A Wodehouse a Week #10: Over Seventy

Cough. I'm feeling much better today, but still a bit under the weather, despite or maybe because of powerful antibiotics the size of Marshmallow Peeps that are no doubt designed to K.O. every signs of bronchitis or whatever-the-Sam-scratch-it-is out of my little stuffed system. These pills seem to be working as I'm coughing a wee bit less, but they've knocked me for a loop making me feel, as they might say in a Wodehouse book, swoony (and not in the good way, say, over a chipper and tow-headed heroine named Sue or Jill). I slept better last night but was prone to almost hallucinogenic dreams, including the usual one where I have to pack for a trip in a hurry and keep finding new things to shove into my tiny suitcase. I also dreamed at one point that Gus, my kittycat, was actually speaking aloud, and at the same channeling a LOLcat by saying to me: "DO NOT WANT TACO BELL." "NO 1 DUZ," I replied, before I woke up coughing.

Anyway. I'll keep this review brief, but not because it is an inferior Wodehouse book. Quite the reverse—this was possibly one of the best books I could have read this week, light, breezy, and funny (I laughed myself into a coughing fit more than once): Over Seventy (1956), the third of Wodehouse's three autobiographical works and golly, just an all-around rollicking read. Look up "fun book" in the dictionary and you may well spot a clever line drawing of Over Seventy next to it.

It's an "autobiography" in only the loosest sense of the term. As the title tells you, Wodehouse was a septuagenarian by the time this was published (and he had a good twenty years left in his career by this point, too). As such he's got a lot of life to talk about, unlike Miss Billie Piper writing her autobio when she's 24. So you get the basic structure of an autobiography here: Wodehouse was born, and grew up, and did some stuff, and he tells us about them. But for the most part the book is a series of extended comedic essays on this and that subject: butlers, critics, smoking, women, television, the stage, writing, New York City (much of the book is set in America, either covering his early visits or his post-WWII resettlement to Long Island), cats and dogs, Santa Claus, and virtually anything else Wodehouse puts his quicksilver mind to. He even admits it's not a real autobiography:

...as an autobiographer I am rather badly handicapped.

On several occasions it has been suggested to me that I might take a pop at reading my reminiscences. 'Yours has been a long life,' people say. 'You look about a hundred and four. You should make a book of it and cash in.'

The book was originally inspired by American journalist J. P. Winkler (who doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page; so much for his legacy), who presented a series of essays in newspapers and radio by septuagenarians on their lives and how the world has changed in their span. Wodehouse went above and beyond the call by producing the many-chaptered book I hold in my eager little hooves tonight. Ostensibly therefore it's an autobio, but it's really just a grand occasion for Wodehouse to spin a lot of tall tales and wonderful yarns and tell a few jokes, and without needing to stick to a chronological fictional narrative, he has the luxury to just have a great deal of fun throughout. As such there's more laughs and whimsy per chapter than any of the Wodehouse books I've read this far, and if it's light on characters and motivation it's one of the best Wodehouses (Wodehice?) for picking up when you've only got time to read a chapter or two, or when your little bean-filled brain is a wee bit feverish. Aw, heck, let's let his writing speak for itself here, as when he talks about his genesis as an author:

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. I started turning out the stuff at the age of five. (What I was doing before that, I don't remember. Just loafing, I suppose.)

...explaining how civil and even-tempered New York City residents are (hah!):

A man I know was driving in his car the other day and stalled his engine at a street intersection. The lights changed from yellow to green, from green to reed, from red to yellow and from yellow to green, but his car remained rooted to the spot. A policeman sauntered up.

'What's the matter, son?' he asked sympathetically. 'Haven't we got any colours you like?'

It is difficult to see how he could have been nicer.

...relating his conversations with the quintessential New York wisecracking cabby:

He is quite different from his opposite number in London, partly because of his name, as stated on the card on the windscreen, is always something like Rostopchin or Prschebiszewsky but principally owing to his habit of bringing with his quips and cranks and wreathed smiles like the nymphs in 'L'Allegro'. Except for an occasional gruff grunter, all New York taxi-drivers are rapid-fire comedians, and they are given unlimited scope for their bob Hopefulness by that fact that in American cabs there is no glass shutter separating them from the customer.

...

'I want to go to the Cunard White Star pier," you say.

'Okay. Don't be long," he ripostes, quick as a flash.

'You know the way there, I suppose?'

'Garsh, yes, it ain't no secret.'

Then he settles down to it. A few gay observations on the weather and he is ready for the big yoks.

'Say, mister.'

'Hullo?'

'Your name ain't Crime by any chance, is it?'

'Crime?'

"C-r-i-m-e.'

'Oh, Crime? No. Why?'

'Just thinking of a feller I had in my crate the other day. We got talking and he said his name was George Crime.'

'Odd name.'

'What I thought. Well, sir, we got to where he wants to be took and he hops out and starts walking away. "Hi, brother," I say, "ain't you forgettin' something?" "Such as?" he says. "You ain't paid for your ride." "Why would I?" he says. "Haven't you ever heard that crime doesn't pay?" Hey, hey, hey.'

You laugh politely, but inwardly you are saying, 'Not so good, Prschebiszewsky.' The build-up a little too obvious and elaborate, you feel.

For decades Alistair Cooke did a series of BBC radio commentaries entitled Letters from America. I think that Wodehouse could have done just as well and probably more entertaining job, if only the last time he had broadcast on radio hadn't been for Nazi Germany.

I'm no smoker, but I'm fond of the following passage, which is especially apt in this week in which London has banned all public inside smoking, even in pubs (which is apt to leave Warren Ellis and Shane MacGowan very, very cranky indeed):

...our own manufacturers are turning out good and powerful stuff today, so let us avail ourselves of it. Smoke up, my hearties. Never mind Tolstoy. Ignore G. Swanson. Think what it would means if for want of our support the tobacco firms had to go out of business. There would be no more of those photographs of authors smoking pipes, and if authors were not photographed smoking pipes, how would we be able to know that they are manly and in the robust tradition of English literature?

So, don't come into Over Seventy expecting to get a traditional autobiography. Bring on the Girls and Performing Flea, Wodehouse's two other autobiographical works, which I'll get around to reviewing one of these years, are similarly entertaining but a little more straightforward in their format. If you want traditional biographies, of course, there's always the Frances Donaldsonand the Robert McCrumbios (truth in disclosure: the McCrum is published by W. W. Norton, where I toil away the workdays). But none of these feature, as does Over Seventy, this wonderful glimpse of one of Wodehouse's most beloved characters, the pig-loving Lord Emsworth, in the afterlife:

...I like to think that this separation of butler and butler-aficionado will not endure for ever. I tell myself that when Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, finally hands in his dinner pail after his long and pleasant life, the first thing he will hear as he settles himself on his cloud will be the fruity voice of Beach, the faithful butler, saying, 'Nectar or ambrosia, m'lord?'

'Eh? Oh, hullo, beach. I say, Beach, what's this dashed thing they handed me as I came in?'

'A harp, m'lord. Your lordship is supposed to play on it.'

'Eh? Play on it? Like Harpo Marx, you mean?'

'Precisely, m'lord.'

'Most extraordinary. Is everybody doing it?'

'Yes, m'lord.'

'My sister Constance? My brother Galahad? Sir Gregory Parsloe? Baxter? Everybody?'

'Yes, m'lord.'

'Well, it all sounds very odd to me. Still, if you say so. Give me your A, Beach.'

'Certainly, m'lord. Coming right up.'

Finally, why did I pick this book to read this week? Only partly because I want to mix up his series and hadn't covered any of his non-fiction yet, but mostly because in America Over Seventy was published in a different format under a different title: the very-apt-for-this-week America, I Love You. Hooray! I love America, and I love Wodehouse, so this is like the Fudge-Covered Oreo of Wodehouse books. The version I have is the expanded British one titled Over Seventy, and it's contained in Wodehouse on Wodehouse, a wonderful Penguin paperback omnibus edition of his three autobios in one, which means that I shall put this book back on the big daunting 'haven't reviewed yet' bookcase instead of the 'already written about' shelf in order to cover the other two books at a later date. So now you want to read Over Seventy/America, I Love You? Well, good luck, Bucky! In either version this is one of Wodehouse's harder books to find: both are long out of print and even Wodehouse on Wodehouse commands big bucks on the used-book market. Now is the perfect time for Overlook Press to republish these three autobios in their lovely uniform Collector's Wodehouse editions, but until then, you may be able to find one or another at your local library or through inter-library loan, or, if you're flushed as Croesus (and I think we all know how painful that can be), click on the Amazon.com link to the right to buy an expensive used copy of Wodehouse on Wodehouse. It's not my copy: I ain't givin' mine up!