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. 

Knocking on the Fourth Wall

One of the comedic elements that I appreciated most about the great, recently late, 30 Rock was its willingness to break the fourth wall and acknowledge its audience.  This is by no means a new technique, although there were many ways that the writers had a new take on this approach.*  One of my more favorite ones was an obvious plug for Verzion, after which, Tina Fey’s character turned to the screen and asked, “Can we have our money now?”  Breaking the fourth wall allows the audience to become even more embroiled in the action.  Consider Matthew Broderick’s star turn in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  The film was amazing in and of itself, but by having the main character address the audience in a conspiratorial manner, it felt as though we were a part of this fantastic, impossible day.  Perhaps it is easier to believe, or at least accept as plausible, an unusual situation when you’re involved with it on level that you would not be normally.

An argument could be made that first-person narration starts to deconstruct the fourth wall, but in Wodehouse the style is more gentle than blatant.  In the later Jeeves and Wooster novels, when Bertie makes reference to the Scripture Knowledge prize or his article on What the Well-Dress Gentleman is Wearing that was published in his aunt’s magazine, he usually states that the reader probably knows all about them.  I was a little thrown, then, when I was reading Laughing Gas last month, and came across this quotation: “The Hitlers and Mussolinis of the picture world… What do they do?  They ship these assortments of New York playwrights and English novelists out here and leave it all to them.  Outside talent doesn’t get a chance.”**  It just so happens that Wodehouse was one of those English novelists in Hollywood.  My Wodehouse-man uncle told me that Plum was drummed out of Tinseltown for publicly acknowledging that he was earning a lot of money for almost no work.  This passage felt almost as though it was an apology to the native writers he must have met during his time there.  Like most of Wodehouse, though, nothing is blatant.  The fourth wall is merely being touched, not shattered.

Speaking of being shattered, anyone who is recovering from a wretched marriage or a cruel break-up should not touch Gone Girl with even a fifty-foot pole.  This novel annihilates the fourth wall, drawing the audience in to some extremely tawdry events that make you question the basic decency of humanity.  It is beautifully written and constructed, but its soul is black and I wonder at the wisdom of reading such things (for the record, I‘m pressing on because it is for a book club).  I am reminded of a Nietzche quotation that I came across last week: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”  Sometimes, there are very good reasons to have walls protecting people. 

*Now that I’m thinking about it though, I wonder when it began.  I was involved with a few Shakespearian productions when I was younger.  While my dim, addled memory does not recall a stage direction requiring the actor to address the audience, I do know that it happens all the time.  Perhaps it was a trick in live stage productions used to draw in an audience that became more formalized later on.  Who knows.  There is probably a doctoral thesis all about this moldering away in the bowels of a library somewhere. 

** For reference, this novel was written in 1936, I.e. before the start of WW II.  There is a lot of debate surrounding some controversial radio broadcasts he made during the conflict about whether Wodehouse was politically naïve.  Reading this casts massive shadows of doubt on this for me. 

The Immortal Gold-Digger

I time-traveled this month and shot into the future.  For a while now, I’ve been focusing on Wodehouse’s early oeuvre, mostly from the teens and 1920’s.  It has been fascinating to observe the style evolution of one of the acknowledged masters of English prose.  The Girl in Blue was written at the other end of his career and was published in 1970(ish).  The plotting was exquisitely tight and the four storylines (or was it five; it was hard to tell because they whizzed about with astonishing speed) came in and out of the frame like the warp and weft threads of a skilled weaver.  Lines were repeated for comic effect, and I got the sense that Plum was having fun playing with details.

To my astonishment, one of the main female characters was an air hostess.  Generally, the women in these stories are employed as private secretaries, writers, or actresses.  While all three of these professions also appeared, the presence of a stewardess reminded me that we weren’t in the Kansas of the 1930’s anymore.*  The female anti-hero was a writer who was astoundingly beautiful and unsuccessfully tried to nab an American corporate lawyer.  What is more, she had a secondary occupation: gold-digger, which is probably one of the oldest professions in the written word.  The contempt that Wodehouse had for this woman almost dripped off of the page.  Fortune-hunters have always had an interesting time of it in literature.  They can be of the cool and calculating mold, like Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre, or a pitiable lass thrust into desperate circumstances; like Gwendolyn in Daniel Deronda and about a thousand others I could rattle off. 

Vera, such as was her name, was in a different camp.  True, she possessed the element of cool calculation that is a universal trait of your average adventuress, but what struck me was that Wodehouse wrote about her in a style that was reminiscent of the way that he wrote his underworld characters.  The thieves that appear in Wodehouse, and there are quite a lot of them, always work in pairs or groups, and there are numerous conversations that transpire as they concoct their nefarious schemes.  While there was no official criminal gang, Vera did have a number of conversations with her mother, a successful gold-digger herself, wherein they laid out the means by which Vera would ensnare her prey.  Fortunately for our American friend, his sister intervened and tried to knock sense into him, and then he caught the object of his lust kissing another man. 

There were certainly other women in Wodehouse who were fortune-seekers, or who had other motives regarding their intendeds, but this was the first time that I know of where he treated this type as a criminal.  I could speculate about what brought about this change in attitude, but the truth is, without access to the man himself, the answer will remain unknown.  My own pet theory is that, having lived through two world wars, a Cold War, and enduring hippies and the emergence of disco, his thinking might have changed.  While there were not many opportunities for women to earn money when Wodehouse put pen to paper at the dawn of the twentieth century, that situation was no longer the case in the 1970’s.  It is possible that, for a man who worked like a dog for over seventy years and wrote about ninety books, he valued the work ethic, and thought that his characters should as well. 

*While I’m ruminating over modernity and Wodehouse, I also had a think this morning about how progressive the women are in these books.  As much as I get impatient with poorly-written works that discuss the representation of women (few have anything important to say, and I am usually left wondering wither the articles on the representation of men?), it is remarkable that women play a leading role in Wodehouse books.  If I’m ever at a loss for material on this blog, I’m afraid that I might pursue this topic at greater length.