Tales of St Austin's

One of the (many) reasons why I am revisiting Wodehouse at the moment is that I am trying to find an answer to the ridiculous question: "How did he do it?" There are other writers whose style is more precise and fastidious. Wodehouse wrote in echoes of other writing: in quotations, old jokes, set phrases, and mangled clichés.  There are lots of writers about the place who do just that, and they're rotten. The difference (one of the differences) is that Wodehouse did it deliberately and with relish for the language. Even when he is romping through the most ridiculous slang phrases of 1920 vintage, he makes of them a sequence of precious gems.

He makes it look utterly easy. But, when you try it yourself, you find it really isn't.

I want to write a comic novel. But I always fizzle out after a few thousand words when I realise that what I have written is as funny as something that is not at all funny. So now I have reduced my ambitions. I'm trying to write a funny short story. It doesn't matter how short. If it has a beginning, middle and end, and fits in a few genuinely humorous cracks, I'll be well satisfied.

Wodehouse was a master of the funny short story. Some of them are as near perfection as you're likely to find. I read his short story collection Ukridge (1924) a few months ago and... well, if you take just the first page of the first story in the collection ("Ukridge's Dog College"), and you read it with the eye of a writer trying to work out how to do it, the sheer technique is flabbergasting. In a few short lines of dialogue we know just what kind of character Ukridge is, his relationship with the narrator, and why the narrator is telling the story, as well as some of the high points of Ukridge's speaking style and his sartorial shortcomings, not to mention throwing in, at my reckoning, five excellent laughs along the way. And it all looks as easy and relaxed as an idle conversation after dinner. It's enough to make a budding writer throw in the towel and turn his face to the wall.

(I mention all this here because I don't think I will include the Ionicus cover for Ukridge in this series: it is one of his failures.)

So let us instead turn back the clock and look at Wodehouse's first collection of short stories: Tales of St Austin's (1903). It was his third published volume, after the public-school novels The Pothunters (1902) and A Prefect's Uncle (1903); but all the short stories, bar one, had been originally published in magazine form, and they include the earliest pieces that Wodehouse selected to publish in book form. It also happens to be the earliest Wodehouse book that Ionicus did a cover for.

It's an excellent example of Ionicus's "group photo" style of cover: a nicely grouped selection of characters, in characteristic poses. We know immediately what kind of characters these characters are, from the keen cricketer and equally keen rugger player to the priggish schoolmaster and the more jolly and humorous one in the middle distance. The frank and cheerful expression of the boy looking directly out at us is just right. The view of St Austin's School itself, complete with flourishing trees and the inevitable cricket score board, is attractive enough almost to make one hanker for the dear old days when one went through the unadulterated hell of school oneself.

The Penguin edition of this book was originally published in 1978 by Puffin, the children's arm of that publisher; but this is the full Penguin from 1983. Surprisingly, the book does not state the name of the font used. However, here's what it looks like:

As we can see, there is a trace in the style of what Wodehouse would achieve in later years; but as we can also see, he's struggling. Why does he give three words and then say there is no other word for it? If it's a joke, it fizzles out. Well, never mind; Wodehouse was only 22 when the book came out. (Yes: twenty-two.)

The stories are simple, not a patch on the brilliant little firework displays later achieved. They are anecdotes, sometimes leading up to a nice little punchline that the mature writer would have disdained; sometimes shaggy dog stories like "The Manoeuvres of Charteris." There are sub-Punch essays like the one called "Work". But they all have a lovely freshness about them, as of a craftsman trying out his new tools. The mischievous amorality of the Wodehouse work is here: school, in his world, is not for doing work or getting ahead, but for games, for breaking bounds, for annoying your teachers and getting one up on the folk in authority. He would never have said it, but the Wodehouse world is completely anarchistic. I am almost certain that his school stories would never be reprinted today for a children's audience; they are not moral enough.

And, I may add, I would be proud to be able to write a short story as good as "How Pillingshot Scored."