Tag: P. G. Wodehouse

The Psychology of the Individual and What Not

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So now I have to start writing book two of my series.  And boy, that’s a wide-open operation.  You see I wrote the book based on the idea of a father’s revenge.  And all the stuff that grew out of that was seat of the pants writing that came to me as things that would make the story more fun.  I invented Connors to give Bogey a powerful friend who owed him.  I invented Cutter to facilitate the impossible task of Bogey being invisible to the surveillance state.  I invented Chastain to have a conflicted antagonist to provide resistance to the protagonist but also acknowledge the justice of his cause.  All of these major characters and the plot elements they involve just grew out of the desire to tell Bogey’s story in an interesting and dramatic way.  But Bogey’s crusade is over.  He won.  He steps out of the center stage.  Now what?

It’s not an easy question to answer because I need a direction to go.  Certain things are now baked in.  The United States government nuked some of its own citizens.  A shadowy tech giant took down Washington DC with a technology nobody (including me!) truly understands.  This weakened United States is struggling to hold onto the allegiance of many states that have seen its unjust criminal actions exposed and want to free themselves from its tyrannical control.  That’s a lot of stuff going on.  It’s like the cue ball hitting the racked balls on the nose and scattering them across the table.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put things back together again.  So, we have to dodge around the flying wreckage and wait for the ricochets to subside before planning the next move.  Of course, I could cheat and place the next story five, ten or even twenty years into the future and announce some faits accomplis as ancient history.  And I know that is the lazy way out but, after all, I am an extremely lazy man.

But all of that is still only the window dressing of the story.  Hanging together a future history is relatively easy.  What I really need is another character with as compelling a problem as Bogey had with his son.  But really the two elements are linked.  Bogey’s problem grew out of the injustice of the society he lived in and his war against this injustice gives the story its trigger but the larger effect also has to be an interesting story too.  So, I need another personal story wrapped up in the tumult I have set loose on my imaginary world.  So, what I’m looking for is a personal story that is tied up in the larger actions that I’ve unleashed and that takes the world in a direction I think will be interesting and lead to further stories and actions beyond.  The only problem is where to start.  Hmmm.

“I fear I have nothing to suggest at the moment, sir.”

“Come, come, Jeeves!” 

“I fear not, sir. Possibly after I have seen the lady—-“

“You mean, you want to study the psychology of the individual and what

not?”

“Precisely, sir.”

Quote – The Vegetable Motif

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“A costermonger, roused, is a terrible thing. I had never seen the proletariat really stirred before, and I’m bound to say it rather awed me. I mean, it gave you some idea of what it must have been like during the French Revolution

From every corner of the hall there proceeded simultaneously the sort of noise which you hear, they tell me, at one of those East End boxing places when the referee disqualifies the popular favourite and makes the quick dash for life. And then they passed beyond mere words and began to introduce the vegetable motif.

I don’t know why, but somehow I had got it into my head that the first thing thrown at Tuppy would be a potato. One gets these fancies. It was, however, as a matter of fact, a banana, and I saw in an instant that the choice had been made by wiser heads than mine. These blokes who have grown up from childhood in the knowledge of how to treat a dramatic entertainment that doesn’t please them are aware by a sort of instinct just what to do for the best, and the moment I saw that banana splash on Tuppy’s shirtfront I realized how infinitely more effective and artistic it was than any potato could have been.

Not that the potato school of thought had not also its supporters. As the proceedings warmed up, I noticed several intelligent-looking fellows who threw nothing else.

The effect on young Tuppy was rather remarkable. His eyes bulged and his hair seemed to stand up, and yet his mouth went on opening and shutting, and you could see in a dazed, automatic way he was still singing, “Sonny Boy.”

Then, coming out of his trance, he began to pull for the shore with some rapidity.   The last seen of him, he was beating a tomato to the exit by a short head.”

(from “Jeeves and the Song of Songs”

by P. G. Wodehouse)

The Shorter Fiction of P. G. Wodehouse – A Book Review

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Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse was an Englishman who came to America in the early years of the twentieth century and made his name as an author of comic fiction and musical comedies.  I’ve never indulged in his work for the stage but I have read a good dose of his novels, both long and short and probably all his short stories.  You may know of him as the author of the Jeeves books.  In these stories, Jeeves is gentleman’s gentleman to a rather dim-witted young British aristocrat named Bertie Wooster who invariable runs afoul of everything in his life from unsympathetic aunts, to equally dim-witted friends, to ill-fated romances, to, …, well basically anything more complicated than a highball glass.  The charm in the stories is the narration and dialog that Wodehouse assigns to these characters.  Bertie is an amiable and good-hearted nitwit and Jeeves is the brilliant, ever sympathetic and always accommodating vassal to his hare-brained liege.

In addition to his Jeeves stories Wodehouse had a number of other series that all take place in a semi-mythical England inhabited by, the useless younger sons of English peers at the Drones Club, the friends of Mr. Mulliner hearing about his various relatives at the Anglers’ Rest pub, the golfers buttonholed by the Oldest Member of the country club and the unfortunate associates of Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge reliving the misadventures of that much suffering man.

There is something like six hundred pages of Jeeves stories available and probably another six hundred pages of the shorter fiction for the other storylines.  But I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that there is a great deal of sameness in the plots in the Wodehouse universe.  Bertie runs afoul of a number of girlfriends.  His Aunt Agatha is the cause of more than a few of his misadventures, and the romantic disasters of his friends Tuppy Glossop, Bingo Little and Gussie Fink-Nottle all start to run into each other in the matter of plot elements.

And this is unsurprising.  Wodehouse admitted that he approached his comic fiction in the same manner as he wrote musical comedy.  The plots are straight forward and paper thin.  But the whole thing is an excuse for the dialog that showcases the blithering idiocy of the protagonists and forces them to throw their fate into the lap of Jeeves who like some kind of domestic genie provides a miraculous solution to the tempest in a teapot that Bertie and his circle of acquaintances have gotten themselves into.

I enjoy the stories.  But I recognize that tastes will vary.  Luckily any library will contain copies of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and other works to try out.  As a fairly representative sample I would recommend the story titled Jeeves and the Song of Songs.  Read it and put up some comments on what you think of it.

Here’s a representative sample of the prose:

“I don’t know why, but somehow, I had got it into my head that the first thing thrown at Tuppy would be a potato. One gets these fancies. It was, however, as a matter of fact, a banana, and I saw in an instant that the choice had been made by wiser heads than mine. These blokes who have grown up from childhood in the knowledge of how to treat a dramatic entertainment that doesn’t please them are aware by a sort of instinct just what to do for the best, and the moment I saw that banana splash on Tuppy’s shirt-front I realized how infinitely more effective and artistic it was than any potato could have been.  Not that the potato school of thought had not also its supporters. As the proceedings warmed up, I noticed several intelligent-looking fellows who threw nothing else.   The effect on young Tuppy was rather remarkable.  His eyes bulged and his hair seemed to stand up, and yet his mouth went on opening and shutting, and you could see that in a dazed, automatic way he was still singing ‘Sonny Boy.’  Then, coming out of his trance, he began to pull for the shore with some rapidity. The last seen of him, he was beating a tomato to the exit by a short head.”