Juvenilia
Plum' AD 1902
Benny Green
The literary conscience sometimes asserts itself in the most surprising ways. For several decades it was believed that P. G. Wodehouse had no desire to see his juvenilia, the early public school tales, reappear on the market, although it is doubtful if they have been as long lost to the reading public as Wodehouse and his assorted publishers appear to have assumed. I can testify that as late as 1939 several of these early volumes were still on the shelves of the St Marylebone Junior Public Library, where Wodehouse was devoured with an avaricious delight I will explain in a moment.
It now appears that either Wodehouse's unwillingness to revive his apprentice work was greatly exaggerated or that he has changed his mind, for he has lately been falling over himself in his eagerness to expedite the publication of six of the school stories, four of which are already on the bookstalls. So far from turning his back on his own literary beginnings, Wodehouse took the trouble to send to the Souvenir Press in London his own original copies of some of the volumes.
The world that Wodehouse pictures in the school stories differs from that of the better-known books in that something approximating to it seems once ' to have existed. The difference is that whereas nothing remotely resembling, say, The Drones ever flourished outside Wodehouse's imagination, the face of England eighty years ago was positively pitted with schools whose pupils would have recognised in the St Austin's of The Pothunters, if not a facsimile of their own experience, then at least its romanticised fictitious projection. Which is not surprising, as Wodehouse, who began publishing the school tales in 1902, had still been a pupil at one of these very schools only two years before. Wisden's Almanack for 1901 records that at Brighton on June 2, 1900, in the match between Brighton College and Dulwich College, the visitors opened the bowling with Wodehouse and N. A. Knox, a curiosity of this partnershp being the unexpected later confluence of the careers of the two men. Wodehouse enjoyed a
brilliant career as a musical comedy librettist, while Knox became so en amoured of that same tinsel world that by 1910, by which time he had already opened the bowling for England in two Test
matches, he was neglecting the sporting for the dramatic world by appearing nightly at Daly's in The Dollar Princess.
It is these two influences, of cricket and musical comedy, which are most in evidence in the Wodehouse school tales.
Not only are the plots largely preoccupied with cricket matches, but the language itself reflects the author's affection for and knowledge of the game. In A Prefect's Uncle, a well-turned fable whose Ansteyesque overtones stem from the fact that the uncle turns out to be much younger
and much smaller than the prefect, thetext is sprinkled with names like Ranjitsinhji, Jessop and Tyldesley, and at one point Wodehouse actually coins the adjective " Palairetic " in reference to the elegance of somebody's batting technique.
As for musical comedy, it is noticeable that Wodehouse the master-quoter, the arch snapper-up of other people's highly considered trifles, has already digested his W. S. Gilbert whole and clearly expects his readers to have done the same. So that when Farnie, the prefect's uncle, tries to borrow from several friends at once, he likes "the notion of being turned into a sort of limited liability company, like the Duke of Plaza Toro."
But what were elementary school pupils from working-class homes like mine doing reading such books forty years on? If George Orwell is to be believed, which in this context of course he is not, we were being indoctrinated by reactionary jackals into accepting a lifetime of subservience to the type of boys who attended St Austin's. Orwell, who acquired his famous intimate knowledge of the proletarian schoolboy mind by attending Eton, spoke much hard truth in his time, none of it in connection with Wodehouse or boys' weeklies. In his Defence of P. G. Wodehouse, in which he postulated the interesting theory that Wodehouse couldn't possibly have been a quisling because he never had enough sense, Orwell writes, "It is nonsense to talk of 'Fascist tendencies' in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all "; and again, "Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word ' Fascism ' or ' Nazism '."
In retrospect it is positively stupefying that neither Wodehouse nor any of his friends ever beat Orwell about the head with a copy of The Code of the Woosters (1938), whose Roderick Spode is a priceless reduction to total absurdity of the totalitarian ideal, whom Wodehouse derides throughout the text as "The Dictator," and who is finally exposed as a lingerie entrepreneur, at which Wooster remarks, " You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothing. One or the other. Not both." It seems that Orwell, who once asked for a left-wing comic, occasionally became one.
As to the hunger of my schoolboy generation for the anachronisms of Wodehouse's school yarns, it is explained by the fact that the only other way we knew of assuaging it was to fork out twopence for the Magnet or the Gem. Nobody who examines A Prefect's Uncle or The White Feather or the rest of them, can fail to be struck by the resemblances to Frank Richards, who began compiling the Gem in 1907 and the Magnet a year later. But it was Wodehouse who, in these early fables of inky fags and study fires at dusk, unwittingly released distant echoes of diaphanous lunacies to come. At one point the extraordinary Farnie, who changes schools the way most people change their underwear, with relief but without deep thought, is challenged by a sarcastic adversary. Across the gulf of seventy years we perceive the authentic ambience as Farnie, "in a series of three remarks, reduced him, figuratively speaking, to a • small and palpitating spot of grease."
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