P.G. Wodehouse, c. or d.?

Hugh Laurie was a perfect Bertie Wooster - but Stephen Fry was much too young for Jeeves.

Yes, but I laugh with Wodehouse characters. Seinfeld characters I generally wish to kill.

The Blackshirts are lampooned in some of the 30s books, as the Blackshorts. PGW clearly considered them merely absurd, rather than threatening or evil. I think he pretty much lived in an England entirely of his own invention, with major world events and actual grown-up politics as extremely distant background noise.

Molly Keane is a good writer. I think that's how you spell it.

This is true for 'Seinfeld' but not for Wodehouse, therefore N. is wrong QED.

Pssshhh. Not round here it ain't.

Okay PF, put forth your challanger and we'll have a ILE boxing match to settle this one.

Gob, there's me bus. Bye now.

This weekend The Pinefox gave me an excellent early birthday present: Mark Steyn's 'Broadway Babies say goodnight: musicals then and now' which I recommend highly (especially to the Barnet Ape). Among other things, it contains the startling - to me - revelation: "If PG Wodehouse had died in 1918 he would be remembered, not as the creator of Jeeves etc, but as the man who revolutionized the Broadway musical" (I quote from unreliable memory). Quite a claim, but it turns out to be true! With Jerome Kern, in shows such as 'Very good Eddie' and 'Oh, Kay!' Plum apparently staked out a bold new democratic voice on Broadway which paved the way for Porter, the Gershwins, Berlin etc etc. Well, if I liked PGW before, I like him even more now! But does anyone know where I can find the lyrics (or better still - recordings) of these songs?

Imagine therefore how doubly insulting Andrew Lloyd Webbers "Jeeves" would have been....

If you find any more, let me know.

Think how sad a carrot would be if no boiled beef was near
Think how sad an egg would feel if ham should disappear
Think how a sausage's hopes would be dashed if one day it awoke and missed its mash
Or what grief a steak would feel if it found that there wasn't an onion around
(If I Ever Lost you - set to music by Ivor Novelloe!)

Bibliography of Woodehouse musicals here: http://wodehouse.ru/musical.htm (Anything Goes is one of his - makes sense)

I'm so busy

[Marjorie]
I always said
That the man I would wed
Must be one who would work all the time.
One with ambition,
Who'd make it his mission
To win a position sublime.
One whose chief pleasure would be
Making a fortune for me;
One who would toil all the day
Down in the market and say:

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Don't know what to do.
Goodbye dear, I'm off to the street.
Can't stop now,
I'm cornering wheat.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy,
Till the deal goes through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
I'm making a pile for you.

[Donald]
Don't be deceived,
If you've ever believed
That my taste for hard labor is small.
Stifle the lurking
Idea that I'm shirking,
I never stop working at all.
I may have loafed in the past,
But I am busy at last,
I've found employment and I'm
Working away all the time.

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Busy loving you.
That's the job that suits me the best,
Though I never get any rest.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy
But I shan't get through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
So won't you get busy too?

[Both]
Mm...

As for musicals, I've never seen one of his 'books' available anywhere, nor a soundtrack album. He always described his stories as musical comedies without the music, though. One of my favourite ever lines about writing was from one of his books, where he claims that to change what he writes into serious literature, all you would have to do is take out all the plot and bung in loads of misery.

i finally got around to reading "code of the woosters" this weekend and i must say it's kind of shocking to realize everyone's right about wodehouse; he's not just a wry old artifact you might chuckle at on a rainy sunday when browsing the local used bookstore, he was a bonafide fuckin' genius! i mean god knows how else he was able to write nothing but utterly beautiful, utterly hilarious sentences, one after the other.

I can't believe that Seinfeld comment way above. Ned was not nearly vitriolic enough.

yeah, even if you like seinfeld its attitude toward ppl is clearly the complete opposite of wodehouse - PGW's world is a utopia, seinfeld's is a sort of hell.

PGW's world is a utopia

Although I love PGW and have been reading him for about 20 years - he's pretty much my default reading material when feeling low - I remember my father ranting about him (or at least Wooster). As far as he was concerned the world portrayed in the books was a real one, albeit exaggerated, which existed up until WW2 and which was wholly repulsive. Stupid toffs living off various their relatives wealth, wealth which had been achieved at the expense of the working classes, doing nothing constructive and wholly self absorbed in their own petty world. He really couldn't see the joke. Pr at least he could, he just didn't think it was funny.

Oh - I just read the thread and that's basically what maryann was saying I think so what she said otm.

Also someone used the name Mrs Edna Welthorpe back then. Excellent.

Joy in the Morning is perfect from end to end.

The newest editions of these keep showing up remaindered in various local bookshops in Aus--$7 each. Which is great, and somehow I've so far managed to avoid buying any I already own (which is harder than you'd think, given the often interchangeable titles and sometimes interchangeable blurbs--'Oh, this is the one where Jeeves gets Bertie out iof a fix!')

And OTM to Alfred's Joy in the Morning comment

I bought the 2010 Just Enough Jeeves omnibus for $5 used on Friday.

The newest editions of these keep showing up remaindered in various local bookshops in Aus--$7 each.

I hope this proves true for me!

This made a great christmas present:

http://www.thebookpeople.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/qs_product_tbp?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051&langId=100&productId=253016&searchTerm=wodehouse

Thread of missing Mrs. Edna Welthorpe

morelike p.u. chodehouse

j/k :)

My parents owned one for years until the tail snapped

modern dutch

would love to see whit stillman take on a wodehouse

Hot Water is next in my queue. Good to know!

bear in mind this is preteen imago you're taking your tips from

I've always just grabbed the books at random without thinking about how they fit together sequentially or the overall arc of the story. Might be interesting to go through them chronologically some day.

Due to the short stories being collected semi-haphazardly, one would need to draw up a map and flit from book to book to pull this off (I tried when I was 12 to figure out a Wooster / Blandings / Psmith chronology but failed early for lack of resources.)

flit

and sip

A Damsel in Distress is another really good stand-alone.

Agreed! The ADiD movie adaptation is less faithful, more a Fred Astaire showcase with the Wodehouse framework, but still fun.

HI DERE

The movie is ADiD is Fred Astaire with ... George Burns and Gracie Allen, correct? And Fred and Gracie resurrect one of Fred and Adele’s signature numbers, iirc.

i saw this set in a thrift store years ago and i think they wanted like 50 bucks for the whole thing and i didn't get it and i still kick myself:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/PG-Wodehouse-20-Vol-hardcover-Heron-Books-vintage-set-40-titles-British-humor/152905775633?hash=item2399e4fa11:g:~b4AAOSw8RZagkvF

for the hardcore:

https://historical.ha.com/itm/books/literature-1900-up/p-g-wodehouse-plum-stones-the-hidden-p-g-wodehouse-complete-in-twelve-volumes-london-galahad-books-total-12-items-/a/6064-36390.s

bertie! this is amazing! do you really read spinoza?

A developing mind is so fascinating.

Oh this looks fun

https://hotelfred.blogspot.com/2018/06/wodehouse.html

This was quite good:

https://edwardbindloss.wordpress.com/2018/11/09/on-p-g-wodehouse/

Contains some transcripts of the war-time broadcasts discussed above.

i feel like i've read versions of this piece before (cockburn in the early 80s, hitchens in the early 90s): coming from some way left (lol hitchens but this is fair for the times) they were faintly more generous to PGW and didn't include any extracts -- so that's new

i was totally brought up to disdain him: "not funny". i'm guessing because my parents and grandparents were a certain age and well read politically informed and lived through the actual real blitz and were pretty impatient w/his choices. i've never hated one that i read but i never got addicted either. of course he has a phenomenal comic ear and we still live in the shadow of his sense of rhythm…

Need 20K words from Perry Anderson in the LRB to solve this issue for us.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DeMLXGpVMAA9pV5.jpg

i reckon seven of the PA words here you could easily find in PGW

"when life gives you degringos, make dégringolade" is forever mine tho

I will look for them when I dive into his short stories in a week or two

for the full #perryandersonvocabulary bingo card, put these in order of likely occurrence:
accidie
attentat
capsisal
castellar
cursus
defalcations
dubitative
ecumene
eructations
fellation
malversation
nescience
obnubilating

one of these is a highly unlikely plumword

HI DERE

What ho

tinkerty tonk

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wartime-for-wodehouse

This is really nice. I should pick up more and re-read Code again

That was great, thanks. Learned a new word too, popliteal. Wondering what the second imprisonment in 1944 was about, was he in Berlin all that time?

Ah, no, he was in Paris during the liberation and the French arrested him.

yeah that was nice, thanks for sharing

This is an interesting, more critical take on what Wodehouse was up to.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Wodehouse was remotely a Nazi sympathiser, but the defences of his broadcasts from Berlin - such as Christopher Hitchens’ here - really have to do some work to make it stick. pic.twitter.com/HGk20rjGG1

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) August 11, 2020

"Tea?"

"Yes, your lordship."

"Oh?" said Lord Emsworth. "Ah? Tea, eh? Tea? Yes. Tea. Quite so. To be sure, tea. Capital."

One gathered from his remarks that he realized that the tea hour had arrived and was glad of it. He proceeded to impart his discovery to his niece, Millicent, who, lured by that same silent call, had just appeared at his side.

"Tea, Millicent."

"Yes."

"Er - tea," said Lord Emsworth, driving home his point.

I was reading a book recently where an Indian writer was saying how P.G. was very popular with him and amongst contemporaries of his because he didn't sully his reputation doing racist Empire propaganda for the Raj and the only work he did for the BE was briefly working in a Hong Kong bank or something. A rare example he gave where he mentions the Raj, that made him chortle was (which is from memory so I'm probably not doing it much justice) where a character explains the Indian independence movement as thus: "the problem is they only get a cup of rice to eat every day over there, once someone serves them a good steak they'll soon jolly well simmer down".

watch me deal with him, gussie. it may amuse you.

This is kind of weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_a_Factory_Girl?wprov=sfti1

This is kind of weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_a_Factory_Girl?wprov=sfti1

This is kind of weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_a_Factory_Girl?wprov=sfti1

What’s weird about it

That it posted twice.

I thought he made that title up himself. Didn’t realize it preceded him.

Third time wasn’t weird then

It seems to be multiplying!

Thought maybe somebody made this film up but those citations seem legit. Rosie M. Banks is rotating in her final resting place.

Not that I subscribe to any Wodehouse newsletters or the like but I have never anyone mention the provenance of that title. I believe I am in need of one of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups.

How did Encyclopedia Redd know that Bertie had let a pal down?

Maybe there were even earlier uses of that title. I seem to see some theatrical performance of something with that title in Baton Rouge in the nineteenth century along with a Victorian short story from 1881. Maybe it’s just a title that one naturally arrives at. Maybe I need to go to sleep and awake to find out it was all just a kooky dream.

Bingo reported three days later that Rosie M. Banks was the goods and beyond a question the stuff to give the troops. Old Little had jibbed somewhat at first at the proposed change of literary diet, he not being much of a lad for fiction and having stuck hitherto exclusively to the heavier monthly reviews; but Bingo had got chapter one of All for Love past his guard before he knew what was happening, and after that there was nothing to it. Since then they had finished A Red, Red Summer Rose, Madcap Myrtle and Only a Factory Girl, and were half-way through The Courtship of Lord Strathmorlick.

Considering Wodehouse's enormous popularity in India it's such a shame they never made a bollywood Jeeves & Wooster.

With Johnny Walker and Guru Dutt! #onethread

1. picked up a gorgeous old copy of "the old reliable" the other day -- will maybe report back.

2. still haven't read any of the psmith stories -- really want to, though.

B-b-but what about The Courtship of Lord Strathmorlick?