THE WORDY SHIPMATES

Overall, I didn’t enjoy Sarah Vowell’s latest historical romp as much as Assassination Vacation, but here is a choice quote:

Because of the “city upon a hill” sound bite, “A Model of Christian Charity” is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.

DID YOU KNOW YOUNG ALAN GREENSPAN PLAYED PROFESSIONAL CLARINET IN A TRAVELING JAZZ BAND?

Do you dork out about history? For instance, did you have ever a crush on an historical figure? I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but what first attracted me to A was the fact that he uncannily resembled the sultry portrait of Christopher Marlowe I took a fancy to in my high-school English textbook (A is not that sultry, but I still see the likeness in the eyes and hair). I’ve also frequently been heard to state that Alexander Hamilton is smokin’ hot on the $10 bill. Or have you ever found a long-dead personality so inexplicably hilarious or endearing that you been unable to resist sharing choice anecdotes about him or her with everyone you meet, or constructing elaborate jokes about him/her with your friends? In college, K and I would gossip about the Elizabethans as though they were characters on our favorite soap (I was a particular fan of Sir Phillip Sidney and—for comedic value—Sir Walter Raleigh), and later our fandom shifted to the Founding Fathers. My previous job, in which I edited collective biographies of all sorts of historical figures, was just one such obsession after another. Over long months of fact-checking, photo research, writing and rewriting, layout, and proofreading, I became personally fond of a whole series of greats, including strangely cuddly John Maynard Keynes, crazy fake-nosed Tycho Brahe, doomed hottie Robert F. Kennedy, good old chick magnet/awe-inspiring genius Ben Franklin, and sweet, tragic Alan Turing.

If you’re at all like me, it will behoove you to read the cute and clever comics of Kate Beaton immediately. Beaton’s takes on historical figures are a perfect mix of the silly and the intellectual. It takes a smart and talented person to create whimsical historical fantasies that still ring true—maybe not strictly factually, but emotionally true. I’ve edited a book about the history of computers, so I can vouch that Charles Babbage really did have a bizarre hatred of street musicians; Beaton takes this odd fact to his logical conclusion by having his wife Georgina wonder, “Does he have to make a big spectacle about it every time we go out?” Similarly, Nikola Tesla really was celibate, and although there’s no evidence suggesting that frenzied screaming ladies were throwing their bloomers up on stage when he demonstrated electricity, wouldn’t it be awesome if they had?

What unfailingly cracks me up about history is that it’s just so big and crazy and yet so ordinary and human, and I feel that (like Sarah Vowell in Assassination Vacation) Beaton gets that too. Washington decides to “Cross the shit over the Delaware.” Maud Gonne complains to Yeats, “It’s just another faggy poem.” Orwell says of Animal Farm, “Seriously that book is going to rule so hard.” Charles of Austria woos Queen Elizabeth I with a song that goes, “Your hairrr is like a giant muffin.” James Cook fatally taunts the Hawaiians, “You can’t kill me! I’m too busy banging your chicks.” Admiral Nelson goes on a date: “I’d smile at you more but I have no teeth. There’s that ‘shot in the face’ thing again.” Jane Austen copes with her fans (“This novel is a social commentary.” “Is it a social commentary about hunky dreamboats?”). Teddy Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize (“Russia, Japan, must you kill each other so? We can negotiate! Or, if you want to, we can safari.” “Fuck it let’s do both!”). Fat King George IV fears “a sexy revolution” and envisions James Monroe showing off his hot ass (“Goodness I have dropped the Constitution…let me get that”). But lest I give away all the punchlines, let me just say that my all-time favorite is the Mary Shelley one and the runner-up is the one about St. Francis. Happy reading!

VARIOUS AND SUNDRY

Reading Project Update: I’m making slow but steady progress through the Wodehouse bio, which is interesting but pretty dense. I’ve got just over 100 pages to go and have made it a priority to finish before I leave for my Thanksgiving trip to D.C., so I can read The Code of the Woosters on the plane. I always want something light (both physically and emotionally) and super-fascinating for my travel reading, and I spend a lot of mental energy planning the perfect books to bring on a trip. I have a secret terror of being trapped somewhere without something good to read. This is why I would bring half a dozen books on an overnight trip when I was a kid—of course I knew I’d only have time to read a few of them, but I required access to a wide selection. This is also probably why one of my childhood fantasies was being locked in a bookstore overnight. And why in middle school I thought being in prison wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was a well-stocked library. Now that I’ve seen Oz and graduated to actually enjoying fresh air and physical movement, I’ve rejected that last idea, but I still carefully strategize about which books to pack in my carry-on bag…and I still usually bring way too many, although now this seems like good common sense, given the state of air transportation today. I pray to never be stuck on a runway for six hours, but I hope that if it happens, I’ll at least be reading something awesome.

Since the end of the year is when all those “Best American Whatever Writing” collections come out, that makes choosing books for holiday travel a no-brainer. Anthologies are perfect travel reading—if you don’t like one story, just turn a few pages and you’ll find something entirely different. It’s basically like having a magazine but looking smarter. Thus, my other reading selections for the Thanksgiving trip will be The Best American Crime Reporting 2007 and Best Food Writing 2007 (yeah, the 2008 books are already coming out, but these are new to me—my library’s painfully slow in acquiring the latest entries in the series I like). I’m pretty pleased about the prospects, but my flights still better go smoothly. Even a good book can only pass the time for so long.

I’m also doing the Mr. Burns “Exxxxcellent” finger-tenting gesture because I managed (through my mad hold-list skillz) to snag a library copy of Sarah Vowell’s brand-new book about Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. I’ve only read the first few pages, but I have no doubt I’ll enjoy it.

And finally, I just finished reading two stellar young-adult novels that should be just as appealing to real adults: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages. They combine a number of my favorite book elements: an interesting historical setting (in this case, the Manhattan Project during World War II in the first book, and the early postwar rocketry program in the second), strong female characters, unlikely friendships, kids who are smart without being annoyingly precocious, and people who have rich interior lives with interesting hobbies/obsessions/fields of expertise. The details of the time period are effortlessly drawn, the books are chock-full of social history and science and engineering and art, and I loved the adorably brainy characters. It’s surprisingly rare to find a work of fiction about smart people that is actually smart itself (just one of the many that fails to pull it off: the movie Smart People). I can only hope that Klages is planning another book in the series.

RIGHT HO, JEEVES

Background: Published in 1934, just seven months after Thank You, Jeeves. The original U.S. title was Brinkley Manor.

This is the one where: Bertie thinks that Jeeves’ problem-solving powers are slipping and attempts to deal on his own with “the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop, and the cook, Anatole”

The action takes place at: Brinkley Court, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia’s house in Worcestershire (near the town of Market Snodsbury)

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Madeline Bassett—or, as he refers to her, “the Bassett” (“I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”)

But she’s really in love with: Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle, who is reclusive, obsessed with newts, drinks only orange juice, and “wears horn-rimmed spectacles and has a face like a fish” (“Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett… A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but…I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely-populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.”)

The task at hand: Give away the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School (or, as Bertie says to Aunt Dahlia, “strew prizes at this bally Dotheboys Hall of yours”—yay for Nicholas Nickleby allusions!); mend the rift between Cousin Angela and Tuppy Glossop; help Gussie propose to Madeline; get Uncle Tom to give Aunt Dahlia more money to print her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir (she has gambled away 500 pounds playing baccarat in Cannes); keep the brilliant but temperamental chef Anatole from quitting

Other characters include:

• Hildebrand “Tuppy” Glossop (“In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.”)

• Cousin Angela Travers (“This cousin and I had been meeting freely since the days when I wrote sailor suits and she hadn’t any front teeth, yet only now was I beginning to get onto her hidden depths. A simply, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly…like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie”)

• Aunt Dahlia Travers (“If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is apt to address a vis-à-vis as if he were somebody half a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds. A throwback, no doubt, to the time when she counted a day lost that was not spent chivvying some unfortunate fox over the countryside.”)

• Uncle Tom Travers (“all those years he spent making millions in the Far East put his digestion on the blink, and the only cook that has ever been discovered capable of pushing food into him without starting something like Old Home Week in Moscow under the third waistcoat button is this uniquely gifted Anatole”)

• Anatole (“This wizard of the cooking-stove is a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops.”)
  

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Being chased around a park bench by an angry Tuppy, being insulted by a drunken Gussie during the school prize-giving, having to bicycle 18 miles in the middle of the night, and suffering the company of Madeline Bassett (“I could not but remember how often, when in her company at Cannes, I had gazed dumbly at her, wishing that some kindly motorist in a racing car would ease the situation by coming along and ramming her amindships”).

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: white mess jacket with brass buttons, which Bertie has brought back from Cannes. (To Bertie’s assertion that such jackets are all the rage in Cannes, Jeeves replies, “The code at Continental casinos is notoriously lax, sir.”) The jacket meets its fate when Jeeves “accidentally” leaves the iron on it too long.

First paragraph:
“‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘may I speak frankly?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘What I have to say may wound you.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Well, then—’
No—wait. Hold the line a minute. I’ve gone off the rails.”

Bertie fashion moment: None, but he makes several proud mentions of having written an article for Milady’s Boudoir on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing”

Slang I’d like to start using: Bertie’s jaunty abbreviations; for example, “I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.”

Bertie gets no respect:

• “Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that after two months of my company, what the normal person feels is that that will about do for the present. Indeed, I have known people who couldn’t stick it out for more than a few days.”—Bertie

• “I wonder, Bertie…if you have the faintest conception how perfectly loathsome you look? A cross between an orgy scene in the movies and some low form of pond life.”—Aunt Dahlia, to a hungover Bertie

• “I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg.”—Aunt Dahlia

• “I might have known that some hideous disaster would strike this house like a thunderbolt if once you wriggled your way into it and started trying to be clever.”—Aunt Dahlia again, handily summarizing the plot of just about every Bertie Wooster story

• “Ass,” “maddening half-wit,” “fathead,” “greedy young pig,” “idiot nephew,” “treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard,” “abysmal chump,” “dithering idiot”—also Aunt Dahlia

• “To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot—certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are a worse scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post.”—a final coup de grace from Aunt Dahlia

Best Jeeves moment: “I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.”

Best bit of description: “Conditions being as they were at Brinkley Court—I mean to say, the place being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing room only as regarded tortured souls—I hadn’t expected the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre. The whole thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on Devil’s Island…What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back from the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the shape of brilliant badinage was concerned. The fact that he was fifty quid in the red and expecting Civilization to take a toss at any moment had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy. The Bassett was a silent bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed. And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.”

Best bit of dialogue: Madeline Bassett: “Don’t you love this time of evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers? When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see a fairy queen.”

My review: Five stars! This one includes all my favorite characters from the Bertieverse—awesome Aunt Dahlia (who, despite her bluster, is usually quite cheerful and has an affectionate relationship with Bertie), hilariously drippy Madeline Bassett, cringe-worthy Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Anatole, whose cooking inspires reverence and whose allegiance is the center of many Wodehouse plots. In contrast to Thank You, Jeeves, where most of the characters seemed to hate Bertie and I felt a bit sorry for him, he fares much better in this one, serving more as an inept advisor to his friends and family and an audience to the hijinks rather than as a victim (except at the end, when, as usual, Jeeves’ scheme to solve everyone’s problems requires a sacrifice from Bertie—in this case, a long and unnecessary bicycle ride in the dark). The plot was funnier, the characters were more vivid, and even the language seemed to sparkle more brilliantly; as you can see, I had difficulty restraining myself from quoting the entire book to you. This one is definitely required reading for Wodehouse fans and a good intro for newbies.

Had I read it before? Definitely yes. My parents own it (in fact the edition that I got from the Pasadena library happened to be the exact same cover and everything), so my father read it to me when I was a kid and I read it myself at least once or twice while growing up. But it has been at least ten years since my last reading, and since I didn’t remember how the plot worked itself out, it still felt fresh to me this time around. Wodehouse bears much rereading, especially when you are older and can better understand the slang and literary allusions.

Next up: The Code of the Woosters