Fun with Comics: How Bertie Wooster would have handled Nazis

from the Junior Rangers story in Headline Comics v.1 #7 (Prize, Spring 1944), art by Henry Kiefer (?)

Stuff Bully Got: A clever spy and a cleverer valet

A couple cool books I bought for myself at Housing Works Bookstore and Café today!


This Black Widow book is great; I've never seen it before. It's a history of the character in comics with lots of illos and it's very attractively designed.





And of course I already have the stories in this Wodehouse collection already, but not in this edition! I am an obsessive little bull when I'm collecting Mr. P.G. Wodehouse.


To sum up: buy more books!

Stuff Bully Got: More P.G. Wodehouse books!

Instead of weed, I bought these at Housing Works today.


I hope 4/20 doesn't mind.

Stuff Bully Got Wants: Why can't I buy this magazine?

I wanted to buy an old magazine because it had a P.G. Wodehouse story, but John wouldn't let me!


I wonder why?

A Wodehouse a Week Special: "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss" from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Happy Halloween! On this night that's kooky, spooky, and altogether ooky, let's while away the time after gathering candy and before our visit to the stomach ward of the local hospital by checking in on our old Halloweeny pal, Mister P. G. Wodehouse. It's been one year to the day since old man Jenkins died in that strange house on the hill under mysterious circumstances I reviewed P. H. cannon's pastiche novel Scream for Jeeves, a loving if not always successful mash-up of Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. Coincidentally—or not, you make the call!—virtually one year ago today Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's much-delayed, eagerly-anticipated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier was finally released, and I ran home excitedly with it, crawled into my big armchair, strapped on my 3D glasses, and eagerly devoured it (note: not literally).

My take on LoEG: BD? (Sorry, not callin' it LXG, no how, no way!) Well, I liked it, liked it a lot, enough to name it #20 on my Fun Fifty of 2007. I liked Moore's take on James Bond (probably a version closer to a real-life 007 than any movie version), its clever reimagining of my favorite map in the world...



...and the thrill-ride that takes Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain from grey and dreary Post-Orwell Britain to a literally eye-popping fantasyland beyond the realm of imagination. Like the earlier LoEG volumes, it rewards re-reading for its variety of prose, denseness of ideas, and the whirlwind parade of guest stars from literature, film, comics and popular culture. As always, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, so Jess Nevins's annotations for Black Dossier are, as always, especially useful—altho' much of the fun is in figuring out references on your own. The thrill and delight in recognizing one of them gives a "Where's Waldo?" feel to the book but doesn't overwhelm the plot. (I myself was delighted to see the comic The Winged Avenger on a newsstand in the book)

The reason I most enjoyed Black Dossier, however, is that Moore and O'Neill weren't content to just produce another comic book sequel—Black Dossier truly goes one step beyond the originals by presenting us with a history of the League's world in titular secret documents: a lost Shakespeare play (on yellowing paper illustrated with period woodcuts), a pastiche of 1950s British picture-comics telling the life history of League member Orlando (from the Virginia Woolf novel), picture postcards between the original cast members, a not-suitable-for-little-stuffed-bulls Tijuana Diary, an excerpt from a Kerouac-styled Beat novel of the League's universe (that one's sadly pretty unreadable). Each of these pieces, and the many more that accompany them, are presented in a specific visual design style that emulates the originals that they're parodying or referencing, giving us the feeling that we're not looking at a hardcover graphic novel, but actually a scrapbook—the true Black Dossier. The original two LoEG books may have celebrated the great characters of literature and pop culture, but Black Dossier goes one step further and celebrates the medium and the art of storytelling, publishing, and visual entertainment as much as it does its protagonists. Moore would have even gone one further and added the element of sound to the mix if the book had contained the original planned flexi-disc.

But what's this got to do with A Wodehouse a Week, you muse? One of Moore's segments is the four-page Wodehouse pastiche "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss," written by "The Rt. Hon. Bertram Wooster." Like Scream for Jeeves, it's a blending of the light-hearted comedy of P. G. Wodehouse and the chilling dread of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu (or, as Bertie mishears them "Cool Lulu") horrors, set at Aunt Dahlia's familiar old manse Brinkley Court.

Moore has the general narration style and character voices of Wodehouse down pretty pat, right to the traditional Bertie story-opening:

Friendship can be a rather sticky wicket now and then, as when one's anxious to assure one's chums that one does not regard them as a hideous embarrassment, when one actually does. Old hands amongst you will have no doubt guessed ahead that the source of my discomfort was that same Augustus, he of the Fink-Nottles, whom I've previously lamented in these pages.

He even throws in running Bertie jokes and references:

'...That man has been a font of knowledge when it comes to folk traditions from rural America, which I believe that I may write a piece on for Milady's Boudoir.'

This was a weekly periodical, intended for the sensitively reared. Of which my Aunt was proprietor. I looked her in the eye and said 'Tish-tosh,' which I am not afraid to state that I had intended as a cut.

Trouble is, Moore has the style down, but not the patterns. Take a quick peek at this first two-page spread—don't pay attention to the words itself, but look at the length of the paragraphs:



...and now grab a gander at a randomly chosen couple pages from a real book by The Master himself:



Moore's prose is dense, with long, deep, descriptive paragraphs and virtually no dialogue; Wodehouse's is short, sharp, and peppy, featuring short paragraphs and fast-alternating lines of dialogue. I've said before that Wodehouse's books sometimes read like plays (he himself commented that he was writing musical theatre without the music) because the back-and-forth conversation frequently monopolizes the page for so many lines that it becomes a dialogue. I'm not familiar with Lovecraft's literary style—is Moore specifically copying the pacing and paragraph construction of Lovecraft here? If so, that's very clever, but as a Wodehouse pastiche, it rings oddly because you never see a true Wodehouse book that's mostly narration and very little dialogue.

The League shows up in the middle of the Jeevesian do to put things right:

They were a dashing crew, I must say, even if they did appear to have a girl in charge of them, a pretty little thing called Min, with steely eels and a thick muffler around her neck despite it being then the stifling height of summer. With her was a wiry gentleman around her age, whom she called Allan, and another person, called Orlando Something, who despite his deep voice and deportment looked to me the very spit of Gussie's fatuous fiancée, the appalling Madeline Bassett o the limpid eyes and weeping-spasms.

Despite departing snappy dialogue for eldritch description, Moore's got a pretty good handle on Bertie's narrative voice, and there's some spot-on bits that not only had me nodding my head in their approximation of authentic Wodehouse, they made me giggle:

My aunt and all her pals were twitching and convulsing on the clipped grass, foaming at their mouths and jabbering in tongues, with not a stitch of clothing on between the lot of them. I'd feared that Morris dancing might result from all this folk tradition lark. But naturism really was the limit.

Of course, poor Gussie Fink-Nottle gets the worst of it, as usual:

'...If what I have heard of this abominable creatures is correct, Mr. Fink-Nottle's most essential self is at this moment being carried to the place called Yuggoth that they mentioned, possibly some other planet or dimension, in the confines of a copper cylinder. Put simply, sir, I fear they have removed his brain and left him here like a boiled egg that's had its top sliced off.'

'Oh bother, have they really? Do you know, I thought that I was feeling muzzy.'

Gussie sat up slowly in the armchair, lifting one hand gingerly to feel around inside his open and demonstratably deserted cranium. His goldfish eyes gazed up imploringly towards my manservant. 'I say, you couldn't fix my lid back so that it wouldn't show, Jeeves, could you? If Miss Basset saw me like this I should never heard an end to it.'

Wearing a look of incredulity that bordered on the insolent, and muttering about a tube of glue he thought he might have, Jeeves led the pair of us back to the house past what survived of Auntie's soiree.

That last bit, by the way, is the only piece of "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss" that rang truly false with me. Sure, one might suppose that faced with the ultimate evil incarnate, even Jeeves might be shaken enough to drop his usual unflappable decorum. But you know, I'd prefer Jeeves to be the unshakeable, the unsinkable, the non-plussed supermind he is in the Wodehouse books. Here's a counterargument to a shaken and stirred Jeeves from a real Wodehouse (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen):

'Jeeves,' I said, when I had returned to the Wooster G.H.Q., 'I'm afraid I have bad news.'

'Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear that.'

One of his eyebrows had risen about an eighth of an inch, and I know he was deeply stirred, because I had rarely seen him raise an eyebrow more than a sixteenth of an inch.

Now that's the real Jeeves. But Alan Moore's version ain't bad, and the general concept—although done previously by P. H. Cannon—makes a spiffing excursion into Moore and O'Neill's heavily-celebrity-populated world. I've always thought Jeeves was among history's most Extraordinary Gentlemen...now we have proof.



I may have waited a year to review Moore's Wodehouse pastiche, but you reap the spooky benefits of my delay! How's that? Because The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier just came out in paperback this week at your local comic store, and will be in stock early next week at Amazon and other fine bookstores around the country. (Just click on the link to your right to pick up a copy!) It's the perfect adventure into the world of spies, spaceships, and spooks, capped off with a spectacular (if over-the-top nonsensical) 3D end section. Like it or love it, you have to admit Moore's not resting on his laurels he's given us something new and dramatic that expands the scope of the original League novels. May he continue to surprise, outrage, and entertain us.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #70: The Prince and Betty

The Prince and Betty. No, not


but the 1912 novel by...aw, you guessed it, P. G. Wodehouse. The Prince and Betty is something of an odd duck. Plop it in your lap with a trayful of buttered toast at your elbow and turn page one and you're instantly transported to the tiny Mediterranean island paradise known as Mervo, where millionaire Benjamin Scobell plots to turn Mervo into the next Monte Carlo-style gambling paradise, complete with hot and cold running chorus girls, 24-hour baccarat and all the cheap shrimp cocktail you can shovel down your gullet. He's built an expansive casino and is only missing one tourist draw that Monte Carlo can boast of: an honest-to-goodness royal Prince. A simple matter to dispatch his secretary Crump to dig up and bring back the young man who's the real heir to the throne, his family long-ousted by the republic.

Meanwhile, Scobell's stepdaughter Betty pines for her one true love. In what seems like a very open-minded plot for 1912, Betty reveals the name of that love:

Elsa leaned forward eagerly.

'Who, Betty?'

'You don't know him.'

'But what's his name?'

Betty hesitated.

'Well, if I am on the witness-stand—Maude.'

Hotchy motchy! That's some progressive stuff for the nineteen-teens. But wait, faithful reader:

'Maude? I thought you said a man?'

'It's his name. John Maude.'

'But, Betty! Why didn't you tell me before? This is tremendously interesting.'

Yes it is...especially when (could you guess it?) loverboy John Maude and the newly reinstated Prince of Mervo turn out to be one and the same, and both of him are pretty likeable—a stalwart Wodehouse hero:

Ten days after Mr Scobell's visit to General Poineau, John, Prince of Mervo, ignorant of the greatness so soon to be thrust upon him, was strolling thoughtfully along one of the main thoroughfares of that outpost of civilization, Jersey City. He was a big young man, tall and large of limb. His shoulders especially were of the massive type expressly designed by nature for driving wide gaps in the opposing line on the gridiron. He looked like one of nature's center-rushes, and had, indeed, played in that position for Harvard during two strenuous seasons. His face wore an expression of invincible good-humor. He had a wide, good-natured mouth, and a pair of friendly gray eyes. One felt that he liked his follow men and would be surprised and pained if they did not like him.

and becoming royal doesn't go to his head; John's still the same salt-of-the-earth reg'lar guy he always is:

At this point Mr Scobell made his presence felt.

'Glad to meet you, Prince,' he said, coming forward. 'Scobell's my name. Shake hands with General Poineau. No, that's wrong. I guess he kisses your hand, don't he?'

'I'll swing on him if he does,' said John, cheerfully.

Golly. I think I'm falling in love with him.

Just like they always do, complications ensure. (Darn those complications!) Tho' John and Betty are reunited and it feels so good, his conscience won't allow the home of his ancestors to become a gambling haven, and he exercises le droit seigneur to shut down the casino. Around this point, your buttered toast cooling and forgotten, your bottom creeps to the edge of your seat and you lean over the book, enthralled, expecting the rest of the novel to be a romantic swirling Ruritanian romance of princes with mistaken identities and swashbuckling sword fights and court orchestras feverishly playing Strauss's Trisch-Trasch Polka.

And then, on page sixty-five, the thing suddenly turns into The Gangs of New York.

As Mike Nelson so succinctly opined during a fast scene change in a Coleman Francis movie: "Agh! My neck got broken during that jump cut!" But had he been born much earlier and he and his steampunk auto-mat-ons engaged to poke japes at the nickeoleon cinemo-entertainments, Nelson might have been referring to the second two-thirds of The Prince and Betty, which are set in the world of New York City tabloid journalism, so far from Mervo that you may as well take off your tropical shirt and sunglasses. John abdicates the throne rather than put up with being a puppet ruler, and Betty, who has already run away from him in dismay, falls into steady work as a typist for the genial and low-key periodical Peaceful Moments, overseen by the talkative, philosophical, and monocled Rupert Smith:

He was a young man of spirit and resource. His appearance, to those who did not know him, hardly suggested this. He was very tall and thin, with a dark, solemn face. He was a purist in the matter of clothes, and even in times of storm and stress presented an immaculate appearance to the world. In his left eye, attached to a cord, he wore a monocle.

Through this, at the present moment, he was gazing benevolently at Mr Renshaw, as the latter fussed about the office in the throes of departure. To the editor's rapid fire of advice and warning he listened with the pleased and indulgent air of a father whose infant son frisks before him. Mr Renshaw interested him. To Smith's mind Mr Renshaw, put him in any show you pleased, would alone have been worth the price of admission.

'Well,' chirruped the holiday-maker—he was a little man with a long neck, and he always chirruped—'Well, I think that is all, Mr Smith. Oh, ah, yes! The stenographer. You will need a new stenographer.'

The Peaceful Moments stenographer had resigned her position three days before, in order to get married.

'Unquestionably, Comrade Renshaw,' said Smith. 'A blonde.'

Mr Renshaw looked annoyed.

'I have told you before, Mr Smith, I object to your addressing me as Comrade. It is not—it is not—er—fitting.'

Smith waved a deprecating hand.

'Say no more,' he said. 'I will correct the habit. I have been studying the principles of Socialism somewhat deeply of late, and I came to the conclusion that I must join the cause. It looked good to me. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start in by swiping all you can and sitting on it. A noble scheme. Me for it. But I am interrupting you.'

Mr Renshaw had to pause for a moment to reorganize his ideas.

'I think—ah, yes. I think it would be best perhaps to wait for a day or two in case Mrs Oakley should recommend someone. I mentioned the vacancy in the office to her, and she said she would give the matter her attention. I should prefer, if possible, to give the place to her nominee. She—'

'—has eighteen million a year,' said Smith. 'I understand. Scatter seeds of kindness.'

Mr Renshaw looked at him sharply. Smith's face was solemn and thoughtful.

'Nothing of the kind,' the editor said, after a pause. 'I should prefer Mrs Oakley's nominee because Mrs Oakley is a shrewd, practical woman who—er—who—who, in fact—'

'Just so,' said Smith, eying him gravely through the monocle. 'Entirely.'

The scrutiny irritated Mr Renshaw.

'Do put that thing away, Mr Smith,' he said.

'That thing?'

'Yes, that ridiculous glass. Put it away.'

'Instantly,' said Smith, replacing the monocle in his vest-pocket. 'You object to it? Well, well, many people do. We all have these curious likes and dislikes. It is these clashings of personal taste which constitute what we call life. Yes. You were saying?'

Mr Renshaw wrinkled his forehead.

'I have forgotten what I intended to say,' he said querulously. 'You have driven it out of my head.'

Huh! sez I, scratching my little stuffed head as I read this bit. This Smith fellow reminds me an awfully lot of another Wodehouse character. Wears a monocle, monopolizes the conversation, calls his peers 'Comrade'...why, this Smith character

(Yes, I actually thought this distinctly before I realized exactly what I was saying)

this Smith character reminds me a lot of Psmith.

Bang! goes my hoof on my forehead as the other shoe or the shiny penny drops and the similarity of the names makes perfect sense: no simple coincidence; this is Rupert Psmith, he of the silent P and the later Wodehouse adventures like Psmith in the City. This is his first full-fledged appearance, and if he's missing his P, very nearly everything else is in place. Our Ruritanian romance has turned into a Psmith adventure. Betty helps the plot along by rescuing the cat of a Manhattan tough guy crime boss (thus ensuring his undying gratitude), and john shows up much later to accompany Psmith Smith on his muckraking newsmaking adventures, but the love story if pretty much tabled in favor of Smith, Journalist, as the pleasant and quiet Peaceful Moments becomes a hard-hitting tabloid that promotes boxing matches and enflames the ire of the mobs by running a series of exposés on the dismal living conditions in the New York slums, turning it into a paper J. Jonah Jameson himself would be proud of, albeit unusually free of Spider-Man bashing. There's plenty of chasing in and across rooftops, being hit by the head with coshes and rival gangs facing off against each other, and the whole thing seems to be The Gangs of New York except with a few jokes along the way and some kisses at the end.

But delve in deep like the journalistic muckraking of Smith and Co. to find the true origins of this novel and its dual two-face nature is revealed. In 1912 Wodehouse released "The Prince and Betty" in serial form in The Strand magazine; it was later collected into a novel of the same name, but not the one I've read this week. Instead, the action is confined to Mervo, the main players to John and Betty, and their love story the primary action. When the novel was published later that same year in the United States, Wodehouse substantially expanded it by integrating most of the plot of a 1909 magazine serial from The Captain magazine that starred (P)smith and Mike. Thus, the edition I've been reading is what's known as the "American version" of The Prince and Betty, which, much like Composite Superman or Certs with Retsin, contains two, two, two things in one. To complicate matters, Wodehouse rewrote and recombined the two plots yet again in 1931 as a magazine serial under the title A Prince for Hire. It's not considered part of the true Wodehouse book canon as it was never originally published in book form (but here's a news story of a publishing endeavor that eventually brought it out in a 2003 limited edition that I need to get my hooves on one of these days. C'mon, A Prince for Hire...to paraphrase Billy Ocean, get out of my dreams and only my shelves!) And there's a 1919 silent film version that featured a young Boris Karloff (as one of the gangsters? We can only hope!). Clearly this evergreen plot was fodder for a lot of Wodehouse's creations, and if the American patchwork version of The Prince and Betty is a wee creaky at times, it makes up for it with some fine dialogue, the sparkling characters of Smith and his comrades, and some really lovely and still-accurate descriptions of New York City:

New York is an egotist. It will suffer no divided attention. "Look at me!" says the voice of the city imperiously, and its children obey. It snatches their thoughts from their inner griefs, and concentrates them on the pageant that rolls unceasingly from one end of the island to the other. One may despair in New York, but it is difficult to brood on the past; for New York is the City of the Present, the City of Things that are Going On.

But finally, I can't find fault with a Wodehouse book that so jovially addresses me by name:

John beamed down on them.

'That's right,' he said. 'Bully! I knew you could get a move on as quick as anyone else, if you gave your minds to it.'

Golly. Thank you, Mister Wodehouse.



The Prince and Betty is one of those early Wodehouse novels that, until recently, has been out of print just about forever. Why, if it weren't for the internet itself, we'da scarcely been able to read it: here's the online free text version. But for those of you who prefer to hold a book in your hands and turn the pages with barely-concealed excitement and mounting thrills, well, then, thanks to the modern-day invention of the twenty-first century, The Prince and Betty is now in the public domain and has been republished in Arc Manor's series of inexpensive early Wodehouse paperbacks. Their jacket designs are often amateur and cartoonish and the books are typeset cheaply with regrettable typos that suggest it was optical-scanned without proofreading: 'His first act, on landing, w5as to proceed...' says the opening of Chapter Four, and there's a rogue asterisk in the first sentence of page one: 'A pretty girl in a blue dress came out of the house, and began to walk slowly across the terrace to where Elsa Keith sat with Marvin Rossiter in the* shade of the big sycamore.' But skim over these minor annoyances and dive into Mervo and New York—it's well worth the adventure.

Oh, and what of the adventures of Smith/Psmith and friends? If The Prince and Betty existed in two forms, with Smith and without, is the same true for the Psmith storyline: does it exist shorn of its Mervonian origins? But of course!—Wodehouse went back to the well once again for the 1915 Psmith novel Psmith Journalist, a rewriting of the second two-thirds of the American version of The Prince and Betty. Let's read it next week, shall we? Yes, let's! See you then!

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #69: Jill the Reckless

Derek drew at his cigar, and watched the smoke as it curled to the ceiling.

'It's about Jill.'

Freddie signified his interest by wriggling still further sideways.

'Jill, eh?'

'Freddie, she's so damned impulsive!'

Freddie nearly rolled out of his chair. This, he took it, was what writing-chappies called a coincidence.

'Rummy you should say that,' he ejaculated. 'I was telling her exactly the same thing myself only this evening.'
—from Jill the Reckless by P. G. Wodehouse

This week's Wodehouse is Jill the Reckless (1921, titled The Little Warrior in the USA). How reckless is Jill Mariner? Well, she ticks off her snobbish fiancé Derek by having dinner with an old chum from her childhood in Chapter Four, and by Chapter Five she's pinched by the Metropolitan Police for assault. She's got a perfectly good reason, of course—Jill's pleasant and smart and not at all the Frank Castle type: she was thrashing an animal abuser who was trying to attack an escape parrot. But by far the most reckless thing young Jill does is lose her family fortune. Rather, it's her charming rogue of an Uncle Chris (a sort of proto-Uncle Fred in the Wodehouse canon) who loses it all on the stock market. For this she's shunned by her fiancé and his family, and like all good heroines off to make their way in life, she escapes to New York to take a job as a chorus girl on the Broadway stage. Reckless? Mmm, by the standards of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton, Our Miss Mariner is practically Mother Cabrini.

Thus begins one of Wodehouse's early comedy-romances, and it's a wonderful little fluffy piece of adventure, one of my favorite of his between-the-war non-series books. Jill is one of Wodehouse's favorite names for a heroine (remind me to someday do that pie-chart showing how often he re-used female names for protagonists) and his affection for her is clear and adoring, passing her brightness and cheer onto us. She's no Pollyanna—she's clearly inherited the family cleverness that gets her con-man uncle into so much trouble—her can-do spirit and cheerful demeanor keep her from being a pushover, as solemn Long Island relatives try continuously to take advantage of her good will until Jill has had all she can take:

Mrs Mariner frowned.

"I was going to suggest," she said frostily, "that you shovelled the snow away from the front steps!"

"Splendid!" said Jill. "Oh, but I forgot. I want to go to the village first."

"There will be plenty of time to do it when you get back."

"All right. I'll do it when I get back."

It was a quarter of an hour's walk to the village. Jill stopped at the post-office.

"Could you tell me," she asked, "when the next train is to New York?"

"There's one at ten-ten," said the woman, behind the window. "You'll have to hurry."

"I'll hurry!" said Jill.

There's other great characters: Freddie Rooke is a helpful and sometimes bumbling member of the Drone Club; he follows Jill to New York to persuade her to return to Derek but winds up staying for a life on the stage when he falls in love with a chorus girl. There's Wally Mason, tall, gallant and handsome playwright, who we all know is the man Jill should be with (but she's not sure of it herself until the end of the book). While Wally serves several plot points to introduce Jill to her new world, Wodehouse smartly resists the temptation to make Wally a deus ex manhattana to solve all her problems—instead, Jill's smarts and kindness get her ahead and solve the puzzles, no matter how complicated they are. Her Uncle Chris—Major Christopher Selby—is a charming rogue, conning his way into crashing at Wally's lush midtown apartment behind Wally's back. Then there's a bevy of chorus girls: Babe, The Duchess, Nelly and the Cherub, who are about to become Jill's friends and confidantes and for whom Jill learns she can lay down the law to authority on behalf of. I like almost everyone in this novel, and if Wodehouse probably could have used a little bit of judicious editing (it clocks in at 300+ pages, about a third longer than the vast majority of Wodehouse novels), Jill flies by thanks to its energetic and amusing cast of characters.

Add to that cast of characters the twin cities of the novel's setting, my two favorite big-ass cities in the world, London and New York. Wodehouse as a comic writer isn't best known for lyrical and picturesque descriptions of his cities, but his affection for both metropolises is generally crystal clear, and in Jill he foregoes much of the usual humor and off-handed jokes when he describes London and New York, giving us almost Dickensian paragraphs like

There are streets in London into which the sun seems never to penetrate. Some of these are in fashionable quarters, and it is to be supposed that their inhabitants find an address which looks well on note-paper a sufficient compensation for the gloom that goes with it. The majority, however, are in the mean neighborhoods of the great railway termini, and appear to offer no compensation whatever. They are lean, furtive streets, gray as the January sky with a sort of arrested decay. They smell of cabbage and are much prowled over by vagrom cats. At night they are empty and dark, and a stillness broods on them, broken only by the cracked tingle of an occasional piano playing one of the easier hymns, a form of music to which the dwellers in the dingy houses are greatly addicted. By day they achieve a certain animation through the intermittent appearance of women in aprons, who shake rugs out of the front doors or, emerging from areas, go down to the public-house on the corner with jugs to fetch the supper-beer. In almost every ground-floor window there is a card announcing that furnished lodgings may be had within. You will find these streets by the score if you leave the main thoroughfares and take a short cut on your way to Euston, to Paddington, or to Waterloo. But the dingiest and deadliest and most depressing lie round about Victoria. And Daubeny Street, Pimlico, is one of the worst of them all.

Those of you who know this li'l stuffed bull know that one of my favorite times of day in England's capital is being able to wander through London by night, so this description of wandering down the Thames Embankment after dusk especially touched me. His words still ring true; it's barely changed in almost ninety years:

She glanced down the Embankment. Close by, to the left, Waterloo Bridge loomed up, dark and massive against the steel-gray sky, A tram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over rails that shone with the peculiarly frostbitten gleam that seems to herald snow. Across the river, everything was dark and mysterious, except for an occasional lamp-post and the dim illumination of the wharves. It was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind that to the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on the Embankment the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself. She gave a little shiver. Somehow this sudden severance from the old days had brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standing alone in a changed world.

"Cold?" said Wally Mason.

"A little."

"Let's walk."

They moved westwards. Cleopatra's Needle shot up beside them, a pointing finger. Down on the silent river below, coffin-like row-boats lay moored to the wall. Through a break in the trees the clock over the Houses of Parliament shone for an instant as if suspended in the sky, then vanished as the trees closed in. A distant barge in the direction of Battersea wailed and was still. It had a mournful and foreboding sound. Jill shivered again.

Things are apt to get brighter and sunnier in New York, both thematically and literally, when Jill once again meets Wally there, with room for another wonderful panorama landscape view of a great city:

Wally disappeared again, and a few moments later Jill heard the faint splashing of water. She walked to the parapet and looked down. On the windows of the nearer buildings the sun cast glittering beams, but further away a faint, translucent mist hid the city. There was Spring humidity in the air. In the street she had found it oppressive: but on the breezy summit of this steel-and-granite cliff the air was cool and exhilarating. Peace stole into Jill's heart as she watched the boats dropping slowly down the East River, which gleamed like dull steel through the haze. She had come to Journey's End, and she was happy. Trouble and heart-ache seemed as distant as those hurrying black ants down on the streets. She felt far away from the world on an enduring mountain of rest. She gave a little sigh of contentment, and turned to go in as Wally called.

A good two-thirds of the novel takes place in Manhattan, and that's "good" not only as "the better part of" but also "agreeable": New York City energizes and enlivens our heroine and brings out the best in her. I see her point. It's a tough city to live in—the mild-mannered need not apply, and being a small stuffed bull on the MTA subway is often an invitation to have a boot step on you. But it's a grand and glorious place, and Jill's (and Wodehouse's) affection for it is nicely drawn. Much of the action takes place in Bryant Hall, a (possibly fictional) music hall theater on 42nd Street, my midtown stomping grounds. Right across Fifth Avenue from the New York Public Library is Wally Mason's midtown apartment, so deviously appropriated by Uncle Chris, so out at lunchtime on a bright day I stepped around the corner and tried to scout out 9 East 41st Street, where Wally lived on the 22nd floor. Wally's building is almost certainly gone: there's no building at that address or near it of that height, and the buildings are all much young than 1921. But here, showing the scaffolding that tells you New York is always a place of change and transformation, is where once upon a time Uncle Chris threw dinner parties behind Wally's back and from whose balcony Jill gazed out across the East River. You see, there's a little bit of Wodehouse wherever your hoofs take you.



Jill has much in her to be admired: her faithfulness to friends, her cleverness in a scrape, kindness to animals, resourceful nature, and gung-ho spirit are all signs of the finest of her fair sex. But there's another way she proves to be one of my favorite Wodehouse heroines. Like another famous New Yorker, she's quite fond of a delicacy that might aptly be named the food of the gods:

'Whatever are you doing in New York?' asked the girl. 'I never knew you meant to come over.'

'It was a little sudden. Still, here I am. And I'm starving. What are those things you're eating?'

'Buckwheat cakes.'

'Oh, yes. I remember Uncle Chris talking about them on the boat. I'll have some.'

You can't go wrong with a heroine who enjoys wheatcakes.





I had wheatcakes for breakfast this morning and delicious they were too, a proper accompaniment to reading this Wodehouse book—two of my favorite delights at the same table. Be careful you don't get syrup on your book and you two can enjoy the sweet, buttery richness of Jill the Reckless at your very own table, just by clicking on the Amazon.com link above. It's part of this delicious and nutritious breakfast! Of course, if you prefer Special K or waffles or yogurt, I can't stop ya. But it seems like I hardly know you when you do that.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #68: Hot Water

Bonjour, ma petite fromages! Hot Water (1932), like French Leave, takes the usual Wodehouse couples in love and plops them en masse not in the London countryside but in a French chateau. Why isn't it called Eau Chaude? The world may never know.

Not everybody is who they seem during the house party at the Chateau Blissac in beautiful Brittany. The debonair Vicomte de Blissac? That's really American Packy Franklyn, who's tête oveur talons d'amour with Jane Opal, daughter of blustering American Senator. Problem 1: Jane's engaged to Blair Eggleston, who in a comedy of errors becomes the Senator's valet. Problem 2: Packy's engaged to the prickly and snobbish Lady Beatrice Bracken.

Packy was feeling mildly surprised that, considering how deeply in love he was with Beatrice, the recent embrace had not revolted him more. He had not enjoyed it, of course. He could scarcely have been expected to do that. But it had not really revolted him. He was, however, conscious of a feeling of relief that Beatrice had not been an eyewitness of the episode.

Jane was thinking rather along the same lines. It would be too much, naturally, to say that she had derived any pleasure from Packy's kiss. On the other hand, it had not jarred every fibre of her being. But she was glad Blair had not happened to be looking on at the moment.

Is there any reader in any doubt who will wind up with whom at the end this novel?

Along the way we have the usual comedy derived from the protagonist pretending to be someone he isn't when he meets someone else (confidence trickster Oily Carlisle, who later re-appears in Cocktail Time) pretending to be someone he isn't, both of them pretending to be able to speak French when they can't:

'Still, you did get here, didn't you, Duke?' said Miss Putnam, smiling in a roguish sort of way. 'And how nice it will be for you, having somebody to talk to in your own language. I was saying to the Vicomte only just now that, however well you speak a foreign language, it is never quite the same.'

A somewhat strained pause followed the delivery of this dictum. For the space of perhaps a quarter of a minute the French aristocrats stared at one another dumbly. Here, you would have said, watching them, were two strong, silent Frenchmen.

Mr Carlisle was the first to rally from the shock.

'Parfaitement,' he said.

'Alors,' said Packy.

'Parbleu!'

'Nom d'une pipe!'

There was another pause. It was as if some theme of deep interest had been exhausted.

Packy indicated the sky, as if something to which he felt the visitor's attention should be directed.

'Le soleil!'

'Mais oui!'

'Beau!'

'Parbleu!' said Mr Carlisle, rather meanly falling back on old stuff.

They paused again. Packy, except for 'Oo la la' which he did not quite know how to bring in, had now shot his bolt.

But Mr Carlisle was made of sterner stuff....after what he would have been the first to confess a bad two minutes, was his resourceful self once more.

'But really, my dear fellow,' he said, with a light laugh, 'all this is vairy delightful, but you must not tempt me, no. My English is not good, and I promise my instructeur that always I would speak it only. You understand?'

The interval of silence had enabled Packy to dig up a really hot one.

'C'est vrai,' he said, with a glance at Miss Putnam which suggested that, in his opinion, would hold her for awhile. 'Mais, c'est vrai, mon vieux. Oo lá lá, c'est vrai! I also, study the English and do not want to speak the French.'

Miss Putnam, in keeping with the Wodehouse Rule of Maximum Occupancy of Imposters, is also not who she seems:

'Presenting Kate Amelia Putnam, of the James B. Flaherty Detective Agency of New York," she said amiably, holding the pistol in her hand on a steady line with Mr Carlisle's pelvis. 'Drop that gun. And you,' she added to Packy, 'keep your hands up.'

Mr Carlisle's automatic dropped to the floor. Miss Putnam seemed well content.

(Although, in this little stuffed reader's opinion, this dénouement is slightly ruined by exposing it several chapters before to the reader, well before Packy and Oily discover it at the point of a gat. But I'm second-guessing Mr Wodehouse, and we all know that leads to tears.)

Oh sure, between the love-crossed youngsters and the masquerading as Frenchmen story there's also a plot about trying to steal away an incriminating letter written by Senator Opal, but that's just a MacGuffin (or, as we like to call it, a Silver Cow Creamer) to set up a lot of laffs, lovely...

'...When I married you, my late husband's sister Mabel made herself extremely unpleasant. She seemed to consider that a woman who had been Mrs Wilmot Brewster ought to be satisfied for life. I'm not sure that when Wilmot died she would not have liked me to commit suttee.'

'Do what?'

'I was only joking. Commit suicide. When an Indian dies, his widow burns herself on the grave. They call it suttee.'

A wistful look came into Mr Gedge's face. It was just his luck, he seemed to be thinking, that an unkind fate had made the late Wilmot Brewster a Californian and not an Indian.

...and groan-worthy...

'I knew a man who was fired for removing a spot from his employer's clothing.'

'What a shame!' said Jane. 'Why?'

'It was a ten-spot,' explained Packy.

...to lines even Chico Marx might be ashamed to utter:

'.,.Did they deport you?'

'Oh, no. My mamma send a cable that I should go out West to Colorado. I left New York to arrive there. It was a great wrench.'

'You were sorry to go?'

'No, I liked going. I had fun.'

'Then why was it a great wrench?'

'Because it was. A great cattle-wrench.'

'I get you,' said Packy, 'Your habit of dropping into Yiddish is a little confusing at times, but I get you.'

But nobody describes scenery the way Wodehouse does. He ought to have been a writer for Town and Country:

He found Mrs Gedge in the Venetian Suite, a large apartment with a heavily carved ceiling which always looked as if it were going to come down and bean you.

So, in short, Hot Water: oo la la.



How to get Hot Water: fill a teakettle from the tap and put on the range, being careful not to set your fur alight. Turn around and don't watch it! Quickly the teakettle will whistle and...oh wait, I've made another one of my foolish mistakes. Like me, you can have a copy of Hot Water bubbling merrily in front of you in no time by clicking with upon the Amazon box to your right. (Prefer l'edition français? Simplement le clique ici.) I find it best enjoyed with some French toast made out of French bread. But that's just moi.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #67: A Damsel in Distress

I spend quite a bit of time casting imaginary movies of books during A Wodehouse a Week (usually involving Keira Knightley as the heroine), but A Damsel in Distress (1919) comes ready-made-to-order, with perhaps one of the most appropriate Wodehouse actors ever:



Yes, that's Mister Fred Astaire, as airy and delightful on his feet as Wodehouse is on the page, along with George Burns and Gracie Allen (playing, at a stretch, the characters "George" and "Gracie.") The movie is the 1937 musical version of the novel. The movie's script is co-written by one P. G. Wodehouse, the music's by George and Ira Gershwin (including some of their most winning tunes, "A Foggy Day (In London Town)," "Nice Work If You Can Get It," and "Stiff Upper Lip":



It's a fine film: if not exactly faithful to the original book, it at least preserves some of the better moments and the dialogue is authentically Wodehouse. It's the first of Fred's post-Fred-and-Ginger musical pictures and suffers a bit from the absence of the talented Miss Rogers, but for what it is, it's 100 minutes of fluffy cheerful joy. Sadly, it's not available on DVD—but you can still pick it up on VHS, if you have one of those steam-powered wankel-rotary engine devices in your home. Barring that, here's a fine summary and analysis of the movie, and here's the Turner Classic Movies webpage for the film. (Make sure you vote for it to come out on DVD!)

What about the book? Well, that's a fine thing too. It's in many ways a proto-Blandings novel, with an absent-minded Lord who wants nothing to do except work in his garden, his shrewish sister, a very British butler (in fact, it's Keggs, who we meet again later on Something Fishy), a prig of a brother, and two star-crossed lovers slated to be together, if only they can overcome the Earl, the sister, the butler, the brother, and Fate. All that's missing is the Pig.

The heroine's named Maud (Alyce in the movie), the hero's George (Jerry in the film), but the basic plot's the same: Maud has so many suitors the household staff, led by the devious Keggs, is running book on which of the many houseguests at the manor will be the one she'll become engaged to. American composer George is a dark horse unknown, especially since Maud is truly enamored of Geoffrey, a sportsman she met in Wales last year. When Maud enlists George's help to get in touch with Geoffrey so they can continue their romance, what else can George do but agree? Selflessness like this is the standard of the Wodehouse hero, and George is one of the selflessnessest, especially in the funny early scene where he hides Maud in his taxicab (before he even knows her name) to keep her out of sight from her prying fat brother:

The stout young man, whose peculiar behaviour had drawn all this flattering attention from the many-headed and who appeared considerably ruffled by the publicity, had been puffing noisily during the foregoing conversation. Now, having recovered sufficient breath to resume the attack, he addressed himself to George once more.

'Damn you, sir, will you let me look inside that cab?'

'Leave me,' said George, 'I would be alone.'

'There is a young lady in that cab. I saw her get in, and I have been watching ever since, and she has not got out, so she is there now.'

George nodded approval of this close reasoning.

'Your argument seems to be without a flaw. But what then? We applaud the Man of Logic, but what of the Man of Action? What are you going to do about it?'

'Get out of my way!'

'I won't.'

'Then I'll force my way in!'

'If you try it, I shall infallibly bust you one on the jaw.'

The stout young man drew back a pace.

'You can't do that sort of thing, you know.'

'I know I can't,' said George, 'but I shall. In this life, my dear sir, we must be prepared for every emergency. We must distinguish between the unusual and the impossible. It would be unusual for a comparative stranger to lean out of a cab window and sock you one, but you appear to have laid your plans on the assumption that it would be impossible. Let this be a lesson to you!'

This is, of course, all showing that George is a Good Egg™, well-worthy of being loved, yet for much of the novel the love is unrequited:

He draws a deep breath, misled young man. The night is very beautiful. It is near to the dawn now and in the bushes live things are beginning to stir and whisper.

"Maud!"

Surely she can hear him?

"Maud!"

The silver stars looked down dispassionately. This sort of thing had no novelty for them.

Come in the garden, Maud, she doesn't. Poor George! Fred Astaire now, he'd break into a sad sort of dance to while away the dark night, but George can only shuffle home.

How much is this like a Blandings novel? Well, witness this exchange between Lord Emsworth and sister Connie Lord Marshmoreton and sister Caroline:

'...When I arrived there he was standing on the pavement outside. There were no signs of Maud. I demanded that he tell me her whereabouts...'

'That reminds me,' said Lord Marshmoreton cheerfully, 'of a story I read in one of the papers. I daresay it's old. Stop me if you've heard it. A woman says to the maid: 'Do you know anything of my husband's whereabouts?' And the maid replies-'

'Do be quiet,' snapped Lady Caroline. 'I should have thought that you would be interested in a matter affecting the vital welfare of your only daughter.'

'I am. I am,' said Lord Marshmoreton hastily. 'The maid replied: 'They're at the wash.' Of course I am. Go on, Percy. Good God, boy, don't take all day telling us your story.'

And like Blandings, which is more populated by imposters than it is the nobility, George's invades the castle posing as a waiter during a grand ball (quite probably the same grand ball seen in this section of the movie):



George is one of my favorite Wodehouse heroes, not merely for his quick wit, his steadfast devotion, friendly attitude and can-do demeanor—add to all that, he's a Brooklyn boy:

"And then, that is one point I wish to make, you know. Ours is an old family, I would like to remind you that there were Marshmoretons in Belpher before the War of the Roses."

"There were Bevans in Brooklyn before the B.R.T."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I was only pointing out that I can trace my ancestry a long way. You have to trace things a long way in Brooklyn, if you want to find them."

"I have never heard of Brooklyn."

"You've heard of New York?"

"Certainly."

"New York's one of the outlying suburbs."

Lord Marshmoreton relit his pipe. He had a feeling that they were wandering from the point.

Au contraire, m'lord. Brooklyn is never far from the point.

In short, this is a delightful and brisk book, and even if it hadn't been made into a motion picture, I still would count it as one of my favorites of Wodehouse's work, for this section at least:

Consider his position, you faint-hearted and self-pitying young men who think you have a tough row to hoe just because, when you pay your evening visit with the pound box of candy under your arm, you see the handsome sophomore from Yale sitting beside her on the porch, playing the ukulele. If ever the world has turned black to you in such a situation and the moon gone in behind a cloud, think of George Bevan and what he was up against. You are at least on the spot. You can at least put up a fight. If there are ukuleles in the world, there are also guitars, and tomorrow it may be you and not he who sits on the moonlit porch; it may be he and not you who arrives late. Who knows? Tomorrow he may not show up till you have finished the Bedouin's Love Song and are annoying the local birds, roosting in the trees, with Poor Butterfly.

What I mean to say is, you are on the map. You have a sporting chance. Whereas George...Well, just go over to England and try wooing an earl's daughter whom you have only met once-and then without an introduction; whose brother's hat you have smashed beyond repair; whose family wishes her to marry some other man: who wants to marry some other man herself-and not the same other man, but another other man; who is closely immured in a mediaeval castle...Well, all I say is-try it. And then go back to your porch with a chastened spirit and admit that you might be a whole lot worse off.

...or this particularly fine piece of pathetic fallacy:

Unconscious of these eulogies, which, coming from one whose judgment he respected, might have cheered him up, George wandered down Shaftesbury Avenue feeling more depressed than ever. The sun had gone in for the time being, and the east wind was frolicking round him like a playful puppy, patting him with a cold paw, nuzzling his ankles, bounding away and bounding back again, and behaving generally as east winds do when they discover a victim who has come out without his spring overcoat. It was plain to George now that the sun and the wind were a couple of confidence tricksters working together as a team. The sun had disarmed him with specious promises and an air of cheery good fellowship, and had delivered him into the hands of the wind, which was now going through him with the swift thoroughness of the professional hold-up artist. He quickened his steps, and began to wonder if he was so sunk in senile decay as to have acquired a liver.

Why, I'll even forgive him this slur against bulls:

Observe Bertram the Bull when things are not going just as he could wish. He stamps. He snorts. He paws the ground. He throws back his head and bellows. He is upset, and he doesn't care who knows it.

Let's face it: this is the book that inspired the sight of Fred Astaire dancing in Piccadilly in London. And that is, as I like to say, a Very Good Thing. (But watch out for the taxicabs, Fred! Didn't your mama teach you not to dance in traffic?)







I have four copies of the book A Damsel in Distress. But I don't have the Fred Astaire movie. I'm going to remedy that as soon as possible, by buying one of the used VHS copies out there and hoping it hits DVD someday. You should, too, and look how easy I've made it for you with handy Amazon links and the like! And by the way, you ought to know that the book was also made into a silent movie the same year the book came out, 1919? Now you do. And I'd like to see that movie, too. It was probably pretty fun. But did it have this? No. No, it did not:



A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #66: Indiscretions of Archie

I am not allowed to read Cosmopolitan magazine. Every week John takes me to the newsstand and I am allowed to buy some magazines with my pocket money. I am allowed to get Time Out London and Games and MAD and Starlog and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and especially Bull's Life. But I am not allowed to get Cosmopolitan magazine. Why? Because it looks like this:



No, I am not allowed to get Cosmo no matter how much I ask for it:



No matter who is on the cover:



But it didn't always look like that! Here, take a gander:



Fact is, once upon a time, Cosmo was a literary magazine, especially under the ownership of William Randolph "I am not Charles Foster Kane" Hearst, Cosmopolitan was a leading fiction periodical. Isn't that right, Wikipedia?

...it was subtitled The Four-Book Magazine since the first section had one novelette, six or eight short stories, two serials, six to eight articles and eight or nine special features, while the other three sections featured two novels and a digest of current non-fiction books.

But by the 1970s, Cosmo had turned into a women's magazine featuring fashion, advice, and models who have trouble bundling up for cold weather. I blame Helen Gurley Brown, the little-known older sister of Charlie Brown, because I sure would like to plunk down my twelve cents on the counter of the newsstand, fix the newsagent with a firm stare, and ask him for a copy of a magazine that contains four whole books for me to read. Also, some M&Ms and a packet of Doublemint.

What's all that got to do with Wodehouse, you may ask, Kind Reader? It's because tonight's Wodehouse a Week, Indiscretions of Archie, originated in that now-sexy magazine: Indiscretions of Archie was first serialized in short stories that appeared in Cosmopolitan during 1920 (and turned into book form in 1921). Man, what I woulda given to get that magazine in my postbox once a month throughout the year of 1920! (Plus, all those saucy daguerreotypes of Mary Pickford on the cover!)

Indiscretions of Archie is a series of linked stories that are a bit of a departure for Wodehouse: they feature a married hero, the titular Archie Moffam (pronounced "Moom"). Affable but aimless Archie has gotten married to the lovely Lucille Brewster, daughter of Manhattan hotel magnate Daniel Brewster, who loathes Archie's very presence, and that, as they say in the sitcoms, is where the fun begins. In fact, the basic premise of Indiscretions of Archie is very much an early situation comedy, with each chapter an episode in Archie's adventures to ingratiate himself with his bristly father-in-law but failing miserably (until book's end, of course). That traditional sitcom triangle of sweet daughter, bumbling son-in-law, and prickly father is a comedy classic, as, say, f'r instance, in the John Ritter Three's Company spin-off Three's a Crowd. But just like Cosmopolitan magazine for its time, it's all very innocent and G-rated for every audience—probably a little too tame for ABC-TV's Tuesday night late-seventies line-up but a perfect frothy comedy for this little stuffed bull.

In many ways it's also a predecessor and a practice run for Wodehouse's Bingo Little short stories: the adventures of a cheerful but aimless young man and his adoring wife, and aforesaid young man's frequent attempts to make a bit of ready cash on the side without dear wifey finding out. Wodehouse didn't feature too many married protagonists—he was more interested in getting the booted towards the altar rather than hanging around after the rice had been thrown to see what happens—so this early comedy-romance is a bit of an unusual duck for Plum's work. Which in my book makes it absolutely a delight: it's different enough from the later more-predictable (but always fantastically entertaining) country house plots, and his dialogue and description is, nearly twenty years into his career, sparkling and witty. Which is not to say that there isn't a handful of clichôs in Indiscretions of Archie: in a plot—later much used in movies and sitcoms—Archie accidentally bids for an expensive item at an auction. Nowadays we can look at a scene like this and shake our heads at the predictability of Wodehouse, but hey, it was 1920! In the words of Montgomery Scott, "how do we know he didn't invent the thing?"

'Willie,' he observed, eyeing that youth more with pity than reproach, 'has a face like Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy, don't you think so?'

Archie nodded briefly. Precisely the same criticism had occurred to him.

'Forty-five-five-five-five-five,' chanted the high-priest. 'Once forty-five. Twice forty-five. Third and last call, forty-five. Sold at forty-five. Gentleman in the fifth row.'

Archie looked up and down the row with a keen eye. He was anxious to see who had been chump enough to give forty-five dollars for such a frightful object. He became aware of the dog-faced Willie leaning towards him.

'Name, please?' said the canine one.

'Eh, what?' said Archie. 'Oh, my name's Moffam, don't you know.' The eyes of the multitude made him feel a little nervous 'Er—glad to meet you and all that sort of rot.'

'Ten dollars deposit, please,' said Willie.

'I don't absolutely follow you, old bean. What is the big thought at the back of all this?'

'Ten dollars deposit on the chair.'

'What chair?'

'You bid forty-five dollars for the chair.'

'Me?'

'You nodded,' said Willie, accusingly. 'If,' he went on, reasoning closely, 'you didn't want to bid, why did you nod?'

Archie was embarrassed. He could, of course, have pointed out that be had merely nodded in adhesion to the statement that the other had a face like Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy; but something seemed to tell him that a purist might consider the excuse deficient in tact. He hesitated a moment, then handed over a ten-dollar bill, the price of Willie's feelings. Willie withdrew like a tiger slinking from the body of its victim.

...but Lucille is a good deal more understanding than Rosie M. Banks (Mrs Bingo Little), even suggesting he pop into a pawn shop for a bit of ready money:

'That's all right. You can pawn that ring and that bracelet of mine.'

'Oh, I say, what! Pop the family jewels?'

'Only for a day or two. Of course, once you've got the thing, father will pay us back. He would give you all the money we asked him for, if he knew what it was for. But I want to surprise him. And if you were to go to him and ask him for a thousand dollars without telling him what it was for, he might refuse.'

'He might!' said Archie. 'He might!'

'It all works out splendidly. To-morrow's the Invitation Handicap, and father's been looking forward to it for weeks. He'd hate to have to go up to town himself and not play in it. But you can slip up and slip back without his knowing anything about it.'

Archie pondered.

'It sounds a ripe scheme. Yes, it has all the ear-marks of a somewhat fruity wheeze! By Jove, it IS a fruity wheeze! It's an egg!'

...which has a lovely callback when Lucille uses the same phrasing in reply to Archie's joy:

'This really does begin to look like the point in my career where I start to have your forbidding old parent eating out of my hand.'

'Yes, it's an egg, isn't it!'

'Queen of my soul,' said Archie enthusiastically, 'it's an omelette!'

What a lovely little lady! I'm sure that when Keira Knightley and I am married, she will be as understanding and as ready for me to go to the pawnbroker's.

No, no problems here with the lovely Lucille. The fly in the ointment is dear old Papa Brewster, who (of course) didn't approve of Lucille marrying this Englishman, much less Archie sponging off him by living rent free in his finest hotel.

'Have you really inflicted this—this on me for a son-in-law?' Mr Brewster swallowed a few more times, Archie the while watching with a frozen fascination the rapid shimmying of his new relative's Adam's-apple. 'Go away! I want to have a few words alone with this—This—wassyourdamname?' he demanded, in an overwrought manner, addressing Archie for the first time.

'I told you, father. It's Moom.'

'Moom?'

'It's spelt M-o-f-f-a-m, but pronounced Moom.'

'To rhyme,' said Archie, helpfully, 'with Bluffinghame.'

'Lu,' said Mr Brewster, 'run away! I want to speak to-to-to—'

'You called me this before,' said Archie.

...and every attempt to ingratiate himself with dad-in-law sets Archie further down the path:

Mr Brewster snorted.

'I am informed that this precious friend of yours entered my grill-room at eight o'clock. He must have been completely intoxicated, though the head waiter tells me he noticed nothing at the time.'

Archie nodded approvingly.

'Dear old Squiffy was always like that. It's a gift. However woozled he might be, it was impossible to detect it with the naked eye. I've seen the dear old chap many a time whiffled to the eyebrows, and looking as sober as a bishop. Soberer! When did it begin to dawn on the lads in the grill-room that the old egg had been pushing the boat out?'

'The head waiter,' said Mr Brewster, with cold fury, 'tells me that he got a hint of the man's condition when he suddenly got up from his table and went the round of the room, pulling off all the table-cloths, and breaking everything that was on them. He then threw a number of rolls at the diners, and left. He seems to have gone straight to bed.'

'Dashed sensible of him, what? Sound, practical chap, Squiffy. But where on earth did he get the—er—materials?'

'From his room. I made enquiries. He has six large cases in his room.'

'Squiffy always was a chap of infinite resource! Well, I'm dashed sorry this should have happened, don't you know.'

'If it hadn't been for you, the man would never have come here.' Mr Brewster brooded coldly. 'I don't know why it is, but ever since you came to this hotel I've had nothing but trouble.'

'Dashed sorry!' said Archie, sympathetically.

'Grrh!' said Mr Brewster.

Archie made his way meditatively to the lift. The injustice of his father-in-law's attitude pained him. It was absolutely rotten and all that to be blamed for everything that went wrong in the Hotel Cosmopolis.

It's not just these three that populate mid-town Manhattan's most hotel: like any good sitcom, the cast is bolstered by grand appearances of characters and guest-stars galore. There's the Sausage Chappie, a pal of Archie's so hideous that his future as a horror movie star is ensured the moment a movie producer walks in the hotel lobby; The Growing Boy, the small son of a diet guru whom Archie enlists to win a pie-eating contest, and Roscoe Sherriff, the gung-ho movie publicist whom we've met in Wodehouse's Uneasy Money. In short, enough plots and personalities to populate an entire BBC series of half-hour sitcoms, and enough left over for the spin-off following the happy event of the final chapter finally pleases Mr Brewster with his son-in-law: the announcement that soon they'll present him with a bouncing little grandbaby:

A curious change had come over Mr Brewster. He was one of those men who have the appearance of having been hewn out of the solid rock, but now in some indescribable way he seemed to have melted. For a moment he gazed at Archie, then, moving quickly forward, he grasped his hand in an iron grip.

'This is the best news I've ever had!' he mumbled.

'Awfully good of you to take it like this,' said Archie cordially. 'I mean, being a grandfather—'

Mr Brewster smiled. Of a man of his appearance one could hardly say that be smiled playfully; but there was something in his expression that remotely suggested playfulness.

'My dear old bean,' he said.

Archie started.

'My dear old bean,' repeated Mr Brewster firmly, 'I'm the happiest man in America!'

The Grinch with his triple-sizing heart? Ain't got nothin' on Daniel Brewster at the end of Indiscretions of Archie.



While we wait for some brilliant telly producer to snap up the rights to a weekly Indiscretions of Archie situation comedy, there's better way to while the hours than to read "The Book That Inspired The Hit TV Series!": the original stories, now back in print in an expensive paperback edition, thanks to our old pal Public Domain. Pick up a copy by clicking on the Amazon link to the right, or, if you're as low on cold cash but as savvy as Archie Moffam, read the whole bally thing online for free. For the most authentic results, lounge about in the ornate lobby of your cranky pa-in-law's hotel, mooching free wifi and putting shrimp cocktails on your wife's tab. Mmmm, yummy shrimp cocktails.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #61: The Mating Season

Bertie Wooster is, as per usual, in a spot of trouble:

It was the being without advisers that made the situation so bleak. On these occasions when Fate, having biffed you in the eye, proceeds to kick you in the pants, you want to gather the boys about you and thresh things out, and there aren't any boys to gather. Jeeves was in London, Catsmeat in Basingstoke. It made me feel like a Prime Minister who starts to call an important Cabinet meeting and finds that the Home Secretary and the Lord President of the Council, have nipped over to Paris and the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and the rest of the gang are at the dog-races.

True, that could sum up a number of Bertie and Jeeves adventures, but it suits The Mating Season (1949) to a T, which is just as well, because it is from The Mating Season. Appropriate that, what?

Oh yes: Bertie's in the soup again, and a fine mulligatawny it is too—this is one of the sharpest and funniest of the Bertie Wooster books, from the golden immediate Post War-age of Wodehouse, the same era that brought us the sublime Joy in the Morning. It, too, is a Dickens of a Wodehouse (or is that a Wodehouse of a...no, sorry, no it isn't). Bertie's set off to pastoral Deverill Hall, Hampshire, with a smile on his lips but sadly minus Jeeves (for the moment). Even more fearsome, Deverill is inhabited by a cadre of aunts (luckily, not Bertie's) intent on splitting up the much-delayed wedding of newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett (she who thinks the stars are God's daisy chain). Sadly, Gussie's in the clink: arrested for a tipsy tottle through the fountains at Trafalgar Square, he's unable to make it to Deverill. Bertie to the rescue: he will pose as Gussie to impress all concerned. Simple enough, eh?

Not so fast. Enter pal o' Bertie and Gussie's, "Catsmeat" Potter-Pirbright, posing as Bertie/Gussie's servant. Why couldn't Jeeves come along? Because Jeeves's uncle Charlie is butler at Deverill, and one glance at nephew Jeeves would spill the beans that "Gussie" is not who he says he is. Fair enough, what? Well, then, to confuse things further, enter the real Gussie Fink-Nottle, released from jail early, posing as Bertie Wooster, and making even more of a mess of it than Bertie would. And the fake Bertie is of course accompanied by the real Jeeves, cool as a cucumber even though the rest of us need a scorecard to keep track of which guest is whom.

A sudden blinding light flashed upon me.

'You means it was gussie to whom Uncle Charlie was referring when he said that Mr Wooster has punched the time-clock? I'm here saying I'm Gussie, and now Gussie has blown in, saying he's me?'

'Precisely, sir. It is a curious and perhaps somewhat complex situation that has been precipitated—'

'You're telling me, Jeeves!'

Only the fact that by doing so I should have upset the tray prevented me from turning my face to the wall. When Esmond Haddock in our exchanges over the port had spoken of the time that try men's souls, he really hadn't a notion of what the times that try men's souls can really be, if they spit on their hands and get right down to it. OI levered up a forkful of kipper and passed it absently over the larynx, endeavoring to adjust the faculties to a set-up which even the most intrepid would have had to admit was a honey.

Wodehouse is firing on all pistons in The Mating Season, which is not only a doozy of a plot but also features some of his funniest dialogue and narrative. As a die-hard PGW fan, I tend to look at his entire oeuvre as the bee's knees, but so much of the golden stuff falls right after the war that it can't be a coincidence: whatever was in the Long Island water after Plum moved to America had to be inspiring his writing. The action is fast but not frenzied, the cast varied but not overwhelming, and Wodehouse shows his mastery of keeping his audience turning the pages with a funny, spanner-in-the-works cliffhanger revelation at the end of most chapters as well as a driving plot that follows reverse bell-curve that is the perfect definition of comedy. In fact, Bertie even comments on the slope of his fortunes in nearly the dead center of the novel:

And as the days went by, these unsettled outlooks because more unsettled, those V-shaped depressions even V-er. It was on a Friday that I had clocked in at Deverill Hall. By the morning of Tuesday I could no longer conceal it from myself that I was losing the old pep and that, unless the clouds changed their act and started dishing out at an early date a considerably more substantial slab of silver lining that they were coming across with at the moment, I should soon be definitely down among the wines and spirits.

One cause of the Btfsplkesque little dark cloud hovering over Bertie's head is the threat that soon he will have to recite poetry at the local village fete. Not merely any poetry, but the soppy Christopher Robin poems of A. A. Milne. This jab can't be coincidence: Milne was one of Wodehouse's most outspoken critics during WWII, painting Wodehouse as a traitor for his ill-advised but well-intentioned radio broadcasts while a prisoner of war. (Read "Why A.A. had it in for P.G." for a full examination of the two writers' connection and spats). Wodehouse doesn't quote from any Milne in the book, so I will:

Oh Timothy Tim
Has ten pink toes
And ten pink toes
Has Timothy Tim
They go with him
Wherever he goes
And wherever he goes
They go with him.

'How wet," Bertie might exclaim, and even I, a little stuffed bull of six, would agree. (I much prefer Edward Lear.) To Bertie, who'd been expecting to take part in a music-hall-style comedy review featuring bearded Irishmen, of course it's something that Jeeves must get him out of. Catsmeat's no help, of course:

I was sorry for the unhappy one blister, of course, but it piqued me somewhat that he seemed to consider that he was the only one who had any troubles.

'Well, I've got to recite Christopher Robin poems.'

'Pah!' he said. 'It might have been Winnie the Pooh.'

Well, there was that, of course.

It's all complicated (of course) by Bertie's Aunt Agatha announcing her arrival at the manor in one chapter, threatening to blow the elaborate Bertie/Gussie ruse sky high, and no sooner is that solved and swept away under the rug than Madeline Bassett, Gussie's fianc#233;, announces the same thing. Bertie and Co. can't catch a break, and the action speed from complication to complication like a roller coaster, except with more tea and scone breaks. Then Gussie falls in love with another girl at Deverill. Then Catsmeat falls in love with Uncle Charlie's daughter. Jeeves to the rescue, of course—was there ever any doubt? But the fun's as much in the journey and its hills and valleys as it is in the destination, and Wodehouse gives us plenty of lovely scenery to admire along the way:

The door opened, revealing some sixteen stone of butler.

'Good evening, sir,' said this substantial specimen. "Mr Wooster?'

'Fink-Nottle,' I said hastily, to correct this impression.

As a matter of fact, it was all I could do to speak at all, for the sudden impact of Charlie Silversmith had removed the breath almost totally. He took me right back to the days when I was starting out as a flaneur and man about town and used to tremble beneath butlers' eyes and generally feel very young and bulbous.

Older now and tougher, I am able to take most of these fauna in my stride. When they open front doors to me, I shoot my cuffs nonchalantly. 'Aha, there, butler,' I say. 'How's tricks?' But Jeeves's Uncle Charlie was something special. He looked like one of those steel engraving s of nineteenth-century statesmen. He had a large, bald head and pale, protruding gooseberry eyes, resting on mine, heightened the Dark Tower feeling considerably. The thought crossed my mind that if something like this had popped out at Childe Roland, he would have clapped spurs to his charger and been off like a jack-rabbit.

...and...

Unlike her sister Muriel, who had resembled a Criterion barmaid of the old school, Poppy Kegley-Bassington was long and dark and supple, with a sinuous figure suggestive of a snake with hips; one of those girls who can do rhythmic dances at the drop of a hat and can be dissuaded from doing them only with a meat-axe.

Not to mention...

...I subjected Catsmeat to a glance. I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover—the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

But finally, this is the novel that really cements my opinion of Bertie Wooster as a hero, not a patsy. I've mentioned here before that I take offense when critics refer to Bertie as a twit or as brainless. Pshaw, I say, or to quote Nero Wolfe, pfui. Bertie has plenty of grey matter and he's often quite sharp on the uptake. Wodehouse simply spins his world to ensure the cards are stacked against Bertie, or that his friends or relations wind up complicating his plans, and Bertie's the one who winds up with egg on his face. But his intentions are clear and bright, and his plans, while complicated, have a chance of succeeding, if only the omniscient PGW weren't spinning him round like a gramophone record, or, as Jeeves might observe: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport." I would certainly argue that his plans are solid if complicated, and more important, his heart is always in the right place—altho' he's occasionally blackmailed into it, Bertie is always gung-ho to help out a mate and dive into a complicated scenario involving mistaken identities and pushing small children into rivers if it helps a Drones Club comrade seal the marriage deal. Bertie observes:

...I found myself musing, as I have often had occasion to do, on the callous way in which Nature refuses to chip in and do its bit when the human heart is in the soup.

Nature refusing to help out a pal, maybe. Bertie refusing? Never. Well, aside from a few feeble protests, maybe. But the Wooster of The Mating Season is a brave and mature Bertie. How so? Why, at the end of the novel, at the point where he and Jeeves often scurry away to avoid a complicated situation or an angry aunt, Bertie actually holds his ground to stay and face the music (i.e., the ferocious Aunt Agatha):

'...I understand there is an excellent milk-train at two-fifty-four. Her ladyship is expressing a desire to see you.'

It would be deceiving my public to say that for an instant I did not quail. I quailed, as a matter of fact, like billy-o. And then, suddenly, it was as if strength had descended upon me.

'Jeeves,' I said, 'this is grave news, but it comes at a moment when I am well-fitted to receive it. I have just witnessed Esmond Haddock pound the stuffing out of five aunts, and I feel that after an exhibition like that it would ill beseem a Wooster to curl up before a single aunt. I feel strong and resolute, Jeeves. I shall now go downstairs and pull and Esmond haddock on Aunt Agatha. And if things look like becoming too sticky, I can always borrow that cosh of yours, what?'

I squared the shoulders and strode to the door, like Childe Roland about to fight the paynim.

Despite being one of Wodehouse's finest novels, it isn't currently available in paperback (altho' you can probably find it at used bookstores or online in paper). Or, click on the Amazon link to the right and pick yourself up a new hardcover in the Overlook Wodehouse series. It's all good. Believe me, with a Wodehouse this funderful, it doesn't matter which edition you get: just pick it up and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week #60: The Gold Bat

Today we'll be looking at The Gold Bat. No, not this gold bat:


...nor this gold bat:


Much to your disappointment, I'm sure, we shan't even be discussing this gold bat:


No, no, no. None of those. This is P. G. Wodehouse's novel The Gold Bat (1904), his fourth book and the first in his Wrykyn boy's school series. Wrykyn appears in two other novels (The White Feather and Mike) and is most famous (or is that infamous?) as the alma mater of Ukridge, one of Wodehouse's earliest series characters. Like The Pothunters and Tales of St. Austin's, The Gold Bat is one of Wodehouse's earliest books and like most of those, one of the "school novels": high-adventure, low-romance, very-British teen boys at English private boarding school sagas. The sort of lad of that period who might call The Dangerous Book for Boys a "ripping good read" would be the sort who would have attended, like Wodehouse, one of those schools. Wodehouse provides a solid enthusiastic exploits for this audience, and if they are a little dated or mysterious in tone and lingo, well, it's a wonderful nostalgic look at a brightly colored world in which all that mattered was scoring at rugby and putting a trick over on the Latin master. Altho' they've fallen a bit out of fashion (and often have been out of print over the years), I very much enjoy Wodehouse's school novels and especially the Wrykyn books. Why Wrykyn? Can't explain it in definite terms except that even more than St. Austin's, Eckleton School or Beckford College, Wrykyn feels real and solid and more distinctly and colorful drawn: there are wonderful details of the school buildings, rooms, grounds, woods, and even secret passages (Hogwarts owes a lot to Wodehouse and his fellow writers of this genre) that seem to occupy a place of reality yet a pictured with a truly rosy enthusiasm and optimism. One reason for this might be that Wrykyn, while fictional, is probably the closest to a real place among Wodehouse's school stories. That real place? Wodehouse scholars generally agree it's Dulwich College.



Wodehouse attended Dulwich College himself as a teenager, and his (then-recent) memories of Dulwich are used to solid effect in the Wrykyn books. He held the college in high regard and they him (once he made his fame, of course). He's prominently celebrated as one of their most prestigious former students or "Old Alleyneans", which also include Raymond Chandler, C. S. Forester and Michael Ondaatje. Fine company indeed. Wodehouse's so revered there that there is a permanent display devoted to his life and works in the college's public library. Wodehouse later described his years at Dulwich (1894-1900) as "six years of unbroken bliss"—which may be why, unlike the other schools, Wrykyn not only is more detailed and vibrant than the other school settings, but also has a life beyond the school novels as occasionally being mentioned in the later, more typical Wodehouse books. And it's to my great shame that despite it being just a short train hop from London, I've never visited Dulwich during one of my several trips to the UK. (Next time, I promise!)

The book itself? Well, it's a fairly straightforward fast-paced Ripping Yarn, concerned with sport, brewing sausages in school studies, playing tricks on the teachers and occasionally doing some schoolwork. I'm not entirely certain if the dialogue is authentic for the period, but it's one of those cases where fiction should be the truth. If all British turn-of-the-century schoolboys didn't talk like this, well, by gum, they jolly well ought to have done:

"Outside!"

"Don't be an idiot, man. I bagged it first."

"My dear chap, I've been waiting here a month."

"When you fellows have quite finished rotting about in front of that bath don't let me detain you."

"Anybody seen that sponge?"

"Well, look here"—this in a tone of compromise—"let's toss for it."

"All right. Odd man out."

All of which, being interpreted, meant that the first match of the Easter term had just come to an end, and that those of the team who, being day boys, changed over at the pavilion, instead of performing the operation at leisure and in comfort, as did the members of houses, were discussing the vital question—who was to have first bath?

Golly. When I grow up, I sure hope I can go to a British public school.

The light plot concerns a feat of minor, and much-lauded, vandalism: a small group of boys tar and feather the statue in the town square of the local Member of Parliament (rightfully so; he's a frightful stick-in-the-mud and prig). In the commission of this dire deed, one of the boys accidentally drops a watch-fob in the shape of a gold cricket bat, which he had borrowed from star athlete Dick Trevor. With the bat missing, it doesn't take the crime-investigating skills of a Batman or a Bulldog Drummond to link Trevor to the crime falsely. But who's got the bat now, and how will they use it to blackmail Trevor?

Meanwhile, the resurgence of a mysterious "League" threatens the comfort of our group of young heroes, when school studies are trashed in exchange for imagined wrongs:

"I tell you what it is, Trevor, old chap," said Milton, with great solemnity, "there's a lunatic in the school. That's what I make of it. A lunatic whose form of madness is wrecking studies."

"But the same chap couldn't have done yours and mine. It must have been a Donaldson's fellow who did mine, and one of your chaps who did yours and Mill's."

"Mill's? By Jove, of course. I never thought of that. That was the League, too, I suppose?"

"Yes. One of those cards was tied to a chair, but Clowes took it away before anybody saw it."

Milton returned to the details of the disaster.

"Was there any ink spilt in your room?"

"Pints," said Trevor, shortly. The subject was painful.

"So there was here," said Milton, mournfully. "Gallons."

There was silence for a while, each pondering over his wrongs.

"Gallons," said Milton again. "I was ass enough to keep a large pot full of it here, and they used it all, every drop. You never saw such a sight."

But in truth, that's only the plot. The main thrust of the book—and the part that takes over even from the adventure aspect—is just the basic simple enthusiastic school life in which sport is king, and schoolwork a definite afterthought:

Tuesday mornings at Wrykyn were devoted—up to the quarter to eleven interval—to the study of mathematics. That is to say, instead of going to their form-rooms, the various forms visited the out-of-the-way nooks and dens at the top of the buildings where the mathematical masters were wont to lurk, and spent a pleasant two hours there playing round games or reading fiction under the desk. Mathematics being one of the few branches of school learning which are of any use in after life, nobody ever dreamed of doing any work in that direction, least of all O'Hara. It was a theory of O'Hara's that he came to school to enjoy himself. To have done any work during a mathematics lesson would have struck him as a positive waste of time, especially as he was in Mr Banks' class.

In fact, as the omniscient narrator (Wodehouse himself?) opines, if you aren't interested in outdoor competitive games you're not respected, whether you're a boy:

"Hullo, Trevor," said Ruthven.

"Come over to the baths," said Trevor, "I want to see O'Hara about something. Or were you going somewhere else."

"I wasn't going anywhere in particular. I never know what to do in term-time. It's deadly dull."

Trevor could never understand how any one could find term-time dull. For his own part, there always seemed too much to do in the time.

"You aren't allowed to play games?" he said, remembering something about a doctor's certificate in the past.

"No," said Ruthven. "Thank goodness," he added.

Which remark silenced Trevor. To a person who thanked goodness that he was not allowed to play games he could find nothing to say. But he ceased to wonder how it was that Ruthven was dull.

...or even a master:

There is usually one house in every school of the black sheep sort, and, if you go to the root of the matter, you will generally find that the fault is with the master of that house. A house-master who enters into the life of his house, coaches them in games—if an athlete—or, if not an athlete, watches the games, umpiring at cricket and refereeing at football, never finds much difficulty in keeping order. It may be accepted as fact that the juniors of a house will never be orderly of their own free will, but disturbances in the junior day-room do not make the house undisciplined. The prefects are the criterion. If you find them joining in the general "rags", and even starting private ones on their own account, then you may safely say that it is time the master of that house retired from the business, and took to chicken-farming.

In short, it's sport that makes the man. And it's sport that settles the differences between wholesome O'Hara and the sneak Rand-Brown: the two boys box it out in an exciting penultimate chapter in which, to put it kindly, Rand-Brown gets his knickers handed to him on a plate. As he does in several of his later, more mature novels, Wodehouse curiously tells rather than shows the bout: two younger students excitedly discuss the boxing match and its knockout finish as they rush to classes. At first this might seem to be a violation of fiction's rules of narration and pacing: after a book of firsthand observation, why switch to a third-person view? I like to think—as Wodehouse did when he'd pull the same trick in later novels—that he's commenting that the results of the competition are less important than the effect it has had on the rest of the school, and the breathless exhilaration of the retelling celebrates the grand tradition of storytelling and larger-than-life adventure that the book itself has been a part of. Or, maybe I'm just blowin' hooey, and Wodehouse was working fast on deadline and had to wrap up the book quick. The world may never know. But it's certainly a nice chapter that contains this exchange:

"What's up?"

"You mustn't tell any one."

"All right. Of course not."

"Well, then, there's been a big fight, and I'm one of the only chaps who know about it so far."

"A fight?" Harvey became excited. "Who between?"

Renford paused before delivering his news, to emphasise the importance of it.

"It was between O'Hara and Rand-Brown," he said at length.

"By Jove!" said Harvey. Then a suspicion crept into his mind.

"Look here, Renford," he said, "if you're trying to green me—"

"I'm not, you ass," replied Renford indignantly. "It's perfectly true. I saw it myself."

"By Jove, did you really? Where was it? When did it come off? Was it a good one? Who won?"

"It was the best one I've ever seen."

You said it, Renford.



Up until recently, The Gold Bat has been mostly unavailable—as have been many of Wodehouse's earlier, non-romance or non-series books that were perceived to have less appeal to a modern audience. It was briefly reissued in the 1980s by Penguin in an omnibus edition of three of the school novels (also contained in this volume: The Head of Kay's and The White Feather); this is the edition I've got. If you've waited this long to read The Gold Bat, eee by gum, you're in luck, my lad. Not only has our good mate public domain brought it back into print through inexpensive and inelegantly designed editions like the Manor House paperback available from the Amazon link to the right, but, if you're as thrifty as a school lad and have spent all your shillings and pence on jam tarts at the tuck shop, well, then sprint over to your local Internet and find the full Gold Bat as an online e-text. It's a jolly right rag and spiffing rip. Whatever that means.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.