Sam the Sudden / Company for Henry

This Penguin edition of Sam the Sudden (1925), first printed in 1974 and here in a reprint from 1978, includes a Preface written by Wodehouse in 1972. It starts "I have always been particularly fond of this one." I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.

Despite a mannequin-like suggestion in the figure of Sam above (Ionicus's old failing) I do like this cover. The details in the décor, and the maid Claire's impassiveness in the face of Sam's excitement (this is a key moment when he realises he is in the house of the woman he has fallen in love with from afar), are very well done. I like the detail of the half-eaten toast which has fallen onto the carpet!

Wodehouse is of course associated with the lives of the upper crust, with toffs and their servants, enormous country houses with 52 rooms and 365 windows (366 in leap years), and so on; but he could also deal with life at a lower and more familiar level, and I especially like his Valley Fields novels, of which this is the first. Valley Fields was a very thinly disguised Dulwich, which he knew from his education at Dulwich College.

(Rereading the book a few days ago, I noticed a reference to "the faint grunting of a train as it climbed the steep gradient of Sydenham Hill." A quick glance at Google Maps shows that Sydenham Hill is the station before West Dulwich. Wodehouse must have heard the sound of that grunting train often when he was at the College.)

It is a novel of semi-detached existence, and I have always imagined the two houses Mon Repos and San Rafael to be very like the house of my parents and the house next door, though of course we didn't have a maid (!) or anything of that nature.

The hero Sam Shotter is himself a transatlantic character, brought up in England but first seen in New York. This is how the tale begins:

The type is Linotype Times, with a no-nonsense look to it that is typical of the Wodehouse titles added to Penguin's repertoire in the 1970s. I would note in passing that the opening paragraph, nine lines long, consists of a single sentence as smooth and seemingly effortless as a very smooth and effortless thing. This is typical of the easy flow of the writing throughout.

Sam the Sudden has plot similarities with other Wodehouse works of the period, including The Girl on the Boat (1922) and Bill the Conqueror (1924), but is superior to them both, more assured and less flawed. The introduction of the suburban note adds reality to the absurd and unreal doings described. There are at least two absolutely outrageous coincidences in the plot, but the reader accepts them cheerfully.

Forty-two years later, Wodehouse published Company for Henry (1967). Reading this immediately after Sam the Sudden, as I have done, emphasises the sad contrast between them. Nevertheless, I have always had a fondness for Company for Henry, and maybe that is in large part due to Ionicus's charming cover (dating from 1980):

It's one of Ionicus's best "group photo" covers, a study in green.

Here's the opening paragraph, and again we're in Linotype Times:

This time round, the opening paragraph is only seven lines, consisting of three sentences. Still, though the breath may be slightly shorter, the tone is still there, including a nice modern-period gag about Ben Casey (according to Wikipedia, "An American medical drama series that aired on ABC from 1961 to 1966"). 

I know some people rather object to Wodehouse making any reference at all to post-WW2 matters, but after all, he always made a point of current references. If he could jest about Hitler's moustache and puffed-up British Fascists in the 1930s, why not Ben Casey and the Beatles in the 1960s? Today, these too are quaint period references; and after all, dash it, he was P.G. Wodehouse! It was his privilege to choose what to write, and our privilege to read.

Nevertheless, let us be honest. This is one of Wodehouse's weaker late-period works He was in his mid-eighties and he felt the waning of his powers. He confessed somewhere that he no longer had the sustained imagination to create big comic scenes. He also had a tendency to "write short" - to set down events briefly and sparely, for instance writing the dialogue baldly and with hardly any of the narrative interjections that in his earlier works give spice and humour to the proceedings. 

These are factors that the reader should bear in mind when tackling any of Wodehouse's later novels, but what is unusual in Company for Henry is the level of frank self-borrowing. Whole passages are transplanted with minor variations from earlier works, especially Sam the Sudden and The Small Bachelor (1927). For instance, an episode from Sam the Sudden in which the hero rescues a cat from a tree becomes the "meet-cute" at the start of Company for Henry. Here is another passage from Sam the Sudden:

… which becomes after only the smallest adjustment the following in Company for Henry:

Nevertheless, there is much to savour in the later book, including some nice new one-liners, and afterwards, it is perhaps the atmosphere of it - deckchairs on the lawn, leisurely tomfoolery about the theft of a paperweight, romance and sunshine - that remains. In these times, who could ask for anything more?