Delicious Trifles

...They felt warm and prickly...

...The rest of the book contains a number of droll stories that won the author his early fame...

...Due to the public's preoccupation with golf, cricket, croquet, horse-racing, and Olympic games—and the abolition of the Army upon receipt of certain trenchant letters from the Scotch and the Socialists—the invaders encounter no military resistance...

...He wandered through dry places seeking rest, and at intervals he would smile evilly, and jot down a note on the back of an envelope...

...It was one of those crisp, sunny, bracing days with a pleasant tang in the air, and had circumstances been different from what they were I should no doubt have been feeling at the peak of my form, chatting gaily, waving to passing rustics, possibly even singing some light snatch...

...He brooded silently apart from the madding crowd...

...The Swoop and Other Stories, early fiction rediscovered by David Jason, contains the long title story written when Wodehouse was 27 and therefore considerably harsher and more critical of society than in his later work...

...Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon...

...Like all of them, however, Wodehouse loved the lilt and wielding of words, and could conjure up a hilarious character by savory exaggeration...

...feature an unscrupulous youth, Bradshaw ("later conspicuous in the celebrated European, African and Asiatic Pork Pie and Ham Sandwich Supply Co...

...They give vent to annoyance only when the Russians walk across the bowling screen at Kenning-ton Oval or the Germans dig a trench into the turf at Queen's Club...

...and bristle with schoolboy scorn for the enemy: "Mellish was our form-master and once a term a demon entered into Mellish...

...Perelman describing Jeanette MacDonald as "the Iron Butterfly" and Nelson Eddy as "the Singing Capon...

...Somehow these fish images, absurd as they make their subjects, show up our virile American animal metaphors of cat, jackal, weasel, and skunk as shamefully abusive, something Wodehouse never saw any need to be...

...A nation of shopkeepers, the English promptly raise their prices...

...frauds"), who prepares for his exam on Thucydides by reading The Pickwick Papers...

...They were published in the Captain, a magazine "for boys and old boys...

...Undoubtedly, his most popular character is the peerless Jeeves, resourceful and erudite valet, a natural aristocrat who knows his lower-class place...

...Up to this point in his career, Wode-house was sufficiently tuned in to the 20th century to acknowledge its vices but, according to Malcolm Mugge-ridge's "Introduction," he was not for most of his life on its wavelength...

...Mildness was his special limitation and gift, allowing him the large part of a century for fastidious craftsmanship and an amicable acerbity that often impelled him to compare his fellow men with fish: they look like a "gaffed salmon" or a "bewildered halibut," "cringe like a salted snail" or wear the "reproachful look of a dying newt...

...This sorry pass the author attributes to such basic British failings as Socialist propensities, dogged cheerfulness and preternatural love of sports...

...Wodehouse (turning out at least a book a year up to his death at 93) built securely around the romance of social distinctions...

...His novels—with balmy titles like Love among the Chickens, Heavy Weather, Jeevesandthe Tie that Binds, and No Nudes Is Good Nudes—are monuments to trifles, but British trifles can be rich and exquisite treats...

...His humor is wrung from delicious implausihilities: names like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Honoria Glossop, Stiffy Byng, and Stinker Pinker...

...or Bertie Wooster's unquestioning loyalty to his Aunt Dahlia, "as genial a soul as ever downed a veal cutlet...

...There is without question an Olympian element in Wodehouse that might account for such imperviousness, as well as for his unswerving high spirits...

...Man and boy, Jeeves,' I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven miles,' I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.' "We were bowling along in the old two-seater on our way to Totleigh Towers, self at the wheel, Jeeves at my side...

...Beneath the chilly state of the populace, they experienced all the sensations of a man who has come to a strange dinner party in a tweed suit when everybody else has dressed...

...These notes, collected and printed closely on the vilest paper, made up the examination questions...

...in an age of music halls, they enlist Russian and German generals as stage entertainers...

...That is Muggeridge's explanation for the by now famous episode in which the novelist, after being interned by the Nazis in 1940, was inveigled by a CBS reporter into talking flippantly about his recent experiences in a series of broadcasts from Berlin, where he joined his wife...

...Well, yes, sir, I must confess I did gather the substance of the conversation.' '"Very well, then, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?' '"Certainly, a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would seem to have been precipitated, sir.'" Well-being floats from the Wodehouse pages as Bertie imbibes some of the "strengthening liquid," and the gratifyingly stylized, predictable drama reenacts itself...

...Is that what sends us in pursuit of the English and diverts us in the 75 novels that P.G...

...Immoderately exercised over some miniscule quandary (like his Aunt Dahlia asking him to steal a cream pitcher), Wooster turns to a Jeeves who is at first bland, noncommittal and only formally concerned, but who inevitably intervenes at the eleventh hour with his "giant brain" to rescue his distraught employer from the soup...

...In addition, they prove to be unnervingly accommodating, going so far as to acclaim the demolition of London's statues by shelling as an esthetic improvement...

...Wodehouse's celebration of the insignificant soothes the weary pate addled by the makework intellectual clamor of our time...

...Not for him the stern metaphors of an S.J...

...Though he belongs to the company of the world's great humorists, he never aspired to Mark Twain's philosophical didacticism, Perelman's dazzling exasperation with the whole galaxy of contemporary hucksters, or Peter de Vries' brilliant grasp of the distortions that social changes wreak in language and personality—and his work is surely not in the same class with the eccentric mind and viscera-haunting comedy of Dickens...

...or Jeeves' observation, when a worried look overtakes Bertie, that "The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...

...In real life, too, Wodehouse was rarely encountered other than beaming...

...No less devoted and firmly allied than Prince Hal and Falstaff or McMillan and Wife, this benign Edwardian couple gives solid testimony that the world is not a menacing place...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp A foreign cynic who saw Americans mired in the nougaty entanglements of maids and masters on the BBC's Upstairs, Downstairs a few years ago, and finds us this season lifted up by the spectacle of Lillie Lang-try's social climb, might believe we are pushovers for a touch of class...

...The mottled oyster,' I repeated...

...Sir?' '"Don't pretend you don't know all about it, Jeeves.' "He dropped the mask...

...If this is not vintage Wodehouse, it is astute enough about the likelihood of popular acquiescence in the face of a well-behaved invader, and indeed an eerie preview of the French collaboration in World War II...

...The day of the invasion, the stop press news starts with cricket scores: "Fry not out, 104...

...and although all humor shares to some degree the quality of disdain, his prose, particularly when he got into his stride in the 1930s, tempers it to the peculiar amiability of the British disposition...

...But they are taken aback by the commercial aggressiveness of their captives...

...Most demoralizing to the alien troops is "the cold, contemptuous, patronizing gaze of the Englishman...

...The worst Wodehouse could say of a thoroughly unpalatable specimen is, "He was a man whom I would have hesitated to invite to come with me on a long walking tour...

...It gave the invaders a perpetual feeling of doing the wrong thing...

...Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran...

...Still, almost any exchange between Jeeves and his dithery yet likable employer, Bertie Wooster, makes it plain that the Wodehouse charm lies not' in the privilege of snobbery but simply in British beatitude...

...But the young Wodehouse already displays his now proverbial sang-froid as England is invaded by nine countries (a motley assortment including Monaco, China and Moroccan brigands...