The Code of the Wodehouses ~or~ The Prince and Betty*

“‘I’m so tired of money - money - money.  Everything’s money.  Isn’t there a man in the world who won’t sell himself?’” (The Price and Betty, p. 105).

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. 

Alternative Realities ~or~ Uneasy Money*

Since taking a chronological approach to the remaining titles in my Wodehouse challenge, I’ve had a sense of foreboding hanging over me for the past few months.  While I was reading The Luck Stone there was a claxon blaring away in my head, because it was difficult not to remember that, for all of their derring-do, the valiant schoolboys I was reading about would most likely be WWI cannon fodder.  That is, of course, if they were real human beings.

The odd thing is that, aside from a nod to Prohibition and the Depression, the real world seems not to have intruded much into Wodehouse’s novels.  This did not stop Plum from mocking the current political situation.  Earlier books have shown him to have a deeply satirical side, and the character of Spode in the Jeeves and Wooster novels shows that he did have a sharp political awareness.  It seems that our author only judiciously applied real world evets as he deemed necessary.  Take, for instance, the many trips over the Atlantic during the action of Uneasy Money.  This book came out in 1916, at the height of WWI, and yet there is no mention that it was a slightly dangerous thing to do. 

Maybe it was a method of coping with the situation.  If my memory serves me, Wodehouse was not resident in the UK during the war because he was busy with musical comedies on Broadway.  Perhaps the war’s horrors would not have been immediately felt at such a remove, told only through the newspaper and letters.**  A novel which overlooked the international situation might have well suited an isolationist US at the time.  Given that Wodehouse experimented with a few genres, I always wonder why he did not continue down some routes.  Maybe it was as simple as money, or what amused him.  Honestly, I could speculate endlessly about his motivations, but the simple fact of the matter was that while the war raged on, Wodehouse gave his readers a delightful bucolic romp to sink into, much like an ostrich burying its head in sand.

*Read April 2016

**I was living abroad when some fairly horrible things happened in the US, not the least of which was 9/11.  It is very strange to be so far away when such things happen in your native land, or at least I thought so.  I felt as though I ought to be doing something, although exactly what that was did not make itself immediately apparent.  Of course, I had access to things like television and the internet and could following developments as they happened.  I cannot even begin to imagine how receiving news at a slower pace would have felt.

The Luck Stone ~or~ Ripping Adventures with Plum*

This book was completely unexpected.  It’s a school yarn, but it is unlike the earlier entries into the same genre amongst the Wodehouse oeuvre.  For the most part, I find that Wodehouse’s school books tend to be centered on a great sporting rivalry, be it boxing or cricket or one of a thousand other diversions that seem to capture the imagination of our youthful heroes.  The sporting obsession is so great that I often find myself wondering if these boys had any time for their studies, what with the required practices, the strategy sessions, and general to-ing and fro-ing.  Part of me is tempted to liken the obsession of winning a match with the need for the Empire to conquer half of the globe, but frankly, it’s a lovely spring morning and I suspect that the marco-historic implications of cricket have been done to death. 

While there are the occasional sporting contests in The Luck Stone, they are not the central pivot around which the entire plot is hinged.  Without giving too much away, there is a MacGuffin that everyone is trying to either protect or purloin.  It finds its way to a school, and from there Wodehouse sets off with a plot replete with danger and intrigue.  Being a fan of Indiana Jones, Tintin, and other such things, I was pleasantly surprised.  For whereas the later Wodehouse books have MacGuffins such silver cow creamers, this one has implications for the ruling house of a certain part of the Empire.  Although I love the later books, part of me wishes that he Wodehouse had gone the cloak and dagger route with just a couple of later novels.  He was very good at it indeed.

Since I have a background in history, I cannot but help to point out two things that intrigued me (aside from the macro-political implications of cricket.  I have a feeling that there is at least one doctoral thesis on this moldering in a library somewhere.).  The book was originally published as a serial that ran from 1908 until 1909, meaning that it came out before the outbreak of World War I.  This would explain why one of the more sympathetic schoolmasters was a German.  He might have been mocked for his funny accent, but he was the only one who really connected with the action and helped our heroes fulfill their missions.  I wonder if such a character would have been viable just a few years later.  The other character that caught my attention was an Indian student who was there with the intent that he would go on to study law at University.  My mind immediately went to Gandhi, but of course he had not yet achieved his notoriety at this point.  Both characters are portrayed using massive stereotypes, but, because both had roles that supported the main story, Wodehouse was not merely laughing at foreigners.  There was a respect there that almost makes the jeers palatable, almost. 

*Read March 2016

Not George Washington ~or~ Shakespeare is Wrong*

This is an early-career Wodehouse, published as it was in 1907.  The slightly unusual thing about it is that it was written in collaboration with another author, Herbert Westbrook.  I have become grudgingly accepting of the fact that Wodehouse wrote non-fiction with others, never mind his music-theatrical productions which were always written with at least one other person.  Thinking about the machinations of the process bent my mind a little. 

My main confusion comes from wondering just how one goes about writing a book of fiction with someone else.  After one develops the plot, then what?  Is it like one of those games where one begins, hands off the work to the collaborator, who carries on, and so on and so forth until the thing is finished?  Is there a set word count, and how on earth did they manage that in a time before word processors?  Then there is always the question of voice.  How do you decide what the overall style will be?  How does editing work?  It all sounds like a massive experiment in not hurting someone’s feelings, which is simply exhausting.  Either that, or each author knows the other very well indeed and can anticipate how to cope with these issues, or simply avoid potential hot-potato topics. 

I am less confused about my feelings of our hero, James Orlebar Cloyster.  He’s a nitwit.  I take great satisfaction in knowing that it sounds as though Wodehouse rather felt the same way about him.  Now then, I don’t mean nitwit in the same way that Bertie Wooster might fairly be called one.  I can take tomes and tomes about Bertie, and I know that I would not be able to stomach another book about Mr. Cloyster. 

My main problem is that he becomes engaged to a nice young woman, goes off to the city to fund said union, becomes a success, regrets his engagement, becomes entangled with another woman, and decides he does love the first young lady only after she sends him a magnificent play that she has written to pawn off as one of his own.  I would put forth Mr. Cloyster’s actions in an argument against Shakespeare’s line “…Frailty, thy name is woman.”  Because indeed, it can go both ways.  While I comprehend that the authors are probably making fun of Mr. Cloyster, I cannot help but feel sorry for Margaret Goodwin, the future Mrs. Cloyster.  I cannot imagine that joining one’s life to an emotional weather vane would be much fun.

*Read February 2016

A Return to Form ~or~ Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means

After suffering through too many Wodehouse non-fiction books in a row (yes, all two of them), I decided to adopt a chronological approach to the remaining titles in this resolution.  This meant a return to early Wodehouse, in a tome that was divided into two parts: a collection of related boxing tales and a novella about a man whose riches cause him a number of problems.  Dipping back into Wodehouse fiction was such a delight, almost as though I had been granted a reward for virtuous behavior. 

Oddly enough, I read the novella on the commuter rail during the course of attending a conference in Boston.  For an absurd number of years, I had been accustomed to having uninterrupted reading time while commuting on the train, which was the only reasonable way to access various workplaces.  My new job is but a short car ride away, so I have abandoned the Commuter Rail.  It has been something of a slog to get a new routine established.  While I do not regret gaining back the commuting time (something on the order of at least 1.5 hours a day, and that was when things were running smoothly*), it has been challenging to find some reading time.  One of my colleagues pointed out that my daughter is quickly approaching the age when she will toddle about the house without a death wish, so there might soon be a day when I can read at home during the daytime.**

Everything seems to be coming back these days: the Gilmore Girls will soon reappear on our screens, Mulder and Sculley are investigating new phenomena, and Bloom County has reemerged in all of its glory.  So too did the glory of Wodehouse for me.  To be honest, I could have done without the boxing tales, mostly because I see it as a brutish sport.  The second half of the book was a delight, and it reminded me of the reason why I was reading this in the first place: a twisty plot and witticisms, one of which involved calling a fake South American country Paranoya.  I feel that this is a much better approach, and I am anticipating this final stretch with much less trepidation that I did a few weeks ago

*The dedicated readers of this blog (who themselves deserve some sort of reward) will note that many of my jaunts in and out of work last winter were elongated by the horrible winter that pummeled the Northeast.  Would that epic snowfalls were the only cause of delays.  More often than not the sky would be blue, birds would be singing, and the train would still be late because of signal failure, bridge openings, and other acts of a mad universe.  I don’t envy our current governor his job in trying to introduce order and reason. 

**Why not read at night, the more circumspect of you might wonder.  By the time I am able to take to my couch in the evenings, I have already seen to the needs of: two children, two cats (one asthmatic, one lacking teeth), my darling husband, my adored new employer, my albatross of a house, assorted family members and friends who I have had the luck to remember during the course of this daily madness, and my creditors.  In short, come eight o’clock at night, if everything is going to plan, I am reduced to a slobbering wreck of a person fit only to operate a remote control for an hour before collapsing into the blissful arms of oblivion, until I am inevitably woken in the wee hours of the morning by one of my aforementioned children, felines, etc.