Wodehousing again

I started off wanting this to be a piece about Wodehouse dedications - but after I started, I realized that the excellent folks at Madame Eulalie had already done it - and much more comprehensively than I ever could.
So thought I'd make it about Wodehouse fans and fandom and references to Plum in books and letters and so on
If I was conducting a quiz for Wodehouse fans, I'd probably begin with the question "Which is the first novel by any author referenced by Wodehouse?", and you would reply Great Expectations and you would be perfectly right. But I'm not conducting a quiz, and I'm trying to describe the kind of wiki-walking tab-exploding that looking up Plum can lead you to.
For example, there's this phrase "name and fame". It's not very common these days, but there were quite a few of my relatives who used it - the older ones, who had had an English education but preferred to do their reading in Tamil or Telugu. I've often hear uncles and grand-uncles say that someone has sought "name and fame" - just that phrase in English, the rest in Tamil. But looking at Eulalie tells me that the phrase is a reference to a GA Henty novel. Now Henty was a person of his time, which was the mid 19th century and the Englishman was white, Christian and the apex of evolution, but if you can look past all that, the books are quite fun, in an old-fashioned sort of way.
The Annotations page at Eulalie is a whole fund of information, and provides so many rabbit-holes with just the small subset of books it covers.

It's funny, but it's also so sad. Poor Eliza

The Pothunters took me to Barry Pain's Eliza novels. Another school story took me to F Anstey and Hurree Bungsho Jabberjee, who was obviously the inspiration for Charles Hamilton's Hurree Jamset Ramsingh. But Anstey was also referenced by Charles Rainier in Random Harvest - specifically, the novel Vice Versa ("if you remember your Vice-Versa"), which I later dug up and read and found a precursor to the 100+ body swap books.

But no. I still cringe when I read Baboo Jabberjee, BA

Talking of Hilton, Wodehouse mentions him in one of his letters - saying that he enjoyed Goodbye Mr Chips - which he naturally would have, given that Dulwich, much like Brookfield was a respectable public school, though not in the Eton and Harrow class. But its a pity he stopped reading Hilton after being told that Lost Horizon was a bunch of mystical mumbo-jumbo. There's - at least to my mind - a lot of overlap between Hilton and Plum, and I think he really would have enjoyed Random Harvest or Time and Time Again, and their essential Englishness.
One book that Plum references in his school stories (I know Kipling does, and I think Plum does too, atleast indirectly, when Psmith asks Mike if he is the boy who turns to drink in the final chapter)  That I never did try to read was Eric, Or Little By Little by Frederic Farrar (who, it turns out, was one of Darwin's pallbearers and should not be judged by his literary output) - because, to misquote Kipling, we don't want "any beastly Ericking".

Clubland

I think Psmith in the City was the first book to mention a club - The Senior Conservative. And there was a whole genre of books in popular Brit-lit that started in the 1910s-20s, featuring the so-called Clubland heroes. There were the Bulldog Drummond novels by Sapper with the eponymous hero,  butt-ugly in the books, Ronald Colman handsome in the movies. And one of Drummond's sidekicks, Algy, to all intents and purposes, is a spatted, monocled and seemingly imbecile specimen who would have been greeted by a flying bread roll when he entered the Drones Club. In fact, Algy refers to Plum as a "master brain" in a typical speech in Challenge, the last Drummond novel.

"I was just trying to get the tempo and the first note of the seven-fold Amen," explained Algy. "No, it eludes me. But how right you are—how very right. There is just one academic point, however, on which I would like to join issue with you. Do we exist? Or is it just the figment of a disordered stomach? If you carefully study the works of Einstein and P. G. Wodehouse you will have to agree, that amongst the master brains there is considerable doubt on the subject. Are you really you, or are you a sweet ethereal wraith, wrapped round a central electron?

I prefer Ronald Colman and Joan Bennett, though Phyllis isn't in this

That's not exactly the kind of thing that Bertie would say, but it just might be possible to imagine one of Wodehouse's buzzer heroes (I wonder who came up with that wonderful description) making a similar speech - all Algy does is mix in some obfuscating stupidity.
But maybe Sapper was paying Plum back, because of ...
Ok. In the first Drummond book, the adventure kicks off with Drummond's  valet and cook discussing an advertisement in the paper.

... 'Demobilised officer,' she read slowly, 'finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential. Would be prepared to consider permanent job if suitably impressed by applicant for his services. Reply at once Box X10.'

Three years later, a similar advertisement kicks off an adventure involving diamond necklaces, impersonations, pale parabolas of joy (and its less famous sibling, 'the scented, sibilant silence that shimmered where we sat') and flower pots.

Then there are the Berry novels, by Dornford Yates - which, frankly, while being set in the same Edwardian era (yes, the purists will quibble, but you know what I mean) which, while being both pleasant and contemporaneous, do not reference the master - nor do his Chandos thrillers.
Which brings me to the longest lived clubland hero of them all.
Simon Templar made his appearance in 1928, was featured in a movie which had Val Kilmer as the Saint and the amazing Elizabeth Shue in 1997 (it was terrible) and people were talking about a Saint TV serial just a couple of years ago. And Charteris liked Wodehouse, and was his friend. He dedicated The Saint's Getaway to "To P.G. Wodehouse who had time to say a word for the Saint stories, when he could have written them so much better himself". In fact, there's a lot of Wodehousian similie-ing in Charteris - who named his protagonist's Lestrade "Claude Eustace". Here's a sample describing Inspector Claude Eustace Teal after a particularly exasperating encounter with Simon Templar:

"He bit on his chewing gum with the ferocious energy of a hungry cannibal tasting a mouthful of tough missionary"

Another person who Wodehouse adored - and dedicated Very Good, Jeeves to was the author E Phillips Oppenheim - probably the person who most made the Clubland Hero trope. Oppenheimer's most famous book today is probably The Great Impersonation, but he wrote so many - more than a hundred novels, as well as many short stories. To get an idea of Oppenheim's books, here are a few verses that one particular critic had to say about him: (from Roy Glashan's amazing website, an artifact of the web circa 2000)

I have read your latest book, Oppenheim;
it involves a swarthy crook, Oppenheim;
and a maid with languid eyes,
and a diplomat who lies,
and a dowager who sighs, Oppenheim, Oppenheim,
and your glory never dies, Oppenheim.

Oh, your formula is great, Oppenheim!
Write your novels by the crate, Oppenheim!
When we buy your latest book
we are sure to find the crook,
and the diplomat and dook, Oppenheim, Oppenheim,
and the countess and the cook, Oppenheim!
....
If you'd only rest a day, Oppenheim!
If you'd throw your pen away, Oppenheim!
If there'd only come a time
when we'd see no yarn or rhyme
'neath the name of Oppenheim, Oppenheim, Oppenheim.
It would truly be sublime, Oppenheim!

In his WSJ piece on Oppenheim, Michael Dirda (another Plum fanatic), says "As early as 1915, Wodehouse, no less, noted that Oppenheim’s 'easy, distinguished style, the naturalness of his dialogue, and the wonderfully expert story construction in them made his novels unique'"
Oppenheim himself dedicated one of his books to Plum, saying "To My Friend ‘PLUM’ WODEHOUSE Who tells me what I can scarcely believe, that he enjoys my stories as much as I do his".
I have the complete Oppenheim on my Kindle, a steal at Rs 44. And one of my favourite books is The Pawns Count. The Pawns Count is a spy story, but is so much like Leave it to Psmith - without the Wodehouse language, of course, but still quite easy reading. Lutchester, the hero, is much like Psmith, with all the Xanatos Speed Chess-playing, and Pamela Van Dyne, the heroine, combines beauty and brains and an appreciation for eccentricity. Instead of a necklace, its a secret formula, instead of Joe Keeble and Connie, there is the political uncle and his ambitious wife. And instead of Oily Carlisle and Miss Peavey, there is a German millionaire.
Oppenheim, as well as Sapper, were models for Ian Fleming - who makes one mention of a Wodehouse novel in his best novel, from Russia with love. It's the first chapter,. 'Roseland' and Fleming, with his famous 'descriptive lust' is talking about the Russian assassin who has been trained to impersonate an English "chentleman"

"To judge by the glittering pile, this had been, or was, a rich man. It contained the typical membership badges of the rich man's club--a money clip, made of a Mexican fifty-dollar piece and holding a substantial wad of banknotes, a well-used gold Dunhill lighter, an oval gold cigarette case with the wavy ridges and discreet turquoise button that means Fabergé, and the sort of novel a rich man pulls out of the bookcase to take into the garden--The Little Nugget--an old P. G. Wodehouse."

This post started as something, and ended up somewhere else entirely. I still wish I could talk about Anthea Bell looking to Wodehouse for inspiration in translating Asterix in Britain, or Sinclair Lewis ordering all the Wodehouse books to keep him company on a sea voyage. And as this lovely piece by Charles E. Gould, Jr. points out, Lewis actually provided a blurb for Pigs Have Wings:

P.G. Wodehouse has become, as Sinclair Lewis put it, ‘not an author but a whole department of rather delicate art. He is the master of the touchingly inane…of the ultimate and lordly deadpan.

I want to talk about Lawrence Durrell saying that the Mulliner stories were an inspiration for his own Antrobus stories, and oh ... so much more. Maybe, in another couple of years, I will.

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1. If the white rabbit from Alice had done his job in the perpetuation of his species, and each of his descendents built their own rabbit holes, there would have been 7.594347e+133 rabbit holes by the time Wodehouse died (assuming six babies each month during the mating season of four months, as rabbits gestate for 1 month).