Fred's Book Club: World's Funniest Writer.

Welcome to Wednesday, a.k.a. Hump Day, and thus our latest addition to and edition of the Humpback Writers, the book feature that has no actual writers with humps (that we know of) but who get the dromedary treatment because it's Wednesday. So there.

Today we combat yesterday's grouchy mood on this blog with one of the funniest books by one of the funniest writers in the English language. I refer of course to that singular genius, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, and his first novel of Blandings Castle, Something Fresh.

Something Fresh is a virtuoso performance by Wodehouse, in which he not only sets a desperately complicated plot in motion, and creates a timeless story setting and a passel of memorable characters (several of whom became mainstays of the Wodehouse canon), but also does so with a deft storytelling touch and a ready wit that makes his prose as impactful as good poetry. My Penguin edition, above, is a mere 208 pages, but you'd think it was longer although you fly through it, so full of incident and hilarity it is.

To summarize the plot just a little: Ashe Marson, writer and fitness buff, is hired by millionaire J. Preston Peters to accompany him to Blandings Castle as a valet to retrieve a priceless Egyptian scarab that the Earl of Emsworth has stolen. The Earl did not actually steal the scarab, he just placed it in his pocket and walked off with it, because he is woefully absent-minded. The Earl is hectored constantly by his male secretary, the Efficient Baxter, a busybody and snoop of the first order. Ashe falls for Joan Valentine, who is friends with J. Preston's daughter Aline, and accompanies her to Blandings (disguised as Aline's maid), where Joan too seeks the scarab for the reward. Aline is engaged to Lord Emsworth's wastrel son, Freddie Threepwood, who wants to do nothing but gamble and fall for showgirls and read the thrilling novels written by Ashe under a pseudonym. Aline is also sought by George Emerson, a former policeman who is a tough sort, as likely to murder Freddie as look at him. Beach is the butler, and he disapproves -- you name it, he disapproves of it. 

Well, that scrapes the surface, but there's a lot going on. The stars of the book are Ashe and Joan, but the background characters of Blandings steal the show. Lord Emsworth, Beach, Freddie, Emsworth's siblings, Emsworth's prizewinning pig, and all of Blandings went on to appear in eleven novels and nine stories. And these aren't even Wodehouse's most famous characters, who are Jeeves and Wooster.

Perhaps the real star is Wodehouse's prose; one of the reasons I've always been dissatisfied with adaptations of Wodehouse for the screen is that the omniscient narrator often gets the best lines. Here the narrator takes a simple description of a town and makes it wonderful:

Baxter, then, as he bicycled to Market Blandings for tobacco, had good reason to brood. Having bought his tobacco and observed the life and thought of the town for half an hour--it was market day and the normal stagnation of the place was temporarily relieved and brightened by pigs that eluded their keepers, and a bull calf which caught a stout farmer at the psychological moment when he was tying his shoelace and lifted him six feet--he made his way to the Emsworth Arms, the most respectable of the eleven inns the citizens of Market Blandings contrived in some miraculous way to support.

In English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers to blaming the government.

So you can imagine how well Wodehouse does in a more action-packed scene, as when Ashe and George get into a fistfight in the dark:

Ashe, removing his left arm from George's neck, brought it up as a reinforcement to his right, and used both as a means of throttling George. This led George, now permanently underneath, to grasp Ashe's ears firmly and twist them, relieving the pressure on his throat and causing Ashe to utter the first vocal sound of the evening, other than the explosive Ugh! that both had emitted at the instant of impact.

Ashe dislodged George's hands from his ears and hit George in the ribs with his elbow. George kicked Ashe on the left ankle. Ashe rediscovered George's throat and began to squeeze it afresh; and a pleasant time was being had by all when the Efficient Baxter, whizzing down the stairs, tripped over Ashe's legs, shot forward and cannoned into another table, also covered with occasional china and photographs in frames.

The hall at Blandings Castle was more an extra drawing-room than a hall; and, when not nursing a sick headache in her bedroom, Lady Ann Warblington would dispense afternoon tea there to her guests. Consequently it was dotted pretty freely with small tables. There were, indeed, no fewer than five more in various spots, waiting to be bumped into and smashed.

And then Lord Emsworth blunders onto the scene with his trusty six-shooter....

This book, not surprisingly, catapulted Wodehouse to American popularity, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post.

Writing the funny bits and coming up with characters never seemed to tax Wodehouse, who was a dynamo. Working out the complex plots of his novels could cause him grief, however. In a letter quoted in Frances Donaldson's P.G. Wodehouse: A Biography, he said, "I wrote an elaborate scenario of the first third of my novel yesterday. I've got a new system now... that is to write a 30,000 word scenario before starting the novel.... By this means you avoid those ghastly moments when you suddenly come on a hole in the plot and are tied up for three days while you invent a situation. I found that the knowledge of a clear path ahead of me helped my grip on the thing." To put this in perspective, Something Fresh itself is about 78,000 words. His scenario would be almost 40% as long as the book itself. 

I still feel like a novice Wodehouse fan, having read only a few dozen of his books and one biography. The real devotees can name his minor characters at will, citing all of Bertie Wooster's romantic disasters and everyone who visited Blandings. What first got me hooked was that a friend of mine in college took me to the Strand one day and said, "Ficus," (his name for me), "the Strand's got all these Wodehouse books in hardcover for five bucks each. You need some." It took me a while to get warmed to them, I don't know why, but eventually I became an addict. (And eventually I realized how much my friend resembled the endlessly dreaming and mooching Wodehouse hero Ukridge.)

Of course my copy of Something Fresh is not one of those hardcovers but a paperback I picked up later. You can certainly buy the book, as most of the Wodehouse works are still in print in the United States, or you can find Something Fresh under its American title, Something New, for free from our friends (including Mongo) at Gutenberg. The book is 106 years old this year, after all, but it reads better than most new things you can find.

And Wodehouse always cheers me up. You know how when you're in a funk and you hear a chipper song you like and it changes your mood? And you think, "I should listen to this every day"? Wodehouse's stories do that for me.