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. 

P.G. Doghouse.

Readers of this blog, being literate and above average in oh so many ways, may be able to guess why I spent the money on a bag of refrigerated dog treats for our two little (read: huge) chaps. Yes, they're mostly good boys and deserve treats. And yes, they like chicken, very much. But why this brand?

P.G. Wodehouse was perhaps the funniest artist of prose the English language has ever known. Certainly there are many other talented humor writers, but not one has had the consistency and staying power of that late hero of humor. Readers of his will remember Freddie Threepwood, the rather soft-headed second son of the somewhat addlepated Lord Emsworth, who first appeared in Wodehouse's incomparable Something Fresh. Freddie is a bit of a wastrel, but sort of an innocent, never carousing in a serious way, but pulling pranks, drinking too much in school, running up debts, and consistently falling in love with the wrong women.

The Earl of Emsworth was so constituted that no man or thing really had the power to trouble him deeply, but Freddie had come nearer to doing it than anybody else in the world. There had been a consistency, a perseverance about his irritating performances which had acted on the placid peer as dripping water on a stone. Isolated acts of annoyance would have been powerless to ruffle his calm; but Freddie had been exploding bombs under his nose since he went to Eton.
       He had been expelled from Eton for breaking out at night and roaming the streets of Windsor in a false moustache. He had been sent down from Oxford for pouring ink from a second storey window on to the Junior Dean of his college. He had spent two years at an expensive London crammer's and failed to pass into the Army. He had also accumulated an almost record series of racing debts, besides as shady a gang of friends, for the most part vaguely connected with the turf, as any young man of his age ever contrived to collect.  

The thing about Freddie is that, after many disappointments in romance, he finally meets the true love of his life, the American Aggie Donaldson, whose father is the owner of Donaldson's Dog-Biscuits. They wed, move to America, and Freddie's new father-in-law puts him to work in the firm, selling Donaldson's Dog-Joy. Freddie becomes reborn -- confident and driven to succeed. It makes a new man of him. Kind of a bore on the subject. Lord Emsworth barely recognizes Freddie when the latter makes a trip to scout the prospect of selling Donaldson's in England. Here, from "The Go-Getter" in Blandings Castle:

"Rupert Bingham, did you say?" said Freddie with a sudden animation. "I'll tell you something about Rupert Bingham. He has a dog named Bottles who has been fed from early youth on Donaldson's Dog-Joy, and I wish you could see him. Thanks to the bone-forming properties of Donaldson's Dog-Joy, he glows with health. A fine, upstanding dog, with eyes sparkling with the joy of living and both feet on the ground. A credit to his master."
       "Never mind about Rupert's dog!"
       "You've got to mind about Rupert's dog. You can't afford to ignore him. He's a dog to be reckoned with. A dog that counts. And all through Donaldson's Dog-Joy."

I have no idea if Freshpet had Wodehouse in mind when they created their own Dog Joy. The website doesn't mention it, and I have my doubts. For one thing, Donaldson's product is clearly a dog food, a mainstay of a pet's diet, while Freshpet's Dog Joy is a snack. Still, in honor of Wodehouse, and in solidarity with another Freddie, I went ahead and bought the bag.

My dogs give it two paws up. Two out of two approve. They like the rubbery, stinky little chicken-flavored treats. However, I was surprised that they weren't wild over them. I can tell when they like a treat, when they really like a treat, and when they'll run through fire for a treat (we call that Cheese Level). Dog Joy did not achieve the top ranking. But they liked it a lot, so yes, they approve.

It did not turn them into dogs to be reckoned with. Actually, at their large size, I think that was already the case.

And I think writing about Freshpet's Dog Joy has not done the slightest bit as much for me as selling Donaldson's Dog-Joy did for Freddie Threepwood. Pity.

Marriage is a great institution.

But who wants to be in an institution?

I see a lot of jewelry ads this time of year where guys are giving big diamond engagement rings to girls in Christmas settings. I actually know a couple that got engaged on a carriage ride at Christmas. You'd think Christmas was by nature a romantic time of year, but it really isn't -- the Holy Family modeled perfect love, but not romance. However, folk songs (yick) demonstrate that Christmas has long had a "true love gave to me" feel to it, so I suppose there's something to it. 

Then again, people get a lot of cars in Christmas commercials too, and I've never gotten one. 

But we must assume that many people in relationships are considering popping the big one this time of year, so we ought to add a word of advice here, dusted off from my old defunct blog:

As that profound religious thinker, The Impressive Clergyman, once said, “Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togedder tooday. Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wiffin a dweam. And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva. So tweasure your wuv.”

It’s a sad fact that there is a lot of divorce about today. Then again, maybe some people don’t think of it as a sad fact. Maybe they think in olden times when few people were divorced that most people were stuck with other miserable people, but now everyone can be free to dump the other person and they can each go and try again elsewhere, and that it’s a good thing all around. Hooray!

But divorce is not exactly a new thing. As far back as 1947, in the novel Full Moon, P.G. Wodehouse describes his young American millionaire, Tipton Plimsoll, as "The son of parents who after marrying each other had almost immediately started marrying other people with a perseverance worthy of a better cause," and that "his had been one of those childhoods where the faintly bewildered offspring finds himself passed from hand to hand like a medicine ball." Back then the American wealthy were known for divorcing---see also 1939’s The Women by Clare Boothe Luce---while the peons, aware that their reputation as well as their financial security was at stake, stayed together. Now it’s the other way around, ironically.

I am a strong believer in the institution of marriage. Of course, mine is intact because I married a saint. Still, for at least one of us, there was a steep learning curve when we first got married. Maybe more like a learning wall. Sorry, honey. Anyway, marriage is the building block of society; people running around permanently unattached do not make a society, they make anarchy. Two problems with anarchy: It’s only fun until it actually happens; it may be the shortest-lived of any kind of society, because some tyrant will come along and impose order with the promise of security. Only the strong like anarchy because they intend to do away with it.

Divorce is nothing short of disaster to the one who still wants to stay in the marriage while the other does not. A number of my friends have gone through that and my heart goes out to them. I’ve also known folks who said their marriage had fallen or was falling apart, but I think that's a misnomer. Barring tragic circumstances, marriages do not just fall apart. Someone is dismantling them. Or they never existed in the first place.

That’s why we Catholics insist on Pre-Cana, the preparation for marriage. No one ever knows entirely what they’re getting in for with marriage, but you had better have some awareness and be warned to build that house out of bricks. Even lapsed Catholics have a lower rate of divorce than the norm, but they have a considerably higher rate of divorce than those who attend Mass faithfully. And no matter whether divorce is a needful or frivolous thing, there's nothing happy about it.

So don't go popping the question because Zales or Kay make it look like fun. Go into marriage with your eyes open and your TV off, kid. 

And remember, always tweasure your wuv. Wuv, after all, makes the world go ’wound.

The beards bursting in air.

A friend of mine popped up at church Sunday with not one hair on his face. This was astonishing, as I had never seen him without some kind of whisker -- full beard, goatee, handlebar, lump of fuzz on his chin, something. As it turned out, having rediscovered his bald face, he decided he didn't like it, didn't think it had aged well, and was planning to cover it up again as soon as possible.

It got me to thinking about our hirsute age, where so much facial hair is about, where it's never been easier for men to shave and yet so little shaving is being done. And yet, with Independence Day upon us, it dazzled me that we've had so few U.S. presidents with facial hair. Other fashions have come and gone with presidents as with the general population, politicians following rather than setting the fashions -- presidents didn't make powdered wigs take a powder, and Kennedy did not actually kill the male hat. But despite the fact that respectable men have been growing facial hair since the 1970s, we have not had a serious candidate for the office with a mustache or beard since Thomas Dewey, who ran in 1944 and 1948.

Maybe the 'stache is why he lost.

Have a look at these portraits of the presidents. Lincoln is, as in so many things, a pioneer, our first chief of the executive with facial hair beyond some comical sideburns. After the break with Johnson, we get quite the run -- Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, (McKinley abstains), Roosevelt -- until Taft finishes the chain of hair in 1912. Since then, 18 presidents in a row with no hair on their mugs at all, our longest unbroken streak.

It's an out-of-date collection, but I hear that Trump fellow also has no beard.

The post-Civil War era when all these presidents had all that foliage was one of great industry and optimism in America, and I have to wonder if our longstanding malaise could be combated by leaders with big ol' beards. Not the female leaders, of course; that would be weird. The men would just have to beard up enough to cover all of them.

I'm not sure if that would do the trick, though, as the biggest beards I'm seeing since Duck Dynasty went off the air tend to belong to hipsters, who produce no hope or optimism and for a very large part no industry. In fact, one sees all too little of our old can-do attitude these days; more of our where's-my-friggin'-entitlement attitude. Rather than the unity of E pluribus unum we have the splintering of Unum de multis.

But it's hard to ignore the argument put forth by P. G. Wodehouse, himself no bearer of beards. In his 1956 book America, I Like You (in the UK published as Over Seventy), Wodehouse wrote an ode to the American beard and the American spirit. I hope his estate will not come down on me too hard if I reprint it on my humble, advertising- and profit-free page, in the interest of encouraging my fellow citizens to pull up our socks, tuck in our shirts, grow some fuzz, and get out there and do something big:

The world is in a mess today,
Damn sight worse than yesterday,
And getting a whole lot worser right along. 
It’s time that some clear-thinking guy
Got up and told the reason why
America has started going wrong. 
If laws are broke and homes are wrecked,
It’s only what you might expect
With all the fellows shaving all the time. 
Yes, sir, the moment you begin
To crop the fungus from the chin,
You’re headed for a life of sin
And crime. 

What this country needs is whiskers
Like the men of an earlier date.
They were never heels and loafers
And they looked like busted sofas
Or excelsior in a crate. 
Don’t forget it was men with whiskers
Who founded our New Yorks, Detroits and San Franciskers.
What this country needs is men with whiskers
Like the men who made her great. 

The pioneers were hairy men,
Reckless devil-may-care-y men,
Who wouldn’t have used a razor on a bet.
For each had sworn a solemn oath
He’d never prune the undergrowth;
Their motto was “To hell with King Gillette!”
And when they met on country walks
Wild Cherokees with tomahawks,
I’ll say those boys were glad they hadn’t shaved. 
When cornered by a redskin band,
With things not going quite as planned,
They hid inside their whiskers and
Were saved. 

What this country needs is men with whiskers,
For the whisker always wins.
Be it war or golf or tennis
We shall fear no foeman’s menace
With alfalfa on our chins. 
Whitman’s verse, there is none to match it,
But you couldn’t see his face unless you used a hatchet. 
What this country needs is men with whiskers
Out where the best begins.

What this country needs is men with whiskers
Like the men of Lincoln’s day.
At the Wilderness and Shiloh
They laid many a doughty guy low,
They were heroes in the fray. 
Theirs is a fame that can never die out,
And if you touched their beards, a couple of birds would fly out,
So let’s raise the slogan of “Back to whiskers!”
And three cheers for the U.S.A.

Happy birthday, America.