Joy comes in the morning and stays for a generation

William Trevor

A MAN OF MEANS by P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill Porpoise Books, £3.99, pp. 89

I go off the rails,' P. G. Wodehouse once wrote, 'unless I stay all the time in a sort of artificial world of my own creation. A real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb.'

It's a world that goes back to the Boer War, when Wodehouse's school stories were just beginning to entertain English schoolboys. Since then his thwarted aunts and bewildered earls, his mean men of commerce and disagreeable children have entertained almost the whole world. They've become known to all classes and all kinds of people, readers and non- readers, intellectuals and non-intellectuals, upper crust and bottom drawer. His idiom has entered language after language (to thrash that pie-faced young warthog Fittle-

worth within an inch of his life: Rosser, a deux doigts d'en crever, cette face de tarte, cette jeune verrue de Fittleworth). Only those who find laughter difficult or undignified pass by on the other side.

Performing flea of English literature in Sean O'Casey's time and 'the finest living writer of English' in Hilaire Belloc's, Wodehouse today has lost nothing of his edge, which might have surprised him in his lifetime, since he insisted that he belonged well below the salt, 'among the scurvy knaves and scullions'. If he does, it's the place to be.

Radio and television — both here and in America — have had a go at offering his genius to a rising generation, sometimes successfully enough, sometimes in so dis- mal a manner as almost to destroy it. The BBC's Wodehouse Playhouse of many years ago — John Alderton's and Pauline Collins's romp through the Mulliners caught the spirit and the nuances,' mainly because it gave neither a hint nor a nudge that anything happening on the screen was even faintly funny. More recently, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie created the seminal TV Jeeves and Wooster, but the wretched ornamentation of Jeeves dressing himself up in women's clothes is hard to forgive: you can't make Wodehouse funnier than he is, and efforts to do so can shatter in a single moment the whole elaborate edifice.

To know Wodehouse, to savour him, he must be read. His artistry and his crafts- manship belong on the page, and what he leaves to the imagination is left deliberate- ly. So A Man of Means, which consists of five related short stories from the Strand Magazine in 1914, is a more reliable reminder of what he was up to than glossy transference to another medium. In this collaboration with C. H. Bovill, with whom in the same year Wodehouse wrote a play, Nuts and Wine, we are introduced to Roland Bleke, a clerkly innocent for whom everything keeps going right.

This is not juvenilia. Wodehouse was 32, had already invented Psmith and Ukridge, and was only months away from the birth of Blandings castle and the advent of Lord Emsworth. Roland Bleke is in every way a slighter figure, which may possibly have had something to do with the constraint of working in harness, although elsewhere this was never a hindrance.

Roland has the usual adventures. He foolishly engages to marry his landlady's daughter, and on winning the Calcutta Sweepstake finds the union particularly dif- ficult to elude. By chance, he manages to

do so and by chance again — his constant ally in these simple tales — he more than quadruples his original winnings. He is inveigled into the purchase of a theatre by an actress he has a fancy for, escapes her Clutches only just in time, and ends up richer than ever when the theatre burns down.

When Lord Evenwood's daughter decides she doesn't want to marry Roland after all, her father tells her not to be child- ish. The man, he points out, is not unsight- ly. He is not

conspicuously vulgar. He does not eat peas with his knife. The man pronounces his aitch- es with meticulous care and accuracy. The man, moreover, is worth more than a quarter of a million pounds.

But Roland himself has again decided he Isn't ready for the altar either and, with the assistance of a butler who has something of the Jeeves magic about him, extricates both parties from their fate.

It's little stuff, certainly not vintage. There's no Aunt Agatha here, no Wooster, no Edwin the Boy Scout. Nothing chal- lenges the glory of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle presented the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Moustaches don't rise and fall 'like sea- weed on an ebb-tide'; whiskers don't seem to have been grown under glass. No one gazes at a beloved 'like an ostrich goggling at a brass door-knob'.

Yet nothing of the great Wodehouse extravaganza should be lost, and this small book is welcome. Wodehouse never ceased to insist that he had no message, being con- tent to leave `all that kind of thing' to the sombre boys and the swells. Yet he continues to survive, while all around him messages are forgotten. The nicest epitaph I know is the remark of a priest who was asked soon after Wodehouse's death if he would consider remembering him at Mass. 'Well, I will,' replied the priest, 'but in the case of someone who brought such joy to so many people in the course of his life, do you really think it necessary?'