Summer Moonshine / Money in the Bank

I've been  revisiting a number of Wodehouse's "light novels" - that is, the ones that are outside the Jeeves and Blandings series. The titles in question are: Summer Moonshine, Quick Service, Money in the Bank, and Spring Fever, written between the end of the 1930s and the end of the 1940s. I wanted to check my theory that these novels shared essentially the same plot.

I think my theory was wrong, in the end, but there are undoubtedly many links and similarities between them. The "gall of an army mule" hero who plunges into outrageous acts in pursuit of the loved one; impostures; the squire of the manor who is desperately hard up for cash; the dodgy butler; the theft that is not a theft; the "false fiancé" who sings "Trees" and is entirely without zip and enterprise; these elements recur in two or more of the titles, rise to the surface and disappear again, mingle in different combinations. I've already written about Spring Fever. Actually, I thought I'd written about Quick Service too, but I can't find it, so maybe I haven't. I'll have to rectify that, and soon.

Anyhow. Let's look at Summer Moonshine.

It's a slightly odd beast. Dating from 1937, it's from the same period as The Code of the Woosters and Uncle Fred in the Springtime: Wodehouse was at the very top of his game: and yet there is something just a little bit "off". Richard Usborne has drawn attention to the unusual sense of real bitterness shown towards the character of the Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek. The scene depicted by Ionicus above is another odd spot, touching on one of Wodehouse's weaknesses, an apparently genuine apprehension in the face of "ordinary people", depicted as a hostile mob. (You can see it popping up even in his earliest school novels.) The heroine, Jane Abbott, has rescued Mr Bulpitt, who has been bopped on the snoot and mislaid his false teeth, and brings him in to the local town, only to find her car surrounded by locals who become swiftly convinced she has half-killed the man in a road accident. There is genuine menace in the scene as the crowd threatens to start baying for her blood. And yet, elsewhere, the light Wodehouse tone is there, and in spades.

Here's the opening paragraph, in Linotype Times. The first Penguin edition was in 1966, and the illustration dates from 1972.

It's a bit startling to see a gag about weather forecasts on the BBC cropping up so early, especially as it still works.

By the way, reading Summer Moonshine shortly after the much later Company for Henry (1967) induces a certain sense of deja-vu; Walsingham Hall and Ashby Hall are clearly the same hideous building under different aliases, the selling of both being a major plot point.

Money in the Bank (1942) is a minor favourite of mine, partly but not entirely because of its unusual history: Wodehouse wrote it whilst in a German interment camp, but there are few overt traces of this in the text, unless the fact that much of the action takes place in a stately home turned health farm with a somewhat prison-like atmosphere counts in that respect. The cover, dating from 1978, is unfortunately not one of Ionicus's successes.

Lord Uffenham and Jeff Miller (the two gentlemen to the left) have much too sinister an air, and Jeff in particular has the look of a Boris Karloff fiend, which is hard to justify from the text. While the cover is not a complete failure, it's certainly a bad sign when the best feature appears to be the chair.

Here are the opening paragraphs, set in Linotype Pilgrim - an unusual choice in the Penguin Wodehouses. The title was first published by Penguin in 1964.

It is an astonishing achievement that Wodehouse was able to devise and write this typically intricate farce whilst imprisoned by a foreign power in the middle of a world war. Of course, his insouciance in the circumstances were to become a factor in his disfavour as events panned out; fortunately, that whole saga is not something I need to detail here.

Lord Uffenham, it has been found, is based closely on one of Wodehouse's fellow inmates. Otherwise, there is a very slight coarsening of tone attributable to mingling in mixed society, but not so much that you would notice if you were not being very, very sensitive about it. ("He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.")

There's just one more thing I want to mention. You may know of the Hollywood rom-com concept of the "meet-cute" - literally, the cute incident in which the couple who are about to fall in love meet. Billy Wilder talked about it in an interview. Well, Wodehouse was in his way a master of the meet-cute (see A Damsel in Distress, for instance), and Money in the Bank has possibly the most outrageous and the funniest of these. If you don't know it, I won't spoil it for you, except to mention that it involves rock-cakes.