For Want of an Ending

Love among the Chickens started off with a bang.  After the first third, I was beginning to wonder if it was going to become my favorite Wodehouse book (not that I have one, officially.  I initially decided to retain judgment until all of the contestants had presented themselves).  Two bits in particular caught my fancy, which, in context, had me giggling helplessly.  Should this happen more often, I suspect that my fellow Commuter Rail passengers might have me committed.  The first was the description of a chase between the narrator and a particularly vile member of the poultry race called Aunt Elizabeth.  He was taxed a considerable amount by this hen, although he had tried to remain a gentleman about the entire ordeal, until:
“I am not a violent or quick-tempered man, but I have my self-respect.  I will not be sneered at by hens.”  p. 49

The second was the description of a cold dinner that was to be served to our heroes:

“A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way.  I do not know how else to describe it.  It wore a blatant, rakish, nemo-me-impune-lacessit air, and I noticed that the professor shivered slightly as he saw it.”  p. 65

The rest of the book, which introduced the character Ukridge, whom Wodehouse would write about later on in his career, trots along merrily.  The narrator, an author based in London looking for a diversion from the city, agrees to start a chicken farm with him.  The story is told in first-person narration, and it was difficult to separate this character from the young Wodehouse.  Given that it was written in 1906, perhaps Wodehouse injected a bit of himself into the character.  He does not reach the imbecilic height of Bertie Wooster, although, by agreeing to start a farm with a dubious person, one detects a sense of whimsy.

The problem that I had with the book was that the ending was flat.  Endings are difficult things, in life as in writing.  Oddly enough, I have been thinking a lot about ending recently because I am going through a slew of them on both the personal and professional fronts, which is a bit disconcerting, to say the least.  The thing about a book, unlike life, is that one has control over the ending.  Wodehouse normally leaves you firm in the knowledge of what happened to the characters.  This time around, I was not so certain that the object of the narrator’s affections would keep their engagement, owing to certain events that concern the dissolution of the farm (I would write spoiler alert, but, honestly, the novel is over a century old.  It’s akin to having to stop yourself from telling people not to become too attached to Anna Karenina.).  Then there was the idea that the narrator probably really should be getting back to London, although that was not mentioned.  It sort of drifted off, instead of, like many an American Olympic gymnast, sticking a firm landing.  One reason that I think crime procedurals are so popular is that there is a finality that people rarely get in everyday life.  One knows what happens, and moves on.  I did not appreciate the sense of being dangled at the end, and this was what took Love among the Chickens out of the favorite Wodehouse tome race, despite a strong early showing. 

Wodehouse the Religious Fanatic

In the aforementioned essay on cricket, which I plowed through because of my devotion to my goal and with the knowledge that it was only seven pages long, comes this little entry:

                “There are misguided people who complain that cricket is becoming a business more than a game, as if that were not to be the most fortunate thing that could happen.  When it ceases to be a mere business and becomes a religious ceremony, it will be a sign that the millennium is at hand.” 

The funny thing is that this essay appears in a book that goes on at length about rugby (or, football as it is called in the book itself.  Thank goodness I am fairly fluent in early twentieth-century British English, or I would have been completely lost.).  Cricket makes a brief appearance, but only in passing.  I got the feeling that it was mentioned only because it was one of the sports that the inmates of St. Austin’s used to while away the time.  Similar mention is made of boxing and cross-country running, and those sports are also not the subject of Wodehouse’s lyrical waxing. 

Much of the drama of St. Austin’s revolves around the rugby team and various house cups, etc.  Later on in the Wodehouse oeuvre, golf makes a serious appearance.  As I have noted in earlier entries, entire books are devoted to the sport, which makes me happy that I endured watching coverage of the Ryder Cup and other tournaments with my father years ago.  At least I know what goes on in golf.  I even comprehend the notion of a handicap, although that took a couple of years to seep in to the old cranium.  While I am only just half-way through the collected works of Wodehouse, I don’t think that there are any great cricketing novels. 

This omission is puzzling.  Why would Wodehouse not write at length about a sport about which he has a religious fervor?  Is it because he holds it too dear?  That I could understand.  My first attempt at novel writing concerned a series of events loosely based on my experiences at graduate school.  I love my alma mater with a passion that mirrors Wodehouse’s feelings about cricket.  (In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that this will go down as my most enduring relationship of all time, excluding, of course, the ardour I have for my son and heir, which is a beast sui generis.)  Unfortunately, the novel is crap.  My subsequent attempts at fiction have not dealt with places that I hold in the same light (frankly, there are none) and are, I think, more successful because of it.  Maybe the same hold true for Wodehouse.  Perhaps he tried to write a decent cricket story and found that they lacked that certain je ne sais quoi.  It is difficult to truly seeing something clearly when you are too close to it.  Reason and religious fanaticism have never been known to be bedfellows. 

Notes on Notes with a Note

At the end of Tales from St. Austin’s there are four essays by Wodehouse written on various topics.  Reading them felt like trying to keep pace with an overactive puppy.  I have fallen into the lull of well-constructed Wodehouse plots.  It was a jolt trying to grapple with the Wodehouseian essay format.  Although I have never head him speak in a pre-recorded interview, I can imagine that the thought process would be remarkably similar.  Massive leaps were made, leaving me wondering if he was talking in another language.  Not helping was the fact that one of the essays consisted of him waxing lyrical about the glories of cricket.  I have a tenuous grasp at best on the rules governing that game, but the musings of this fanatic made me wish that I had paid more attention to those kind souls who tried to impress upon me the evils of an LBW 

I think it was the second essay (it might have been the first, but my mind is still a little blurry after grappling with googlies) that made me pause for a moment.  That essay basically rips apart the notion of footnotes and academic musings.  The thesis gave me pause.  I am, at heart, an unrepentant nerd.  In popular culture, my forbearers are more Frasier Crane and Cliff Craven than the bumbling Bertie whose only claim to academic fame was winning a prize in school for his Biblical knowledge.  I write this blog in my spare time, I adore adding footnotes wherever possible,^[1] and I do read non-fiction in my spare time.  In short, I have the feeling that Sir Pelham would look askance at my existence, despite the fact that he is one of my favorite authors, so surely there must be something redeemable about me. 

Now I could become all meta about this conflict (although I can hear a weak chorus of “too late” in the background) and prosaically wring my hands about the very nature of this blog.  What’s the point?  It is not as if the ghost of P.G. Wodehouse is going to confront me as I write (which would be interesting, considering I write on the train ride to work) and forbid me from carrying on.  One of my favorite quotations is “Proceed until apprehended,” which was given to the world, among other things, by the inimitable Florence Nightingale.  Proceed I shall, until either I finish all of Wodehouse or I am compelled by his spirit to stop (who knows, it is, after all, October, that month when wraiths walk the earth, or perhaps those people proclaiming gloom and doom are merely politicians running for office.  So difficult to tell these days.).

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^[1] Something that I wanted to write about but did not quite merit its own blog entry was the fact that in these essays, I ran across the word “slacker.”  I am a child of the 90’s, when this phrase was popularized especially by the movie of the same title, so was shocked to find it being bandied about by Wodehouse.  There was nothing for it but to take out my magnifying glass and consult my compact Oxford English Dictionary.  Sure enough, I was informed that slacker came into the English language as a way to describe a wastrel in 1898, and that its use became more popular during WW I.  There is a great book about Wodehouse by Kristin Thompson called “Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes” (I have probably mentioned this before), which looks into any number of facets about the author’s oeuvre.  One of the things she asserts is that Wodehouse adored using slang.  Since Tales from St. Austin was published in, this is yet another instance of him being on top of verbal fashions.  I would love to have heard a conversation between him and Richard Linklater.

Boys will be Boys

September’s Wodehouse selection was an early collection of stories set at St. Austin’s, the fictional school that was also the setting for his earlier school days idylls.  About two stories in, I got an odd sense of déjà vu.  It was impossible that I had read the stories before, because the only Wodehouse books I had read prior to this were Jeeves and Wooster stories.  From what I can tell, these stories were never adapted for television, unlike the brilliant versions put on by Fry and Laurie.¹  Despite all of my rationalizing, I could not shake the sensation that there was something very familiar about the exploits of British schoolboys.

Then it hit me, a wave of nostalgia so strong that I almost felt a little queasy.  There was a very good reason for all of this.  I attended graduate school in the UK.  To make ends meet, I was a Junior Dean at my college, responsible for the welfare of over 400 students, poor things.  I’m pleased to say that in my four years on the job, I never lost one of the little buggers.  During that time, though, I did encounter more than one episode of high-spirited shenanigans.  The rugby team, in particular, was particularly active.  The year before I was appointed, the team was suspended for some goings-on that occurred after one of their infamous team dinners. 

It was an unusual position to be in.  There were a few other deans, but I was the only American.  There was the added feeling that we were not undergraduates, but neither were we quite proper staff as well, because as we were students as well, and not much older than the undergraduates.  My main goal was to remind these nascent adults about the rules concerning mature behavior.  This was easier said than done in a country where the drinking age is 18 and the college had its own cheap subsidized bar.  So while reading about young men flouting the boundaries of the school and weaseling out of examinations, I was torn.²  Part of me cheered on our heroes, but another part, the tiny bit that will always be a Junior Dean on patrol, felt sorry for the housemasters.

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¹I was very excited recently when I head that the BBC was adapting the Blandings Castle stories for television, to be broadcast soon.  I’m hoping that they are picked by PBS or BBC America, because otherwise I will have to concoct a plan to escape to the UK for the broadcasts. Unfortunately, this is probably impossible on a fiscal level, given that all of my spare funds are consumed by daycare and diapers.

² Talking about examinations reminds me about the time I was asked to invigilate a student who had to have a transcription taken of his finals papers.  The problem was that the examiners could not read his handwriting, so he had to pay not only for a typist to take his dictation, but for me to be in the room to make certain that everything was above board and that he was not amending wheat he had written (although how they expected me to do that since the handwriting was illegible is beyond me).  At one of our breaks, he seemed very pleased and I asked him if he was annoyed by having to do this.  He replied that, to the contrary, he had expected something like this to happen.  He knew that he could only get everything in that he wanted to say by writing illegibly.  Far from being a punishment, he was thrilled that he had been able to write everything he had wanted.  I forget his final grade, but I will never forget that he was a lawyer in training.

Country Life

                While Wodehouse set a good number of his novels and stories in London and New York, a staggering number were also set in country houses.  This is more than fine by me, a shameless Downton Abbey devotee.  Aside from being a crucial part of upper class living, they also provide an environment where characters are thrown into high relief, and enemies are forced to cope with one another at dinner.  The countryside also provides much amusement in simply getting around.  In The Mating Season (I think, it might be another one), there is a famous bit where Bertie has to go to and fro on a bicycle in the middle of the night to retrieve a key.  People dash off with furious desperation to catch milk trains to avoid sticky situations.  Had the story been in a major city, one could simply hail a cab, which is very efficient but does not provide the same comic scope.

                The book I read in August, Thank You, Jeeves, is a prime example of the country house book, although there is also a yacht and a cottage thrown in for good measure.  There are a couple of interesting variations on a theme with this novel.  First off, this is one of the earlier examples that I know of in Wodehouse where the owner of the estate is in a tight financial position.  This is an acknowledgement that the high death duties (akin to estate taxes in the US) that were imposed by the government in the early 20^th nearly wiped out the members of the upper class who were land rich but cash poor.  Many had to sell off land, valuable artwork, jewelry, and sometimes even the main house itself in order to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.  The theme of financially desperate gentry winds throughout the Wodehouse oeuvre, making them vulnerable to get rich quick schemes, or, causing them to fall in love with rich Americans whose deep pockets will sort out everything.

                The second variation is that Jeeves is temporarily out of Bertie’s employment following a disagreement between the two about a banjolele.  The interesting thing is that it is Jeeves, rather than the socially superior Bertie, who is living in the manor house while Bertie has rented a cottage to avoid some disagreeable neighbors in the metropolis.  The position of these two characters tells us all that we need to know: that Bertie literally cannot maintain his position in comfort without his trusty valet.  In fact, Jeeve’s replacement incinerates the cottage, temporarily rendering Bertie homeless.  Again, had this been in London, Bertie could simply spent the night at his club.  But that’s the problem with the country, everything is a little bit more difficult, and thank goodness for that, because it makes for a very good read. 

The Inimitable Jeeves

This book could very easily have been titled “The Many Loves of Bingo Little.”  It was extremely satisfying to me for a couple of reasons.  The first was that, although a Bertie and Jeeves novel, it heavily featured one of my favorite supporting Wodehouse characters: the aforementioned Mr. Little.  He is an old school chum of Bertie’s, and, in later volumes, tends to be a more stable presence.  The other aspect of the novel that I found enjoyable was its structure.  It felt like a series of interconnected short stories, with details and themes that at first appeared to be inconsequential being woven throughout and are ultimately crucial to the plot.  I always enjoy when an author does not mention something only to abandon it later.  I suppose that is why I’m always a stickler for continuity in television series writing (although, for some odd reason, I always give Doctor Who a pass, perhaps because all of the timey-wimey stuff sometimes boggles my brain.). 

In the course of the book Bingo falls in and out love perhaps a half-dozen times.  At one point, I began to wonder if this was almost meant as a piece of satire.  This came when Bertie was describing his idea of a good time as chucking dinner rolls around the dining room of his private club and then, in the same breath, thinking that Bingo was being more than a little silly due to the rapidity at which he became besotted with the female du jour.  You know you are in trouble when someone who counts the height of their day as food fight thinks you are a bit potty.  Wodehouse’s humor derives mostly from his elegant wordplay and observations.  There is almost no cruelty involved with his comic observations.  In this way, he differs greatly from Edward St. Aubyn, who wrote the Patrick Melrose novels.  I read the first four books of that series this summer (there are five altogether.  The last one was published this year.).  They are highly enjoyable and deeply funny, although the humor I cruelty at its most basic.  St. Aubyn has much in common with Bret Easton Ellis.  His bon mots almost feel like the first grenades being lobbed in a class war. 

The other thing that struck me about the Patrick Melrose character is that one of his guiding forces is lust.  The same could probably be said about Mr. Little, although Wodehouse never touches upon sex.  You know that it must happen, as babies emerge now and then, but, typically for this period, it is never mentioned.  He approaches Bingo’s infatuations from a very innocent point of view, making him seem more like the prisoner of his emotions that some sex-starved young man on the make.  Bertie’s amusement about Bingo’s romantic entanglements, I would venture to say, mirrors Wodehouse’s gentle mocking of what young men can be like.  It is affectionate, as though Wodehouse himself was relieved to be removed from such a period himself.  This gentle humor is one of the parts of Wodehouse’s writing that I really like.  It is such a relief from our modern times, which has such a rough edge it to.  Reading Wodehouse is like a vacation for one’s sensibilities.