World of Wodehouse

Richard Usborne has in fact provided an excellent list of Wodehouse’s fictitious book titles in his book Plum Sauce. Here are some that may tickle the diaphragm in fond remembrance…

Rosie M. Banks: Only A Factory Girl

Stultitia Bodwin: Offal

Lady Florence Craye: Spindrift

Lady Carnaby: Memories of Eighty Interesting Years

Adela Cream: Blackness At Night

Percy Gorringe: The Case of the Poisoned Doughnut

The Rev. Aubrey Jeringham: Is there A Hell?

Louella Peabody: My Friends the Newts

Alexander Worple: American Birds, More American Birds

Muriel Singer: The Children’s Book of American Birds

Horatio Slingsby: Strychnine in the Soup

Clare Throckmorton Stooge: A Strong Man’s Kiss

Bound to your bookseller, leap to your library,

Deluge your dealer with bakshish and bribary,

Lean on the counter and never say when,

Wodehouse and Wooster are with us again.

Flourish the fish-slice, your buttons unloosing,

Prepare for the fabulous browsing and sluicing,

And quote, til you're known as the neighborhood nuisance,

The gems that illumine the browsance and sluicance.

Oh, fondle each gem, and after you quote it,

Kindly inform me just who wrote it.

Which came first, the egg or the rooster?

P.G.Wodehouse or Bertram Wooster?

I know hawk from handsaw, and Finn from Fiji,

But I can't disentangle Bertram from PG.

I inquire in the school room, I ask in the road house,

Did Wodehouse write Wooster, or Wooster Wodehouse?

Bertram Wodehouse and PG Wooster,

They are linked in my mind like Simon and Schuster.

No matter which fumbled in '41,

Or which the woebegone figure of fun.

I deduce how the faux pas came about,

It was clearly Jeeves's afternoon out.

Now Jeeves is back, and my cheeks are crumply

From watching him glide through Steeple Bumpleigh.

Something Fresh, the first Blandings story, is a rom-com with a who done it. It’s decently written, although it isn’t as uproariously funny as his later stories. You do get an introduction to some of the principal denizens of Blandings Castle, and one gets glimpses of the comic genius to come. Parenthetically, I was fascinated to learn of the complicated social strata amongst the staff.

“As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.”

“There are men in this world who cannot rest, who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work.”

You know you are in Heaven when your:

Cook is French

Lover is Italian

Policeman is English

Engineer is German

And the Swiss run the whole place.

You know you are in Hell when your:

Cook is English

Lover is Swiss

Policeman is German

Engineer is French

…..‘I’ve never heard of Bassington. Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?’

‘I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family—the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent Bassington-Bassingtons.’

‘England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons.’

‘Tolerably so, sir.’

‘No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?’

‘Presumably not, sir.’