Imagine a scenario in which ridiculous characters bumble through a series of hilarious coincidences and an equal number of snafus, all in the name of love, marriage and a big business deal. That’s the main idea in Joy in the Morning, the first of three short novels included in Just Enough Jeeves, a great introduction to P.G. Wodehouse’s famous characters, a twenty-something Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves.
For the pure unadulterated joy of drinking, you can’t really beat Wodehouse. Indeed it’s hard to beat him for pure unadulterated joy full stop. He had wonderful phrases for it – “tanked to the uvula” or “oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto”. He also has the wonderful story of Gussie Finknottle’s first encounter with alcohol. Gussie is a shy man who is shyly in love with Madeline Bassett. But he doesn’t have the nerve to propose to her. Bertie tries to persuade him that a stiff drink will give him the requisite Dutch courage. Gussie refuses and Bertie decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice. Unfortunately Jeeves also decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice, and Gussie himself then decides that he’ll do as Bertie suggested and downs half a decanter of whisky, which he washes down with the doubly-spiked orange juice. The result is a new Gussie Finknottle, who acts as though he could bite a tiger. “Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.”
Chortle launches P.G. Wodehouse award
4 September 2015
Today Chortle launches a new comic writing competition in honour of P.G. Wodehouse.
As well as the title, the winner of the P.G. Wodehouse New Comic Writer award will win a weekend writing course (worth £425) plus a bundle of books by the man widely regarded as the best comic novelist of the 20th century.
The competition coincides with the centenary of the publication of Something Fresh, the first of his novels set in Blandings Castle - featuring a valuable scarab unwittingly acquired from a dyspeptic American billionaire, plus imposters, engagements, broken engagements, elopements, mistaken identities, family spats and shots fired in the dead of night.
Devotees of P. G. Wodehouse, and I’m one, don’t respond well when he’s criticized. We have snap rejoinders. He wrote too many books? Hardly—why, he published only ninety-six in his long lifetime. He was repetitive? It’s called variations on a theme. His characters did not live in the real world? Would they have fared better in a realer one? You might as well point out that the beribboned Pekingese at the national dog show would founder if set loose in the jungle.
PG Wodehouse
Evelyn Waugh’s praise of Wodehouse, offered for a BBC broadcast, in 1961, got the matter exactly right: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Waugh wasn’t promising what so many blurbists promise for other novelists: life-changing visions, staggering epiphanies, insights to free you from the nightmare of your existence. Waugh’s artful “irksome” goes to the nub. Wodehouse is an anodyne to annoyances. He’s a tonic for those suffering from bearable but burdensome loads of boredom, from jadedness of outlook and dinginess of soul.
"I have been wondering where you would take this reading group for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get."
So wrote Reading group contributor AlanWSkinner wrote last week. I've been wondering too – worrying even. Leave It To Psmith offers plenty of delights. I laughed all the way through this story of impostors, jewel thieves and poets at Blandings Castle. But it's true that most of the novel's pleasures lie on the surface. AlanWSkinner may be right that there isn't much more than meets the eye. That's not a problem. But what scope does it leave for literary inquisition?
P.G. Wodehouse, in full Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, (born October 15, 1881, Guildford, Surrey, England—died February 14, 1975, Southampton, New York, U.S.), English-born comic novelist, short-story writer, lyricist, and playwright, best known as the creator of Jeeves, the supreme “gentleman’s gentleman.” He wrote more than 90 books and more than 20 film scripts and collaborated on more than 30 plays and musical comedies.
’Tis a strange serpent – 10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature
From Viking magical mead poetry to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, here’s how writers have encapsulated an eternal boozy truth
Mark Forsyth
Friday 1 December 2017
T
here have been drunken poets and poetic drunkards ever since the dawn of time, or, to put it more properly, since the sun first rose over the yardarm of history. The Vikings believed that all poetry came from some magical mead that Odin had stolen from a giant, downed, and then regurgitated in Asgard. They even believed this of bad poetry because, according to them, Odin had regurgitated most of it, but, in the heat of the moment, some of it had leaked out of his arse.
That is the reason that some great literary drinking bouts are better than others. Some stories sum up an eternal boozy truth, some pinpoint perfectly how one particular culture saw their alcohol. Here are 10 of the best.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The first ever work of literature is about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is the musclebound king of Uruk and Enkidu is a musclebound wild man who lives happily among the animals. Enkidu is completely at one with nature until a beautiful woman offers him beer.
Enkidu eats food till he was satiated. Ale he drinks, seven goblets. His spirit is loosened, he becomes hilarious. His heart becomes glad and his face shines. The barber removes the hair on his body. He is anointed with oil. He becomes manlike. He puts on a garment, and he is like a man.
And after that he can never go back to the animals. They shun him now. Alcoholhas made him a human. That’s exactly the same thing that happens at the end of Animal Farm (written a mere 4,000 years later). The animals peek in the window to see pigs drinking with the humans and “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which”. It’s alcohol that divides us from the animals.
That’s not scientifically true, by the way. Most of the higher apes love to get drunk, providing that they can get their opposable thumbs on the stuff. Darwin recorded that the best way to catch a baboon was to offer it beer and then grab it when it was hungover.
Letters, Lord Byron
When not shagging his way across Europe or swimming his way across the Hellespont, Byron liked a drink. It’s not that he was a better drinker than anybody else, but he was much better at describing it. It’s probably best to simply let him speak for himself. This is from a letter to Thomas Moore dated 31 October 1815:
“Yesterday, I dined out with a largeish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris of Covent Garden and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Ds. Kinnaird, and others, of note and notoriety. Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling;—and, to crown all, Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.
Both he and Colman were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the wine had previously carried away my memory; so that all was hiccup and happiness for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the conversation.”
‘Experimental literary chaos …’ An illustration by Gustave Doré from the novel Gargantua by François Rabelais. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare always gets things right. Though Falstaff is his most famous drunk, there’s one aspect of the business that the Bard nailed in Antony and Cleopatra.The three rulers of the known world – Antony, Octavius and Lepidus – are drinking together and Lepidus is very, very drunk. He’s so drunk that he doesn’t just say things, he insists on them.
“Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies’ pyramids are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard that.”
As though some invisible figure keeps contradicting him – something that I (and you) do after a few glasses. They’re so smashed that, when Lepidus asks Antony what Egyptian crocodiles are like, Antony replies: “It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it.”
And Lepidus is just about capable of considering this answer, nodding like he understands and saying, after some thought: “Tis a strange serpent.”
Right Ho, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
For the pure unadulterated joy of drinking, you can’t really beat Wodehouse. Indeed it’s hard to beat him for pure unadulterated joy full stop. He had wonderful phrases for it – “tanked to the uvula” or “oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto”. He also has the wonderful story of Gussie Finknottle’s first encounter with alcohol. Gussie is a shy man who is shyly in love with Madeline Bassett. But he doesn’t have the nerve to propose to her. Bertie tries to persuade him that a stiff drink will give him the requisite Dutch courage. Gussie refuses and Bertie decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice. Unfortunately Jeeves also decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice, and Gussie himself then decides that he’ll do as Bertie suggested and downs half a decanter of whisky, which he washes down with the doubly-spiked orange juice. The result is a new Gussie Finknottle, who acts as though he could bite a tiger. “Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.”
He proposes to Bassett, who joyously accepts. But he then has to give a speech at the school prize-giving in Market Snodsbury, and his drunkenness, now begun, must run its course through the classic stages of jocose, bellicose and morose, before finally arriving at comatose, by which time Bassett has called off the engagement.
The King in Yellow, Robert W Chambers
The story of an American in Paris in the 1880s who falls in love with a Parisian girl, but is too prim, proper and embarrassed to even introduce himself. So far, so Henry James. But this hero differs from James’s, because after a few bottles of wine, and a brief attempt to start a fight with the Arc de Triomphe (“Its size annoyed him”), he realises that it would be a fantastic idea to visit her street, and, once there, that it would be a fantastic idea to climb up to her window, and a simply superb idea to break in. Finally, they come face to face, but he still hasn’t the courage to speak, and, in a beautiful tragicomic ending, he retreats, wordless, with a rose.
Gargantua, François Rabelais
Long before there was James Joyce, there was the experimental literary chaos of Rabelais. The Discourse of the Drinkers is a crazy dialogue where you can’t work out who’s saying what or why, but everybody wants to drink. “The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity … There is not a corner, nor cunniborow in all my body where this wine doth not ferret out my thirst.” NB: a cunniborow is a rabbit-hole.
‘Bite-of-the-nail suspense …’ Alec Guinness (right) and Ernie Kovacs in Our Man in Havana (1959). Photograph: Ronald Grant
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh
Decline and Fall starts with the famous drunk scene where Paul Pennyfeather is debagged by the Bollinger Club, but it ends with a better one. Waugh not only captures perfectly the ability of a drunkard to repeat himself ad nauseam, but he also uses those repetitions to make the final conversation of the book into a literary symphony of theme, repetition, variation and motif. And when the drunkard is told he drinks too much, he replies: “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?”
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
This is the only drunk scene I can think of that has edge-of-the-seat bite-of-the-nail suspense. The main character, Wormold, has to render the head of Cuba’s secret police unconscious. So he challenges him to a game of draughts played with whisky miniatures. When you take a piece, you have to drink it, thus handicapping yourself. The police chief begins to realise what’s happening and is caught in a battle between the desire to win, the desire to keep his head and the alcohol. A board game, some drinks, and the casual question: “Do you keep your gun loaded?”
The Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Vikings believed that all poetry came from alcohol, specifically from the magical Óthrerir, the Mead of Poetry. This was guarded by a giant in the middle of a mountain, but Odin managed to break in, down it in one and then fly back to Asgard in the form of an eagle and regurgitate into a cauldron. Unfortunately, he was being chased by the giant and he was in such a hurry that, though most of it came out of his mouth, some sprayed out of his godly arse. All good poetry, believed the Vikings, came from the former; all bad poetry from the latter.
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Let us end with a hangover, as these things usually do. There have been some great descriptions, but this is the greatest. Dixon finds himself “too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning”. But the line that clinches it is: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”
•A Short History of Drunkenness is published by Viking.
The 100 best novels: No 66 – Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
PG Wodehouse’s elegiac Jeeves novel, written during his disastrous years in wartime Germany, remains his masterpiece
Robert McCrum
Monday 22 December 2014
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or PG Wodehouse, this novel, completed amid the horrors of wartime Germany, was something of a miracle, “the supreme Jeeves novel of all time”, he wrote. Defying gravity, English literature’s “performing flea” effortlessly reminded his postwar readers of a world whose day was done and also of a literary sensibility that had entranced a generation now facing retirement. A late-season masterpiece, Joy in the Morning is both an elegy and an encore.
“The super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my uncle Percy…” is one of those imbroglios that Bertie Wooster believes his biographers will refer to as “The Steeple Bumpleigh Horror”.
A more brilliant example of Wodehouse’s literary escapism, his capacity to conjure sweetness and light out of airy nothing, would be hard to find. Not only does he weave together many of his best characters and themes around the old plot of a Wodehouse heroine (Florence Craye) and her matrimonial designs upon Bertie (“She was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove”), it was also conceived and written during the “phoney war”, and all but completed during the Nazi occupation of Le Touquet (Wodehouse’s interwar home).
PG Wodehouse
Joy in the Morning is an anthology of Wodehouse’s favourite comic situations: the impending doom of a mesalliance; a blazing country cottage; a nocturnal confrontation; a fancy-dress ball. Style and content achieve a perfect union when a running gag about “the fretful porpentine” culminates with “a hidden hand” concealing a hedgehog in Bertie’s bed. The novel also contains some of Wodehouse’s most immortal similes, including the moment when one of the characters, caught in the act, spins round “with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk”. There’s also, for readers troubled by Wodehouse’s terrible wartime gaffes, a line of oblique self-justification. “I doubt,” says Bertie, speaking of the writer Boko Fittleworth, “if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.”
A note on the text
Joy in the Morning was the novel Wodehouse was working on at home in Le Touquet when the German army burst into France with the blitzkrieg of May 1940. Two months later, he was interned as an “enemy alien” and had to leave his unfinished MS in the care of his wife Ethel.
During his internment in Upper Silesia (“If this is Upper Silesia,” he joked, “what must Lower Silesia be like?”) Wodehouse wrote another novel, Full Moon, and did not return to the final chapters of his incomplete Jeeves and Wooster novel until 1943, after his release from captivity, and more especially, after his disastrous radio broadcasts from wartime Berlin. Battered, and embarrassed, but unbowed, he took for his title a quotation from Psalm 30, verse 5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” This, perhaps, was a coded affirmation of his determination to ride out the controversy surrounding his wartime behaviour.
PG Wodehouse
Eventually, Joy in the Morning would be completed in the idyllic rural solitude of Degenershausen, a country house deep in the Harz mountains. From there, the typescript was shipped back to his American publisher, Doubleday Doran, which launched it, with some misgivings about its reception after the scandal of the broadcasts, on 22 August 1946. An English edition from Herbert Jenkins followed on 2 June 1947. In the event, the reviews were good, and the hardback sales respectable, some 20,000 copies at first.
For a writer who preferred to give little away, and (as he put it) “wear the mask”, Wodehouse’s preface to Joy in the Morning is surprisingly candid, revealing his creative anxiety about the effect of the second world war on his art and his audience. “The world of which I have been writing since I was so high…” he conceded, “has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it.” Although he would go on writing about silly young men in spats, butlers, posh girlfriends, and country houses for another 30 years, he never recovered his vintage prewar form (with the possible exception of The Mating Season, 1949). His best work was done. Some Wodehouse fans may want to dispute this, but Joy in the Morning stands, for me, as his masterpiece, rivalled only by Uncle Fred in the Springtime, The Code of the Woosters and Heavy Weather.
Three more from PG Wodehouse
Heavy Weather (1933); Right Ho, Jeeves (1934); The Code of the Woosters (1938).