A Wodehouse a Week #3: The Heart of a Goof

'You haven't seen a novel called The Man with the Missing Eyeball anywhere about, have you? I'll swear I left it on one of these seats when I went in to lunch.'

'You are better without it," said the Sage, with a touch of austerity. 'I do not approve of these trashy works of fiction. How much more profitably would your time be spent in mastering the contents of such a volume as I hold in my hand. This is the real literature.'
—from The Heart of a Goof by P. G. Wodehouse

"What are you reading these days?" people asked me. Well, mostly Snuckles, and he never can remember the answer from one day to the rest. But, when I'm out and about on the town with book people, like I was with the good folks from Amazon last week (dining at the fabulous and posh Cascadia Restaurant, home of the delicious lobster-crushed potatoes), that sort of question is likely to come up: "What are you reading these days?" Well, I lowered my lobster-potatoed fork and stared fixedly across the table at them and announced "I am reading my way through P. G. Wodehouse, book by book, one a week." Then everyone says something along the lines of "Oh, that must be fun. How far along are you? How long will it take you?" When I explain that I am on week three and I have another two years to go, they blink and drop their famous miniburgers and exclaim in consternation and uproar: "That's quite an undertaking! You'll never finish it." Sigh.

So here I am at week three, with umpty-umpt weeks to go, but I must tell you this project is a pure pleasure. I've gotten away from straight book-reading in the past few months and it's a delight to dive into a book a week that is light and entertaining and funny and pleasant, a book that has me chuckling out loud on the subway and pulling little Post-It™ tabs to mark especially delightful phrases that tickle my fancy. Check back again in forty-nine weeks or so and see if I still feel the same, but I've gotta be thinking that bar a serious overload of fun, I'm going to be having a boatload of a good time doing this.

Why, look at week three's offering of The Heart of a Goof (1926), a collection of nine short stories (some of them interconnected), all on golf, a subject that is not only not near and dear to my heart but which I actively run away from whenever any of my plus-foured fuzzy pals step up to me with clubs in hand and ask me to go the back nine with them. (I'm lookin' at you, Walt the Sporty Cow). My idea of sport is watching Bend it Like Beckham on TV with a big bowl of pizza rolls by my side, and aside from sussing out that golf is the sport with the long sticks and the dimpled white balls and remembering that Auric Goldfinger is a terrible cheat at it, I know very little about it. But it's one of Wodehouse's favorite sports and one of his favorite to write about—he seldom speaks about other English sport like football (that's soccer to you and me), horse racing (leave that to Dick Francis) or darts, and even quintessentially British sport like cricket and rugby only really pop up in depth in his early Wrykyn and other "Boy's Own" type-school stories like The Gold Bat or The Pothunters. But golfing, my my my, he does love the sport, and it shows. Wodehouse writes about golf with expertise but not technicalities, and more important, he writes about it with humor and passion. Don't be afraid if, like me, you know little about the sport. About all that's essential to understand is that a) it is as important as life and love itself, and b) the lowest score wins, the knowledge of this giving a funny undertone to Wodehouse's description of a doting though clueless mother speaking of her son's golf game:

'Rollo is exceedingly good at golf," proceeded Mrs Podmarsh. 'He scores more than a hundred and twenty every time, while Mr Burns, who is supposed to be one of the best players in the club, seldom manages to reach eighty. But Rollo is very modest—modesty is one of his best qualities—and you would never guess he was so skilful unless you were told.'

Well, maybe you need to know one more thing: to P. G. Wodehouse, golf is love. With only a few exceptions these tales relate stories of avid golfers winning their ladies fair (themselves usually enthusiastic linkswomen) through showing their courage and prowess on the links. Golf as a metaphor for love? Certainly odder things have been done in fiction, and Wodehouse makes it all so wonderful, joyful, and convincing that it puts a scheme in my little bean-filled head to get out there with my clubs and spiky shoes and practice practice practice until I get my handicap squared away and then Keira Knightley will quite fall in love with me. Well, it doesn't quite work that way in the real world, but don't you wish it did?

Like an earlier collection of golf tales, The Clicking of Cuthbert (which of course—no pun intended—I'll get around to reviewing one of these weeks), The Heart of a Goof consists of stories told by The Oldest Member, the venerable Greek chorus of the golf club, who knows all, sees all, and very definitely tells all. Spotting a hapless golfer at the top of every story, he takes him by the arm, plops him down in a chair, and relates to his reluctant audience a short saga of golf, life, and love. Remember those wonderful Commander McBragg cartoons where the Commander would sideline a member of the club to tell a tall tale? Well, that's the Oldest Member to a...heh heh heh...tee...and his hapless victim audience hasn't a chance of escaping the telling:

'But you will, no doubt, wish to heart the story from the beginning.'

The young man rose with the startled haste of some wild creature, which, wandering through the undergrowth, perceives the trap in his path.

'I should love to,' he mumbled, 'only I shall be losing my place at the tee.'

'The goof in question,' said the Sage, attaching himself with quiet firmness to the youth's coat-button, 'was a man of about your age, by name Ferdinand Dibble. I knew him well. In fact, it was to me—'

'Some other time, eh?'

'It was to me,' proceeded the Sage, placidly, 'that he came for sympathy in the great crisis of his life, and I am not ashamed to say that when he had finished laying bare his soul to me there were tears in my eyes. My heart bled for the boy.'

'I bet it did. But—'

The Oldest Member pushed him back gently into his seat.

'Golf," he said, 'is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious goddess—'

The young man, who had been exhibiting symptoms of feverishness, appeared to become resigned. He sighed softly.

'Did you ever read "The Ancient Mariner"?' he said.

'Many years ago,' said the Oldest Member. 'Why do you ask?'

'Oh, I don't know," said the young man. 'It just occurred to me.'

There are stories in here about magic plus fours, a tournament battle for the ownership of the perfect English butler, timid men finding the gumption to fold the woman of their dreams in their tweeded arms on the seventeenth green, and young children scolded by their mother for not holding a mashie correctly. Wodehouse has a lot of fun here, and it shows. How can you resist a book whose dedication reads "To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time," an introduction which suggests that book critics need to publish their golf handicaps aside their reviews of the volume and thus be judged whether they are worthy or not to critique it, and even a lovely bit of self-reference, meta before meta even came along: the book that the Oldest Member is reading in the section I quote at the very top of this post is a masterpiece of golf indeed: we are told it is titled Wodehouse on the Niblick. This is an early collection from the twenties and it's charming more often than it is laugh-out loud, but there are still plenty of funny passages:

'I can stand a lot, but pie-faced Spelvin tries human endurance too high.'

'He is not pie-faced,' said Jane, warmly.

'He is pie-faced," insisted William. 'Come round to the Vienna Bon-Ton Bakery tomorrow and I will show you an individual custard-pie that might be his brother.'

Really, where would the acting career of Hugh Grant be without the influence of lines like that?

He understand the passion players have for the game—and not necessarily gentle loving passion:

'I wish to goodness I knew the man who invented this game. I'd strangle him. But I suppose he's been dead for ages. Still, I could go and jump on his grave.'

...and how love brings golfers together...or is that how golf brings lovers together?:

Barbara squeezed his hand lovingly.

'Don't worry, precious," she said soothingly. 'It will be all right. I am a woman, and once we are married, I shall be able to think of at least a hundred ways of snootering you to such an extent that you'll be fit to win the Amateur Championship.'

'You will?' said Ferdinand, anxiously. 'You're sure?'

'Quite, quite sure, dearest,' said Barbara.

'My angel!' said Ferdinand.

He folded her in his arms, using the interlocking grip.

or these absolutely sublime couple paragraphs:

'Oh, Mary! Mary!' he breathed to himself as he swung.

You who squander your golden youth fooling about on a bowling-green will not understand the magic of those words. But if you were a golfer, you would realize that in selecting just that invocation to breathe to himself Rollo Podmarsh had hit, by sheer accident, on the ideal method of achieving a fine drive. let me explain. The first two words, tensely breathed, are just sufficient to take a man with the proper slowness to the top of his swing; the first syllable of the second 'Mary' exactly coincides with the striking of the ball; and the final 'ry!' takes care of the follow-through. The consequence was that Rollo's ball, instead of hopping down the hill like an embarrassed duck, as was its usual practice, sang off the tee with a scream like a shell, nodded in passing Mary's ball, where it lay some hundred and fifty yards down the course, and, carrying on from there, came to rest within easy distance of the green. For the first time in his golfing life Rollo Podmarsh had hit a nifty.

I have just read The Heart of a Goof in the Penguin paperback edition, which features a dandy Ionicus illustration of a plus-fours, tweed-capped foursome teeing up while a pair of lady golfers wait rather impatiently in the background, but I have two other editions of this book in my collection: a rather non-descript hardcover British reprint published by Barrie & Jenkins in the late seventies (the dull uniform brown typography cover on the left) and a volume in the new uniform Everyman Library reprint in the Complete Wodehouse project (published by Overlook in the US). I've got almost all of these lovely Everyman reprints to date, and this one is one of a selection that Father Christmas brought me while I was on my London holiday this past year, and now that I've re-read the book for the first time in many years, I've got to say "Ta very much, big guy! What a wonderful book to have brought me for Chrimble!" You can get the Overlook hardcover edition of The Heart of a Goof by clicking on the Amazon.com link to the right, and there are many other easier-on-the-change-purse options for older, out-of-print paperback editions available through third-party sellers on Amazon as well. It's the perfect pick-me-up between rounds or a lovely refresh at the nineteenth hole. Even if your golf balls are red and yellow and you're putting through a windmill.