Memories are realities

Published 100 years ago in 1918, Willa Cather's My Antonia remains a remarkable work of literature. Thomas C. Foster features it in his book Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, observing "it is beautifully written and was recognized as such from the moment of its publication."

Although relatively short, the novel covers a lot of territory and many years. It can be said to be about  many things, among them:

"Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

1.  The power of memory

Two men who grew up together in a small Nebraska town decide to share written memories of a girl they both knew, a Bohemian immigrant named Antonia Shimerda. Jim Burden is the only one who actually does so, and this book is what he remembers.

Although she is four years older than him, Jim tutors her in English. He is a brilliant boy who eventually goes to Harvard and becomes a lawyer. She becomes his playmate, a lifelong friend and, thanks to the power of memory, the love of his life.

"I knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!"

2. The strength of immigrant women

Antonia's father becomes so lonely for the Old Country (the power of memory again) that he commits suicide. Later her husband similarly pines for the land he left behind, but Antonia's strength and optimism (and a house full of children) helps keep him focused on the present. Unlike in Glendon Swarthout's The Homesman, the female prairie pioneers are the sturdy ones, able to meet any obstacle with good cheer and a little extra effort.

Of all the girls in his rural community, Jim Burden finds those immigrant girls the most appealing. "If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry," he says.

"Everything was as it should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold of the sky, the evening star, the purr of the milk into the pails, the grunts and squeals of the pigs fighting over their supper."

3. The lure of the prairie

The prairie was the focus of all, or at least most, of Willa Cather's books, and My Antonia was the third novel in her prairie trilogy, which also included O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. Jim Burden's education and later career takes him far from the Nebraska home where he came of age, but as the saying goes, you can't take the country out of the boy. The prairie, like Antonia herself, remains a part of him and draws him back.

The Barnaby Skye challenge

Although I have read quite a number of Richard S. Wheeler westerns over the years, I have avoided his Barnaby Skye series, mainly because there are so many novels in the series (about 20). I can handle trilogies. After that the challenge just seems too imposing.

Nevertheless I have read The Far Tribes (1990), one of the early books, and found it to be wonderful. Barnaby Skye is a former British sailor who ventured into the American West and stayed, becoming a hunter, trapper, guide and Indian expert. He travels with his two wives, Victoria and Mary, each from a different Indian tribe. Mary has a baby, Dirk.

Mister Skye, as he insists on being addressed, is hired to escort a party of Easterners to tribes in the Yellowstone area. They include a businessman, traveling with his wife and daughter, who views the Indians as potential customers and wants to show them his wares and determine what products they might most desire; a military man gathering intelligence that might prove useful in the Indian battles likely to come; and a scientist.

The way west proves interesting enough, but the real drama happens on the way back, as winter nears, when they are attacked by a renegade band while still sleeping. Virtually everything they have except the skimpy nightclothes they wear and Skye's ornery horse, Jawbone, is either stolen or destroyed. They are left to die in near-freezing rain.

How Mister Skye brings his party, or most of it, to safety and handles the treachery from within makes for a riveting tale. Wheeler has always striven for realism in his fiction. In some cases, as in novels about Bat Masterson and Major Reno, he writes about real people and events. In other novels he writes about problems pioneers, settlers, cattlemen and miners, etc., would have faced in the West. In The Far Tribes his detail about how a group of people in such a desperate situation might have found shelter, built a fire, gotten food, made clothing and so on is truly stunning.

I'm glad I still have so many Barnaby Skye novels yet to read.

Details matter

When I worked for a newspaper I noticed that when the editor left for a week's vacation, it didn't seem to affect anyone else. We all went about our usual business in the usual way, ignoring the empty corner office. Yet when the lowly clerk took a vacation, it impacted everyone. She knew where everything was stored, whom to call when something needed attention and, perhaps most important, how to tend to the copy machine.

Computers were supposed to decrease the amount of paper consumed in a newsroom, as in other offices, but that never seemed to be the case. Reporters wrote their stories on their computers but still wanted a hard copy. Copy editors designed pages on their computers but still wanted a proof of each page. And multiple copies were as easy to make as a single copy.

The clerk knew how to put in toner. Most of the rest of us didn't, so her absence usually meant gradually fading ink quality. Most of us knew how to add paper to the copier. It was simple, but no one was eager to actually do it. When someone, and this was often me, did put in more paper, there would always be a large quantify of backed-up print jobs flowing from the copier for the next several minutes, and people from all over the newsroom would suddenly flock there to pick up the copies they had been waiting for. Whoever put in more paper would get his or her copies last.

These memories came back to me yesterday when I called my investment office and got a recorded message saying the office manager, among the last people in America who actually answers the phone when it rings, was gone until November. You could leave a message if you didn't mind waiting until then for a return call or you could try one of two other people in the office. This I did and got a long, detailed, quickly-stated message with no less than 10 options. I chose to keep hitting 0 until I finally heard the voice of an actual person who, though she did not know as much as the office manager, was nevertheless able to help me.

Decades ago my doctor had one employee, a nurse/receptionist. Virtually every call to the office was answered. Today the same practice has a different doctor who must have 8 or 10 people on his staff, none of whom answers the telephone when you call. You have probably heard a message like this: If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Office hours are such and such. To schedule an appointment, press 1. To speak to the nurse (which usually means to leave a message for the nurse), press 2. There can be several other options and instructions. Chances are someone will eventually call you back, but because of so many calls each day from telemarketers, most of us don't want to answer our telephones either.

Whenever I hear the oft-repeated phrase on recorded messages: "Your call is very important to us," I have to laugh. If my call was important, someone would pick up their phone and answer it.

And so what began as a reflection on how the lowest-paid workers in any office can sometimes be the most valuable turned into a rant about the frustrations of unanswered calls. The common thread is that in business, as in one's personal life, little things matter.

What life censors books reveal

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is writing about her youth. Children and teenagers who read, especially those who are introverts, learn from reading what many of their peers learn from experience or, perhaps more commonly, from older kids. We, Schwartz and I, are speaking mostly about sex, but there are plenty of other adult mysteries that open up to youngsters who read.

Today most bookstores have large and seemingly growing sections of books for young adults, meaning older kids. Such sections did not exist in my own youth, and there were relatively few books to stack in such sections had they existed. When I left children's books behind, somewhere about the seventh grade, I went directly to the adult section of the local public library. Words that weren't spoken in my home were written in these books. Sex acts, death, violent crimes, imaginary worlds (such as those in Green Mansions and Journey to the Center of the Earth) opened up to me. This was an education unlike anything I had learned in school.

As I think about it, however, I am not so sure this phenomenon, books revealing what is "censored in life," isn't true almost as much for adult readers as for younger ones. So many things just aren't talked about, or are spoken of rarely, in adult conversation. Homosexuality is mentioned much more than it used to be, yet it remains a rare subject, at least among the people I converse with. How about the most personal thoughts and actions of other human beings? People don't often talk openly about certain things, yet amazingly they write books about them.

And then there are all those subjects that fascinate you but not anyone else you know. If you don't live in a big city you may not be able to find someone, much less a group of someones, who shares your interest in butterflies, say, or antique pedal cars. The web now makes possible connections with others who share your interests, but for a long time we depended on books to learn what we wanted to know about these obscure subjects.

Notice the pair

Mark Twain

When he began writing for a newspaper in Nevada as a young man, Samuel Clemens chose "Mark Twain" as a pseudonym. The name stuck, and he continued to write as Mark Twain for the rest of his long and celebrated literary career. The usual explanation for this choice of names is that it comes from his brief career on a Mississippi riverboat, "mark twain" being a term used to mean two fathoms, or a safe depth of 12 feet.

Yet it it interesting to examine his life and work in terms of the literal meaning of that chosen name. The phrase "mark twain" would mean something like "note the two" or "notice the pair." Just the fact that the man had two names, Samuel Clemens the private citizens and Mark Twain the famous writer, gives significance to the choice.

Twain may be America's most celebrated humorist. The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is awarded each year to some deserving humorist, few of whom have reputations for wit that will survive anywhere near as long as Twain's. Yet, especially toward the end of his life because of a string of personal losses, he was a bitter, depressed man. He has been described as a nihilist. Most of his later literary output was not printed until after his death because it was so unlike the books he was famous for.

The man was celebrated in his own time for his literary success, yet in his business dealing he was an abject failure. He loved new technology and invested heavily in products, such as an early type-setting machine, that he thought would make him so wealthy he could retire from writing. Instead he lost everything and was forced to continue writing and then go on long lecture tours to make enough money to pay his debts.

Just as he was a man with two sides to his personality, character and reputation, so the characters in his stories so often came in pairs: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim, the prince and the pauper, the duke and the king (or the duke and dauphin). Twain seemed fascinated by the idea of Siamese twins, and in one of his best novels, Pudd'nhead Wilson, he writes of two babies, one white and the other a light-skinned slave, who are switched soon after birth. Twain once wrote a sketch about an imagined twin brother.

And so it goes. When reading Twain, or reading about him, notice the pair.

Thrill-seeking

With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Did P.G. Wodehouse write thrillers? Well, yes, if you define the word thrill as Lynne Sharon Schwartz does, as a reader's reaction to exquisite language, language that soars, language that sings. That may be the whole reason for reading Wodehouse. A century after it was written, in some cases, his prose still amazes us. With Wodehouse, it is not so much what he says as how he says it. His readers mine each of his books for thrilling lines like this one from Something Fresh:  "I have often wondered what General Sherman would have said about private tutoring if he expressed himself so breezily about mere war."

One reason I use unlined 3x5 cards as bookmarks is so that I can make note of some of the most transcendent lines I come across in my reading. That Wodehouse line is one example. The one by Schwartz is another. Here are a few others:

"The secret motive of the absentminded is to be innocent while guilty." Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

"People who are flamboyantly good usually aren't." Richard S. Wheeler, Restitution

"Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it." Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

"We all write poems; it is simply the poets are the ones who write in words" John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

"I will love him like a camera lens that closes at too much light and opens at too little, so his blemishes will never mar my love." Akhil Sharma, An Obedient Father

"By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient." Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

I have been coming across thrilling lines that beautifully describe the weather we are beginning to experience in the Northern Hemisphere. Wodehouse, again in Something Fresh, writes, "Cold is the ogre which drives all beautiful things into hiding."

Early in The One-Way Bridge, Cathie Peltier puts it this way, "Mother Nature knew what she was doing all right. She was giving everyone some last splashes of red and orange and golden yellow before she gave them a solid blanket of white for months. Maybe, Edna thought, autumn was nature's way of apologizing."

Just yesterday afternoon I came upon this line in My Antonia by Willa Cather: "It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer."

When one reads what is commonly called a thriller, the thrills happen only once. Read it again and the thrill is gone. Not so with literary thrills like those listed above. The thrill returns again with each rereading.

Mary and Martha and Mary Martha

Can you imagine a tearful love story filled with as much spirituality as romance? Well, Tim Farrington could, and the result is his well-received 2002 novel The Monk Downstairs.

Rebecca is a 38-year-old divorced woman with a little girl and a devoted boyfriend whom she doesn't love but who won't stop asking her to marry him. Her ex-husband, who gets Mary Martha on weekends, spends his days surfing and smoking pot. To help make ends meet, Rebecca decides to rent out her small garage apartment.

The first person who inquires about it is Michael Christopher, who has spent virtually his entire adult life in a monastery. After differences with his superior, who thought Michael emphasized contemplation over work (as in the gospel story about Mary and Martha), he is now on his own in the real world. He carries all his possessions in a small bag. He gets the apartment, and soon like so many others gets his first job at McDonalds.

While the romantic relationship that builds gradually between Rebecca and Michael may seem predictable, the path Farrington takes the couple down is full of surprises. A lapsed Catholic, she doesn't think much of her tenant's contemplative nature either. That is, until his spiritual insights, combined with a gift of servanthood unrecognized at the monastery, help pull her through the crises that soon overwhelm her.

An intriguing cast of supporting characters, including Rebecca's irrepressible mother and her playboy boss, add substantially to the story.

Farrington, like Rebecca, was a Catholic who lost his way before finding it again. He actually spent part of his boyhood in a convent, where his aunt was a nun. So he knows the territory, and he makes the most of it in this intriguing novel.

Worms under rocks

As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs.

Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle

In Germany after the war, finding ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers was as easy as turning over a rock. Even Marianne von Lingenfels finds this to be true in Jessica Shattuck's powerful 2017 novel The Women in the Castle.

The widow of a man  executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, she tries after the war to gather up as many wives and children of resisters as she can find and take them to her family castle. She finds just two of the women on her list, beautiful Benita, the widow of Marianne's childhood friend who was also executed by the Nazis, and Ania, a somber woman whose name on the list is something of a mystery. Both women have young sons.

Years pass, and life in postwar Germany gradually gets easier. Yet Marianne discovers disturbing things about the two women she has adopted as part of her family. Benita falls in love with a former Nazi and wants to marry him, while Ania already has a Nazi husband who turns up after she marries a nearby farmer.

Marianne feels betrayed, but by 1991 when the novel ends she wonders if she is not the one who has betrayed her friends. Are there not worms even under her own rock?

Shattuck's book explores the lives of the war's widows and the ways Nazi guilt spread to them and even to their children, proving that Nazi Germany, the subject of so many novels since the 1930s, can still be mined for original plots and ideas.

Bennett's Don'ts

James Gordon Bennett Jr.

Most of us probably have certain words and phrases that we try to avoid in both our speech and writing. We find them tacky, stilted, vulgar, whatever. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the celebrated publisher of the New York Herald who died 100 years ago this year, had the clout to require others to follow his particular biases, and Stanley Walker, once city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, listed some of these in his 1934 book City Editor.

"His 'Don'ts' were rigid, but most of them were sensible," Walker writes. Yet less than two decades after Bennett's death, Walker goes on to say that "many of his particular abominations are in almost universal use today, for better or worse."

All these decades later it is something of a mystery to try to determine why these prohibitions were once thought necessary and, if these usages were not permitted, what was considered proper? Were retired copy editors, and I am one, to have a reunion, this might even make an interesting party game.

Bennett's Don'ts

Don't call a theatrical performance a "show."

Presumably this term was once thought too lowbrow, yet within decades such phrases as "the show must go on," "there's no business like show business" and "let's put on a show" were commonly heard, either in or about theatrical performances.

Don't apply "schedule" to the movement of persons, as "Ambassador Bacon was scheduled to leave Vienna."

Presumably Ambassador Bacon planned to leave Vienna. His departure, however, was scheduled.

Don't use "New Yorker." 

The New Yorker started publishing in 1925. Interestingly, that magazine has long been noted for its own list of Don'ts for editors and writers.

Don't use "week-end" or "over Saturday."

As for "over Saturday," Bennett was a winner there. Do you ever hear anyone say that? But how would we manage without "weekend?" My own newspaper had a weekly section called Weekend.

Don't use "guest of honor" or "maid of honor."

So what terms do you suppose Bennett considered proper?

Don't use "gang" or "gangster."

Walker wonders what Bennett would have thought of the term mobster, common by 1935. Today gangster seems dated.

Don't us "diplomat"; use "diplomatist."

Diplomatist? Diplomats today would probably give you a funny look if you called them that.

Don't use "plan" except in connection with drawn architectural or engineering plans. Do not use it as a verb.

So I guess Ambassador Bacon didn't plan to leave Vienna after all.

Don't use (hotel) "patron" or "guest."

I think I may understand Bennet's dislike of the idea of a "hotel guest." The term guest suggests that somebody else will be paying the bill. But if a hotel staff member refers to you as their guest, guess whose credit card is going to be charged? The term patron doesn't sound right either for a hotel, though perhaps for a hotel gift shop. But lodger now sounds old-fashioned, and resident seems too permanent for someone just staying a night or two.

A chase through paradise

Paradise Sky might be the perfect title for a different kind of novel. The title may be suggestive of the west, which is where, at sunset, we find paradise in the sky, but it hardly suggests an expansive western saga of the type we find in novels with titles like Little Big Man, Wild Times and The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. Yet that is what Joe R. Lansdale gives us in his endlessly entertaining 2015 novel.

This is a highly fictionalized retelling of the life of Nat Love, or Deadwood Dick, although some would say Love's original telling of his story in his autobiography was itself highly fictionalized. Wherever the truth lies, Lansdale's version makes fine reading.

There were plenty of black cowboys in the Old West, but only Nate Love became a western legend. An expert horseman and marksman, he associated frequently with other, more prominent western legends. In the novel he is a close friend of Wild Bill Hickok. In his own account Love knew such men as Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid.

The son of freed slaves, Love is still in his early teens when a white man named Ruggert catches him looking at his wife's backside. From then on Ruggert proves willing to ruin his own life to end Love's, and the chase covers many years and a lot of western territory.  A story that begins with Ruggert chasing Love ends with Love, by now a Judge Parker deputy, chasing the outlaw Ruggert.

In between there are shooting matches, gunfights, Indian battles, love stories and, always, witty storytelling.

Lansdale has written some terrific novels, and Paradise Sky ranks high among them. With a different title, more people might have read it.

Satire Dogwatch-style

Wouldn't Al Capp have had fun in today's world? Of course, in today's world, newspapers and thus the comic strips found in newspapers have shrinking importance, so we should be glad Capp lived when he did (1909-1979). Still, it is interesting to wonder what he would have made of the soap opera that the national political scene has become.

Capp had a knack for making sharp political commentary while seemingly drawing his Li'l Abner comic strip about absurd happenings in a never-never land called Dogwatch. In The Best of Li'l Abner, a 1978 collection I just read again, we find tales about a girl called Boyless Bailey who because of a curse may remain boyless even with the Sadie Hawkins Day race approaching, another girl whose lips can fry a boy's brains and a plague of turnip termites that could bring starvation to Dogwatch. Yet Capp always managed to insert just enough mid-20th-century reality into these outlandish stories to make them read like current events.

"A satirist has only one gift," Capp wrote in an introduction, "he sees where the fraud and fakery are. I turned around and let the other side have it." For Capp, the "other side" often actually was the other side, not the conservatives who were usually the ones targeted by satirists but those on the left. This was especially true during the turbulent Sixties when he again and again targeted campus radicals and those college administrators who seemed willing to let them get away with anything.

Much of Capp's humor had to do with playing with names, which may seem like junior high school except that he did it so well. In this book we find a body builder named Stanley Strongnose, a plastic surgeon named Rex Moosehead, a Liberace-like pianist named Loverboynik, a long-haired singer named Hawg McCall, a cartoon busybody named Mary Worm, a chubby movie star named Anita Eatburg, a pork-and-bean executive named J. Roaringham Fatback, an Indian princess named Minihahaskirt, an advice columnist named Hazel Homewrecker (actually a bigamist named B. Fowler McNest), a wild boar named Porknoy (who naturally has a complaint) and a TV talk show host named Tommy Wholesome.

Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson and other political figures of the day made cameo appearances in the comic. It was all great fun.

Well-read Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse

I was midway through P.G. Wodehouse's Full Moon before it occurred to me I should have been making note of each literary reference. He employs them by the score, usually for comic effect, not just in this novel but in so much of his work. Readers of the Jeeves stories will recall instances when one of Bertie's challenges, or perhaps his own pluck in facing that challenge, reminds him of something he read in public school, but he can't quite put his finger on it. Jeeves, the manservant who never had the advantage of that kind of education, immediately quotes the line and cites the source. These exchanges never fail to amuse.

In this Blandings novel, as well, the literary references are plentiful and, whatever their original intent, Wodehouse uses them for humor. Here are some examples, all from the novel's second half:

"He was not in the market for sunshine. Given his choice, he would have scrapped this glorious morning, flattering the mountain tops with sovereign eye, and substituted for it something more nearly resembling the weather conditions of King Lear, Act Two." (page 143)

"Anybody who wishes to be clear on Tipton Plimsoll's feelings at this juncture has only to skim through the pages of Masefield's Reynard the Fox. The sense of being a hunted thing was strong upon him." (page 158)

"It is a truism to say that the best-laid plans are often disarranged and sometimes even defeated by the occurrence of some small unforeseen hitch in the programme. The poet Burns, it will be remembered, specifically warns the public to budget for this possibility." (page 164)

"... the poet Coleridge, had he been present, would have jerked a thumb at him with a low-voiced: 'Don't look now, but that fellow over there will give you some idea of what I had in mind when I wrote about the man who on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.'" (page 214)

"'Bothering passes me by as the idle wind which I respect not.'
"'That's Shakespeare, isn't it?'
"'I shouldn't wonder. Most of the good gags are.'" (page 222)

And so it goes. Wodehouse was a busy writer, always with several projects going on at once. He usually wrote quickly to meet book and magazine deadlines. Yet he apparently took time to read, as well, or else unlike Bertie Wooster, he remembered everything he read in public school.

In the presence of Nazis

Reading P.G. Wodehouse's Full Moon it can difficult to believe he wrote the novel behind enemy lines, a prisoner or virtual prisoner of the Nazi army. This Blandings story is as light, frantic and hilarious as any he wrote.

Biographer Robert McCrum cites the following lines from the novel to suggest what might really have been going on in Wodehouse's mind during this period: "In every situation, when the spirit has been placed upon the rack and peril seems to threaten from every quarter, there inevitably comes soon or late to the interested party at the centre of the proceedings a conviction that things are getting too hot. Stags at bay have this feeling. So have Red Indians at the stake. It came now to Bill."

Well, maybe. But Wodehouse had lines much like those in many of his novels. His characters were always getting into impossible situations, then getting out again thanks to Jeeves, Galahad, Freddie or some other hero. What amazes me is that he could write so breezily in France or Germany, wherever he happened to be at the time, with a war going on around him, sometimes within his hearing.

Wodehouse plots often revolve around young love, the problem of making a marriage possible despite all obstacles. In Full Moon, he doubles the stakes, giving readers two couples in love. In one case, the suitor, an American millionaire the girl's parents would welcome into the family needs a drink to work up the courage to ask her to marry him, but every time he takes a nip he sees an image of a frightful-looking man. That frightful-looking man is actually Bill, who despite his looks is a wonderful man, but one with little money. This girl's mother erects strong defenses to keep Bill away from Blandings Castle. Not until the last few pages does Wodehouse work all this out to the satisfaction of everyone, especially the reader.

When one reviews a Wodehouse novel, it can be all but impossible to refrain from quoting a few of his most notable lines. They are just too choice to pass up. Normally these are the funniest lines in the story, but the lines that struck me most powerfully in Full Moon were those that open the novel, which aren't funny at all but rather quite beautiful. It goes on for a page or more, but here is a sampling:

"The refined moon which served Blandings Castle and district was nearly at its full, and the ancestral home of Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, had for some hours now been flooded by its silver rays. They shone on turret and battlement; peeped respectfully in upon Lord Emsworth's sister, Lady Hermione Wedge, as she creamed her face in the Blue Room; and stole through the open window of the Red Room next door where there was something really worth looking at -- Veronica Wedge, to wit, Lady Hermione's outstandingly beautiful daughter, who was lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wishing she had some decent jewelry to wear at the forthcoming County Ball. A lovely girl needs, of course, not jewels but her youth and health and charm, but anybody who had wanted to make Veronica understand that would have to work like a beaver."

Never mind the humor in Full Moon, how did Wodehouse write that under the watchful eye of Nazis?

The real Lord Emsworth

As a writer, P.G. Wodehouse was something of a Jeeves, his most famous character. He came up with outrageous solutions to outrageous problems. He even out-jeeved Jeeves by inventing the problems in the first place. Wodehouse said his novels usually began with an absurd situation. Then he just had to figure out a way to get his characters into that situation and out of it again by the last page.

Otherwise Wodehouse was more like Lord Emsworth (Clarence) of his Blandings novels, the character he most identified with according to Robert McCrum, author of the superb 2004 biography Wodehouse. Clarence gives every appearance of being a befuddled old man. Actually he is just preoccupied. The only thing he cares to think about is his prize-winning pig, the Empress of Blandings. On that subject he is always alert,  always on top of things. Everything else just goes over his head. Wodehouse was that way. It was his writing that drew his focus. Most everything else he preferred to let his wife, agent or somebody else handle for him. When his wife gave parties, he would make a brief appearance, then suddenly disappear to return to his work.

It was this Lord Emsworth quality that led to the biggest crisis of Wodehouse's life, to which McCrumb devotes several chapters. Wodehouse was living in France when the Germans invaded early in World War II. He made no attempt to leave, although in fairness it should be noted that many other British citizens also stayed in France, assuming the Germans would be stopped just as they were in the first war.

The Nazis kept coming, however, and Wodehouse was soon their prisoner. Wodehouse being Wodehouse, he kept writing his funny stories and making light of a bad situation. When the Nazis, recognizing his propaganda value, offered him his release in exchange for doing a series of radio broadcasts, the writer viewed it as an opportunity to connect with his fans and assure them he was alright. In Great Britain especially, many saw it as betrayal, a collaboration with the enemy.

Wodehouse lived in the United States for the remainder of his long life, never returning to England because of his shame and, for many years, fear of prosecution. He was eventually knighted, but by then he was too old to travel and probably would not have returned to his home country even if he could have.

Most of the biography, if not as light as Wodehouse's novels, is at least lighter than most biographies. McCrumb describes the plots of much of his best work, and so much of his work was terrific. For about 70 years he was an important writer, not just of books but also of short stories, pieces for magazines and newspapers and even Broadway plays and Hollywood movies. For a number of years, in fact, his was one of the biggest names on Broadway, teaming with the likes of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. His books remain in print and loved around the world. I have seen a couple of his musicals performed in recent years, and they are still entertaining.

Even though Wodehouse remained productive while a Nazi prisoner, for about five years after the war he found it difficult coming up with anything funny. Eventually he put his embarrassment behind him. Wodehouse fans would be kind to do likewise.