Posted on 19 April 2007
We’ve reviewed Wodehouse omnibus editions and
Wooster stories and short story collections, but this particular volume introduces to Glory readers a new character, Lord Ickenham, who combines the best of many Wodehouse characters. If you’re tense, like me, and need to relax before falling asleep, read Wodehouse. You’ll shriek with laughter as you subside into oblivion.Excerpts: “…bore his cigar as if it had been a banner with the strange device Excelsior” (p7). “It was his considered view that joy reigned supreme. IF at this moment the poet Browning had come along and suggested to him that he lark was on the wing, the snail on the thorn, God in His heaven and all right with the world, he would have assented” (p8). About to shoot a Brazil nut at a pretentious lawyer and knock off his top hat, Ickenham says, “it’s extraordinary how vividly this brings back to me those dear old tiger-shooting days in
Bengal. The same tense extectancy, the same breathless feeling that at any moment something hot may steal out of the underbrush, lashing it’s top hat” (p11). “…each particular hair standing on end like quills of the fretful porpentine” (p12). Ickenham says he can do it: “Did our representative at King Arthur’s Round Table say ‘Can’t’ when told off by the front office to go and rescue damsels in distress from two-headed giants? When Henry the Fifth at Harfleur cried, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead’, was he damped by hearing the voice of a Twistleton in the background saying he didn’t think he would be able to manage it?” (p12). And adds, “Anything William Tell could do, I can do better” (p13). When he sees the man enter the street, he says, “There he spouts” (p13). Not giving up secrets of the trade, Wodehouse says, “The question of how authors come to write their books is generally one not easily answered. Milton, for instance, asked how he got the idea for Paradise Lost, would probably have replied with a vague, “O, I don’t know, you know. These things sort of pop into one’s head, don’t you know,” leaving the researcher very much where he was before” (p14). The old lawyer, angry with young men, thinks, “If, say, something on the order of the Black Death were shortly to start setting about these young pests and giving them what was coming to them, it would have his full approval. He would hold its coat and cheer it on” (p19). When the lawyer tries to get Ickenham to identify the young man who knocked off his top hat, Ickenham replies, “Let me try. I remember a singularly handsom, clean-cut face and on the face a look of ecstasy and exaltation such as Jael, the wife of Heber, must have worn when about to hammer the Brazil nut into the head of Sisera, but…no, the mists rise and the vision fades” (p22). The lawyer takes out his venom in writing a novel, but wants it under a pseudonym due to his political ambitions: “It is all very well for your Dantes and your Juvenals to turn out the stuff under their own names, but…You cannot expect to get far on the road to Downing Street if you come up with something like Forever Amber” (p25). Realism in expecting response to a first novel: “An author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo” (p27). But the novel takes off, and the publisher is pleasantly surprised, having expected a first novel to only build a foundation to a later one: “…had been looking on all this while as just another of the stones the builder had refused, was plainly about to become the head stone of the corner” (p29). But the lawyer doesn’t want to be infamous. He sees the situation “through a glass darkly” (p29). Ickenham suggests a solution: call someone else the author, and uses a literary example: Francis Bacon, “according to the Baconians” started writing plays, then worried that people would find out: “After knocking off a couple of them, he got cold feet. ‘Come, come Francis, he said to himself, this won’t do at all. Let it become known that you go in for this sort of thing, and they’ll be looking around for another Chancellor of the Exchequer before you can say What-ho. You must find some needy young fellow who for a consideration will consent to take the rap.’ And he went out and fixed it up with Shakespeare” (p39). You didn’t know that, did you? And it’s just as well, for that theory is falling out of favor. So the lawyer decides to call his nephew, who he hates, the author. The nephew is a dandy, “a social blot who…had…no right to be so beautifully dressed. Solomon in all his glory might have had a slight edge on Cosmo Wisdom, but it would have been a near thing” (p41). Cosmo, now notorious for having written the book, is fired by his employer and basically told to “go and sin no more” (p47). Thereafter, they consider him a “broken reed” (p159). The lawyer tries to change his irascible nature, and Ickenham says, “Give him time. It isn’t easy for leopards to change their spots.” When asked if they want to, he answers, “I couldn’t say. I know so few leopards” (p58). Ickenham’s godson is Johnny Pearce, now a young detective novelist. Pearce’s ancient nannie, more known for her absolute control of the house than for her Biblical knowledge, says, “Verily, as a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout is a woman which is without discretion. That’s what Ecclesiastes wrote in the good book…and he was right” (p66). Someone without an appetite recoiled from the chicken casserole “as if it had been something dished up by the Borgias” (p68). Ickenham meets Peasemarch, an old friend from Home Guard (WWII) days and they sing, “If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quite the port of heaven an’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago,” from Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Drake’s Drum” (p75). On the House of Lords: “I’m a Lord, yes, no argument about that, but you don’t have to keep rubbing it in all the time….We know what lords are. Anachronistic parasites on the body of the states, is the kindest thing you can say of them. Well, a sensitive man doesn’t like to be reminded every half second that he is one of the untouchables, liable at any moment to be strung up on a lamp post or to have his blood flowing in streams down Park Lane” (p76). On showing mercy: “You string along with the Bard of
Avon about the quality of mercy not being strained?” (p89). Ickenham tells the lawyer to mellow: “I, too, have long been wounded by your manner toward your sister…considering it to resemble far too closely that of one of the less attractive fauna in the Book of Revelations. Correct this attitude….Coo to her like a cushat dove” (p.91). The young man, in distress, meets a friend: “his heart leaped up as if he had beheld a rainbow in the sky. Rather more so, in fact, for, unlike the poet Wordsworth, he had never cared much for rainbows” (p97). Peasemarch is in love with the lawyer’s sister, and about to make his move when she mentions saucepans. “Romeo himself would have been discouraged if, early in the balcony scene Juliet had started talking about saucepans” (p117). Ickenham observes: “As the fellow said—Ecclesiastes, was it?—I should have to check with Nannie Bruce—whoso findeth a butler findeth a good thing” (p122), and “who, I asked myself, is the Johnny who is always on the spot, the man who sticketh closer than a brother? The butler, I answered myself. Albert Peasemarch, I said, still addressing myself…” (123). Peasemarch and Pearce still have trouble in their respective romances because “the course of true love has not been running very smooth of late” (p123-124). Ickenham observes: “Every little bit added to what you’ve got makes just a little bit more” (p126). And when wanting a story told, says. “Don’t be cryptic, my boy. Start at the beginning, and let your yea be yea and your nay be nay” (p127). The plot heats up, with one character undecided: “Like the youth who slew the Jabberwock, he paused a while in thought” (p134). In contrast, Ickenham, in action, “feeling, as did Brutus, that there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” (p140-141). Meanwhile, the lawyer, “questing hither and thither like a Thurber bloodhound” (p145) and finally reaching his objective “with something of the emotions of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand when they won through to the sea…he saw what the poet Tennyson has described as the shining levels of the lake” (p146). But this doesn’t comfort him, for the swan chasing him “was not one of those swans that abandon the battle half fought. When it set its hand to the plough, it did not readily sheathe the sword. Casting a hasty glance behind him, Sir Raymond could see it arriving like a
United States Marine” (p146). All this happens in a peaceful town where, “except for an occasional lecture by the vicar on his holiday in the Holy Land, illustrated with lantern slides, there was not a great deal of night life” (p149). In these idyllic surroundings, they prowl “in a manner popularized by the troops of Midian” (p149) and, when they must run, “fly like a youthful hart or roe over the hills where spices grow” (p151). Johnny Peace, in the midst of mounting, multiplying problems, asks, “Had even Job, whose troubles have received such wide publicity, ever had anything on this scale to cope with?” (p167). When he blames his problems on his Ecclesiastes-quoting nannie, the local policeman says, “I should like the address of the suspect Ecclesiastes.” When Johnny answers, “I’m afraid I can’t help you there” and the policeman asks, “Is he a juvenile delinquent?” Johnny responds, “More elderly than that, I should say” (p168). But in the end, as often in Wodehouse, “all things were working together for good” (p179) and all the lovers are getting married. “It’s the only life, as Brigham Young and King Solomon would tell you, if they were still with us” (p191). Ickenham is happy. “He had set out…with the intention of spreading sweetness and light among the residents of that inland Garden of Eden, and in not one but several quarters he had spread it like a sower going forth sowing” (p206). When some people get married, they turn to sober and somber citizens out of tune with hopes and dreams—“Ichabod was the word that sprang to lips when the mind dwelt on…” (p221). But men lucky enough to be married to women who like them still love life. As does Wodehouse. I heartily recommend this book.
