Wodehouse P.G. Archives - James E Hartley

The Roaring or Boring ’20s

“As Charles Lamb said of Godwin, he had read more books not worth reading than any man in England.”

That is from Bring on the Girls by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. It is not quite an accurate description of the book in which I read the quotation. But, it is too close for comfort.

Back in the 1920s Wodehouse and Bolton were collaborators writing a swath of Broadway Musicals. Many of them were hits. Big hits! They were famous! Bring On the Girls is a memoir of those years. It tells the behind the scenes tales! All the juicy gossip! Character assassination galore! Girls and more girls!

And it is the 1920s! The Roaring 20s! Flappers and speakeasies and, did I mention, girls! For reasons which elude me, there is an incredible fascination with the era. The Great Gatsby is one of the Great Books on the Most Beloved lists of my students. When I ask why, the answer is inevitably some variant of “Duh. It’s about the 1920s.” (No, my students do not actually say “duh.” They just give me that look. You know the one.)

And then, we have P.G. Wodehouse! That man can write! He is funny and witty and hysterical and amusing. Guy Bolton? You probably have never heard of him unless you are an aficionado of 1920s Broadway musicals. But, no matter. Wodehouse Himself in a co-author!

What could go wrong with a book like this? You can imagine the birth of the idea. It’s the early 1950s. Wodehouse is world famous. People buy his books. So why not a memoir with Bolton about their time together in the 1920s? Instant Best-Seller.

Structurally, the storyline is perfect. They meet, they work together, and their first musical is a smash hit. Elation! Their next few, mixed bags. Depression! But, wait, then come more hits! Hooray! More hits! Double Hooray! And then, the crowning achievement. They get contracts to go to Hollywood! To write for the movies! They travel West! They arrive! Book ends: “And they knew they were really in Hollywood.”

Should you rush out and read this book? Not so fast. All that promise. The payoff? Eh.

Have you ever been to one of those cocktail parties where you end up getting stuck talking to the guy who is an inveterate name-dropper? The whole conversation is just one long exercise in listening to stories whose sole function it to allow the person to mention a famous person. Painful, right?

Now imagine 294 pages of name-dropping. Nonstop name-dropping. This book even has an index, so you can look up all the names. It is an eight page index. There are over 300 individual people listed in that Index. Do the math. The book has more than one name dropped per page.

Ah, but surely it is wonderful to read about Wodehouse (P G. Himself!) hobnobbing with all these famous people, right? Well, to be fair, you have never heard of almost all those 300+ people. Well, I suppose if you study the world of Broadway in the 1920s; then you might have heard of more than half of them. There are some famous people here, though, that even we regular people will recognize. If you read this book, you will see those famous people mentioned. Like these marvelous tidbits:

You have heard of Clark Gable, right? Here he is:

Sylvia Hawkes was not only pretty, she had a pretty sense of humour. George Gershwin was swept off his feet by her, so was Lord Ashley, heir of the Earl of Shaftesbury, so was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, so was Lord Stanley of Alderley and so, finally, was the very sure-footed Mr Clark Gable.

That is the only mention of Clark Gable in the book. But, how about Ring Lardner or Oscar Hammerstein? Well, they share a sentence:

There were other neighbors. Eddie Cantor for one, Ring Lardner for another, Elsie Ferguson and, most esteemed of all, a young man named Oscar Hammerstein, who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the musical comedy field.

Charlie Chaplin? He gets a whole paragraph! It’s a description of a sketch he did in a variety show on a boat. O’Henry? He gets half a page! A conversation in which he says nothing. And so on.

To be fair, George Gershwin gets a bit more face time, since he collaborated with Wodehouse and Bolton. Flo Ziegfeld and his Follies get mentioned often for the same reason. Fred Astaire shows up too! W.C. Fields get a few pages!

The bulk of the book is just watching names drop by for a brief visit. Surely, you object, there must be some Wodehousian moments. Some levity and funny stories. Yep. They are there. Some of them are straight out of Wodehouse’s other stories. Or in one case, the other way around. There is a tale of Bolton’s misguided involvement with an Umbrella Club. The story reappears in Wodehouse’s novel French Leave:

“I was thinking of my Umbrella Club.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t I mentioned it to you? It’s an idea I got from a delightful book of reminiscences by a couple of musical comedy writers”

Now that is funny—a character in a Wodehouse novel has read Wodehouse’s memoirs! But, if you want to learn more about the mysteries of the Umbrella Club, French Leave is a much better book to read.

This isn’t the only cross-reference. Wodehouse has a butler, for example, who acts and talks exactly like Jeeves. I mean, exactly like Jeeves.

The appearance of Jeeves under a pseudonym gives up the game. This is not a reliable account of the 1920s. A brief hunt around reveals the story. Guy Bolton wrote the bulk of the text. He is undoubtedly responsible for the endless, pointless name-dropping. Wodehouse, who was famous for writing funny books, then comes along and tries to make the book funnier by adding in some comic relief.

The best summary of Bring on the Girls is in the book itself in a description of one of the stars of the day: “There are no doubt by this time a whole generation of voting-age who will fail to see the significance of all this enthusiasm.” Exactly.

This isn’t really a bad book, it is just a thoroughly disappointing book. The only type of person to whom I could recommend it is someone who thought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was fantastic. If you like rambling anecdotes about the 1920s which do little other than offer an excuse to drop a name or two, then you’ll love this book. If you just want to read Wodehouse being Wodehouse, look elsewhere.

Seven Books

The Seven Book Challenge is one of those curious “challenges” that has been floating around social media. You know the drill: someone challenges you to post pictures of seven books. I have no idea why it is called a “challenge.”

I have a former student who recently tagged me in this challenge. Since all I do on social media is put up book reviews, just putting up pictures of seven books I enjoy seemed odd. But, I like my former student who issued this challenge, and so I feel duty bound to do something. Here it is.

Seven books. These are not the best seven books ever written. They are also not my favorite seven books. Instead, these are seven books which had a big impact on the way I think about world when I read them. There is no implied recommendation that you should read them, by the way. They are offered up purely for those of you who are interested in how I came to think about the world the way I think about it. These seven books will give you a good roadmap.

1. H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

I can’t remember how I discovered Mencken. Sometime in undergrad or grad school, I must have started seeing references to him. I don’t remember which Mencken book was the first book I picked up to read. The Chrestomathy is thus a stand-in.

Mencken’s impact on my mindset was huge. I have always been a rather curmudgeonly sort. In fact, the adjective that may best describe my intellectual mindset is “iconoclastic.” Someone says something, and I instantly start taking apart the argument. Mencken is the ultimate curmudgeon. He mocks everything in sight. A master of prose; I love reading him. But, the thing which struck me the most about Mencken was that while he was as curmudgeonly as I was, he was always cheerful about it.

Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United Sates, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?

That is a beautiful line and one I think about all the time. It has made me smile in the midst of many a bureaucratic meeting.

When I got to Mount Holyoke, the very first decoration I put up in my office was a picture of Mencken. It is still right over my desk. He always reminds me to be cheerful, no matter how annoying the world gets.

2. P. G. Wodehouse, Leave It To Psmith

This was not the first Wodehouse book I ever read, but it is the one that cemented Wodehouse into my mindset. While Wodehouse is always funny, this is probably his funniest novel. Every Wodehouse book has fundamentally the same plot and the jokes are repeated in book after book. That is the point.

Wodehouse taught me that life is a comedy. Yes, there is a lot of pain and misery in this world. A lot. We can easily spend our lives looking at all that pain and the result will be a fully warranted despair. But, there is another way to look at the same world. It is a comedy, full of joy and happiness, punctuated with tragedy. It is a matter of perceptive. Wodehouse taught me that when you step back from life and look at it, the best reaction is to smile and laugh. The eschatological end to this world is a joyful one. Given that we have to trudge through life, we might as well focus on the joy.

3. Augustine, Confessions

I grew up with a divided mind. On the one side, I went to school and learned a lot of things. On the other side, I went to church and learned a lot of things. But, those two parts of my mind never talked to one another. There was the intellectual part that enjoyed taking ideas apart (remember, I am an iconoclast). There was the spiritual part of my life that knew what I was supposed to believe and how I was supposed to act.

Augustine caused those two parts of my mind to come crashing together. Here was a guy who was obviously brilliant, who enjoyed learning and ideas every bit as much as I do, and who thought about Christianity with exactly the same level of intellectual rigor that he thought about everything else. Reading Confessions was a moment of epiphany.

After Confessions, I could never go back to thinking about my Christian faith as somehow separate from the giant intellectual project of understanding the world. Understanding God is an intellectual project. Theology deserves exactly the same iconoclastic tendencies I brought to every other subject. Why do people believe this is true? Is it really true? I grew up certain that faith and reason belonged in separate playpens. Confessions taught me that faith is strengthened when reason works alongside it.

4. Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America

I stumbled into graduate school. Through my first three years of college, I thought I was going to go to law school. Then, at the start of my senior year, I realized I had no interest in being a lawyer. So, I applied to Ph.D. programs. I wasn’t even entirely sure what one did with a Ph.D.

Eventually I realized being professor was a pretty good job for me. Where else could I spend all my time learning things and talking about what I learned? Knowing I would enjoy being a professor is not the same thing as knowing how to be a good professor. I really had no idea what professors actually did on a day-to-day basis.

Barzun’s book taught me the idea that there is a craft to teaching and that if I was going to do this job, I really needed to perfect that craft. The number one lesson I learned from the book was that being a teacher means the job is not really about me. Teaching is for the students, not the professors. (It is depressing to think about the number of my colleagues who do not understand this.) If I was going to be a good teacher, I had to always remember that I was here to serve my students, to teach them everything I know, to impart knowledge and wisdom. The goal is that when they leave, they will lead richer and fuller lives. Teacher in America taught me to care about the craft of what I do.

Barzun’s book is the reason I always leave my office door open. It is the reason I always drop everything when a student walks into my office. It is the reason I never usher a student out the door, that office hours are whenever I am in my office. It is the reason that conversations wander all over the place. Barzun’s book taught me that being a teacher is a calling.

5. Thomas Mayer, The Structure of Monetarism

Tom Mayer is the reason I am an economist. He was a curious guy; I never really understood him, and I never had the courage to ask him a personal question. I took four undergraduate, two graduate courses, and two undergraduate independent studies with him. I was his teaching assistant 3 or 4 times. I attended a weekly department seminar with him all through graduate school. He was the author of what was at the time the best-selling money and banking textbook in the nation and yet he always found the time to meet with me.

The man was a walking encyclopedia. I remember one time in graduate school, someone asking him a question in class. He replied “I don’t know.” The student re-asked the question two more times; both the student and everyone else in the room assumed the question just wasn’t clear. It never occurred to any of us that Tom actually didn’t know the answer to a question.

The Structure of Monetarism was Tom’s most famous book; I read it in one of those independent studies, but the ideas in the book were in his textbook. What was so important about the book for me personally was that it taught me how to think about economics. I came to economics through politics. I loved political debate and economics is one of those things politicians talk about, so I figured I better learn about it. Without Tom’s influence, I suspect I would have become one of those tired political types who see economics as just another tool in a political debate. Pick your political position and then find the economic arguments to match it.

Tom was not like that. He always went the other way. Monetarism was a monetary theory largely associated with Milton Friedman. Friedman was easily the greatest monetary theorist of the post-war era. He was also a notable conservative. What The Structure of Monetarism demonstrated is that politics and monetary theory are not equivalent. You could be a conservative and reject monetarism or you could be a liberal and accept monetarism. Indeed, monetarism is not even a monolithic idea, but a hodgepodge of a whole bunch of different ideas. You could easily accept some, but not all of the parts of monetarism. (There is even massive complicated diagram showing which parts are related to which other parts.)

What Tom taught me more than anything else was that if you want to be a serious scholar, you have to subordinate politics. First figure out the facts or build the model to explain the facts. Policy conclusions may or may not follow from the model. But if you use politics to help build the model, then you will never build a good model. Ideas are more important than politics.

6. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

In my second year of graduate school, I realized that all I was doing was reading economics. I decided I did not want to be someone who only read economics, and so I made a plan that every day I would read books totally unrelated to economics. It was the most important decision of my intellectual life.

I had no idea how to become a reader, though. I had no guide. So, I just started reading books I heard about. I had heard about Faulkner. What I knew about Faulkner was this: he was really hard to understand. That is quite honestly the only thing I knew about Faulkner.

I remember wondering why, with all the books in the world, anyone would ever bother to read a book that was hard to understand. Surely there were better books, like, for example, ones that you could understand. Then at a library book sale, there was As I Lay Dying and for a quarter I could buy it. I am not sure what possessed me to buy it.

I started reading it. By page 4 or 5, I had no idea what was going on. I reread the first few pages and still had no idea what was going on. Faulkner’s reputation was merited. I almost tossed the book aside. Then, again for a reason I do not recall, I decided to just keep reading. Wow. The book was terribly confusing, but gradually the fog lifted and by the end, everything all made sense. I never had that experience before. I realized then and there that there is something beautiful about reading, that it allows for exactly that experience of just letting the book do the work and going along for the ride and enjoying the process of discovery.

7. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems

I hated poetry ever since my 10^th grade English class. Even though I had eventually become a reader, I never read poetry. The memories of that class killed any hope of enjoyment. But, eventually, after I had finished grad school and was teaching at the kind of place where the liberal arts are the thing we espouse, I realized that going through life hating poetry was not what I really wanted to do. I decided I should learn about poetry.

I was in Hailey, Idaho visiting my mom, went to a thrift store, and found a book of poetry that contained the poem I decided I should start reading. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” All I knew about the poem was that it was important. I settled down one night to read it and I had absolutely no idea what I was reading. None. It was incomprehensible gibberish.

Remembering my experience with Faulkner, I persisted. I read the poem over and over, night after night. Eventually I started noticing things; eventually I started to see a structure. Eventually I realized that poetry could actually do things that prose could not do. Eventually I started reading poetry.

Over the years, I have read Eliot many times. He is the poet to whom I most often turn. His poetry has formed the background music of my life. He is the poet to whom I turned when tragedy hit. Eliot wrestles with exactly the same questions with which I wrestle. Eliot is the one who creates words to capture that which cannot be explained in any other way. If you want to know what it is like to think about the world the way I think about it, read Eliot.

What a Coincidence

A Gentleman of Leisure is the story of Jimmy Pitt, the rather wealthy gentleman of leisure from the title, who on a trip from England to New York falls in love with a girl, but sadly never learns her name, gets back to New York, converses with some friends about a play involving a burglar, makes a bet with his friends he can burgle a house that very night, goes home and falls asleep only to wake up and find his house being burgled, interrupts the burglar, pretends to be a bigtime thief himself in order to impress the burglar, arranges with the burglar to go burgle a house that night, breaks into a house, which ends up being the house of the chief of police, who is, it turns out a corrupt chief of police well-acquainted with Jimmy’s new burglar friend, but alas the conversation which would have ensued is interrupted when the chief of police’s daughter wanders in, who is, lo and behold, the very girl Jimmy Pitt fell madly in love with on the boat.

Oh, don’t worry that the plot was just spoiled. That is just the first few pages of the book. Most of the book is all about how all these characters end up in the same castle in England. Throw in a bunch more characters, parties, jewels, thefts, detectives, valets, and butlers.

Will Jimmy get the girl?

Of course he will. This is a Wodehouse novel, after all. They all have the same plot.

One feature of Wodehouse novels is a remarkable series of coincidences. Take the above. What are the odds Jimmy Pitt will end up breaking into the very home where the girl he saw on a boat is currently living? Near zero, right? And that she is the daughter of the chief of police who knows Jimmy’s new burglar friend? Or that the burglar would break in the very night Jimmy made his silly bet? And none of these are the most improbable coincidences of the novel—every one of these things is vastly more likely than the things we see happen in the rest of the novel.

So, Wodehouse acquires a reputation of telling improbable stories. Everything is always just too coincidental. It is incredibly unrealistic. Right?

But…what makes us think that coincidences are unrealistic? If life really free of coincidences?

A few weeks ago, I was telling a student with whom I have had quite a number of memorable conversations (many involving American Girl books) over the last two years the story about the Family Trust my grandfather set up to benefit a small cemetery in the town from which his family came. The Foundation benefits not just the cemetery but other nonprofits in two incredibly rural counties.

I then mentioned the name of the counties: Custer and Lemhi. The student’s jaw hit the floor. It turns out, she has relatives in exactly that part of the country. She went on vacation there all the time when she was growing up. We then swapped stories of going to Idaho for vacation when you were a kid.

What are the odds of finding out someone you know used to vacation as a kid in roughly the same parts of rural Idaho as you did. And let’s be clear. We are not in Idaho right now—we are in Massachusetts. Neither of us grew up in Idaho. We both just used to get hauled by our families on vacation to the middle of nowhere to visit relatives.

Improbable?

Or how about this. I was at a conference in Utah this summer. I was talking with the organizer of the conference, whom I had never met before. Swapping stories, we discover we both went to the same college, UC Davis. Not that improbable; it is a big school. But…we graduated in the same year. We shared a major. We almost certainly took classes together in those large lecture halls where you don’t know a soul. What are the odds?

Or this. I was at a conference in Kentucky a few years back. The conference was for high school history and social science teachers in Kentucky. I was talking with one of the teachers there and discovered she was also from California. Big state, not so surprising. She went to high school in San Jose. Big city, not so surprising. She went to the same high school I did. OK, a bit suspiring. She graduated one year after me. Here I am a professor at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts and she is a high school teacher in Kentucky and we meet at a conference nowhere near San Jose, California.

Things like that never happen, right?

It turns out, when you think about it, your life is full of improbable coincidences. Indeed, when you think about it, everything you have ever done, every place you have ever been, and every person you have ever met is an incredible coincidence. It is just most of the time, you never know how unusual it is that you met that particular person at that particular time in that particular place.

Cormac McCarthy memorably describes this phenomenon in No Country for Old Men:

You know what date is on this coin?
No.
It’s nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And I’m here. And I’ve got my hand over it. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

So given that our lives are one big coincidence, why does Wodehouse seem so unrealistic?

Think about the stories I told above. Why did I pick those stories? Because they seem unusual. I could have told three other stories about talking with people which would not have seemed unusual. Most of those stories would seem pointless to relate. So, we naturally relate the stores which seem improbable.

Now consider the World of Wodehouse. If Jimmy Pitt had never again seen the girl from the boat, there is no story. In fact, if you imagine the full world in which this story is set, nobody else on that same boat had a story to tell. Why do we read Jimmy Pitt’s story? Because it is the only interesting story.

What are the odds that Jimmy Pitt would have this strange set of events in his life? That seems small. But what are the odds that someone on a boat will have an interesting story? That doesn’t seem improbable at all.

Maybe Wodehouse isn’t that unrealistic after all. Wodehouse is a clever one. His novels seem so effortless and fun and full of coincidence, but when you start looking at it, you realize he is actually describing what life is really like. Your life is full of incredibly improbable events. You just don’t notice them. Wodehouse does notice.

Embrace your inner Wodehouse. You think your life is full of dull routine, but you are immersed in an incredibly wonderful and complicated play, with improbable events and curious characters all around you. You just have to pay attention.

And there is no better way to remind yourself of this than to read P.G. Wodehouse.

Embracing Your Inner Psmith

It comes to all of us in the end. The school years finish. Done. Finding ourselves poised at that moment between the rolling years of school and the endless plains of the Rest of Life, what book should we read, dear Comrade? What book sets forth the stark choices facing us all at that moment?

P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the City.

Mike and Psmith (“There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis”), school chums whose antics were chronicled in Mike and Psmith, are, for unrelated reasons, suddenly removed from the pleasantries of school and sent off to work at The Bank. And, Mike finds the prospect dismal.

There are some people who take naturally to a life of commerce. Mike was not of these. To him the restraint of the business was irksome. He had been used to an open-air life, and a life, in its way, of excitement. He gathered that he would not be free till five o’clock, and that on the following day he would come at ten and go at five, and the same every day, except Saturdays and Sundays, all the year round, with a ten days’ holiday. The monotony of the prospect appalled him.

That is work. Stripped to its essence that is exactly what work is. Yes, some people do work outside, and some people travel, and some people work in non-profits, and some people work at their homes, and some people get high pay, and some people get no pay, but one way or another, work is, day after day, the endless repetition, day after day, of the same thing, yes, day after day.

Students do not know this, of course. The school years are different. Two weeks of vacation at Christmas, three months of summer (four if you go to Mount Holyoke!), spring breaks, Thanksgiving breaks, and an assortment of other breaks. School days end well before five. And everyone knows that no matter how bad your teachers are this year, next year at least you get a new set of teachers (well, unless you are home-schooled).

Students, by and large, imagine the time when school will finally end and then get real life begins. They imagine the exciting prospects of The Job. Jobs are exciting. You do exciting things with interesting people and everyone enjoys the days. Worst case, and I mean worst case, you end up with a job at something like Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, and your life has its dull moments to be sure, but it is punctuated by all those zany antics.

Sure, everyone knows RealJob ™ is not the same as The Office™; Real Jobs are never as boring as the TV Show pretends they are.

Then work actually starts, and it hits everyone somewhere between six and eighteen months after graduation; this is forever.

That is the decision moment. And that is the moment when Psmith in the City is most needed.

Mike Jackson facing that prospect of the unchanging tedium of life, gets depressed. Very depressed. “The sunshine has gone out of his life.” This is a perfectly normal reaction to looking with a brutally honest examination at the future.

Psmith has exactly the same job. He also does not want to be there. His first words on showing up at work: “Commerce has claimed me for her own. Comrade of old, I, too, have joined this blighted institution.”

But, that is where the comparison stops. Faced with the tedium of work, Psmith does not despair. He makes a game of the whole thing. He decides to enjoy himself. His irritable boss, Rossiter, walks up to demand to know what he is doing there, and Psmith begins the fun:

‘I tell you, Comrade Rossiter, that you have got hold of a good man. You and I together, not forgetting Comrade Jackson, the pet of the Smart Set, will toil early and late till we boost up this postage department into a shining model of what a postage department should be. What that is, at present, I do not exactly know. However. Excursion trains will be run from distant shires to see this postage department. American visitors to London will do it before going on to the Tower. And now,’ he broke off, with a crisp businesslike intonation, ‘I must ask you to excuse me. Much as I have enjoyed this little chat, I fear it must now cease. The time has come to work. Our trade rivals are getting ahead of us. The whisper goes round, “Rossiter and Psmith are talking, not working,” and other firms prepared a pinch our business. Let me Work.’

Ok, you may not want to talk like that at your workplace.

But, do not miss the deeper message here. Work in the postage department at the New Asiatic Bank is boring, very boring. Rossiter is an unfriendly manager and Rossiter’s manager is the even worse Mr. Bickersdyke. There are no prospects for enjoying this job. Mike knows that full well.

But, Psmith refuses to let the circumstances depress him, and in his own merry way finds amusement in everything.

That is the choice: do you want to be Mike or Psmith?

I am often asked if I like my job and I always talk about how much I love my job. I truly do love my job. And when I talk about how wonderful it is, people believe me that it is a wonderful job.

But, here is the funny thing. I have lots of colleagues who have exactly the same job I have. And they do not love their job. At all. Come around the school on a Friday afternoon in the middle of July or October and you can instantly tell who loves this job. They are the ones who are cheerfully working. Most of my colleagues are not here. At times, one might suspect what many of my colleagues like most about their job is that nobody chastises them when they do not come to work.

That is the real challenge of your life after school. You can’t change the fact that there is an inherent monotony to your daily tasks. But, you can decide how you are going to respond to that monotony.

Embrace your inner Psmith. Remember that no matter how bleak work gets, put it in its proper perspective. Decide you enjoy it. Even if you don’t think you enjoy it, just decide to enjoy it. It won’t always work, some days you will loathe it. But, honestly, will you enjoy it any more if you drag yourself in every day thinking about how much you hate it? Try entering with a smile and telling everyone what a marvelous day it is because you are now there, ready and excited to Work.