She sprang it on me before breakfast. There in seven words you have a complete character sketch of my Aunt Agatha. I could go on indefinitely about brutality and lack of consideration. I merely say that she routed me out of bed to listen to her painful story somewhere in the small hours. It can't have been half past eleven when Jeeves, my man, woke me out of the dreamless and broke the news:Yes, there it is, folks: the very first appearance in print of Jeeves, the ultimate gentleman's gentleman. (And this is our first look at Bertie, too.) I bet you're excited at the prospect of the earliest adventures of Jeeves, huh? Let's take a look at another one of Jeeves's immortal lines from that story:
'Mrs Gregson to see you, sir.'
Jeeves came in with the tea.Hah! Fantastic Jeeves quote, eh? And then there's...
'Jeeves,' I said, 'we start for America on Saturday.'
'Very good, sir,' he said; 'which suit will you wear?'
'Gussie, old top,' I said, 'leave me for a while. I would be alone. I think I've got brain fever or something.'The Man with Two Left Feet has a number of unusual stories. Two are narrated by a dog who, after a lowly birth, finds himself falling into fortune and companionship. The writing isn't up to Wodehouse's later skill, but there's good humor to be found in the dog's misunderstanding of the intentions of the humans around him, if not necessarily in the dog's name. Because he's a black dog, he's nicknamed the n-word...an unfortunately jarring moniker in this day and age but a relic of an older and different time—and I feel fairly certain that Wodehouse, judging from his writing and biographies, would have blanched if he'd realize the loaded bomb that word would become in later years. Skip over the name (it's only mentioned once) and they're actually quite funny and delightful stories about dog-makes-good:
'Sorry, old man; perhaps New York doesn't agree with you. When do you expect to go back to England?'
I looked again at Aunt Agatha's cable.
'With luck,' I said, 'in about ten years.'
When he was gone I took up the cable and read it again.
'What is happening?' it read. 'Shall I come over?'
I sucked a pencil for a while, and then I wrote the reply.
It was not an easy cable to word, but I managed it.
'No,' I wrote, 'stay where you are. Profession overcrowded.'
Round the corner, as the boss was speaking, I saw the kennel-man coming with a plate in his hand. It smelt fine, and he was headed straight for me.About halfway through the book the stories from the mid-to-late teens turn a bit more emotional and sentimental (without becoming maudlin or cloying). A girl is unable to marry her love because her guardian grandfather forbids it...and he thinks he's the King of England. It's a quietly touching eccentricity that's not played for giggles or laughs as later Wodehouses would be, and in lesser hands it would be a tearjerker. In fact, this story and many of the others in the collection remind me of the short stories of O. Henry: quiet and touching, with twist endings (either dramatic or soft) that resolve the tale on an ironic touch.
He put the plate down before me. It was liver, which I love.
'Yes,' went on the boss, 'if it hadn't been for him, Peter would have been kidnapped and scared half to death, and I should be poorer, I suppose, by whatever the scoundrels had chosen to hold me up for.'
I am an honest dog, and hate to obtain credit under false pretences, but-liver is liver. I let it go at that.
There still come days in the spring when the country seems to get a stranglehold on me and start in pulling. This particular day had been one of them. I got up in the morning and looked out of the window, and the breeze just wrapped me round and began whispering about pigs an chickens. And when I went out on Fifth Avenue there seemed to be flowers everywhere. I headed for the Park, and there was the grass all green, and the trees coming out, and a sort of something in the air—why, say, if there hadn't have been a big policeman keeping an eye on me, I'd have flung myself down and bitten chunks out of the turf.Picture the entire story read aloud by Arleen Sorkin (in her "Harley Quinn" voice) and I think you've got Wodehouse's intent: a tough-as-nail New York gal with a soft heart and a desire to see right done for a country wife sadly ignored by her nightclubbing husband. Add an O. Henry twist with a callback to a much-discussed character earlier in the story and it's as neat and tight a little tale as those of Mister William Sydney Porter's.
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #8: This comic is fun. I've been in love with the X-Men since I was a tiny stuffed calf, but that love's been spread among different titles, different creators, and different X-Men teams through certain periods. Right now I'm taking a break from most of the mainstream X-Teams (I do enjoy Astonishing X-Men, but it's really best read in big chunks or in the trade), so that leaves X-Men: First Class as my perennial top X-Title these days. I've heaped enough praise on this book from month to month that you know where I stand: it's fun without being full of angst, even in this month's issue which guest-stars the always gloomy Man-Thing and puts chipper Jean Grey face-to-face with her future, the future we all know from having read Uncanny X-Men #135-137, but which young Jeannie is sensing for the first time. I'm not quite certain weighing this book down with the gloom of the future is something I want to see every month, but it's done in such a light and clever way (the X-Men glimpse alternative future realities when Man-Thing's Everglades Nexus goes haywire) that it hardly seems as heavy as the frequent "Dark Phoenix" references of the mainstream X-Books. Add moments like the delighted glee Cyclops has at the opportunity to pilot a hydrofoil, Angel's encounter with valkyries, and consistently some of the best and cleverest intro/recap pages at Marvel. New (or guest?) artist Eric Nguyen provides suitably creepy swampish atmosphere, and there's a funny one-page Chris Giarrusso "Mini Marvels" strip at the back which ties into an Iron Man gag running in other Marvel magazines. In short, consistently delightful, even with dead Wolverine stinkin' up the place.
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #548: This comic is fun. Well, here's the surprise comeback of the year as far as I'm concerned: bitter and tortured "One More Day" leading into an entertaining and energetic Spidey comic book. I picked this ish (and the two weekly issues preceding it) solely because Dan Slott's handling the writing on this story arc—he's a writer who I nearly always enjoy, and he does Spidey well. There's a fun and footloose 1970s Gerry Conway/Ross Andru feel to the entire proceedings: a clever death threat in a poison engineer to target certain DNA, the soap opera aspects of JJJ's heart attack and what Marla's getting up to while he's out of action, a funny and frantic taxi chase...and just what is the mystery with cute Carlie—will she and our hapless Pete become an item? Most of all I applaud the concept of actually having a story arc that ends (even though with weekly publication, it seemed to come to that end fairly fast) at the same time subplots continue from week to week. Since the next arc is not written by Slott, I'm not entirely certain I'll be buying it, but I'm certainly gonna peek at it. I do miss Mary Jane. But the best thing that Marvel can do now is produce entertaining Spidey stories, and with this, they're off to a good start.
DAMAGE CONTROL #1: This comic is fun. Or, as the full actual title in the indicia says "WORLD WAR HULK: AFTERSMASH!: DAMAGE CONTROL". But that's a bit like calling an old friend "Mister." I loved, loved, loved the three original nineties Damage Control miniseries, so picking up this issue this week was a no-brainer. What I hoped for but didn't quite expect was that it'd be a worthy 21s-century successor to the original, one of the cleverest concepts of the Marvel Universe: who picks up and rebuilds after superhero battles? Damage Control, that's who! This one hits all the right notes straight from the first scene, where DC CEO Ann-Marie Hoag negotiates with Tony Stark...and wins. Like the original, it's funny if not necessary laugh-out-loud, but it doesn't sacrifice story for silly jokes. There's an interesting subplot about unregistered superheroes and a dandy cliffhanger when the Thunderbolts show up on the last page to kick ass and check ID. All the original cast are back (even the Damage Control bulldog), and Damage Control creator Dwayne McDuffie scripting, which is good enough news to make me do the happy Bully dance. Damage Control is a three-issue limited series, and I think it works best in small short stories, but I'm hoping that like the original, this'll spin off annual miniseries. And in a week with funny Spider-quips and some thoughtful Jean Grey dialogue, I'm gonna award The Best Line of the Week to the title of this issue, which sums up the way I've been feelin' about the Marvel Universe before Damage Control's return: "Whatever Happened to All the Fun in the World?" Why, it's right here! Right here in a comic about guys who rebuild the shattered Marvel Universe and give us a good laugh. That's why DAMAGE CONTROL #1 is the most fun comic of the week: because if fun isn't what we all need right now, I don't know what we need.
"The incubator has not done all that it should have done," I said. "Ukridge looks after it, and I fancy his methods are not the right methods. I don't know if I have got the figures absolutely correct, but Ukridge reasons on these lines. He says you are supposed to keep the temperature up to a hundred and five degrees. I think he said a hundred and five. Then the eggs are supposed to hatch out in a week or so. He argues that you may just as well keep the temperature at seventy-two, and wait a fortnight for your chickens. I am certain there's a fallacy in the system somewhere, because we never seem to get as far as the chickens. But Ukridge says his theory is mathematically sound, and he sticks to it."Jeremy's more interested in a chick than a chicken: the lovely Phyllis Derrick. It was love at first sight when he spied Phyllis and her irritable Irish father Professor Derrick on the train down to Dorset, especially since Phyllis was reading The Manoeuvres of Arthur, one of Jeremy's novels. Complications set in (don't they always?) when Ukridge riles up the Professor at a dinner party (much like Basil Fawlty was warned not to talk about the war, Ukridge cheerfully and unconsciously commits the sin of discussing the Irish)—Jeremy is banned from Phyllis's sight, and the resourceful writer must resort to bribing a servant to tip over the Professor's boat in order to save him and win his respect—the sort of plot Bertie Wooster might come up with later on in the Wodehouse canon, with about the same backfiring results. It takes a golf tournament to smooth over the ruffled feathers, but here come Ukridge's creditors, storming down the country lane and demanding payment...
The sun was setting as I left to return to the farm, with Aunt Elizabeth stored neatly in a basket in my hand. The air was deliciously cool, and full of that strange quiet which follows soothingly on the skirts of a broiling midsummer afternoon. Far away, seeming to come from another world, a sheep-bell tinkled, deepening the silence. Alone in a sky of the palest blue there gleamed a small, bright star.In keeping with A Month of Firsts, and perhaps for the very first time in the Wodehouse a Week project, this is the first time I have read Love Among the Chickens. I have only one copy of the book, a nice Herbert Jenkins uniform hardcover reprint from 1963. It may have sat in the bookstore for quite some time, as the initial used book price penciled inside the front cover is "12/6" (twelve shillings and sixpence). It was given to me by my friends Mary and Jay following their trip to London a few years ago. It's a lovely gift and I treasure it greatly, but I'm not certain I'll read it again any time soon. You might say "P. G. Wodehouse: he does chicken right," but on the other hand, while savory, this isn't exactly finger-lickin' good.
I addressed this star.
"She was certainly very nice to me. Very nice indeed." The star said nothing.
"On the other hand, I take it that, having had a decent up-bringing, she would have been equally polite to any other man whom she had happened to meet at her father's house. Moreover, I don't fee altogether easy in my mind about that naval chap. I fear the worst."
The star winked.
"He calls her Phyllis," I said.
"Charawk!" chuckled Aunt Elizabeth from her basket, in that beastly cynical, satirical way which has made her so disliked by all right-thinking people.
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