is an established collective noun that I don’t know: a gaga of Wodehouse aficionados?).  Getting to know who my son is has a similar feel to it as I see bits of me in him, although ultimately I don’t have the knowledge that he’ll definitely turn out like either of his parents, or develop an overwhelming mania for porcine development for that matter.  Life is not as easily scripted as a book, and thank goodness for that. 

Money for Nothing and Surprising People

The main character in April’s Wodehouse, John Carroll, seems to be rather an intellectual dullard throughout most of the proceedings.  Towards the end (should one put a spoiler alert on a book that was written in 1928?), he shows an inner cunning that perhaps even he had not known he possessed.  In fact, those who are witness to his ability to concoct a workable scheme are also surprised.  The emergence of his intellect resolved a part of the construction of the book that had been bothering me.  Wodehouse very frequently plays off someone who is not a brainbox with a brilliant schemer.  The obvious example is Jeeves and Wooster, but I have noticed other such parallels.  Maybe the explanation lies in the fact that this book comes rather early on in Wodehouse‘s career, when his style was a bit more changeable.  Certainly, the minimalism I noted in the school tales had at this time been replaced by the more florid descriptions and dialogue, but there is still a feeling that he has not quite settled into the fiction-churning machine that he would become in his later years.  All of which makes it plausible that the supposed no-hoper at the beginning of the book transforms into its hero.

Thinking about people who are not what they seem reminded me of one of my friends from college.  We met in a writing class, and, at first glance, she seemed as though butter would not melt in her mouth.  She has the wide blue eyes, conservative dress and innocent expression that would convince anyone that here was someone who was probably only sweetness and light, and perhaps someone who might be a push-over.  Adding to the picture was that she hailed from Canada, the land of nice, polite people, or so the stereotype would have us believe.  As I got to know her over the ensuing years, I realized that she had a wicked sense of humor and enough mettle to tussle in the ultra-competitive world of pre-med at our alma mater.  I almost respect her more for having a deceptive façade.

I was reminded about the extremes of deceptive personality types in another book I read this month, The Psychopath Test.  Mind you, I don’t normally go around reading about the mentally unbalanced, but this was for a book club.  So of I went, going along with the rather neurotic author as he learned about the lists developed by psychologists to determine whether or not someone was a psychopath.  The most startling observation he made was that there are a lot of people in power who could technically fit the profile.  Then, he started seeing psychopathic traits in a lot of the people he met.  Some of the members of my book club reported doing the same thing, and I caught myself playing the game once or twice. 

I have met at least one psychopath in my life, and, let me tell you, I try to know where this person is for avoidance purposes.  When I found that I was trying to identify more, I stopped myself.  A few years ago, I watched a documentary about the effects of an eruption of the super volcano that is temporarily lying dormant underneath Yellowstone National Park.  The description of the resulting devastation terrified me, not least because I learned that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.  When the show ended, one of the friends I watched the show with turned to me and said something along the lines of, “For my sanity, I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.”  This is the attitude that I will be adopting about The Psychopath Test.  It was entertaining enough, but it could be dangerous to my well-being in the long run.  Far better to stick with plumbing the hidden depths of an innocuous Wodehouse character. 

The Heart of a Goof

My father’s life for the last thirty-eight years has been intertwined with those of two high-strung, vaguely neurotic women (namely, my mother and me).  This is a man whose feminine side is not the most overt, and who spent a great deal of his youth playing the sports that I would spend a great deal of mine trying to avoid.  Despite this, he does have the unfortunate tendency to be the sole parent on duty when tragedy befalls me, and has learned over the years how to deal effectively with a woe-ridden, snotty female. 

Over twenty years ago, which, now that I think about it, was during my laugh-a-minute adolescence, he took up golf.  It was a smart move made by a very smart man.  If possible, my mother is even less athletically inclined that I am, so there was no chance that either of us would be clamoring to join him on the links.  He had at last found his sanctuary, and every spring he gets a misty look in his eyes when he contemplates the beginning of the season. 

As I stated above, my appreciation of the game is limited.  Occasionally, I have watched televised golf tournaments with my father, but they are not the most riveting of viewing.  So it was with my father in mind that I took up March’s book, which was a collection of Wodehouse golf tales.  To be honest, the first few stories held only slightly more interest than watching a pre-scandal Tiger Woods meandering around yet another rolling green field.  I was struck with the mania that Wodehouse seems to have had for the game.  This is a man who only casually describes the collapse of marriages and breaking of engagements, yet in golf, one finds the alpha and omega of life, the source of true passion.  He may only have been sarcastic about the importance of the game, but somehow, given the number of golf stories that he wrote and the fact that one usually jokes about the things they hold most dear, I don’t think this is the case.  He may have been married to Ethel for years and have been devoted to her, but in golf, at least, he had a favored mistress.

The book, for me, at least, took a dramatic upturn in quality with the last three stories.  They concern a trio involved in a romantic triangle and their adventures over the years.  Golf is only tangentially involved.  For me, a non-golfer, it strikes just the right balance of displaying Wodehouse’s slightly loopy obsession and a good yarn.  I have the feeling that the golfers among us would disagree, and would defend to their death the importance of stories describing the effect of red flannel plus-fours on one’s game.  To them, I can only nod sympathetically, knowing that it is best not to debate a fanatic.

A Prefect’s Uncle and Other Surprises

There is a tense, sparse quality to Wodehouse’s early work that almost reminds me of Hemingway.  I have noted before that the earlier works tend to have pages and pages of dialogue with maybe one of two speech markers.  The result is that the reader (or at least, this particular one) looses track of whom is talking.  When I am floundering in such a morass, sometimes counting backwards from the last speech marker, I wonder if it makes a difference to know which character is talking.  Perhaps Wodehouse meant only to have a run of dialogue, demonstrating how overly worked up about everything his teenagers are, knowing full well that almost everything they are concerned about comes to nothing.

This is perhaps a bit too existential a reading of Wodehouse.  I am not very familiar with the school yarn genre of the early twentieth century; it could be that they were all written in a similar fashion  Certainly, in his later works, the author diverges from his earlier style.  Children are for the most part only sideline players, sometimes the instigators of plot, but never, from what I can tell, the narrator or hero.  Then again, Wodehouse wrote his teenagers almost as if they were adults (and, some can argue that Bertie Wooster is merely an adolescent in a man’s body).  Another style development is that Woodhouse’s descriptions became more developed and lush.  He took great enjoyment in similes, and could run a mile with a metaphor.  One of the nice things about reading the works of an author who published over such a long period of time is becoming familiar with these changes.

There are two other, unrelated, comments that I had which are connected to this book.  The first was that, towards the end, one of the prefects calls a group of students to task for bullying.  Having been peripherally involved with the development of an anti-bullying policy for a local school last year, I almost dropped the book to hear about what we think of as a modern problem.  From what I can tell, we all knew that bullying has been going on since time immemorial, but that somehow it has become more intense in our modern age.   It is nice to know that there is nothing new under the sun, although still a little unsettling to think that intense bullying has always been a concern.

The second was a delightful encounter I had while reading this book.  You never know who you are going to meet on the commuter rail.  I have run into old classmates, teachers, long-lost friends and yoga buddies, to name a few.  The most notable encounter happened one evening when I plopped myself down on a two-seater, next to a man who was reading a Jeffrey Archer thriller.  That was notable enough, as not many people read Archer.  He was more surprised when he saw that I was reading a P.G. Wodehouse novel.  It turns out that my seat companion was the president of the Toronto Wodehouse association, and we had a wonderful ride talking about the master .  It also turns out that he works with the company that will be re-developing the old coal plant site in Salem, a project that is near and dear to my heart, as I always approve of any project that will improve my native city.  We also had a few other bizarre similarities, one of which being that his wife and I are alumnae of the same alma mater.  It turns out that the world of Wodehouse holds many surprises and delights, and not all of them are limited to the text between the covers. 

Katniss Everdeen vs. Bertie Wooster

In January, I read The Man Upstairs, which is yet another early collection of Wodehouse’s short stories.  What struck me about these stories as a collection is how they went back and forth between using a first and third person narrator.  I am a huge fan of first-person narrators.  My favorite novel from my teenage years, Jane Eyre, contains one of the most oft-referenced lines in first person narration (i.e. “Reader, I married him.”  This still gives me shivers every time I see it.).

When I write, I prefer to use the first person, which almost feels like an improvisational acting exercise.  Getting inside the head of one person and telling a tale is a useful trick for drawing in the reader, because it as though we are being taken into a confidence.  The reading experience becomes even more enjoyable for me when the reliability of that narrator is called into question, which happens in The Turn of the Screw or the more recent The Little Stranger (both, interestingly enough, are Gothic novels, but that is something to consider elsewhere).  As a reader coping with a narrator with uncertain motivation, I pull back and begin to examine other possibilities.  Did, in fact, that person jump to her death, or was she coerced by a supernatural being or was she killed by the narrator? 

The most recent first-person escape I went on was The Hunger Games trilogy. Those books are narrated by a girl in her late teens, which is not the most reliable age group for depicting reality in my experience (which is as it should be.  Teenagers need to hyper-emote, otherwise they become stunted adults.).  Added in to the mix is that Katniss Everdeen is put through some rather extreme situations, meaning that you can toss out any hopes for getting the full picture.  The author has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of rebellion, and I have some theories about why those books are particularly popular at this point in time, but in the interests of this blog, what caught my attention most was the amount of emotion that was shown. 

If one ever wanted to demonstrate to an alien race the stereotypical emotional landscape of an American young woman (all right, Panem is not exactly the US, but close enough) and a British man, you would do worse than giving them The Hunger Games and My Man Jeeves.  Katniss’ emotions leap out at you, in fact, they propel the storyline right up to the end.  Concepts like marriage and family loyalty are taken very seriously.  One could argue that is because the stakes are literally life and death, although I find that even teenagers who are not fighting to survive tend to take everything Very Seriously (I might have been a case in point).   Bertie, and other Wodehouse first person narrators, tend to be bounced around by life’s waves of tumult.  They enter into engagements, sometimes accidentally, and seemed resigned to them, and are no less vexed when they are broken.  The stakes never include death, merely the loss of face, a butler, or some other prized possession. 

I could go on about the historical of the time when both books were written.  At the time they were published, just about all of Wodehouse’s readers would have lived through at least one World War, whereas contemporary American readers (with the obvious exception of veterans and returning soldiers) have little experience with war.  This is not my point though.  What I found to be most interesting was how one form of storytelling can be twisted deftly used to convey early twentieth century insouciance and post-Apocalyptic angst.

Carry on, Jeeves Musings

In December, I read this collection of Bertie and Jeeves stories, which includes the first meeting of the renowned pair.  The last story, Bertie Changes His Mind, is one of the few in the Wodehouse canon that is told from Jeeves’ point of view.  Although it is a nice change of pace, I am glad that there are not many like this.  I strongly suspect that this was done on purpose by Wodehouse, who, if he was certain of anything, knew what people would read again and again.  Only the other day, I was talking about Wodehouse with the headmaster of my high school, and he noted that, after a while, he found it difficult to distinguish between one story and another.  There are a lot of recycled plots, it is true, but I find that there are enough differences in the details to make them worth reading.  Well, I would think that, wouldn’t I, given that I’m committed to reading the entire lot.  Writing ninety novels and short story collections during one’s lifetime practically requires repetition. 

It is not uncommon to have the seemingly less-intelligent character pose as the narrator.  One of the more famous examples of this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s device of having Dr. Watson narrate the Sherlock Holmes stories (Holmes himself is the narrator of a couple of later stories).  Of course, I am hardly the first one to see parallels between Holmes and Watson and Jeeves and Wooster.  In “Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes or Le Mot Juste,” Kristin Thompson likens Jeeves to Holmes, and expounds on textual similarities, including references to grey matter and that sort of thing, that indicates that Wodehouse was explicitly making a connection between the butler and the sleuth. 

Why is it so common to have the less-brilliant relate the action?  Two thoughts immediately spring to mind, and I would not doubt if a whole host of other reasons come in to play.  The first issue is reader accessibility.  After all, if one is aiming to be a popular author, then it would fly in the face of logic to alienate a group of potential readers who might feel as though they were being patronized by a superior mind.  In the US, there is a general feeling of mistrust towards the so-called intellectual elite.  Somehow I don’t think that this is a new phenomena, as people really have not changed much in the past couple of thousand years, and probably longer than that. 

The second thought is that the character of Jeeves, and Holmes as well, is enshrouded by an air of mystery.  While the reader is privy to the great mind’s solutions, we do not know exactly how that mind operates.  At the end of each story, the reader is given some insight into Jeeves‘ thought process, although there is often the feeling that we do not know the entire story.  Like God, Jeeves works in mysterious ways, and part of his allure is that element of the unknowable.  Should Jeeves be the central narrator, that carefully cultivated air would erode.  We would see too much of the man behind the curtain and lose part of the special quality of the Jeeves and Wooster stories.  Revealing the man behind the curtain lead to the ousting of the Wizard from Oz, and perhaps something similar would have happened with Jeeves and Wooster had Wodehouse plotted a similar coup. 

Strange Obsession

One of the characters in the Wodehouse pantheon who never fails to irk me is Gussie Fink-Nottle.  My main objection to him is that he is a wet blanket who cannot cope with life.  Reading between the lines, I feel that Bertie Wooster feels the same about him, but continues to be his chum out of a sense of loyalty that he refers to as the Code of the Woosters.  I suppose we all have people like this in our lives whose mere presence causes us to sigh and wish that things were different, but still we tolerate them because there but for the grace of God go I, blah blah blah.  Gussie’s main preoccupation in life is his love of newts.  He has quite the collection and can speak about the amphibians ad nauseam.  His obsession with them has always amused me, as they seem to be such unlikely things to capture a person’s fascination.  My amusement dried up abruptly when I realized that I, too, am obsessed by an unlikely thing.

It all began innocently enough.  My house is over a hundred years old and has a forced hot-air heating system.  While the heat is incomparable, it does dry out the air quite a lot, which causes a lot of tickly throats in the morning and aggravates my cat’s asthma.  The obvious remedy is to run a humidifier.  I bought a wonderful one a couple of years ago.  It was a Sunbeam ultrasonic model.  Not only could you set the desired humidity percentage, but it also shut off automatically when those levels were attained and there were no filters involved.  It was silent, and served me well for a year and a half, until, alas, I hit the clumsy stage of my pregnancy.  Since I was living alone at that point, I was responsible for filling the reservoir.  One night, I dropped it in the bathtub and cracked it.  I spent far too much time searching for a replacement reservoir on the internet after being informed by the good people at Sunbeam that, not only was a replacement reservoir not available, but they no longer made that particular model.  The pregnancy hormones rendered me inconsolable, bemoaning that of all the losses that I had experienced recently, from my failed relationship right on down to my missing memory stick, this was the sharpest sting.  Fortunately for my mental health, I had some chocolate, dusted myself off and concocted a plan.

It being February, when all reasonable people had bought their humidifiers and the stores were stocking bikinis in their place, I was out of luck.  Against my better judgment, I bought a couple of Crane models from Amazon.  I really ought to have paid attention to the reviews, a good half of which almost screamed “Do not buy this!” at me.  Reason was clouded by the blind panic that was brought on by the twin worries of my son’s imminent birth and my cat’s asthmatic condition.  Besides, one of them was shaped like a duck, the perfect thing in a nursery.  The appliances arrived and worked well throughout my maternity leave, misting the air and providing respiratory comfort to all and sundry.

Then the summer hit, and my son developed his first case of the sniffles.  The poor mite had to endure regular applications of saline to his nose and tussles with a Swedish Snot Sucker.  I was told that the air conditioners were drying out the air and to run humidifiers.  Up to the attic went I to retrieve the first Crane humidifier, certain that it would provide the same reliable service that it had during the early spring.  So it did, for one week and then it refused to send as much as a wisp of moisture into the air.  The second unit responded similarly, although this one operated for only a couple of days.  By that time, the weather had broken and the sniffles had dissipated.  Of course, being a baby, he got sick again a month later, again necessitating a humidifier. 

That was in September and since then, I have bought three humidifiers and returned one.  One is in my bedroom and another in my son’s room.  A third is needed for my living room because, as much as I try to lure my asthmatic cat into spending the day snoozing in my room, he is very fond of a spot on the couch directly across from a heating vent.  I have tried carrying a humidifier from room to room, but given my track record, I know it is almost a matter of time before disaster happens.  For reasons unknown to me, probably yearning for a lost love and wanting to recapture the magic, I called Sunbeam and, when I heard that they had a really good ultrasonic model out, I bought two so as to have a back-up or a spare reservoir when/if I break one.  Awkwardly enough, I placed that order after speaking with the Crane people, who informed me that I could have replacement models sent as my units were still under warranty.  I had plumed for a refund, but there was nothing doing.  It seemed madness to have two broken humidifiers in my house when I would have two working ones, albeit working ones that I will never trust, hence the reason why I did not cancel the Sunbeam order.  When all of this is done, I will have six humidifiers in my house. 

My madness only became clear to me when I was asking my father if he wanted a humidifier (a Crane obviously, as I suspect I will start hoarding ultrasonic Sunbeam humidifiers now) and he asked me why I had one on offer.  This put Gussie’s newt-loving tendencies into perspective.  Certainly, I once made the acquaintance of a particularly compelling bearded lizard named Eugene, and thus understand the allure of something that others might put into the creepy and slimy category.  No one, to my knowledge, in literature or real life, has ever had a soft spot for a Sunbeam humidifier manufactured in 2008 with adjustable humidity levels and automatic shut-off.  Were I ever to meet Gussie in the street, I would have to slink off, knowing him to be the better human being.  Thank goodness for my self-respect that he is only a fictional character.