Sydney M. Williams
Burrowing into Books
The Girl in Blue, 1970
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)
August 15, 2023
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive.”
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Marmion, 1808
Like his character Uncle Fred, P.G. Wodehouse spread sweetness and light over a career that lasted more than seventy years. He was the author of over ninety books, more than three hundred short stories, and, along with Guy Bolton, wrote the lyrics for more than twenty musicals. With the first name Pelham, he was called “Plum” by his friends, but to his thousands of fans he was, and still is, “The Master.” No one could (or has been able to) match his literacy, freshness, and humor in perfecting a sentence.
Consider a small sample from The Girl in Blue: “Crispin gave a short quick gulp like a bulldog trying to swallow a chop whose dimensions it has underestimated.” “He had suddenly remembered, what for the moment had slipped his mind, that he was engaged to be married to someone else.” “…he was perspiring in a manner which would have reminded a traveler in France of the fountains at Versailles.” “This was not just a girl, but…a girl Sheiks of Araby would dash into tents after, like seals in pursuit of fish.”
In an interview in late 1974 for the winter issue of the Paris Review, Gerald Clarke asked Wodehouse about his early life. He responded: “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.” Wodehouse published his first novel, The Pothunters, in 1902 when he was twenty. The Girl in Blue was published in 1970 when he was eighty-eight. He went on to write and publish five more novels, including the unfinished Sunset at Blandings. He never rested until God called him home, a month after he was knighted, at age ninety-three.
As in all his books, Wodehouse weaves a web based on an ingenious plot and the personal quirks of his characters. The plot is of such complexity that untangling it seems futile. Yet the impossible happens. Dark clouds part, and the sun shines on those favored. This story centers on a miniature Gainsborough of Willoughby and Crispin Scopes’ great-great grandmother “The Girl in Blue” that goes missing. The story starts in New York, moves to London, and finally comes to rest at Mellingham Hall, a crumbling, family country house, now owned by elder brother Crispin who can only afford it by taking in paying guests. We meet several others: Homer Pyle, a New York lawyer and aspiring poet, and his widowed sister Bernadette (Barmy) Claybourne; G.G.F. (Jerry) West, nephew to the Scopes; pretty Jane Hunnicut; arrogant Vera Upshaw and her mother, Dame Flora Faye; Chippendale, a butler who is not a butler; and Constable Simms.
As a well-read Brit of the late 19th and early mid 20th Centuries, Wodehouse references, in this novel, a variety of historic and literary figures: John Dryden, Lewis Carroll, Rex Stout, Napoleon, Tennyson, Cardinal Richelieu, and others, including the Chevalier Bayard whom I had to look up.
Over the years, I have read most of “The Master’s” work. This one I had not. What pleasure to laugh out loud, especially to the annoyance of those uninitiated in the humor of P.G. Wodehouse.
Comments
Post a Comment