Source of book: I own this.
A trip to the beach. (Okay, a trip to the beach to run the world’s
greatest 10 kilometer footrace...blame my wife for getting me into running
again, and into this race in particular.) Anyway, a trip to the beach requires
a propper beach read. And yes, I know I am probably not the sort of person to
ask for recommendations - after all, I once tackled Camus
on a beach trip - but I do think that it is difficult to do better than Pelham
Grenville Wodehouse for the occasion.
I am a big fan of P. G., and have been ever since my high
school violin teacher’s husband gave my brother and I some of his old books.
(We were his favorites, I think, because we were always happy to discuss
Dickens and other Victorian authors with him. I also credit him with
introducing me to Anthony
Trollope.)
I have read quite a few of Wodehouse’s books over the years.
Even though I am not a golfer, his golf stories are most hilarious, and one can
usually count on his books to be entertaining, witty, and utterly ludicrous. In
any event, here are the books I have reviewed on this blog, along with an
introduction to the author himself:
***
Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, the fifth Earl of
Ickenham - known to Wodehouse fans more jovially as “Uncle Fred” - is one of
Wodehouse’s most delightful creations. An older man, usually tied down by his
far more sensible wife, he is a force of nature, a “chaos
muppet” of the first water (to use a favorite Wodehouse expression), and a
good example of what Psmith might have become given enough age. Wherever Uncle
Fred goes, expect the unexpected, the crazy, the bizarre - and the hilarious,
of course.
I first experienced Uncle
Fred in Uncle Fred in the Springtime, which I read a few years back. He
combines the intellect of Jeeves (and the ability to, well, fix things) with
the exuberance of Psmith. And perhaps the aversion to battleaxe females of
Bertie Wooster. In any event, he is a lot of fun. I understand that David Niven once played
him. This sounds promising...
In this book, it is Uncle Fred who starts a whole cascade of
crazy events, with a simple amusement. While out at the legendary Drones Club
with his nephew Pongo Twistleton, he hears of a marvelous idea: shooting hats
off using a slingshot and a Brazil nut. He immediately borrows one, and shoots
off the hat of Sir Raymond Bastable, a rising barrister and possible future
member of Parliament. “Beefy” Bastable and Uncle Fred also are old
acquaintances. Bastable has no idea who did the dirty deed, but suspects the
“young people” he sees laughing at him. Burning for revenge, he is given an
idea by Uncle Fred, who suggest that someone with actual writing talent would
write a scathing novel. Bastable takes this as a challenge, and writes “Cocktail Time,” a novel filled with sex,
scandal, and a vociferous denouncement of the younger generation. He submits it
under a pseudonym, and, after many rejections, it is published.
It remains mostly unknown, until, by chance, the daughter of
a bishop is caught reading it, he denounces it from the pulpit, and the rest is
history.
Except for a big problem. It isn’t the sort of novel that an
aspiring member of parliament wishes to be known for writing. Enter Uncle Fred
again. For a small fee, Bastable’s doofus nephew, Cosmo Wisdom, agrees to
accept “credit” for the novel. But Wisdom owes a gambling debt to an American
con man and his intimidating wife - and they quickly realize there is a deeper
pocket they can plumb. Things get, um, complicated
really fast.
Before things are wrapped up (with no fewer than four marriages), we meet a potty old
literary agent - given to knitting and forgetfulness, a battleaxe housekeeper,
Bastable’s sister - who resembles a white rabbit, a letter everyone wants for
different reasons, yet another butler (of course), and a novelist who can never
quite make ends meet. For someone of Uncle Fred’s resourcefulness, this is, of
course, just an epic challenge. Between his imagination, his ability to
impersonate, and his epically cool demeanor, everything comes right in the end,
to great hilarity. (Well, except for the con man and his wife. After all, the
“goodness and light” that Uncle Fred has to spread around has its limits, and
someone is bound to be left out.)
Wodehouse is so epically quotable. I literally wanted to
just reproduce a few chapters. But I did select a few of the best quotes to
share.
The whole Britishism affect is hilarious. Not that any of
the Brits I know really talk like this. But one can certainly imagine the
denizens of the Drones Club doing it. How about this opening exchange?
“Yo ho,” said the Egg.
“Yo ho,” said the Bean.
“Yo ho,” said Pongo. “You know my
uncle, Lord Ickenham, don’t you?”
“Oh, rather,” said the Egg. “Yo ho,
Lord Ickenham.”
“Yo ho,” said the Bean.
“Yo ho,” said Lord Ickenham. “In fact,
I will go further. Yo frightfully ho,” and it was plain to both Bean and Egg
that they were in the presence of one who was sitting on top of the world and
who, had he been wearing a hat, would have worn it on the side of his head. He
looked, they considered, about as bumps-a-daisy as billy-o.
And, soon thereafter, the topic of the Brazil nut catapult
comes up.
Lord Ickenham was intrigued. He always
welcomed these opportunities to broaden his mind and bring himself abreast of
modern thought. The great advantage of lunching at the Drones, he often said,
was that you met such interesting people.
“Shoots Brazil nuts, does he? You stir me
strangely. In my time I have shot many things - grouse, pheasants, partridges,
tigers, gnus, and once, when a boy, an aunt by marriage in the seat of her
sensible tweed dress with an airgun - but I have never shot a Brazil nut. The
fact that, if I understand you aright, this stripling makes a practice of this
form of marksmanship shows once again that it takes all sorts to do the world’s
work. Not sitting Brazil nuts, I trust?”
Sir Bastable is decidedly NOT amused by the incident, of
course. And he, like many a codger, would prefer that all those annoying young
people stay off his lawn.
What had occurred, it was evident, had
been one more exhibition of the brainless hooliganism of the modern young man
which all decent people so deplored. Sir Raymond had never been fond of the
modern young man, considering him idiotic, sloppy, disrespectful, inefficient
and, generally speaking, a blot on the London
scene, and this Brazil nut sequence put, if one may so express it, the lid on
his distaste. It solidified the view he had always held that steps ought to be
taken about the modern young man and taken promptly. What steps, he could not
at the moment suggest, but if, say, something on the order of the Black Death
were shortly to start setting about these young pests and giving them what was
coming to them, it would have his full approval. He would hold its coat and
cheer it on.
It occurs to me that Wodehouse was a solid 50 or 60 years
ahead of our modern era, when the older folks seem to make dissing the Millennials
(and whatever the heck my children will be called as an epithet…) But Wodehouse
is indeed timeless for many reasons. Here is another. I remember as a kid the
clergy of that time getting their panties in a complete knot over The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie
which was mediocre at best, and would have died an obscure death had they not
rescued it from oblivion by their vehement protestations. In this case, the
Bishop of Stortford sees his daughter reading the book - at a particularly racy
spot - and then, well, Wodehouse describes it thus:
At twelve-fifteen on the following
Sunday he was in the pulpit of the church of St. Jude the Resilient, Eaton
Square, delivering a sermon on the text “He that touches pitch shall be
defiled” (Ecclesiasticus 13:1) which had the fashionable congregation rolling
in the aisles and tearing up the pews. The burden of his address was a
denunciation of the novel Cocktail Time, in the course of which he described it
as obscene, immoral, shocking, impure, corrupt, shameless, graceless and
depraved, and all over the sacred edifice you could see eager young men jotting
the name down on their shirt cuffs, scarcely able to wait to add it to their
library list.
This success, naturally, leads to the press wanting to know
the real identity of the obviously pseudonymous author. And thus is set in
motion the rest of the plot.
I also have to quote
Uncle Fred in a passage involving Albert Peasemarch. Said fellow is an old
friend of Uncle Fred from the war. He is wealthy enough, but bored with
idleness, so he takes a job as butler for Sir Bastable. He plays the part well,
but this irritates Uncle Fred.
“Now listen, Bert. This ‘m’lord’ stuff.
I've been meaning to speak to you about it. I’m a lord, yes, no argument about
that, but you don’t have to keep rubbing it in all the time. It’s no good
kidding ourselves. We know what lords are. Anachronistic parasites on the body
of the state is the kindest thing you can say of them. Well, a sensitive man
doesn’t like to be reminded every half second that he is one of the
untouchables, liable at any moment to be strung up on a lamppost or to have his
blood flowing in streams down Park
Lane. Couldn’t you substitute something matier and
less wounding to my feelings?”
It is this sort of thing that keeps me returning to
Wodehouse every year. How about another? The senior (in many ways) literary
agent of the publisher that takes on Cocktail Time is Mr. Saxby senior. He has
taken up knitting - in a very serious way. As in, he rambles about turning the
corner on a sock, and is constantly involved in making sweaters for his
grandchildren.
Old Mr. Howard Saxby was seated at his
desk in his room at the Edgar Saxby Literary Agency when Cosmo arrived there.
He was knitting a sock. He knitted a good deal, he would would tell you if he
asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he smoked a good deal to
keep himself from knitting.
My wife is seriously into knitting as well - she’s really
good at it. So I have to tease her with this one. The knitting keeps coming up
throughout the book, usually in hilarious fashion.
Another thread is Lewis Carroll’s most famous book. Several
characters are compared to those from Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, from Bill the Salamander, to the White Rabbit -
who is the pattern for Sir Bastable’s widowed sister Phoebe.
One final line, which is so Wodehousian, fans will recognize
it anywhere. Sir Bastable is about to reconcile with his old flame, Barbara
Crowe (who is the real power at Edgar
Saxby.) He discusses this with Uncle Fred, who has done his best to orchestrate
the reconciliation.
“And what steps do you propose to
take?”
“I’m going to tell her I’ve been a
fool?”
“Doesn’t she know?”
I definitely laughed at that one. Actually, I laughed at a
lot of this book. It is classic Wodehouse, with a twisted plot, goofy and
memorable characters, and a witty and razor-sharp, yet good natured sense of
humor. I recommend books to people all the time. Wodehouse is one of my most
regular recommendations. Don’t expect profundity. But humor is indeed the
hardest genre to write, and beneath the hilarity often lurks the germ of the
truth we don’t want to acknowledge. If you haven’t discovered P. G. Wodehouse,
by all means give him a try. If you have, well, he was prolific, so grab
another of his books as a summer read.
No comments:
Post a Comment