Tag Archives: P. G. Wodehouse

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Damsel in Distress,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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George began to sit up and take notice. A cloud seemed to have cleared from his brain. He found himself looking on his fellow-diners as individuals rather than as a confused mass. The prophet Daniel, after the initial embarrassment of finding himself in the society of the lions had passed away, must have experienced a somewhat similar sensation.

I posted a song from the Fred Astaire musical, “A Damsel in Distress,” a few days ago, mentioning that the film was based on a novel by P.G. Wodehouse. I hope to view the movie as soon as I can, but I wanted to read the book first, as it’s one I’d missed so far.

A Damsel in Distress was published in 1919, which puts it fairly early in the Master’s career. It’s highly interesting as representative of a key moment in his artistic development. He hasn’t yet made the decision to slip the narrow bonds of earth and sail into comic fantasy, but it definitely shows signs of things to come.

Lady Maude Marsh is the daughter of the Earl of Marshmoreton. She has fallen in love with an American, but her imperious aunt, Lady Caroline, who effectively runs the family estate, has utterly forbidden it. Maude manages to slip away to London one day, but is horrified to sight her status-conscious brother Percy approaching up the street. So she quickly jumps into a cab with a young man, imploring him to hide her. With perfect aplomb, the young man, an American musical comedy composer named George Bevan, conceals her, managing to knock Percy’s silk hat off in the bargain. Maude is very appreciative, but leaves George (who has fallen in love with her on the spot) with no information on her identity.

Nevertheless, George manages to discover who she is. He makes his way to the neighborhood of her home, and sets about insinuating himself into brother Percy’s birthday party. And it goes on from there.

A Damsel in Distress is full of Wodehouse themes in embryo. Maude’s father Lord Marshmoreton is a dreamy man, devoted to his flower gardens, oppressed by his sister. Obviously we have here Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle in embryo – but Lord Marshmoreton is more realistic. He is not an amiable idiot, but simply a highly suppressed man.

George poses as a waiter to get into Percy’s party. This is another standard Wodehousian device, but George is not as blatant an imposter as the imposters to come, and he gets out of the false position as quickly as he can.

In other words, Wodehouse hasn’t found his full powers yet. It hasn’t occurred to him to cut his ties to realistic psychology and turn his characters into cartoon figures. He has not yet found the courage to fly – but that doesn’t mean A Damsel in Distress isn’t a very enjoyable comic novel in its own right. If Wodehouse had ended his career in 1919, the book might still be remembered as a fine, funny romance.

I liked it a lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Uncle Fred in the Springtime,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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The Duke shot back in his chair, and his moustache, foaming upwards as if a gale had struck it, broke like a wave on the stern and rockbound coast of the Dunstable nose. A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonized explosion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots.

I recently reviewed P. G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Dynamite, which I enjoyed immensely. So I was happy to see Uncle Fred in the Springtime show up on sale soon after, and I snapped it up. I knew I’d read it before, and had been somewhat disappointed. I consider the classic short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By,” the funniest story ever written, and I felt (this was many years ago) that “Springtime” was just a little below the Plimsoll line. Perhaps, I thought, a re-reading would show me the error of my judgment.

Alas, no. I won’t say Uncle Fred in the Springtime is a bad book (a bad Wodehouse book is an oxymoron), but I still felt just a tad disappointed, like a lion in the Coliseum (as Wodehouse might have put it) sitting down to devour his daily Christian, and suspecting that someone has substituted a Gnostic in heavy French sauce.

The plot is the sort of thing you’d expect, and features the added pleasure of taking us to the familiar precincts of Blandings Castle, where the wooly-headed Earl of Emsworth desires nothing more than a quiet life in contemplation of his prize fat pig, the Duchess of Blandings. But he’s bedeviled by a neighbor, the Duke of Dunstable, a choleric and officious busybody who’s convinced the earl’s pig fixation is unhealthy, and who demands that Emsworth give it (the pig, that is) to him.

Meanwhile, Uncle Fred, himself an earl, is concerned about the fortunes of Miss Polly Pott, daughter of his friend Claude “Mustard” Pott, a former bookie and confidence man. Polly wants to marry a poet who’s looking for 250 pounds to enable him to purchase an onion soup bar in London. Uncle Fred, who is kept on an allowance by his wife, is hunting for a way to find her the money. This leads, through complex narrative paths and byways, to Uncle Fred and his nephew Pongo traveling to Blandings Castle, where Fred, as is his custom, takes up residence under an assumed identity, in this case that of the esteemed brain disease specialist Sir Roderick Glossop. The theft of the pig becomes a central theme.

My problem with this story – and it may just be me – is partly that it contains about one more main character than I can easily keep straight in my head. Also, though it’s always a delight to watch Uncle Fred lie with a straight face when caught in a previous lie, this time out I thought his prevarications sometimes a little thin. I had trouble believing anyone would fall for some of them, in spite of the old man’s charm.

Nevertheless, it’s Wodehouse, so it’s fun to read. Recommended, but a little less than other books from the Master.

Fiction, Music, Uncategorized

‘A Foggy Day in London Town’

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Tonight, not a hymn, but “A Foggy Day in London Town,” a show tune loosely connected to the sainted P. G. Wodehouse.

“Damsels in Distress” is a 1937 Fred Astaire vehicle, co-starring Joan Fontaine. This was the first movie Astaire made after his partnership with Ginger Rogers broke up, and the project was complicated by the distressing discovery that Miss Fontaine couldn’t dance. Oops. (I find it hard to understand how anyone, even a very pretty young woman, could make it in the theater/movie world without learning to dance a little. Maybe she just wasn’t up to Astaire’s standard. That I call highly plausible.)

The film’s story, in any case, is based on a 1919 novel of Wodehouse’s, incorporating his personal experience in Broadway theater. Sadly, he didn’t do any lyrics for this show.

The movie, I’m sorry to report, did not do well, despite the presence of a young couple of comedians who called themselves George Burns and Gracie Allen. But its reputation seems to have grown with time.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it. I need to check it out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Uncle Dynamite,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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If you call at a country house where you are not known and try to get the butler to let you come in and search the premises for photographs of his employer’s nephew, you will generally find this butler chilly in his manner, and Coggs, the major-domo of Ickenham Hall, had been rather chiller than the average. He was a large, stout, moon-faced man with an eye like that of a codfish, and throughout the proceedings he had kept his eye glued on Sir Aylmer’s, as if peering into his soul. And anyone who has ever had his soul peered into by a codfish will testify how extremely unpleasant such an ordeal is.

Among all the priceless works of P.G. Wodehouse, my favorite individual piece is (I’m sure I’ve told you this before) is the short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By.”  But Uncle Fred, the Earl of Ickenham, the living embodiment of aplomb, a man of good nature but utterly without shame, also stars in a few novels. One of those is Uncle Dynamite, and I think it’s one of the Master’s best. I’m not sure if I’ve read it before; I know I got a kick out of it now.

The plot of Uncle Dynamite is difficult to describe, because it’s one of Wodehouse’s most complex tales. I shall merely note that fact and describe a couple of the main story lines.

Uncle Fred’s long-suffering nephew Pongo Twistleton is in love with a girl name Elsie Bean, of whom Uncle Fred approves. But their engagement has been broken, and now Pongo is engaged to Hermione, a beautiful novelist who wishes him to go to her father’s country estate and judge the babies at the Bonnie Baby Contest at the approaching church féte. This is, of course, a prospect to make Pongo tremble and reach for a sustaining drink – except that he’s pretending to be a teetotaler, to please her. Uncle Fred, who finds himself temporarily at liberty because his wife has gone on holiday, offers to come along and substitute for him. Hermione’s father immediately suspects that Pongo is an imposter. Meanwhile, Elsie Bean (the former fiancée), who is a sculptor, has hidden some jewels inside one of her clay busts so that a friend can smuggle them into America and avoid tariffs. But that bust finds its way into Hermione’s home, and somebody will have to burgle it…

You get the gist.

Uncle Dynamite was a pure delight. I chuckled all through. It has my highly prized recommendation.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Code of the Woosters,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

The first Jeeves and Wooster book I ever bought was The Code of the Woosters. That was about 50 years ago. I recall pausing a moment, in the B. Dalton’s aisle, to wonder whether I’d like the book. I was young then, I need hardly say, and knew nothing.

The Code of the Woosters is Wodehouse (as he himself might have put it) at his fruitiest. It’s such a tightly plotted farce that I, for one, was forced to pause my reading every few pages, just to get my breath back.

The plot, even in a broad sketch, requires some setting up. So curl up on the nearest chesterfield and pour yourself a restorative libation.

The tale begins with Bertie Wooster getting a call from his Aunt Dahlia, asking him (for once) to do what seems to be a fairly simple task. He is to go to a particular antique shop and sneer at a silver cow-creamer. Her husband, Tom Travers, a silver collector. yearns to buy that creamer. Aunt Dahlia hopes Bertie’s scorn will demoralize the shopkeeper, who will then knock down the price for Uncle Tom. Then she can touch him for a loan for the insolvent magazine she publishes.

The upshot is, of course, disastrous. On arriving, Bertie finds Sir Watkyn Basset, a retired judge, already at the shop. Sir Watkyn is Uncle Tom’s rival, also coveting the cow-creamer. He and Bertie are acquainted, as Sir Watkyn once fined him for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night. Accompanying Sir Watkyn is the gorilla-like Roderick Spode, leader of an English Fascist party. Caught unprepared, Bertie ends up stumbling over a cat in a manner that convinces Sir Watkyn that he’s attempting to steal the creamer.

Back in his flat, Bertie gets a telegram from his fatuous friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who wants him to come to the country estate where he’s staying. The estate just happens to belong to Sir Watkyn, as Gussie is engaged to Sir Watkyn’s daughter Madeline. Except that Madeline, Gussie reports, has broken the engagement off, This horrifies Bertie, since Madeline has conceived the erroneous idea that Bertie is in love with her, and threatens to marry him if it doesn’t work out with Gussie.

Then there’s a visit from Aunt Dahlia, who reports that Sir Watkyn has now acquired the cow-creamer. So she needs Bertie to go to the same estate and steal the thing. If he refuses, she’ll bar his access to the cooking of Anatole, her incomparable French chef.

Clear so far?

After that it gets complicated.

Oh yes, I need to remember Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng, Sir Watkyn’s niece, who is also on site. She is engaged to an old friend of Bertie’s, whom she is pressuring to steal (recurring theme here) the local constable’s police helmet.

It’s all hilarious. Brilliant. Incomparable.

Most highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Very Good, Jeeves,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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He was fat then, and day by day in every way has been getting fatter ever since, till now tailors measure him just for the sake of the exercise.

It’s kind of a waste of time to review a P. G. Wodehouse book. The intelligent consumer knows the quality of the product. But it’s possible some reader (for some incomprehensible reason) has resisted the delights of “Plum’s” work to date, so here goes.

Very Good, Jeeves!, a story collection, is obviously a Jeeves and Wooster book, so there’s no mystery about what we’re getting. Idle London clubman Bertie Wooster – or one of his equally dimwitted friends – gets into some kind of ridiculous trouble. In the end, they turn to Bertie’s valet (not butler), Jeeves, of whom Bertie testifies: “There are no limits to Jeeves’s brain-power. He virtually lives on fish.”

The basic scenario is consistent (we’d be disappointed if it weren’t) but there are minor variations from story to story – sometimes Bertie turns to Jeeves at the very beginning, but unforeseen complications stretch the problem out. Sometimes Bertie delays resorting to Jeeves because some coldness has arisen between the two of them, over a disagreement about socks or golf attire or something. Once Jeeves is absent on holiday, and on another occasion Bertie’s imperious Aunt Agatha refuses to ask help from a mere servant.

But in the end Jeeves comes through, and the sun shines once again on the Edenic world of Wodehouse.

There are plenty of familiar characters in this collection – Bingo Little, Tuppy Glossop, and – most dramatically – Bobbie Wickham, the beautiful, red-haired, walking attractive nuisance.

Also, I noted, with interest, that at one point Bertie describes a portrait of himself as featuring a monocle. Bertie used to be portrayed with monocles in illustrations all the time, but I don’t recall actually finding one in a story before (there are probably others I’ve overlooked, though).

I think several of the stories in Very Good, Jeeves were actually new to me, which was delightful. The ones I’d read before were also delightful, though, so I had a thoroughly good time.

Authors, Goofing

‘Wodehouse Playhouse’

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I did a search on YouTube for a BBC comedy program I remember from the 1970s, “Wodehouse Playhouse.” I caught a couple episodes back in the day, on PBS, and I remembered it as somewhat low-budget, but energetic and fun.

I tried this once a couple years ago and only found one episode, which I duly posted on this blog. But now I find that the whole thing is available. The first episode is above.

(There’s another version on YouTube, and it may be better, as it won’t let me post it here. If the quality of this one disappoints, you might search for that other.)

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words,’ by Barry Day and Tony Ring

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I took to American food from the start like a starving Eskimo flinging himself on a portion of blubber. The poet Keats, describing his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer, speaks of himself as feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Precisely so did I feel … when the waiter brought me my first slab of strawberry shortcake … ‘No matter if it puts an inch on my waistline,’ I said to myself, ‘I must be in on this.’

There are biographies of P.G. Wodehouse out there; I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them. But a deal showed up on P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words, and I figured I’d give it a try. It’s neither a long nor greatly illuminating work, but it is an opportunity to revisit a lot of Wodehouse’s best stuff, which can’t help being entertaining.

The scheme here is to go through the facts of the author’s biography, relating them to various quotations from his works. This book’s authors, Barry Day and Tony Ring, admit that we don’t know for sure how Wodehouse’s thinking worked, and we can’t always rely on his own statements on the subject – he considered himself rather a dull fellow, and embroidered his statements accordingly.  But overall I think I learned a little reading it.

There isn’t a lot of drama in the story, except of course for the lamentable account of Wodehouse and his wife being detained by the Germans during World War II, and his grievous error in making recordings that the Germans used for propaganda. This mistake resulted in his never returning to England (though he could have gone back after a time, and the queen knighted him in absentia), but becoming a US citizen. The authors take what I consider the correct view – that Wodehouse dropped a brick but merely through thoughtlessness. And regretted it.

I did notice one error in the book. The authors believe (no doubt deceived by Jeeves’s glamor) that valets stand higher in the social order “Downstairs” than butlers. This is wrong. The butler was king of the servants in an aristocratic household. If Bertie had married and set up a stately home, I expect Jeeves would have been promoted to that lofty office.

But otherwise, I had a good time with P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mr. Mulliner Speaking,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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People who enjoyed a merely superficial acquaintance with my nephew Archibald (said Mr. Mulliner) were accustomed to set him down as just an ordinary pinheaded young man. It was only when they came to know him better that they discovered their mistake. Then they realized that his pin-headedness, so far from being ordinary, was exceptional.

Most P. G. Wodehouse readers are familiar with the Jeeves stories, and usually with the Blandings Castle stories too. But there is another substantial series of short stories that sometimes gets overlooked. These are the Mr. Mulliner stories, in which the venerable Mr. Mulliner sits with his drink in the bar parlor of a pub called The Angler’s Rest, regaling his audience with stories of the adventures of his innumerable relations. Often these stories involve a feckless young man of the usual Wodehouse type, who overcomes some obstacle to his marriage to the girl he loves. Usually the solution to the problem is purely nonsensical, based on some character’s unexpected personal quirks. The quality of the mirth varies from story to story, but some of Wodehouse’s best flights of fancy can be found in this category.

About half the stories in this volume, Mr. Mulliner Speaking, however, exhibit a different formula. This is because (and I was not aware of this, having not read these particular stories before) one of Mr. Mulliner’s relatives turns out to be a certain Miss Roberta Wickham. “Bobbie” Wickham is a character who pops up from time to time in the Jeeves/Wooster stories, and may have shown up at Blandings Castle too (I can’t recall). But whenever Bobbie appears, a different pattern is called for. Because marriage to Bobbie Wickham is always regarded as a fate to be dreaded, rather like running afoul of one of Bertie Wooster’s aunts.

For the red-haired Bobbie, in spite her extreme beauty, is a sort of benevolent sociopath. She never means to hurt anyone, but she has absolutely no self-control or sense of responsibility, and she generally drops her suitors into some kind of a nightmare situation, like being mistaken for a burglar by a butler with a shotgun, perhaps, or being forced to climb out of a high window with the aid of knotted-together bed sheets. If you find public humiliation hilarious, these are the stories for you.

Mr. Mulliner Speaking is a very funny book. I recommend it. My e-book version featured a number of OCR spelling errors that should have been caught and corrected.

Creative Writing, Reviews

‘Blandings Castle’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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Lord Emsworth finished his port and got up. He felt restless, stifled. The summer night seemed to call to him like some silver-voiced swineherd calling to his pig….

And suddenly, as it died, another, softer sound succeeded it. A sort of gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.

The nuts and bolts of P. G. Wodehouse’s short story collection, Blandings Castle, are easily covered. This is a compilation of several early Blandings Castle stories, featuring Clarence, Lord Emsworth, followed by a few odds-and-ends stories, and finally a few of the Mulliner stories, in which Mr. Mulliner tells a group of pub friends stories about his various relations – in this case, relations who lived and worked in Hollywood (as Wodehouse himself did for a time).

I won’t describe most of the stories. They are what you expect, and they are delightful.

Instead, I want to indulge in a few theological observations, because that (oddly) is where my thoughts went as I read.

The Great Divide in Wodehouse is drawn, of course, between the Jeeves stories and all the rest. What I began to wonder about as I read is the fact that – although they both operate in the same fictional universe (there are even stories where characters cross over), they seem to nevertheless operate in different theological universes.

The Jeeves stories, it seems to me, take place in a fallen universe. There is “evil” (admittedly rather silly evil) in the Jeeves stories, and poor Bertie Wooster would come to ruin (usually an unhappy marriage) without Jeeves there to rescue him. Jeeves shares the first two letters of his name with Jesus. He is a very present help in trouble. Although infinitely higher and more intelligent than Bertie, Jeeves has emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant. On him depends all the innocence of Bertie’s fictional life.

The Blandings Castle stories, on the other hand, seem to be set in an unfallen world. “Evil” of the same kind as in the Jeeves stories does indeed arise, but it always resolves itself without any heroic intervention. There seems to be a natural balance in this world, and the proper order reasserts itself automatically.

It occurs to me that this may be some kind of unfallen world. Perhaps Eden was like this, and Heaven will be again. Problems arise, but the natural order reasserts itself.

(I do not, I hope you understand, imagine that Wodehouse had these concepts in mind. I don’t even know what – if anything – he believed. I just think that his genius, like all great genius, drew on Eternal Things.)

I might also mention (honorably) one of the miscellaneous stories, neither a Blandings nor a Mulliner: “Elsewhere, a Bobbie Wickham Story.” This one was a gem.

Bobbie Wickham is a familiar character from the Jeeves stories – she was even engaged to Bertie on at least one occasion. Like all Wodehouse girls, she’s smarter than any of his young men, stubborn, self-willed and sweetly ruthless. Here we see her at her best; like Bertie she is being coerced into a marriage she does not wish, so she sets about manipulating the males around her. If you’re familiar with H. H. Munro (Saki), you probably remember the story, “The Open Window.” The girl there whose speciality was “romance at short notice” was a forerunner to Bobbie Wickham. Wonderful story.

In summary, this is a delightful collection of delightful stories which can only do good in the world.