Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Hope you're all having a good weekend! Mine is disappearing all too quickly... and I've read only 20 pages of the book I was intending to finish. Oops.

Slightly different from usual this week, as I'm going to be entirely egotistical in this miscellany... these things are all me elsewhere.

1. I wrote about Jeeves in the Offing by P.G. Wodehouse over at Vulpes Libris.

2. I made a cake to celebrate the 400th Very Short Introduction book.

3. And I appeared in this Oxford Dictionaries video (see the post for answers):

Right Ho, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

My book group recently read Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse.  I always like an excuse to read some Wodehouse.  A diet of nothing else would be like living on ice cream, but as an occasional snack, there is nothing better.  And it would be a mistake to think that, since PGW makes for such easy reading, that it is easy writing.  I think Wodehouse is one of the best wordsmiths (or should that be wordpsmiths?) I have read, and it is far more difficult to write a funny book than it is to write a poignant or melancholy book.

But perhaps there are people out there who have yet to read any Wodehouse?  Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the way he writes (since, let's face it, there is minimal variety within his output.)  In the typical Wodehouse novel you will have comic misunderstandings, elaborate disguises, accidental engagements, wrathful aunts, and everybody ending up happy in the end.  This formula is more certain than ever in a Jeeves and Wooster novel, where rich, foolish young Wooster gets himself entangled in a comedy of errors, and wise butler Jeeves demurely extracts him from them.

But the sheer joy, the genius, of Wodehouse is his wordplay.  It's the kind of thing which will either appeal or not, and is impossible to explain into funniness (which is true of all humour, probably) - Wodehouse uses language like an acrobat, dashing from hyperbole to understatement in a moment; finding the longest way to express the shortest phrase; finding the most unexpected metaphors and similes, and twisting them all together alongside absurd slang and abbreviation.  Who but Wodehouse could have written this line?

Girls are rummy.  Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.

Or have conceived of this image, when serving an aunt with alcohol?

"Give me a drink, Bertie."

"What sort?"

"Any sort, so long as it's strong."

Approach Bertram Wooster along these lines, and you catch him at his best.  St. Bernard dogs doing the square thing by Alpine travellers could not have bustled about more assiduously.

Like Richmal Crompton's William Brown, Bertram 'Bertie' Wooster is nothing if not blessed with aunts - most of whom view him with an unwavering, and understandable, loathing and distrust.  But, like William Brown, Wooster is endlessly well-meaning.  This is what makes him such an attractive hero - more or less all the messes in which he finds himself are caused by trying to help others, often in the romantic department.  Although Wooster himself sees engagement as a misery beyond all others, he often attempts to help others reach this state (invariably finding himself engaged to the soppiest female present.)

But so far I have not been specific.  I should mention Right Ho, Jeeves.  Aunt Dahlia - the only aunt who can tolerate Wooster, although she demonstrates the sort of affection which is shown through terse telegrams and much use of the term 'fathead' - summons Wooster to her mansion in Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire.  (Not many novels feature Worcestershire, the county in which I was raised, so it's nice to see it get a mention - and Pershore, no less, which was the nearest town to my house.  If you're thinking the village name is ridiculous, I should mention that Upton Snodsbury is in the area, and presumably inspired Wodehouse.)  He is being summoned to distribute prizes at a school, a fate which Wooster would rather avoid, to put it mildly.  So he ropes in newt-fanatic Gussie Fink-Nottle, who had been looking for an excuse to go there.  For why, you ask?  Well, with the coincidental air which characterises so many of Wodehouse's convoluted plots, the girl with whom Fink-Nottle is besotted happens to be staying there.  She, 'the Bassett disaster' as Wooster terms her, comes across pretty clearly in his first description of her:

I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

The romantic entanglements do not end there, of course.  Wooster's cousin Angela and her beau Tuppy also have something of a rollercoaster relationship, just to add to festivities.  Then there is Wooster's white jacket, which Jeeves is determined shall not be worn...

My favourite scene from this, and one which often appears in anthologies etc., is Gussie at the prize-giving.  All I'll say is that he's been drinking, for the first time in his life.  It's supposed to stiffen the sinews and summon the blood, but it's a little more chaotic than that.

This isn't my favourite Wodehouse novel.  I think I prefer the stand-alone books to the series, perhaps because they're all the more unexpected and strange.  But Wodehouse's exceptionally brilliant use of language is on fine form in Right Ho, Jeeves and I certainly loved reading this.  There are many imitators, but nobody can equal Wodehouse for his strand of comic writing - and a dose of it, in between other books, is always, always welcome.

And my favourite title is...

What a wonderful selection of favourite titles you all came up with! I'm almost reluctant to put my review up, as I loved hearing them all - do keep letting me know your favourite title, on the previous post, and perhaps I'll do a post on my favourites from them, sometime next week.

A few of my favourites, before I tell you my *absolute* favourite, and then tell you that the novel was pretty good too...

I love:

Tea Is So Intoxicating - Mary Essex
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes - Anita Loos
The Brontes Went To Woolworths - Rachel Ferguson
Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead - Barbara Comyns
No One Now Will Know - EM Delafield

But the one that comes out on top, because it works on at least two levels, and is intrinsically funny, is... Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse.

Ok, wonderful title aside, this is also a great little novel. To be honest with you, I haven't met a PG Wodehouse novel I haven't devoured happily. According to my little drop-down author menu, the only Wodehouse I've written about on here was Indiscretions of Archie, another fab title, and enjoyable, but probably the worst of the Wodehouses I've read. Aunts Aren't Gentlemen is back on form - and the first Jeeves and Wooster novel I've read.

Wooster is sent off to the countryside by a doctor because of his 'young man about town' lifestyle has had a disastrous effect on his general health. He plumps for an Aunt in Worcestershire (land of my upbringing!)

"Is the air pure there?"

"Excursion trains are run for people to breathe it."

"Your life would be quiet?"

"Practically unconscious."

Sadly, said Aunt Dahlia is herself off to Maiden Eggesford, Somerset (she's following me around the country!) and so Wooster decides to follow her there, Jeeves in tow, naturally.

It is one of those villages where there isn't much to do except walk down the main street and look at the Jubilee watering-trough and then walk up the main street and look at the Jubilee watering-trough from the other side.

This bit amused me, because whenever Mel and I visit a little village, we look out for their Millennium Project. Every village has one, usually fairly humble, and generally unveiled in mid 2003. I've seen Millennium benches, signposts, woods, stones... all sorts.

This being Wodehouse, all sorts of coincidences have come together to make more or less everyone Wooster knows turn up in Maiden Eggesford. There's a woman he once asked to marry him, as well as her more recent beau; there's a man he once cheated and gave a fake identity to; there is even Jeeves' own aunt. It all gets a little complicated as two rival households are going in for a horse race, only one of the horses is closely attached to a cat, and is inconsolable without it... and Aunt Dahlia (betting on the other horse) decides to have the cat kidnapped. Or catnapped, if you will. Hence the title - it's not cricket, she is not acting like a gentleman. And so it all begins.

I love Wodehouse's writing, with its mixture of hyperbole and litotes - I love the unbreakable calm of Jeeves, against Wooster's exaggerations and whimsical turn of phrase (I love that he always cheerfully calls Aunt Dahlia either 'aged relative' or 'old ancestor' - but don't think I'll be trying this out on my own aunts. Who are not, for that matter, particularly old):

"Have you ever seen a garrison besieged by howling savages, with their ammunition down to the last box of cartridges, the water supply giving out and the United States Marines nowhere in sight?"

"Not to my recollection, sir."

I just find Wodehouse endlessly funny. But I must confess - I thought Aunts Aren't Gentlemen would be my favourite ever Wodehouse, centring (as it does) around a cat - but, for some reason, the cat is given very little personality. I love reading about cats, and I'd have thought Wodehouse would be on top form writing about one... but perhaps he is not a cat person. Shame.

But, even though this doesn't reach the dizzying heights of its feline potential, it is great fun and very good - sometimes a Wodehouse just hits the spot in a way that no other book can. If you've never read one before - well, firstly, I'm a little horrified - secondly, why not start with this one?

Indiscretions of Archie

A brief blog today, as I still have to pack for the next week and a half...

I bought Indiscretions of Archie by PG Wodehouse in Winchester, because I liked the title and the age of the book, and you can never go wrong with Wodehouse. A quick scan of Amazon tells me that there are lots of different editions available, including one forthcoming in the brilliant Everyman series. Mine is from the 1920s, and has a wonderful mustiness to it.

Archie is an insouciant Englishman who travels to America with his new wife Lucille. He prefixes almost everything with 'jolly old', and is filled with bonhomie to bursting. His plan is to hit it off with father-in-law Daniel Brewster, hotel proprietor. Which, as you'll have guessed if you've ever read Wodehouse, doesn't go quite to plan. And then chaos ensues.

Only Wodehouse could get artist's models, snakes, pie-eating contests, dietician experts, and someone who once gave someone a sausage in the war all into the same novel. There are some wonderfully funny scenes, and everything Wodehouse touches comes out hilarious. He has a brilliant mix of hyperbole and litotes, not to mention delightful similes - 'Archie was one of those sympathetic souls in whom even strangers readily confide their most intimate troubles. He was to those in travail of spirit very much what cat-nip is to a cat.' Indiscretions of Archie isn't my favourite Wodehouse, and I discovered why after I'd finished. The novel was originally a series of short stories which Wodehouse then linked together, and it really does show. I should have guessed. His novels are usually characterised by their cohesion and crazy, but coherent, plots which all come together at the last minute. Indiscretions of Archie is much more disjointed - very funny, but rather more episodic than most of his novels are. Not the best place to start, but I always enjoy being reminded how brilliant Pelham Grenville was.

Favourite Wodehouse novels? I find them so similar that it's difficult to choose, but my first one was The Girl on the Boat, so it might be that one.