Wodehouse on Wodehouse

I'm grateful to the Overlook Press for publishing a complete set of P. G. Wodehouse not merely because my growing collection of hardcovers look lovely on my shelves, but also because it means some of the less well-known books are regularly brought to my bookstore browsing attention. This week, what caught my eye was the memoir (of sorts) that Wodehouse published in 1956, Over Seventy.

You need not have read Robert McCrum's biography to realize that Wodehouse was not likely to reveal himself to any significant degree on the page, and that is the case: the book, structured as a response to some questions about his life and work put by an American magazine, is mostly a series of extended comic riffs on various subjects. As you read it, you feel sort of like you're dipping in and out of various of his novels--there's an exchange between two American heavies here, a discussion of the pains of the musical theater there. Some bits are less that wholly successful, with the air of the after-dinner speech hanging about them, but most work, and the book offers many pleasures.

Unexpectedly, amid the comedy we here and there get a glimpse of what seems to be genuine feeling. The following bit, though presented in the same light tone as the rest of the book's material, feels honest, and, by the time the last line arrives, even poignant:

I am a mass of diffidence and I-wonder-if-this-is-going-to-be-all-right-ness, and I envy those tough authors, square-jawed and spitting out of the side of their mouths, who are perfectly sure, everytime they start a new book, that it will be a masterpiece. My own attitude resembles that of Bill, my foxhound, when he brings a decaying bone into the dining-room at lunch-time.

"Will this one go?" he seems to be saying, as he eyes us anxiously. "Will my public consider this bone the sort of bone they have been led to expect from me, or will there be a sense of disappointment and the verdict that William is slipping?"

As a matter of fact, each of Bill's bones is just as dynamic and compelling as the last one, and he has nothing to fear at the bar of critical opinion, but with each new book of mine I have, as I say, always that feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and makes one write every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty times. My books may not be the sort of books the cognoscenti feel justified in blowing the 12s. 6d. on, but I do work at them. When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, "But he did take trouble."

Were Wodehouse with us today, I would reassure him that Charon--who, having held the same job for eternity, with no suggestions heard from any quarter of slacking, or that another ferryman could perform its duties with more vim, appreciates, one assumes, hard work and craftsmanship--surely has whiled away one of the long, dark nights of the soul (the only kind on offer down there) with a story or two of Bertie and Jeeves. He might even tip his cap at the Master as he disembarks.

If there were a gentleman's gentleman in my employ, he would right now be packing my case.

Vacation beckons, and there is packing to be done. Books first, of course, and then some clothes, for padding. So I'll simply share a couple of short passages from P. G. Wodehouse's Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974). First, a pleasant surprise, which comes when Bertie is confronted by the angry father of a girl who's just eloped:

"Pfui," I said. It is an expression I don't often use, but Nero Wolfe is always saying it with excellent results, and it seemed to fit in rather well here.

It's obvious to any reader of Rex Stout's novels that he was a fan of Wodehouse, but I hadn't known that the admiration was reciprocated.

Then there's this exchange, which occurs on the last page of the novel--the last novel Wodehouse would complete:

"Jeeves," I said, my philosophical mood now buzzing along on all twelve cylinders. "Do you ever brood on life?"

"Occasionally, sir, when at leisure."

"What do you make of it? Pretty odd in spots, don't you think?"

"It might be so described, sir."

"This business of such-and-such seeming to be so-and-so, when it really isn't so-and-so at all. You follow me?"

"Not entirely, sir."

But eventually Bertie makes him understand. Jeeves always understands.

Spotty posting ahead, but things should be roughly back to normal by mid-August. Thanks for reading.

Medical advice from Bertie Wooster

From the opening of Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974):

"Jeeves," I said at the breakfast table, "I've got spots on my chest."

"Indeed, sir?"

"Pink."

"Indeed, sir?"

"I don't like them."

"A very understandable prejudice, sir. Might I enquire if they itch?"

"Sort of."

"I would not advocate scratching them."

"I disagree with you. You have to take a firm line with spots. Remember what the poet said."

"Sir?"

"The poet Ogden Nash. The poem he wrote defending the practice of scratching. Who was Barbara Frietchie, Jeeves?"

"A lady of some prominence in the American war between the states, sir."

"A woman of strong character? One you could rely on?"

"So I have always understood, sir."

"Well, here's what the poet Nash wrote. 'I'm greatly attached to Barbara Frietchie. I'll bet she scratche when she was itchy.' But I shall not be content with scratching. I shall place myself in the hands of a competent doctor."

"A very prudent decision, sir."

There's nothing so comforting after a busy weekend of work than putting oneself in the hands of a competent gentleman's gentleman.

The Wodehouse cure

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Among people who are willing to countenance the possibility that ghosts exist, one of the most common explanations for haunting--for why this person returns be-sheeted while that one sleeps peacefully in the grave--is that the person died with some important business left undone on this plane.

If that's the case, the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters may explain why no one has ever seen the Master's ghost wandering the stately homes of England, harrying aunts and aiding nephews. For with the next-to-last letter in the book, undated but from very late in Wodehouse's life, and addressed to Godfrey Smith, editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Wodehouse discharged a duty:

Jeeves's bracer does not contain dynamite as is generally supposed.

It consists of lime juice, a lump of sugar and one teaspoonful of Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo. This, it will be remembered, is the amount of the Buck-U-Uppo given to elephants in India to allow them to face tigers on tiger hunts with the necessary nonchalance.

Imagine the loss to humanity had Wodehouse gone to his grave with this recipe a secret!

Now to lay in a store of Buck-U-Uppo. Next time I'm in New York, I'll have to stop by the Butler Supply District and claim a case or two.

Wodehouse's letters

In need of a quick post today, I find Jeeves coming, as usual, to the rescue. Well, not Jeeves so much as his creator: I can't believe I've not yet mentioned the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters.

For a proper review of the volume, you couldn't do better than my fellow Invisible Librarian Ed Park's for Bookforum (which I just amused myself by mistyping Bookfuror). One of Ed's most interesting observations concerns the disjunction between Wodehouse's meticulous plotting and an expressed desire for its opposite:

How interesting, then, to read what a younger Wodehouse wrote to a friend in 1914: “That is what I’ve always wanted to be able to do, to interest the reader for about five thousand words without having any real story. At present, I have to have an author-proof plot, or I’m no good.” Voice is subservient to narrative. Of course, an author as long-lived as Wodehouse will change his views on craft and ambition over the years. But in that contradiction between form and style—in a pinch, predestination and free will—lies a curious truth. Could it be that for us readers (after all, the most important part of this equation), Wodehouse in the end achieved his goal of dispensing with “any real story”? “It’s just a question of detail,” Wodehouse remarks about the composition, after the heavy lifting is done. Perhaps the aspects of his books that give us the most pleasure—the utter insouciance, the similes of fizzy genius (comparing, to pluck at random from the sacred oeuvre, a dour countenance to a “V-shaped depression off the coast of Iceland”)—could only be arrived at once the scaffolding was absolutely secure. Which is to say, a reader with much on his mind about the uncertainties of life might well have deeper reasons for immersing himself in a story called “There’s Always Golf.”

It's well worth clicking through to read the rest--there are few writers whose comedic sense I trust more than Ed's, and that comes through in his choice of lines to quote.

For my part, I'll share just two of the bits that have greatly amused me as I've flipped through the book. First comes from a letter to Wodehouse's daughter, Leonora, of July 3, 1921:

Love Among the Chickens is out in the cheap edition. I'll send you a copy. Townend told me it was on sale at the Charing Cross bookstall, so I rolled round and found they had sold out. Thence to Piccadilly Circus bookstall. Sold out again. Pretty good in the first two days. Both men offered to sell me "other Wodehouse books," but I smiled gently on them and legged it.

Just as Bertie would have done.

Then there's this account, sent to his friend William Townend in 1932, of a visit to H. G. Wells's house:

I like Wells, but the trouble with him is that you can never see him alone. He is accompanied wherever he goes by the woman he's living with. When they came to lunch, we were all set to listen to his brilliant table talk, and she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways, monopolizing the conversation while he sat looking like a crushed rabbit. I did manage to get him away in a corner after lunch long enough for him to tell me that he had an arrangement with her that when he went to London, he went by himself, and he added, his face lighting up, that he was going to London next week. Then she yelled for him, and he trotted off.

By the way, when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.

Her idea, I imagine. I can't believe Wells would have thought of that himself.

What makes that letter even more deliciously amusing is that--as editor Sophie Ratcliffe points out in a note, Wodehouse used that very image a mere six years later in The Code of the Woosters. Bertie explains that at the house of a newly married friend he'd seen, over the fireplace, "the legend 'Two Lovers Built This Nest,' and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it."

I would be falling down on one of my self-imposed Internet duties if I didn't close with some lines from Wodehouse's one letter to Anthony Powell, from 1967. A bookseller had sent him Powell's 1939 novel What's Become of Waring, and Wodehouse sent Powell a note of appreciation:

I have always admired your work so much, especially the Music of Time series. The early ones are all fine, but what I like, and what I suppose everyone likes, is the feeling that one is living with a group of characters and sharing their adventures, the whole thing lit up by the charm which is your secret. I hope the series is going on for ever. I should hate to feel that I should never meet Widmerpool again.

Which leads to two thoughts:

1 It's interesting that Wodehouse likes Dance, for Powell's sense of time couldn't be more different from Wodehouse's: the latter's characters are trapped in amber, living forever in a prelapsarian (or at least pre–World War I) wonderland, while Powell's are forever moving, paced by death and driven by various and sundry furies, acted upon by time in ways they could never have predicted.

2 I'm pleased that Wodehouse uses the word "charm." It's undeniably one of Dance's great qualities, yet it's not one I've ever properly identified by that name. But Wodehouse is right: there are few books whose wit and humanity are more delicately charming than Dance.

"In a movie theater at least you can hold hands."

One of the many commonalities between Rex Stout and P. G. Wodehouse* is that their characters are essentially stuck in time. For Wodehouse, that era was gone by the time he really established himself as an author: it's early Edwardian. As Orwell explained in "In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse,"

The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of the "clubman" or "man about town," the elegant young man who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen-twenties. It is significant that Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled Young Men in Spats. For who was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But the traditional "knut," the "Piccadilly Johnny," ought to wear spats.

Stout's characters, meanwhile, are forever of the 1930s, the period of his first success. Though the Depression barely makes an appearance--the Wolfe stories are more akin to the Busby Berkeley musicals than, say the realist movie that John L. Sullivan wants to make in Sullivan's Travels--but the characters, from the thugs and Inspector Cramer to, more importantly, Archie and (sigh) Lily Rowan, are the familiar fast-talking slang-shooters of period's brilliant screwball comedy.

Such stasis is no small part of the comfort these books afford--a comfort matched by few, if any, other writers. Yet both writers continued working regularly until the 1970s, and both, in familiar series tradition, let their characters float in a vaguely defined eternal present rather than having them age or specifying that their new adventures are taking place in the past.** And thus it becomes interesting to note where the present (now well past) creeps in. Christopher Hitchens, for example, once pointed out the ghastly strangeness of Bertie Wooster--allied to no cause aside from aunt-baiting--running into an anti-war demonstration in the 1974 novel Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. With Stout, the dislocations are never jarring, merely interesting.

Such a moment appears in In the Best Families (1950), one of the most clever and satisfying Wolfe stories. Archie has been dispatched to a country house under slim cover, pretending to investigate a mere dog poisoning (shades of the Philo Vance Kennel Murder Case?) while really looking into murder, and after dinner he's stuck in the living room with all the suspects as they watch television:

Nintey minutes of video got us to half-past ten, and got us nothing else, especially me. . . . Television is raising hell with the detective business. It use to be that a social evening at someone's house or apartment was a fine opportunity for picking up lines and angles, moving around, watching and talking and listening; but with a television you might as well be home in bed. You can't see faces, and if someone does make a remark you can't hear it unless it's a scream, and you can't even start a private inquiry, such as finding out where a young widow stands now on skepticism. In a movie theater at least you can hold hands.

I'm no detective, but I sympathize. As March crawls past, insisting on its pretense of being winter with all the wheezy grotesquerie of a past his prime ladies' man bathed in cologne, the Baseball Machine at the Rocketship maintains its winter dormancy. If Archie wants to bring some suspects by, I'll be happy to help him catch a murderer while the cathode rays sleep.

This penny monster is about to explode!, or, Pre-Internet investment spam

We are reaching the end! February--always, somehow, less intolerable than the eleven weeks of January--is nearly upon us, and that means the group snoop into the writers' postbox that has been this month of blogging is coming to an end. I hope you've enjoyed it. February should find me with my feet properly beneath me, work beaten into quivering submission, travel translated to its most manageable state, memory.

But I can't let you turn the calendar page without first apprising you of an amazing investment opportunity--brought to you by P. G. Wodehouse in a letter to his daughter Leonora of September 27, 1920, found in the lovely new collection P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters:

I've just had a letter from a man in California who wants me to buy an interest in a gold mine for five hundred pounds. He says "I happened to pick up the Sept Cosmopolitan and on one of the front pages I see a list of authors and I said to myself that bunch could put this over and I have a hunch they will and your name is in the list and I'm writing you along with the others to send me your check for twenty-five hundred dollars and write on the check that it is for one-thirtieth interest in the eight-year lease of the Kid Gold Mine and then after a while I will send you a check for your share of a million dollars or a letter of regret telling you I have spent the money digging through the mountain and my hunch was a bum one, but anyway I expect your check." Sanguine sort of johnny, what? I'm going to put the letter in a story.

Editor Sophie Ratcliffe helpfully notes that Wodehouse--if not, one assumes, the miner--made good on his statement, using the anecdote in Big Money.

The speculator, methinks, was about a decade too late: Twain would have been a better mark.

Ethel Wodehouse, spy?

Ben Macintyre's Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is, as expected, full of drama, surprise, and interesting tidbits--just seeing Anthony Burgess and Kim Philby pop up as members in good standing of MI5, commenting on reports from double agents, is fascinatingly creepy. What I didn't expect, and something I haven't seen noted in any of the reviews, is that it also goes a ways toward rehabilitating P. G. Wodehouse's wife, Ethel, from the lingering charge of collaboration during the couple's internment.

The last I'd read on the issue was in Robert McCrum's 2004 biography of Wodehouse. McCrum builds a convincing case for what is now, I think, the general assessment of Wodehouse's own level of culpability for his pro-German broadcasts: Wodehouse, McCrum argues, was guilty at most of gullibility and ignorance, rooted in naivete and a desire to please. He should have known better, but he certainly didn't intend worse.

Ethel, however, doesn't come off so well in McCrum's book. Major Cussen, the M15 officer assigned to interrogate the couple after the war, McCrum writes, was strongly critical of Ethel:

"From what I have seen of Mrs Wodehouse," he wrote, " I expect to learn that she conducted herself [in Germany] in a flamboyant manner and that she accepted all the attention which was no doubt paid to her by German officials."

Macintyre, drawing on security service documents, paints a different picture.

The Wodehouses enter Macintyre's account because, while living in France in the pre-war years, they became friends with a German agent, Johnny Jebsen, who was quietly anti-Nazi and eventually became a double agent for Britain. Among his many shady activities, Jebsen ran a minor currency scam, accepting forged British banknotes from Nazi officials to trade for dollars, while skimming a substantial amount--some of which he used to help support the Wodehouses, who knew nothing of Jebsen's secret job or the source of the money.

Macintyre doesn't offer any new information about Wodehouse himself, but Ethel appears very differently in this report from MI6 operative Charles de Salis, written in conjunction with an analysis of Jebsen (whose codename was Artist):

Mrs. Wodehouse is very pro-British and is inclined to be rude to anyone who dares address her in German. She has on occasion said loudly in public places: "If you cannot address me in English don't speak at all. You had better learn it as you will have to speak it after the war anyway." Artist thinks she might be a useful source. . . . Wodehouse himself is entirely childlike and pacifist.

Here's how MaciMntyre glosses the report:

It is not known whether MI6 acted on this suggestion and recruited Ethel Wodehouse, but Jebsen's suggestion casts a new light on their time in Paris. . . . Jebsen's report proves that while Wodehouse himself may have been passively apolitical, his wife was so anti-Nazi that she was considered a potential spy.

Though I realize that security service files, with their purging and blackouts, don't allow for a lot of certainty, it does seem reasonable to assume that if Ethel Wodehouse had actually been recruited that fact would have emerged in the subsequent decades. Regardless, for a Wodehouse fan it's good to see this report--anything that further clears the cloud of collaboration is welcome.

Traveling companions

Last Thursday, in anticipation of some weekend travel, I stopped at my local bookstore, 57th Street Books, to pick up two of my favorite traveling companions: Rex Stout and P. G. Wodehouse. What better comforts to ease the irritations of contemporary travel and wash away the frustrations of a draining workweek than these two authors who offer seemingly infinite minor variations of infinitely lovable formulas?

The travel, alas, has left me too behindhand for proper blogging tonight, so instead I'll just share a couple of favorite passages from the pair. First, from Rex Stout's And Be a Villain (1948), an act of resistance from Nero Wolfe--who is irritated by the name of one of the corporations that is to be paying his fees for a case--generates an equal and opposite reaction from Archie:

"No. I will not." He was emphatic. "I will not draft or sign an agreement one of the parties to which is that Sweeties."

I knew perfectly well that was reasonable and even noble. But what pinched me was that I had sacrificed principle without hesitation, and here he was refusing to. I glared at him:

"Very well." I stood up. "I resign as of now. You are simply too conceited, too eccentric, and too fat to work for."

"Archie. Sit down."

"No."

"Yes. I am no fatter than I was five years ago. I am considerably more conceited, but so are you, and why the devil shouldn't we be? Some day there will be a crisis. Either you'll get insufferable and I'll fire you, or I'll get insufferable and you'll quit. But this isn't the day and you know it."

Archie can do nothing but agree.

From Wodehouse's Nothing Serious (1950), two passages. First, from "Rodney Has a Relapse," this ordinary, yet no less admirable moment from the career of the Oldest Member:

The Oldest Member, who had been in a reverie, came out of it abruptly and began to speak with the practised ease of a raconteur who does not require a cue to start him off on a story.

And, because I can't ever resist Lord Emsworth, the opening of "Birth of a Salesman":

The day was so fair, the breeze so gentle, the sky so blue and the sun so sunny, that Lord Emsworth, that vague and woollen-headed peer who liked fine weather, should have been gay and carefree, especially as he was looking at flowers, a thing which always gave him pleasure. But on his face, as he poked it over the hedge beyond which the flowers lay, a close observer would have noted a peevish frown. He was thinking of his younger son Freddie.

Coming to America to attend the wedding of one of his nieces to a local millionaire of the name of Tipton Plimsoll, Lord Emsworth had found himself, in the matter of board and logdging, confronted with a diffcult choice. The British Government, notoriously slow men with a dollar, having refused to allow him to take out of England a sum sufficient to enable him to live in a New York hotel, he could become the guest of the bridgeroom's aunt, who was acting as M.C. of the nuptials, or he could dig in with Freddie in the Long Island suburb where the latter had made his home. Warned by his spies that Miss Plimsoll maintained in her establishment no fewer than six Pekinese dogs, a breed of animal which always made straight for his ankles, he had decided on Freddie and was conscious now of having done the wrong thing. Pekes chew the body, but Freddie seared the soul.

You see why mine was a carefree trip?

Shakespeare and the Baconians

James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010) isn't quite the book its title and subtitle would suggest: Shapiro isn't particularly interested in the question itself, taking it as established that, yes, Shakespeare was the author of the works commonly attributed to him (and when Shapiro finally gets around to laying on the evidence for that position, it's like watching a rested boxer casually rain blow after cruel blow on a tottering rival). Rather, he's interested in why fairly large numbers of intelligent people since the eighteenth century have raised the question, and seized on other claimants.

The result is an absolutely fascinating book about changing ideas of art, authorship, and genius; more than anything, it's about the risks of ahistorical thinking, and of looking at people in the distant past as if they were our contemporaries, their thoughts, emotions, and actions as clearly understandable and interpretable as our own.

The book is full of interesting figures and incidents, some of the best having to do with the Baconian camp and their search for coded evidence of Francis Bacon's authorship. Key for the Baconians was The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the so-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888)--a book whose title could hold its own with those of any of today's sensationalist pop histories--by Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly's explanation of how a laborious application of Bacon's cipher to Shakespeare's works revealed hidden messages caught the eye of such luminaries as Mark Twain and Helen Keller, despite the fact that, Shapiro explains, his use of the cipher was a complete mess:

Even with his complex arithmetical scheme, Donnelly had to fudge his word cipher, which was based on the numerical distance between his arbitrarily chosen key words. Worse still, he constantly miscounted in order to arrive at satisfying results. Cryptologists who have examined his method have concluded that he "described Bacon's own cipher without understanding it" and "showed a fatal inclination to sieze on whole words which happen to be in both the vehicle and the message to be deciphered." It also turned out that his cipher could produce virtually any message one wanted to find.

As I read, I kept thinking of one of the funniest moments in all of P. G. Wodehouse's work: when, in "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald," a young Mulliner nephew gets buttonholed by a Baconian:

The aunt inflated her lungs.

“These figure totals,” she said, “are always taken out in the Plain Cipher, A equalling one to Z equals twenty-four. The names are counted in the same way. A capital letter with the figures indicates an occasional variation in the Name Count. For instance, A equals twenty-seven, B twenty-eight, until K equals ten is reached, when K, instead of ten, becomes one, and T instead of nineteen, is one, and R or Reverse, and so on, until A equals twenty-four is reached. The short or single Digit is not used here. Reading the Epitaph in the light of the Cipher, it becomes: ‘What need Verulam for Shakespeare? Francis Bacon England’s King be hid under a W. Shakespeare? William Shakespeare. Fame, what needst Francis Tudor, King of England? Francis. Francis W. Shakespeare. For Francis thy William Shakespeare hath England’s King took W. Shakespeare. Then thou our W. Shakespeare Francis Tudor bereaving Francis Bacon Francis Tudor such a tomb William Shakespeare.’”

The speech to which he had been listening was unusually lucid and simple for a Baconian, yet Archibald, his eye catching a battle-axe that hung on the wall, could not but stifle a wistful sigh. How simple it would have been, had he not been a Mulliner and a gentleman, to remove the weapon from its hook, spit on his hands, and haul off and dot this doddering old ruin one just above the imitation necklace.

Shapiro is sensitive enough to human foibles and the turns of history that his portrayals evoke not murderous rage but, most often, sympathy, and even pity for hours and years and lives wasted in fruitless search of a chimera. Sure, there are forgers and charlatans aplenty, but they're outweighed by the number of genuine seekers who latched onto this idea out of misguided feelings of affinity with the author of such great works, and a misplaced certainty that genius could never have had so humble a human home as that suggested by the meager facts of Shakespeare's biography.

In honor of Chicago's new mayor, a proposal

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I'm cross-posting this from my Tumblr Annex. For that small number of you who read both, I promise I won't do this regularly; today's post, though only tangentially connected to books, was something I enjoyed working on enough that the duplication seemed justifiable.

Blame P.G. Wodehouse, whose character the Honorable Galahad Threepwood once said of a Mint Julep that “it sidles up to you as innocent as your baby sister, then it slips its little hand in yours and the next thing you know, the judge is ordering you to pay the clerk of the court $50.” In a Wodehouse story I read recently, Bertie Wooster was drinking a Manhattan. It got me thinking. New York already has so much to hold over us: more people, more tall buildings, winning baseball teams, the body of Illinoisan Ulysses Grant. Why should they also boast a signature drink, while we’re left with tallboys of Old Style?

Thus The Loop was born—but only in concept. The rest is up to you. In this city teeming with young sophisticates, surely there is a mixologist of sufficient imagination and taste to provide Chicago with its inexplicably nonexistent signature drink. Surely someone can chemistry up a concoction that allows us to give the soul of our city a good roll around the tongue, followed by a satisfied, flammable sigh. I have provided the 1% inspiration; a dedicated mixmaster will have to provide the 99% perspiration (but please keep it out of the drink).

As research, I ordered a Manhattan. It’s smooth. So smooth. A broad Fifth Avenue of sophistication. It knows how to tie a bow tie. It tastes like all the best parts of bourbon and none of the parts that used to be so helpful in battlefield surgery. Did I mention its smoothness?

The Loop should not be like that. Here’s how The Loop should be. The first sip opens your eyes wide, so you look like one of those just-graduated-from-UW kids falling for the dude running the shell game on the “L.” The second sip makes you wonder whether your shoulders are broad enough that you can read Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography of Lincoln. The third sip knows a guy who knows a guy who can get you seasonal work driving a snowplow at O’Hare. The fourth sip has you fishing in your wallet for a Big Jackson so you can get in on some of that shell game action. The fifth sip convinces you to take out papers to run for alderman. The sixth sip convinces you that it’s not even worth taking the trouble to go vote. No one has ever taken an seventh sip.

The Loop could come with a little blown-out umbrella.

Alternatively, The Loop could reflect Chicago’s glorious summers: sweet and smooth, unbelievably refreshing, with hints of delicate flavors you never knew were there. One drink and you’re calling friends in San Francisco to laugh at them for paying those absurdly high rents, friends in New York to explain to them how sufficient provision of alleys enables a city to keep its garbage out of sight (and smell) in August. This version of The Loop closes O’Hare for ten weeks, because why on earth would you ever want to go anywhere else? And it should be served in a glass that is tall but deceptively narrow, so that it runs out just as you’re deciding that never could there possibly be a better drink. The next morning, it should feel like all eleven weeks of January have been jammed behind your eyes and left there to melt and trickle down your brainstem throughout the day.

Much more likely is that the city will co-opt the idea and sell The Loop at Navy Pier. It will be a phosphorescent drink flavored with imported fruit and cheap rum, served by a guy dressed as a Blues Brother. You’ll get to choose between a ceramic Daley head and a ceramic Bears helmet. If you leave it on your table long enough, a crew will arrive and erect a wrought-iron fence around it. It will be a huge success. In an attempt to recapture the joy tourists felt on seeing the Cows on Parade, the city will set up bars on the corners downtown to give away The Loop in the summer. It will become so popular that Daley will begin to fear it, and he’ll cast it into the wilderness of Springfield, getting it named to the state Liquor Control Board at a salary of $99,640 per year.

And then it will be ours again. But first we must invent. The hard part lies ahead. Go to work, City that Works! Immortality awaits. Let’s get Looped.

"A distressing habit of writing books and talking a good deal about them," Or, P. G. Wodehouse on publishing

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Given that the publishing world has spent the past several days rending its tweed jackets and gnashing its nicotine-stained teeth over the bankruptcy of Borders, I think we should start the week with some publishing humor!

Publishing, as an industry that has always taken itself very seriously, tends to lend itself more to tragedy than to comedy. (There's a reason the first printed book wasn't Joey Gutenberg's Big Book of Gut-Busters.) Think of the abattoir that is the remainder table--'nuff said?

But P. G. Wodehouse had the knack of finding comedy in anything, and in A Few Quick Ones (1959), a collection of stories featuring many of his best-loved characters, he gives the industry a few gentle pokes. Here, to start, from "Scratch Man," is his account of a small publisher who's facing the aggrieved (because jilted) fiance of the woman he loves:

His heart, as he gazed at this patently steamed-up colossus, missed not one beat but several. Nor, I think, can we blame him. All publishers are sensitive, highly strung men. Gollancz is. So is Hamish Hamilton. So are Chapman and Hall, Heinemann and Herbert Jenkins, Ltd.

A simple joke, but fun, and later Wodehouse rings a change:

Harold Pickering kissed Troon Rocket sixteen times in quick succession, and Macmillan and Faber and Faber say they would have done just the same.

In another story, "Joy Bells for Walter," he reminds us that, for all the talk about publishing's crucial role in our culture . . . a lot of what the industry turns out is, and has always been, crap:

Mrs Lavender Botts . . . had a distressing habit of writing books and talking a good deal about them. Her works were not novels. I am a broadminded man and can tolerate female novelists, but Mrs Botts gave English literature a bad name by turning out those unpleasant whimsical things to which women of her type are so addicted. My Chums the Pixies was one of her titles, How to Talk to the Flowers another, and Many of My Best Friends Are Field Mice a third. A rumour had got about that she was contemplating a fourth volume on the subject of elves.

She nearly makes Rosie M. Banks's oeuvre seem promising!

Archie and Bertie, Wolfe and Jeeves

I'm far from the first person to point out that Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's right-hand-and-legman, bear similarities to Bertie Wooster--if, that is, you can imagine a Bertie Wooster who is capable, tough, and smart. Which, admittedly, is a difficult proposition. Really, the similarities usually begin and end at the two men's use of language: Archie is the best source of outdated slang I know of outside Wodehouse's world, able to work himself up to a dizzying pitch of idle--or, more frequently, needling--banter.

But every once in a while Rex Stout extends Wodehuose a nod that's a bit more overt, as in this passage from one of my favorite Nero Wolfe novels, The Silent Speaker (1946):

What Wolfe tells me and what he doesn't tell me, never depends, as far as I can make out, on the relevant circumstances. It depends on what he had to eat at the last meal, the kind of shirt and tie I am wearing, how well my shoes are shined, and so forth. He does not like purple shirts Once Lily Rowan gave me a dozen Sulka shirts, with stripes of assorted colors and shades. I happened to put on the purple one the day we started on the Chesterton-Best case, the guy that burgled his own house and shot a week-end guest in the belly. Wolfe took one look at the shirt and clammed up on me. Just for spite I wore the shirt a week, and I never did know what was going on, or who was which, until Wolfe had it all wrapped up, and even then I had to get most of the details from the newspapers and Dora Chesterton, with whom I had struck up an acquaintance. Dora had a way of--no, I'll save that for my autobiography.

Would Jeeves have done any less?

Which can't help but lead a reader to imagine the possibilities: what if Jeeves and Wolfe had met at some point, and teamed up? There's no question that they would have been a formidable duo, but would they have gotten along? Or would Jeeves merely have frustrated Wolfe, his silent efficiency eliminating any need for the drama and flourish that Wolfe loved so much?

Archie and Bertie, on the other hand. . . . Bertie would take one look at Archie and quail, seeing the inner tough guy beneath the dapper exterior, while Archie would instantly cross Bertie off any and all lists of both suspects and rivals, and thus would take barely any notice of him at all, methinks.

"Those rather hit-or-miss days," or, Wodehouse in spats and letters

In Wednesday's post about the P. G. Wodehouse interview that's included in the newest volume of The Paris Review Interviews I mentioned in passing Wodehouse's expression of dismay at the disappearance of spats, but his whole disquisition on the topic is so good that it seems a shame not to share it, for it gives a great flavor of the light, yet thoughtful tone Wodehouse maintains throughout.

The exchange begins with a lament from Wodehouse about the changing times:

WODEHOUSE

. . . I suppose a typical member of the Drones Club now is someone with a job and very earnest about it. Those rather hit-or-miss days have passed away. . . .

INTERVIEWER

I suppose that world has gone the way of spats. You were very fond of spats, weren't you? Tell me a little about them.

WODEHOUSE

I don't know why spats went out! The actual name was spatter-dashers, and you fastened them over your ankles, you see, to prevent the spatter from dashing you. They certainly lent tone to your appearance, and they were awfully comfortable, especially when you wore them in cold weather. I've written articles, which were rather funny, about how I used to go about London. I would borrow my brother's frock coat and my uncle's hat, but my spats were always new and impeccable. The butler would open the door and take in my old topcoat and hat and sniff as if to say, Hardly the sort of thing we are accustomed to. And then he would look down at the spats and everything would be all right. It's a shame when things like spats go out.

In fact, as Orwell (among others) has pointed out, Bertie Wooster was out of date almost the instant he first appeared; in his sympathetic 1945 essay defending Wodehouse against the charge of treason for the German radio broadcasts he made from Berlin during the war, Orwell notes,

Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the "knut" of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as "Gilbert the Filbert" or "Reckless Reggie of the Regent's Palace". The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of the "clubman" or "man about town", the elegant young man who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen-twenties. . . . It is significant that Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled Young Men in Spats. For who was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier.

Reading Orwell's essay again made me wonder what Wodehouse himself thought of it, whether his appreciation for the support would be diminished by the fact that Orwell's defense consisted largely of establishing that Wodehouse was so ignorant of reality as to be essentially blameless when it unexpectedly intruded. Robert McCrum, in his biography of Wodehouse, reports the essay was actually in part the result of a correspondence the two men struck up following a group lunch in Paris*, and that at the time the essay was published, Wodehouse was grateful, writing to Orwell,

I don't think I have ever read a better bit of criticism. You were absolutely right in everything you said about my work. It was uncanny.

A bit more digging, however, led me to the P. G. Wodehouse Books site, which quotes from a letter Wodehouse sent around the same time to his friend Bill Townend, wherein he complains about Orwell's mention of Wodehouse's line from the radio talks about how German officers near his house were always "dropping in for a bath or a party":

From Orwell's article, you would think I had invited the blighters to come and scour their damned bodies in my bathroom. What actually happened was that at the end of the second week of occupation, the house next door became full of German Labour Corps workers and they seemed to have got me muddled up with Tennyson's Sir Walter Vivian. The gentleman who "all of a summer's day gave his broad lawns until the set of sun to the people." I suppose to a man fond of German Labour Corps workers, and liking to hear them singing in the bath, the conditions would have been ideal, but they didn't suit me. I chafed, and a fat lot of good chafing did me. They came again next day and brought their friends.

Even the staunchest Wodehouse apologist is unlikely to have much sympathy for his account of the suffering brought on by the horrors of German singing, considering what others went through; at the same time, the letter itself sounds so Wodehousian--so unexpectedly close in tone to some of his characters--that it's hard not to be in some degree charmed nonetheless.

One last note before I leave Wodehouse behind for a while. That passage led me to wonder whether his letters might be worth reading--whether they were, as for so many writers, a place for rehearsing what would later turn up in his fiction. Well, if Nancy Mitford is to be trusted--and on the subject of comedy, I think she surely is--the answer is no: she closed a letter to Evelyn Waugh** in 1953 with this postscript about Wodehouse's just-published Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters:

Have you read the P G Wodehouse letters? He never seems to stay in one place more than a week. Not a joke in the whole lot -- as far as I've read.

Anyone out there read them and disagree strongly enough to make a case for my giving them a try?

"And I thought, Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet?", or, P. G. Wodehouse on Jeeves

The two highlights for me of the new fourth volume of The Paris Review Interviews--reason enough on their own for me to buy the book--are the interview with Haruki Murakami, which I drew on yesterday, and the one from 1975 with P. G. Wodehouse.

Wodehouse comes across as amiable and a bit goofy, but at the same time every bit the master craftsman and hard worker his fans know him to have been. The interview is sprinkled with wonderful moments--like when Wodehouse says, "I'm bad at remembering things, like when flying really became fashionable," or "It's a shame when things like spats go out"--but what has inspired today's post is one of the standard questions that Wodehouse must have fielded hundreds of times, but to which this time he gave an interesting answer:

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever have a butler like Jeeves?

WODEHOUSE

No, never like Jeeves. My butlers were different, though I believe J. M. Barrie had one just like Jeeves.

Really? Now this calls for a trip to the bookshelves, where from Lisa Chaney's Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie (2005), we learn about Barrie's manservant Frank Thurston, who entered Barrie's service in the 1920s and does seem to have been remarkable:

Thurston's ability to enter and leave a room with absolute silence was a reflection of his enigmatic and, some thought, slightly sinister personality. To compound the mystery he had somehow familiarised himself not only with Spanish and French, but also with Latin and Greek. In addition to admirably fulfilling his role as skilled and urbane butler, it soon became clear that Thurston was a man of startling learning. Cynthia [Asquith] wrote of him:

Dictionaries and various learned tomes soon cluttered up the pantry, where I would constantly find him reading Latin or Greek while he polished the silver.
Thurston had an astonishing memory for other things besides living and dead languages. He could supply any forgotten date or quotation. One day Barrie remarked that the only line in an Oxford quotation that survived was "A rose red city half as old as Time." Though we all knew this line, no one of us could remember the name of the poet.

When Cynthia's husband, Beb, confessed that he couldn't remember the name of the "rose red city" and no one else at the table could either, Thurston, passing around the meat, finally said, "Was it not Petra, Sir?"

In light of Thurston's surprising erudition, Chaney tells us, Barrie took to warning his guests that

if they were thinking of reading a thriller in bed they would be advised "to hide it between a Pliny and the latest theory of Ethics."

While Robert McCrum's recent biography of Wodehouse barely mentions Barrie, and Thurston not at all, it does appear
(if Google Book Search's frustratingly limited preview isn't leading me astray) that N. T. P. Murphy at least touched on the question of Thurston as an inspiration for Jeeves in his In Search of Blandings: An Investigation into the Sources That Inspired P. G. Wodehouse (1986), writing that, through the accounts of Wodehouse's friend Denis Mackail, Thurston "played a part in the 'growth' of Jeeves in the early part of the 1920s."*

All of which makes me wonder how Thurston would have handled an odd incident involving Barrie that I've related before, but which seems worth sharing once again. It's from Penelope Fitzgerald's loving, perceptive group biography of her uncles, The Knox Brothers (1977), and, appropriately or not, it's the first thing that comes to my mind when Barrie is brought up:

Desmond MacCarthy, the most genial of Irish critics, had been at King's, and wanted to help [Fitzgerald's uncle Edmund Knox], as he wanted to help everybody he met. He also knew everybody. Eddie must come to him and ask advice from James Barrie, who was at the height of his fame, though he could sometimes be a little disconcerting, unless the side of him which spoke to adults, and which he called "McConachie," happened to be foremost. Buoyed up by MacCarthy's confidence, the two of them called at 133 Gloucester Terrace, where they found the room empty, except for a large dog, with which Barrie used to play hide-and-seek in the Park. While they waited, Eddie in sheer nervousness hit his hand on the marble mantelpiece. It began to bleed profusely. MacCarthy was aghast. Barrie could not bear the sight of blood. They tried to staunch it with handkerchiefs, and with the cuffs of MacCarthy's soft shirt, which became deeply stained. Barrie appeared at the doorway, took one look at them, and withdrew. Kind-hearted though he was, he was obliged to send down a message that he could not see them.

For that matter, how would Jeeves himself have handled it? Bertie's scrapes, though plentiful and harrowing, were rarely the sort to draw blood. Most likely, I suppose, is that no such incident would have occurred, Jeeves having quietly sanded all the corners of the mantelpiece at some point in the past in anticipation of just this sort of danger.

"Too often when a publisher entertains an author at the midday meal a rather sombre note tinges the table talk."

{Photo of an erroneous erratum in the Regenstein Library's copy of Richard Stark's Plunder Squad by rocketlass.}

In my recent reading I've happened across three little bits about publishing that seemed worth sharing. First, from Vere H. Collins's Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate (1928), a discussion between the author and Hardy about publishing errata:

H: There are a considerable number of misprints in the Collected Edition [of his poems]. Macmillan has issued an errata slip. Had your copy one?

C: No, but I bought the book when it first came out.

H: I will get a copy of the slip for you. [He leaves the room and returns with an errata slip.] That will save you from having to buy a revised edition. I cannot understand how mistakes occur in a printed book when a proof has been corrected properly.

C: Sometimes a word or line drops out when the formes are being moved and the printer resets carelessly without referring to the proof.

H: I remember Tennyson being very much annoyed because one of his poems was printed with "hairy does" instead of "aery does." On another occasion "mad phrases" became "mud phrases."

I'm disapointed that "hairy does" didn't become "hairy toes" instead; we could have had hobbits decades earlier!

Then there's this scene from P. G. Wodehouse's Uncle Dynamite (1948), wherein a woman recounts how her brother, a small publisher, found himself in trouble after printing taking on a job for a wealthy--and stodgy--old man:

"[H]e said one thing that gripped my attention, and that was that he had written his Reminiscences and had decided after some thought to pay for their publication. He spoke like a man who had had disappointments. So I said to myself, 'Ha! A job for Otis.'"

"I begin to see. Otis took it on and made a mess of it?"

"Yes. In a negligent moment he slipped in some plates which should have appeared in a book on Modern Art which he was doing. Sir Aylmer didn't like any of them much, but the one he disliked particularly was the nude female with 'Myself in the Early Twenties' under it."

If we were were playing "one of these things is not like the others," this last item would stand out like an unindicted tenant in the Illinois governor's mansion, but since I already had the first two passages on the brain it seemed worth appending when I came across it this afternoon. From Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man (1971), a glimpse of a way of looking at the life of a city that's nearly disappeared:

I walked past the closed door of the Wallers' apartment and down the street to the nearest newsstand, where I bought the weekend edition of the Los Angeles Times. I lugged it home and spent most of the morning reading it. All of it, including the classified ads, which sometimes tell you more about Los Angeles than the news.

The Times is still with us, but the classifieds are just about gone; would Craigslist offer Archer the same insight into the hope and desperation of his city?

Pickwick and Plum and Fielding, oh my!

{Photo of my hat at risk by rocketlass.}

I've always thought that the primary influences on P. G. Wodehouse's gloriously funny work are fairly easy to spot: Shakespeare and the Bible provide most of his references and many of his cadences, while musical theatre, particularly Gilbert and Sullivan, inspire the energetic joking and intricate plotting. Reading The Pickwick Papers makes me realize, with some surprise, that hitherto I've missed a quite obvious one: Dickens.

Take this scene, which finds Mr. Pickwick chasing his hat, which has blown off his head and is "gambolling playfully away in perspective":

There are very few moments in a man's existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it: he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is, to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and autious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.

There was a fine gentle wind, and Mr Pickwick's hat rolled sportively before it. The wind puffed, and Mr Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled over and over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide.

A narrator pausing the action to deliver a brief analysis, followed by seriously given instructions for an utterly unserious action--can you get more Wodehousian? Dickens's humor is so through-and-through lighthearted in Pickwick that its place as an ancestor to Wodehouse's work is much more clear than in the later novels, with their surrounding darkness.

In fact, to draw out the chain by one more link, the same is true for Dickens's own debt to the narrative verve and mock-seriousness of Henry Fielding--it's much more obvious in the playfulness of Pickwick than in the seriousness, of, say, Dombey and Son. Not that Dickens's admiration for Fielding is any sort of secret: he did, after all, name his eighth child Henry Fielding Dickens.

That bloke Shakespeare

After I quoted a bit of P. G. Wodehouse deploying Shakespeare for comic effect in Thursday's post, I couldn't bear not to share this exchange from another of his Mulliner stories, "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald":

"All right," [Archibald] said, "I'll try to remember. Tell me about her. I mean, has she any fathers or mothers or any rot of that description?"

"Only an aunt. She lives with her in Park Street. She's potty."

Archibald stared, stung to the quick.

"Potty? That divine . . . I mean that rather attractive-looking girl?"

"Not Aurelia. The aunt. She thinks Bacon wrote Shakespeare."

"Thinks who wrote what?" asked Archibald, puzzled, for the names were strange to him.

"You must have heard of Shakespeare. He's well known. Fellow who used to write plays. Only Aurelia's aunt says he didn't. She maintains that a bloke called Bacon wrote them for him."

"Dashed decent of him," said Archibald, approvingly. "Of course, he may have owed Shakespeare money."

"There's that, of course."

There's a lesson for comic writers there that's old, but worth restating: the more ridiculous your premise, the more contained and straightforward your language should be. "For the names were strange to him"--can comic genius get more sublimely simple?

Where everybody knows your [drink's] name, or, "We do not often get Americans in the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest."

Most of the time when people write about P. G. Wodehouse, they focus on either his stories about Bertie Wooster and his omnicompetent gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, or his tales of the inhabitants of Blandings Castle. That's not inappropriate: after all, Jeeves and Bertie are the creations that have guaranteed Wodehouse's immortality, while the Blandings Castle stories constitute a rich, interconnected skein that features some of his most inspired plotting.

Lately, however, I've been greatly enjoying a less-celebrated bywater of Wodehouse's work: the stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his club, the Angler's Rest. Comprising collections of stories--Meet Mr Mulliner (1927), Mr Mulliner Speaking (1929), and Mulliner Nights (1933)--plus a handful of additional stories scattered across other volumes, they all feature a protagonist from Mr. Mulliner's seemingly endless stock of young relatives. As the Wikipedia entry for Mr. Mulliner explains, they

are mainly about love lost and found; about fortunes made and failed; and about opportunities sought and missed.

In other words, they are typical Wodehouse stories.

What sets them apart is primarily the simple but effective frame in which they are set: Mr. Mulliner is at the Angler's Rest, where his fellow patrons--identified solely, and ingeniously, by their libation of choice--are chewing over some topic of love, adventure, or contemporary life. After listening for a bit, he takes up the topic on offer and, Ancient-Marinering any opposition, relates an apposite story, rich with Wodehousian complications and comedy. Mulliner's stories are the draw, but the process of getting there is half the fun. Take this late evening scene, which opens "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald":

The conversation in the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest, which always tends to get deepish towards closing-time, had turned to the subject of the Modern Girl; and a Gin-and-Ginger-Ale sitting in the corner by the window remarked that it was strange how types die out.

"I can remember the days," said the Gin-and-Ginger-Ale, "when every other girl you met stood about six feet two in her dancing-shoes, and had as many curves as a Scenic Railway. Now they are all five foot nothing and you can't see them sideways. Why is this?"

The Draught Stout shook his head.

"Nobody can say. It's the same with dogs. One moment the world is full of pugs as far as the eye can reach; the next, not a pug in sight, only Pekes and Alsations. Odd!"

Or this, from "Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court," which opens with "the poet who was spending the summer at the Angler's Rest" going green at the sight of some dead rabbits in the hands of a hunter:

Mr Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.

"You appear upset," he said.

"A little," admitted the poet. "A momentary malaise. It may be a purely personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather more of their contents inside them."

"Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views," Mr Mulliner assured him. "My niece Charlotte did."

"It is my temperament," said the poet. "I dislike all dead things--particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they have so obviously, so--shall I say?--blatantly mad the Great Change."

Or, what may be my favorite Angler's Rest discussion, this one that opens "Came the Dawn":

The man in the corner took a sip of stout-and-mild, and proceeded to point the moral of the story which he told us.

"Yes, gentlemen," he said, "Shakespeare was right. There a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

We nodded. He had been speaking of favourite dog of his which, entered recently by some error in a local cat show, had taken first price in the class for short-haired tortoiseshells; and we all thought the quotation well-chosen and apposite.

Even given Wodehouse's deliberate absurdity, there's something about the slow-moving, gently tipsy conversation of the Angler's Rest that speaks to what we go to bars for: to remove ourselves briefly from the world of our everyday cares into an agreeable other place, where you never know who might pop in with an amusing story in which everything works out okay in the end. Which, come to think of it, is the reason we visit Wodehouse's world, too.

Wodehouse speaks

In the course of my day job, I've recently gotten to work on two new audio collections from the British Library, The Spoken Word: British Writers and The Spoken Word: American Writers. Culled from the archives of the BBC and the Library, the sets offer clips of authors being interviewed or reading from their works or occasional pieces, and for literature fans, they really are a treasure--for example, hearing Arthur Conan Doyle, in the only known recording of his voice, discussing his spiritualist beliefs is itself almost like a visitation.

Lest I begin to seem like a shill for my employer, I'll leave it at that for now--if you want more detail, you can check out this overview from the Guardian. I'm really writing today as a P. G. Wodehouse devotee, for his interview, with which I started my Sunday morning in fine fashion, is my favorite thus far. Simply hearing his voice is a pleasure: it is mild and refined, though without that Edwardian preciousness that is inescapable in the accents of, say, E. M. Forster and Somerset Maugham; the interviewer, the BBC's longtime American correspondent Alistair Cooke, described it at the time in an article for the Guardian as "secure and genial," "tuned entirely in C major." Throughout the interview, Wodehouse's tone carries exactly the hint of amusement that a fan would expect, as if, even as he answers questions, some other part of his mind is perpetually working on a joke--and enjoying doing so.

The interview, conducted in August of 1963 when Wodehouse lived on Long Island, is for the most part easy and conversational, though there's one very brief moment that anyone familiar with Wodehouse's history can't help but hear as awkward: when Cooke asks whether Wodehouse misses living in England. The question was bound to be sensitive, for at that point--and for the rest of his life--Wodehouse viewed himself as an exile from England, persona non grata because of the comic broadcasts he made from a German prison camp during World War II.

Though time has to some extent softened the initially (and understandably) harsh judgement of the broadcasts, with Robert McCrum arguing fairly convincingly in his recent Wodehouse biography that the transgression was the result of Wodehouse's utter, child-like naivete rather than any desire to curry favor with his captors, at the time they were still a definite sore spot for many English, and a source of confusion, frustration, and shame for Wodehouse himself.

After a pause, Wodehouse responds politely, though with an unquestionably hesitancy and even a bit of fumbling for words:

Well, not really, I, I, you see I never ha-have lived in England very much, I was in France . . . for so many years, and then I was over here.

To Cooke's credit, his response to Wodehouse's answer suggests that the question was likely unplanned and unthinking: seeming to realize the touchiness of the subject, he pauses, then moves on to more benign topics.

As for those benign topics, the interview is chock-full of them, from questions of translation to uses of slang to the re-emergence of butlers. A wonderful (or perhaps terrifying image) is conjured up when Cooke asks whether Bertie Wooster was modeled on anyone specific and Wodehouse replies:

I wouldn't say any definite individual, but that type was very prevalent in the days when I was in and about London, ah, 1911, 12 and 13.

Good god, a whole society of Bertie Woosters--and only one inimitable Jeeves!

A question about whether the communist countries of Europe buy the books in translation leads to an amusing exchange:

COOKE: Do the communist countries buy them?

WODEHOUSE: Ah, they've started again now; I was banned in Hungary. Do you remember a few years ago now, a great number of English authors were banned in Hungary? I was one of them. I suppose they thought my stuff was too little about the proletariat and too much about the earls and dukes and so on.

COOKE: But couldn't the, uh, couldn't, for instance, a communist country pretend to, uh, the readers, that this was an accurate depiction or a devastating picture of the decadence of the upper classes?

WODEHOUSE: [Talking over end of question, chuckling] Yes, I suppose they could. Yes.

My favorite bit of the interview, however, has to do with the frozen-in-amber quality of the blithe, early Edwardian world that Wodehouse created and peopled so brilliantly:

COOKE: Are you ever inclined to make a big jump into completely contemporary material?

WODEHOUSE: Well I'm not sure that I can manage it. This one's coming out next year, there's nothing to date it at all, it could all have happened yesterday.

COOKE: But, I mean, you're not moved by things like astronauts or urban renewal?

WODEHOUSE: [Laughing] Oh, no. No. No, I feel much happier with the sort of atmosphere I'm accustomed to.

Astronauts in Wodehouse! Actually, I could almost imagine an astronaut penetrating the hallowed precincts of Blandings Castle . . . but of course, he wouldn't be an astronaut at all, but rather a nephew or a suitor who, through some utterly absurd but flawlessly logical turn of events, found himself wearing a space suit as a disguise. Perhaps he'd even get some astronaut ice cream in his fake moustache.

And now the rest of my Sunday beckons. Who better to spend it with than Jeeves?