Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
P. G. Wodehouse for the Laughs
After the haunting and intense story of The Wager, I decided a little light reading was in order. For me, nothing fills that bill better than P. G. Wodehouse, who is probably most famous for his Jeeves and Wooster stories. I love those, and I like his Blandings Castle tales even better – it’s an Eden where ditsy lovers try to outwit killjoy aunts, and the only danger is from unscrupulous persons who covet the Empress of Blandings, the Earl’s prize-winning enormous pig.
Anyway, Delphi Classics has put together a huge collection of Wodehouse eBooks (31 novels, 10 short story collections, and 2 plays for a whopping $2.99!) and it’s been fun to discover some lesser-known titles of his. The Small Bachelor was first published in 1927, and like many of Wodehouse’s early novels, it is set in New York City.
Even though Wodehouse’s novels don’t tackle “serious” subjects or wrestle with deep philosophical issues, he is an incredibly talented and erudite author. His mastery of comic simile and metaphor is unparalleled:
“Mrs. Sigsbee H. Waddington was a strong woman. In fact, so commanding was her physique that a stranger might have supposed her to be one in the technical, or circus, sense. She was not tall, but had bulged so generously in every possible direction that, when seen for the first time, she gave the impression of enormous size. No theatre, however little its programme had managed to attract the public, could be said to be “sparsely filled” if Mrs. Waddington had dropped in to look at the show. Public speakers, when Mrs. Waddington was present, had the illusion that they were addressing most of the population of the United States. And when she went to Carlsbad or Aix-les-Bains to take the waters, the authorities huddled together nervously and wondered if there would be enough to go round.”
P. G. WODEHOUSE. The Small Bachelor (Kindle Locations 453-458). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
Or how about this:
“His clothes had been cut by an inspired tailor and pressed by a genius. His tie was simply an ethereal white butterfly, straight from heaven, that hovered over the collar-stud as if it were sipping pollen from some exotic flower.”
P. G. WODEHOUSE. The Small Bachelor (Kindle Locations 465-466). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
Wodehouse casually drops in Biblical references, as well as Tennyson, Kipling, Shakespeare, and other authors any well-educated Englishman should be familiar with. Take, for example, his description of the imposing Mrs. Waddington in high dudgeon:
“But, whether it was cold or hot, there was always in Mrs. Waddington’s gaze one constant factor — a sort of sick loathing which nothing that he could ever do, George felt, would have the power to allay. It was the kind of look which Sisera might have surprised in the eye of Jael the wife of Heber, had he chanced to catch it immediately before she began operations with the spike.”
P. G. WODEHOUSE. The Small Bachelor (Kindle Locations 697-700). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
As far as the plot of The Small Bachelor goes, it’s your typical Wodehouse love story that is incredibly convoluted, but by a series of hilarious coincidences manages to untangle itself. George Finch, an independently wealthy young man (no one in Wodehouse Land has to work for a living, kind of like Hallmark Movie Land), sees a pretty young woman on a street and falls head over heels in love with her. She ends up being the daughter of Sigsbee H. Waddington, a somewhat dense businessman who dreams of being a cowboy in the Wild West. The aforementioned Mrs. Waddington is his second wife, and she is determined to marry her stepdaughter, Molly, off to a dimwitted Lord Hunstanton (wearer of that perfect bowtie mentioned above). Meanwhile, poor George spends hours trying to figure out who the love of his life is, until it turns out his best friend, J. Hamilton Beamish, has known Molly from childhood. Hamilton Beamish is famous for the self-help booklets he publishes on every topic under the sun – “Read Them and Make the World Your Oyster”.
Did I mention that George is from out west, namely, East Gilead, Idaho, so of course Molly’s father immediately takes to him? Oh, and the hyper-rational Hamilton Beamish falls in love with a young woman he sees on a bus, who turns out to be Mrs. Waddington’s palm reader, as well as from…East Gilead, Idaho. I’m not even going to get into George’s valet, Mullett, and his fiancée, except to say that she is the most talented pickpocket in New York City. Throw in a hapless policeman, Garroway, to whom Sigsbee Waddington sells some worthless stock in a Hollywood Motion Picture company, and I think that covers all the main characters.
There are laugh-out-loud scenes throughout, and even when you think you know what’s going to happen, Wodehouse throws a curveball. If you are looking for something to completely escape into for a few hours, you can’t do much better than P. G. Wodehouse, and The Small Bachelor was a delightful surprise. It’s not as well known as some of his other work, but it is just as good as any Jeeves and Wooster story.
Published in Literature
Great fun. You remind me that I need to get electronic copies of Wodehouse soon, before the DEI weasels re-edit them. It has already happened with Penguin Random House.
Jeeves and Wooster Tales Censored to Spare Delicate, Modern Sensibilities
You can’t do much better than the Delphi collection that I linked to in my post. They are updating it as more titles enter the public domain.
That’s truly infuriating. What have they edited out?
Wodehouse was a safe go to author when I was growing up because his books were always so proper. No sex, no vulgarity – not even an instance of an unmarried young woman spending the night anywhere unchaperoned by various aunts.
Wodehouse is always great fun. I’ve got a complete set of the Wooster and Jeeves stories set aside for a dark hour. Speaking of which.
If they can update it, they can update them. Get paper copies if at all possible.
Agreed. Overlook Press published all of his books in very nice hardcover editions. They’re getting pricey on used book sites, though. BTW, Overlook also reissued Walter Brooks’ Freddie the Pig books, which are some of the best children’s novels ever written.
Racism; what else? In Thank You, Jeeves, there’s some mention of a blackface troupe, which Wodehouse uses the then common phrase n-word minstrel band to describe. Later on Bertie Wooster spends about half the book in blackface for reasons which seemed quite good at the time but become increasingly difficult to explain.
The jokes, of course, are always on the British upper class toffs and never on the race supposedly being imitated but that kind of subtlety is always opaque to the censors.
Haven’t read that one but I have that episode (I think the same one) on DVD. At least there was a blackface troupe playing banjos.
In part, at least.The books and the show differ substantially. I’m always a little surprised to still find this one on YouTube:
Many thanks for the reminder and the link; I just ordered the collection. We all need Wodehouse to lighten these heavy times.
That’s interesting. I knew that Overlook had published the Wodehouse but not Freddy the Pig. I think my Scottish self (can I say that anymore? when I mean cheap er frugal) will have to just buy them for myself and the grandkids.
Or go to thrift books or alibris for forever copies. I’m so cynical I expect all electric devices to quit on me.
My Mom used to read his stories to the family in the evening – better entertainment than TV.
My favorite was when the two guys were trying to lose a golf match, without being too obvious about their self-sabotage, because the winner won the hand of an unpleasant woman, or something like that.
“Drat! Another ball in the water!”
* Dirty look from his opponent… *
Alas, I own some paper copies of Wodehouse which I will keep. But I have no room for more bookshelves. I’m trying to downsize and buy electronic versions.
It is possible to download e-books to PC, store them on disk, transfer them to a Kindle via cable, and never connect the Kindle to the internet. Mine has been in airplane mode since I registered it.
Finally got a chance to watch this – hilarious! And very unwoke!
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is still some kind of expiration date that might self-delete them from the Kindle at some point.
Not if you use Calibre. It’s like iTunes for your Kindle, and Amazon can’t do a thing if you load your ebooks using it. Between sites like Delphi Classics and Standard eBooks, I haven’t bought a classic work from Amazon in years.
There is/was a great collection of golf short stories by Wodehouse. One of my favorites involved Lenin and Trotsky playing a game. Only Wodehouse could get away with that.
Yes! And it has it’s own search feature if one inputs the author, title, or both. It’s not perfect but it found a number of free Wodehouse books and downloaded them from Project Gutenberg, in Epub format. Epub works great on Ipads.
Thanks for pointing out two sources of ebooks I was not familiar with. Standard eBooks also has a number of free Wodehouse selections.