Or, How Bertie Wooster was Swept Up into the World of Business, Achieved a Measure of Success in His Endeavors, and was Introduced to his Lovely Bride
by nolalibrarian
image stolen/borrowed/linked from the blog of Dove Grey ScribblesHe clenched his racquet tightly in his muscled, tanned hand, poised like a leopard ready to jump on its prey, an explorer or perhaps a gazelle that had strayed from the pack. . . ..
When a fellow starts out, it’s hard to say whether he should just bung in there, or take the opposite track, as in Book of Matthew, and list the genealogy of all the parties concerned. I mean, dash it, that the only author of note, who didn’t have to worry about this, was the poor sod who was put in charge of writing down Genesis, since he was writing about the only man and woman who didn’t have parents, deceased, living, or embarrassing to talk about with strangers. You can see that he was able to get away with “In the Beginning … only once, because by the time he was a few chapters down, he had to list umpteen geriatrics who were remembered only for having lived a few hundred years (one shudders to think what their funeral directors lived on).
Fellow who had it easy--just copyingI thought that for posterity’s sake, as you all know, Mankind keeps mucking on through the same dirt for generations, and I am the product of one of these generations, that I would record, certainement, without all the sordid details and medical fuss that people are so prone to nowadays, and strictly without that Freud fella that has people scared of smoking cigars in mixed company, I would tell the tale of how my father, Bertram Wooster, met and married my mother, Mrs. Bertram Wooster. According to informed sources, there are about several hundred women who did not middle-aisle it with the Old Man, and they form what can be called the Book-Buying Public, in these days of cold, hard brass.
I’ve been told that the year doesn’t matter. And at any rate, someone who is particularly interested can simply adjust their schedule and call in at Somerset House, and request the pertinent records. But it was a year in which the spring buds opened in April, the first snow fell in November, and Christmas was celebrated even in the darkest corners of the English countryside. It was the year 19__ for those of you who have lost your calendars.
Some of you may have read a few adventures that were circulated under the Pen name: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, such an obvious alias for someone writing out of a cell in Dartmoor. In fact, these fictions were published by sympathetic friends who had been schoolmates with the unfortunate sufferer’s parents. It appeared that a character who was fond of prison reform had taken to calling in and gossiping with an eminent brain-spanner who was on call to the prison’s more seriously deluded inmates. Somehow, the erstwhile Wodehouse took down in dictation everything that was related and, after conniving with the underpaid guards for paper and ink (pens were provided by the authorities), he submitted the tales to certain scurrilous journals which paid him fabulous sums for his efforts.
Which only goes to prove that they were motivated by sympathy and not by cold, hard-hearted business considerations. The journal-buying public, which is frequently simply looking for a large journal to place over their faces as they ride in public train cars or something to sit on a public park, were easily satisfied by Wodehouse’s style, which was to add considerably to the weight and thickness of the journals. Eventually, the book-buying public, which is always kind to authors who have been published extensively in journals at train-stations, was kind to Wodehouse.
There was even some Johnny who pretended that he was Wodehouse and spent many happy years masquerading as old P. G. in the public eye. It must have been a rather easy life, being an author and having some poor old maniac do all the heavy lifting for you.
Dartmoor Writers' Colony I suppose you just had to shut the door of a library a few hours a day and type quick brown fox a few hundred times, and not even that when you could claim to be making notes or revising. Even a record of a typist would fool some people. All you had to do was stare off into the distance at dinner parties and write on your cuff little notes like:
Jeeves: psych ind
sermons
handicap
Perhaps you occasionally show up with your collar awry and a heavy beard at a luncheon for another author and toss butter pats at the ceiling with your napkin while they read from their latest work. One might also have to make the occasional appearance of reading a book, but one could fake that with something in Latin or Greek.
On the other hand, you would probably always have people willing to lend you pens any time you asked for one. Many of them would probably never hold it against you if you also asked for paper, ink, and a long visit in their best guest-suite. Ars longa.
I have found that writing one’s first book is the most confounded difficult thing to start. Never mind typing finis at the end of a 900 page opus, one has to find both paper and pens and a typewriter on which every single letter of the alphabet works. Then, of course, one has to find a quiet place to write the damned thing, because if there is anything a red-blooded English pub-owner hates, it’s that damned writer sitting in the corner, smoking a pack of French cigarettes and buying endless cups of tea. Of course, the tea shops tend to get a subtle revenge by seating the most hygienically challenged individuals next to anyone who’s opened a notebook at their table.
The best place to write, of course, is a moving train, in a first class compartment. There one is likely to find only the best people, who will supply you with an endless amount of cigarettes and throat pastilles, an occasional nip of old brandy, and all they want to do is tell you their stories from the moment the train leaves the station until it lurches to a halt.
Reading on Trains is recommended Of course one’s friends and debtors urge you to leave the nation altogether. Their favorite destination is Tahiti or even an undiscovered island off the trade routes. Usually they haven’t got the faintest how to be transported to such a destination, although they suggest that any tramp steamer would be delighted to accommodate any such request on the part of the traveling public.
My mother, of course, simply ruffles my hair and starts telling me about the upcoming village fete, at which many young and beautiful women will be selling pies and jolts of strong tea and presenting prizes. Having been warned by my father to avoid all village fetes if I value my life, I find that I have writerly duties in the City or at Oxbridge that unfortunately conflict with the date. Worse yet, all my white flannel trousers have been rolled into a canvas knapsack and require extensive spot-cleaning and pressing. Since “spot cleaning” invariably gives my mother the vapors, she allows me to leave the house as quickly as I wish, usually one half-hour before the fete is opened. Dad’s old two-seater gets me into W1 in quicktime. I don’t know why they want to build expressways all over the countryside.
Preparations for the sacrifice of the bachelors, an old fete tradition
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