Above Average at Games: Wodehouse on Sport

In stores this week is the second anthology of PG Wodehouse that I’ve had the tremendous fortune to edit for the Hutchinson imprint. The first, in 2016, was on booze; this one concerns sport. No-one can be expected to pursue happiness in moderation; and when a masterful writer such as Wodehouse turns his eye upon such life-enhancing pursuits as these, then the sum of human happiness grows.

Wodehouse was certainly a master - one can argue about the breadth of his range, but not about the perfection of his pitch, founded as it was on plot-building and sentence-making of surpassing elegance. Sports were among his true passions in life, and he wrote stories about them as well as anyone has, before or since. So, I'd concede, this new volume is for the sports fans above all, if not exclusively.

2019 has, of course, been a remarkably dramatic year in sport. Anyone watching the cricket and rugby World Cups, say, or Tiger Woods at the Masters, or Naomi Osaka versus Coco Gauff at the US Open, must surely have felt at times that sporting contests at the pinnacle of excellence contain their very own artistic perfection, which a storyteller can only envy and labour to imitate. Wodehouse, though, is one of those rare writers who makes sport on the page nearly as pleasing as sport on the pitch.

I’ve titled my anthology with a nod to Wodehouse’s biographer Frances Donaldson, who contended that ‘[n]o boy who is good at games ever has a bad time at school,’ and that Wodehouse felt it important to have been ‘above average at games,’ not simply because of the peer approval that followed but because, in his later writing life, he could convey both a participant’s pleasure in and a technical understanding of the game in question.

Above Average is, then, a selective tour through the sporting side of Wodehouse’s oeuvre, beginning with his early school sports journalism (where we find him limbering up and trying out his muscles as a humorist, working towards ‘the voice’ that will see him durably through a 70-year writing career.) It drives onward to extended extracts from certain novels, and noteworthy short stories in their entirety.

Prior to this delightful assignment I had a decently rounded sense of how good Wodehouse was on cricket and golf. I’d less of an appreciation for how well he’d done rugby, athletics, boxing. In the early school novel The Pothunters, for instance, there is a terrific account of a mile-race that puts the reader right in the thick of the tension and adrenalin of timing a kick to the finish against an adversary hard at one’s shoulder (‘Everything seemed black to him, a black, surging mist, and in its centre a thin white line, the tape…’)

As to the boxing: The White Feather – a portrait of an artist as a young and not wholly willing pugilist – is consummate storytelling wherein a boy goes to learn to fight for the good of his mettle and is surprised to discover the immense skill in the thing. (Wodehouse boxed for the school at Dulwich College though he later admitted to an interviewer that he was better on stamina than technique: ‘After three rounds I was always willing and anxious to go on and could never understand why the decision went against me, as I couldn’t remember the other fellow hitting me at all. This although I was streaming with blood…’)

Wodehouse’s principal cricket writing is the sequence of fictions from 1907 to 1910 starring the boy-batsman-prodigy Mike Jackson. Now, batting has always seemed to me a very high-order accomplishment, whatever number you come in at. It’s a lot to do with the demands on concentration, and the high odds that your day will end very prematurely and dismayingly due to a single misjudgement or twist of fortune. It would be annoying, then, if Wodehouse’s Mike were never prey to such anomalies.

Mike is seen to be exceptionally gifted but Wodehouse often shows his talents being first underrated. He was fully aware of the storytelling conventions here, too, as described in Mike and Psmith: ‘In stories of the ‘Not Really a Duffer’ type, where the nervous new boy, who has been found crying in the boot-room over the photograph of his sister, contrives to get an innings in a game, nobody suspects that he is really a prodigy till he hits the Bully's first ball out of the ground for six.’

That set-up is indeed as old as Metheuselah, but Wodehouse doesn’t play it like so: there’s nothing nervy about Mike, indeed he exudes self-assurance whenever he attains the crease. And in asserting the accuracy of this character-type Wodehouse hits the middle-stump: ‘An entirely modest person seldom makes a good batsman. Batting is one of those things which demand first and foremost a thorough belief in oneself. It need not be aggressive, but it must be there.’

Still, it’s fundamentally boring if the hero of a tale flies through every test. Just when the reader might think Mike never fails with the bat, Wodehouse has him out for a duck – because even Don Bradman had days like that. Wodehouse also suggests that the level of Mike’s investment in the game makes him at times a little one-note and sharp-tongued to anyone who interferes with his practice of the art: to that extent, he’s maybe too much of a sportsman, and it might be why Wodehouse began to favour Mike’s friend Psmith for more stories.

The obsessiveness that we bring to playing games has its comical side – the mono-browed pursuit of victory, of the personal best, approximate at times to the larger follies of humankind. The game of golf is especially suited to such comedy: is any sport more thoroughly afflicted by miniscule adjustments to complex rituals, by coaches and expensive quack-remedies? (Thus did Norman Mailer write of ‘monumentally boring golfers who work for years to improve their swing and never stop talking about it.')

Wodehouse, who loved the game, also knew this stuff was ripe for mockery. His golf stories have no giant bestriding the links, analogous to Mike – rather, they tend, as Wodehouse usually didn’t, toward men-and-women stuff, ‘love interest’, and situations of romantic embarrassment badly in need of a solution. John Updike, a big aficionado of these stories, wrote of ‘mock-epic Wodehousian matches, often played for the hand of a comely girl.’ In at least one story the girl wants no part of the outcome. But more commonly golf in Wodehouse proves to be a means for lovers to unite and tee off together forever.

Wodehouse remains top-drawer reading pleasure, even for those hold-outs historically put off by books about people who have butlers. I loved putting this anthology together and I hope readers, too, will get a big kick out of its sporting line-up - a programme near as packed as Grandstand or World of Sport back in their day...

Highballs for Breakfast: "I'm going to do it again!"

Back in 2016 I spent some delightful months carpentering an anthology of Wodehouse's best stuff on booze. On publication the thing seemed to slip down well enough. 'Splendid,' said the Times. 'Enjoyable,' said the TLS, and it ought to know. Two happy years later, this tonic-like volume is now in paperback, £8.99, and I call that a gift.

A common problem with authors who wrote well about alcohol – Scott Fitzgerald, say, or Charles Bukowski – is that often they were alcoholics, with all the misery that entails. Wodehouse, though, flies breezily free of such gloom. One of the great tonics of his famous comic writing is its sense that happiness may be reliably found through the ‘life-restoring fluid’ contained in ‘the magic bottle.’ Here are three of my favourite such moments:

Gregory Parsloe (in Pigs Have Wings) suffers romantic rejection yet is consoled by a tankard of beer that appears before him in the manner of an old pal: ‘A woman is only a woman, he seemed to be saying, but a frothing pint is a drink.’

Stanley Ukridge (in Nothing Serious), reduced to rummaging the drinks cupboard in dire need, finds only a crusty port; yet consoles himself with the thought that, often, ‘a good go in at the port at a critical moment has made all the difference to me as a thinking force.’

Motty (in Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest), having gotten disgracefully drunk while lodging with a friend, is offered by his host the chance to plead food poisoning as the cause, but defiantly refuses: ‘‘No!’ he replied firmly. ‘I didn’t do anything of the kind. I drank too much! Much too much. Lots and lots too much! And, what’s more, I’m going to do it again!’

The TLS enjoyed my Wodehouse book...

The New Year brought a lovely write-up of Highballs for Breakfast in the Times Literary Supplement, written by the Oxford scholar and editor of Wodehouse's correspondence Sophie Ratcliffe. The headline and the accompanying picture were very pleasing, too. But the following was, of course, the money passage for the book's editor:

Richard T. Kelly’s enjoyable book sources a wide range of Wodehouse’s writings on drinking, from his early journalism through to Blandings and Mr Mulliner... what stands out is the sheer joy of Wodehouse’s writing on this theme... a wonderfully cheering collection

Highballs for Breakfast: 'a splendid anthology'

Quite delightful to open up the Saturday Times recently and see that the lead Fiction review in the culture bit is one's own little edited volume of Wodehouse. Patrick Kidd was the reviewer with such advanced taste, and this is part of what he so kindly said:

"Alcohol goes with Wodehouse as eggs do with b, as the author might say. Some of his finest characters live on it, such as the Hon Galahad Threepwood, whose secret of eternal youth is to “keep the decanter circulating and never to go to bed before four in the morning”. Booze washes through his work, and Richard T Kelly has gathered from the cellar a splendid anthology of snippets and longer passages on alcohol. It is vintage Wodehouse in more ways than one."

P.G. Wodehouse: For Christmas, and Forever

This year - because certain times of year are special times - I took it on myself to take care of everybody’s literary Christmas gift needs, by way of a special little piece of publishing. It's called Highballs for Breakfast: The Very Best of P.G. Wodehouse on the Joys of a Good Stiff Drink. 

It is, in essence, a compendium of all the nailed-on funniest bits in Wodehouse’s colossal oeuvre that are to do with drinks, drinking and drinkers. It comes in a lush small-format hardback from Hutchinson Books, priced £9.99, and it’s out now. Be assured, it's only about 8% me, more like 92%-proof Wodehouse comedy gold. You don’t have to thank me, you're very welcome, be assured it was nothing but fun.

A common problem with authors who wrote well about alcohol – Scott Fitzgerald, say, or Charles Bukowski – is that often they were alcoholics, with all the misery that entails. Wodehouse, though, flies breezily free of such gloom. One of the great tonics of his famous comic writing is its sense that happiness may be reliably found through the ‘life-restoring fluid’ contained in ‘the magic bottle.’ And a tonic is what this book is meant to be - the gin or vodka component I leave to you.

The i newspaper had a little feature around the book last week, and the Mr Porter website has also given it generous coverage.

When in 1974 MGM released That's Entertainment!, an edited compilation of joyous life-enhancing extracts from the studio's library of great movie musicals, the lobby poster boasted the rather brilliant tagline: ‘Boy. Do we need it now.’ Here in 2016 that’s rather how I feel about my Wodehouse tome. Even more so than usually right now, a stiff drink and a laugh feel like badly-needed solaces, and I can see that being the case for the rest of the decade at least.

On the subject of Wodehouse’s general greatness as a writer: I came to him a little later in life than some, probably because of issues such as a base, brute class-bound prejudice toward books about people who have butlers. In truth it’s been writers of the left from Orwell to Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn who’ve probably done the most to spread Wodehouse’s renown around the houses and constituencies. Once I had properly read and digested works of the order of Right Ho Jeeves, Joy in the Morning and The Code of the Woosters, the scales were off my eyes for keeps. I now like to think I am playing my own minor role in spreading the good word about the great man.

N.B. Any aspiring writer can learn from Wodehouse – his craft and his practice provide models for more than just the comic forms. He noticed things, kept good notebooks, was powerfully curious in company, planned his works meticulously and then drafted and re-drafted them until all was well-minted and ringing. Above all, he persevered, overcame repeated rejection, poured his ideas into new bottles whenever he had to, and kept grafting hard right up to the blessed end.

Bookhugger column #6: Novelists talking on telly

My Bookhugger column last month (last week, frankly) was inspired by the wonderful BBC4 archive series In Their Own Words, culled from the Corporation's back-catalogue of interviews with major British 20th-century novelists. Television does indeed compel us to look at books, so long as the programme-making and writing in question have sufficient spark. It took a while for TV to 'do' book-chat without too many excruciating pauses, but P.G.Wodehouse, here c. mid-1950s, biting amiably but hard on the end of every query, shows himself to be ahead of his time, whatever the culture once thought.

Yer actual Brit-fascist, or Roderick Spode's eternal return

Aryan fascism? My take on the subject is clear to me as the nose on my face, and I've held said view for years, even though it probably only took me about five seconds to form it - as quickly, in other words, as it takes a racist to figure out his measure of a man based on the colour of the epidermis. Still - and yes, call me shallow - but doesn't it strike you too that those in our society who decide to speak up loudly and proudly about a 'master race' (presuming all the while to count themselves as staunch members of said societal backbone) always look to be made out of the most paltry genetic material? You never get the sense that such evolution-resistant specimens could ever have succeeded in getting our great big budding human race out of the trees.
The estimable James MacIntyre of the New Statesman - who has himself done time as a BBC politics producer, putting wise words into the earpieces of adept-if-overpaid anchormen - says all that needs saying here about the risible performance of our state broadcaster last week. Meanwhile, in the absence of a Wodehouse to nail up the latest "perfect perisher" swanking about as spokesman for our Aryan inheritance, we at least have the splicing brilliance of Cassetteboy, below.