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"Leave it to Jeeves" by P.G. Wodehouse
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The person who started Constant Reader, Allen Crocker, also known as "The Conductor", was a huge P.G. Wodehouse fan. So, it seems slightly amazing, but I don't remember us reading a Wodehouse story or novel in the entire 13 years that I've been associated with CR. Those of you who have been around for a while, please correct me about that if I am wrong.In any case, I am hesitant to say that I am taking a while to warm to the Wodehouse style. Even though it was written in a different era, the writing is supposed to be timeless. So, I am thinking that I need to open myself up a bit to it. And, I am going back for a reread.
In the meantime, one line that had me laughing out loud was:
As a rule, from what I've observed, the American captain of industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a captain of industry again.
And, can anyone tell me what a stiff b.-and-s is?
I haven't read the story yet, but knowing that it's a Wooster & Jeeves story, I'm guessing it's a drink.... bourbon or brandy and soda. Just like calling a gin & tonic, a "G&T". Stiff presumably means light on the mixer @;^).
Ah yes, soda, how could I have missed that as a mixer?
I believe that it's brandy and soda...Brits aren't too much for bourbon, particularly Brits of that era. And yes, stiff is definitely s strong drink, short on the soda.Back in the dear dead days, I consumed mnay a "stiff" G and T myself. Ah, youth and a good digestion, now probably ruined by bad habits.
"What absolute rot! It's the soundest thing I've struck for years."I really like this line. I guess P.G. Wodehouse just gets right after it. It's apparently a habitual contradiction in Wooster to persist in arguing even though he knows Jeeves is always right. I wonder if Wodehouse intended that to be a hook? The disagreement device is used at the end, too, sort of bookending the story.
I like the slang: the johnnies and the chappies and the old bean...
Oh my -- I must -- simply MUST -- jump into this and read it -- I experienced my first Jeeves and Wooster with the Rory Gilmore Group this past year and want to read more Wodehouse for sure!I'll be back -- yes, I promised that on another story or two lately and never got back -- but I've really got to read more Wodehouse -- he makes me laugh and laughing is CRUCIAL these days it really is.
Oh! I am so glad this is available online...this is awesome, I love Jeeves...
"What absolute rot! It's the soundest thing I've struck for years."
I am sorry to have missed this discussion...
Just read this last night. Long ago and far away I was a Wodehouse fan, but I have to admit that time is past and I find him only mildly amusing now.Leif, however, remains a reader to this day. He owns a stack of the Wodehouse books, and if he's ever to be found reading fiction, it's likely to be Wodehouse. As he likes to read late in bed, there have been times when I've been awakened by the whole bed shaking with his laughter.
Stephen Fry was the absolute epitome of Jeeves in the TV series.
And who would have thought that Bertie Wooster would grow up to be a Doctor? ( Hugh Laurie on Fox's House series)
No one has missed the discussion, Candy. We've just barely wet our toes. I've love to hear more comments from everyone and am planning a reread this weekend.
This is fun, but I don't see much to discuss. He is good at creating a sense of time and place. Well, sort of. Under it all, I wonder why he's the rich one, and Jeeves is ironing his shirts.
why he's the rich one, and Jeeves is ironing his shirts. I think that's the point of all the Jeeves books. A poke at the British upper class.
What I found interesting in this particular story is that he's exiled temporarily in New York and enjoying every minute obviously. Getting in with all the right johnnies and chappies and hanging about with the sound sportsmen at their out of the city abodes and dipping into the artsy crowd when not feeling upper-crusty, I guess. What a character he is.Baby Blobbs -- heh! What was the old-time comic strip about a baby? I cqn alomost see a strip in my mind's eye but can't come up wtih the title. Ah, well, maybe it'll pop into my head later.
I loved the breakfast comment, too.
Steve:Here’s a classic. Corky’s uncle “was fifty-one, and it seemed as if he might go to par.” Par would be 72 on Bertie’s 18-hole golf courses.
And did you catch this? “I was so darned sorry for poor old Corky that I hadn’t the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.”
Thanks for that. The first of these two eluded me. The second one I caught and was, I agree, notable.
I also like Wodehouse's commentary on the publishing industry:
I always used to think that publishers had to be devilish intelligent fellows, loaded down with the grey matter; but I've got their number now. All a publisher has to do is to write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work. I know, because I've been one myself. I simply sat tight in the old apartment with a fountain-pen, and in due season a topping, shiny book came along.
Publishing has long been the domain of the wealthy. For most of the history of the printed word, only the wealthy could read. Who has time to make books when one has to earn a living? A small percentage of books are successful in monetary terms, a small percentage of books make any money, and of the books that make money, it may be a year or more before the costs of production are realized in order for profit to be established.
Statistics from Harper's Index, June, 2007:
Minimum number of different books (titles) sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000
Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000
Number that sold more than 100,000: 483
And if one were inclined to take an academic view of Leave it to Jeeves, one might be inclined to mention a certain level of meta-fiction:
"That's true," said Corky. "Sam Patterson would do it for a hundred dollars. He writes a novelette, three short stories, and ten thousand words of a serial for one of the all-fiction magazines under different names every month. A little thing like this would be nothing to him. I'll get after him right away."
I wonder how many words Wodehouse could write in a month?
Re: swings and roundaboutsI'm pretty sure that these are playground terms; swings being, well, swings, and roundabouts are those small merry-go-rounds (from the dear dead days before everything was dangerous) that the kids sat on and could power with their feet.
This is my first time reading Wodehouse, and I don’t really have much to add to the discussion, other than it came around just when I needed a laugh. So thanks Barbara for including it in the list. I have become such a “serious reader” somehow; I seem to be forgetting that not all “light reading” is poorly written. And that a good laugh is good for the soul…
Gail,You are right about swings and roundabouts - it's a common expression used here - really meaning it's got points and bad ones. I'll try to log on this evening and see if there's anything else but I'm going to be away till Saturday eve and then again on Sunday so I'm not much help at the moment.
I love Wodehouse - when I moved to England 35 years ago I discovered him and read everything he wrote. You've got the gist of it - it's how a servant can be so much more capable than the master. In essence though in these stories the reader is allowed to recognize the fact and celebrate it, whilst at the time of course the servant, just like some workers even now, needed to make the boss think he was the one with the ideas. Jeeves as the ultimate manipulator, albeit for the good of Bertie and the family.
having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie” - hunting was quite an upper class sport but also the servants would be sent out to hunt for the pot.
I gave it the complete miss-in-baulk - had to look this up - miss-in-balk: Shamin Mohamed (aka Pongo) kindly supplied the following: "In billiards, the area at the head of the table (the side opposite the 'spot', where you would rack the balls if you were playing pool) is called the baulk. If you are playing with your cue ball in hand, you play from the baulk, and you are not permitted to play a ball that is in baulk. You give that ball the miss-in-baulk."
There is a website you can look at for any help - it's actually called something like decoding the woosters -
http://www.geocities.com/indeedsir/wo...
enjoy yourselves
ricki
remembered while I was out walking in the rain - all day it rained by the way, not good. All day we were outside walking... Anyway a better explanation of swings and roundabouts is that it's six of one, half a dozen of the other, there will be pluses and minuses with each and you just get on and make a choice.that's it.
Ah, thank you, Ricki. Now, I have something that I've wondered about for years. In several books about the Empire, and occasionally in one or two about G.B. itself, I've found mention of "metal roads". Do you have any idea what this might mean? I mean, is the roadbed metal, or a metal grid of some sort, into which the road material itself is applied? Or what? I can't seem to find this anywhere.
I think it's what my grandmother used to call a "macadum" road. Tar mixed with gravel?
Do you have any idea why they call them "metal" then?
Hi Gail,The idea of 'metalled roads' depends on the time that you are talking about. In the days of Jeeves and Bertie, it would have been laid gravel roads but later it became synonymous with tarmac which is what you all would call macadam roads.
Here's a bit from Wiki -
Metal or metalling has had two distinct usages in road paving. Metalling originally referred to the process of creating a carefully engineered gravel roadway. The route of the roadway first would be dug down several feet. Depending on local conditions, French drains may or may not have been added. Next, large stone was placed and compacted, followed by successive layers of smaller stone, until the road surface was a small stone compacted into a hard, durable surface.
Road metal later became the name of stone chippings mixed with tar to form the road surfacing material tarmac. A road of such material is called a "metalled road" in British usage, or less often a macadam road, however the most common name applied to any U.K road surface is "tarmac", regardless of its actual construction. The word metal is derived from the Latin metallum, which means both "mine" and "quarry", hence the roadbuilding terminology.
Hope that helps
Thanks, Ricki. That makes sense.
I've spent the past week buried in paperwork and parent-teacher conferences at work. So, it was a nice surprise to come back and find all of these notes. I'm always interested in the art of opening lines in stories and novels. When I reread this one a bit last weekend, I realized what a pearl the opening paragraph of this one is:
Jeeves--my man, you know--is really a most extraordinary chap. So capable. Honestly, I shouldn't know what to do without him. On broader lines he's like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble battlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked "Inquiries." You know the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and say: "When's the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?" and they reply, without stopping to think, "Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco." And they're right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.
And, there you have it -- Jeeves in a nutshell.
Ah, Ricki, thank you so much! Here I had in my feeble mind an image of metal grids (sort of like chicken wire laid sideways) into which the actual road material was placed. Wrong again.It is, as Steve has pointed out above, a marvel to have you hereabouts. Thanks again for your help and patience.
You're welcome to you both, Gail and Steve, but that's just what we do here, isn't it, help each other when we need it.
http://www.classicreader.com/book/345...
So, even if you don't own the anthology, it's time for you to join in!
The following is a bit of information about Wodehouse from Wikipedia:
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) (IPA: /ˈwʊdhaʊs/) was an English comic novelist, who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than 70 years and continues to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.
An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.
Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin - Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
A longer biography with more description of the Jeeves character is available at:
http://www.online-literature.com/pg-w...