A Ghost on Fleet Street

...and a few chapters set in a hall where Cloyster teaches lower class youths the art of boxing...

...and, in a description that could apply to Wodehouse's books, London of an evening is "quiet with the peace of a humming top, warm with the heat generated from mellow asphalt and resinous wood paving...

...11.95 Reviewed by Brian Thomas Not George Washington makes its American debut after having appeared in England more than 70 years ago...

...According to his biographer, David A. Jasen, who edited this edition, Wodehouse made a point of reading Shakespeare all the way through at least once every year...

...worldly values triumph despite the fortunes of the characters...

...As in their works, he introduces idealisms only to mock them...

...The most salient likeness between creator and creation, though, is that both worked very hard and turned out a great deal of material on a wide range of subjects...

...he simply paid more attention to the world around him than is commonly thought...

...Far from being the product of an apprentice novelist, it reveals how early Wodehouse fell firmly into step with the eccentrics of English comedy: Ben Jon-son, Thomas Love Peacock, Ronald Firbank, and the young Aldous Huxley...

...The laughs ought to beguile even the dourest moralist...

...I was surprised by how many "naturalistic" details there are in Not George Washington...

...Wodehouse takes the practice to comical extremes...

...For what suits Wodehouse men best is a cloister of bubbly bachelors who are absorbed in the childish pleasures of eating and drinking...

...The hero, and her fiance, is James Orlebar Cloyster, a name as apt as any in Jonson's plays...

...With accuracy of hindsight we can say, "Young Wodehouse shows a great deal of promise...

...Such lack of depth is often condemned as a failing of the tradition Wodehouse inhabits, but he consciously, and cleverly, turns it to great advantage—often boobytrapping critics of his comic method...

...There is an exuberance of language in Not George Washington that makes irrelevant the triviality of the subject and the author's sunny indifference to Important Issues...

...But he soon discovers that his visions of inspired writers who scoff at workaday drones are illusory, and sets out to become a well-paid hack journalist...

...a mordant excursus on why it is perfectly rational for a young man in the Foreign Office to marry a chorine...

...In his Introduction, Jasen shows that Not George Washington is in part autobiographical...

...They are always deceiving themselves that they have found the woman, but marriage means as little to them as it does to the roues in a Restoration comedy...

...which set the race of waves to the ridges of Fermanin, where arose no shrill, heated voice crying, 'Love-forty...

...Take Margaret Goodwin, who speaks adoringly of her Bertie Woos-ter-like fiance and gushes about Guernsey, where they are vacationing: "Nature was my hostess...

...Listen to the opinion of Margaret's mother on The Girl Who Waited: "That there is an absence, my dear Margie, of any relationship with life, that not a single character is in any degree human, that passion and virtue and vice and real feeling are wanting?this surprises me more than I can tell you...

...There is a sodden bargee whom Cloyster uses as a ghost for his verse, an inarticulate lout who gets a reputation as "the modern Burns...

...As in most Wodehouse novels, the plot is busy yet has the least number of moving parts necessary: Cloy-ster's conquest of London, his travails with the ghosts he commissions and his rescue by his transcendantly resourceful fiancee...

...He is finally rescued by Margaret, who "masters the exact shade of drivel" that is required for the London stage and writes a smash hit, TheGirl Who Waited—underCloy-ster's name...

...You have proved that you happen to possess the quality...

...It is possible to read this book, for example, without noticing how unromantic and unsentimental it is: After all, the unscrupulous journalist who is its hero finally quits Grub Street to marry his love...

...A character is "cheerfully conscious of being well on the road to intoxication...

...Wodehouse would have appreciated the irony of a young man's book appearing on these shores 70 years late, long after the author's reputation is secure...

...The novelist, for instance, credits his hero with a romance bearing the Wodehousian title, When It Was Lurid, and with a piece he actually wrote himself significantly called, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings...

...I had hoped for originality...

...Still, it is merely on the surface that this novel is less harrowing than, say, one of Ronald Fir-bank's...

...To disguise his reputation, he submits his various efforts under the names of friends and pays them a commission—a deception that prompts the title of the book...

...a scene in a dilapidated gentlemen's club that cries out for footnotes to catch all the topical allusions whizzing past...

...Wodehouse wrote this spoof of diffident bachelors, journalists and ghost writers when he was 26 years old...

...which decked foliage in more splendid sheen than anything the local costumier could achieve, and whose poplars swayed more rhythmically than the dancers of the Assembly Rooms...

...The novel's several narrators each have the same giddy vigor of expression...

...The practice shows...

...But even though we can glimpse Wodehouse's wrists reaching into the puppets, their personalities are distinct...

...At its most brutal and amoral, this tradition is frequently so shocking that its elegance and comedy are not appreciated...

...His characters are too boyish to be really nasty, and he is less interested in withering satire than in playful parody...

...The froth splashes around an armature of steel...

...of surrounding a situation which is improbable enough to be convincing with that absurdly mechanical conversation which the theatre-going public demands...

...Cloyster travels through several strata of contemporary London, affording us gritty views rarely associated with Wodehouse...

...and an astringent humor dissolves whatever is not hard and durable...

...Cloyster does not want his name overexposed on the literary marketplace, lest Margaret see how widely read his writings are and, encouraged by his success, circle a wedding date on the calendar...

...a crowd of costermongers pelts the hero with "passe tomatoes" and other inesculent flora until their ringleader is humiliated, whereupon "a potato, vast and nobbly, fell from his palsied hand...

...Indeed, Wodehouse's rendition of the mishaps that befall "artistic" boxers when they confront a street brawler is as instructive as it is funny...

...This productivity is what sets the plot into motion...

...As your mother, I am disappointed...

...But Wodehouse always was one of its more genial practitioners...

...Cloyster finds his reputation and his earnings slipping away as his "ghosts" steal his glory and clamor for bigger commissions...

...When he must go to London to seek his fortune as a writer before he can marry Margaret, Cloyster is positively relieved...

...His characters, nonetheless, are cartoons...

...As your literary well-wisher, I stifle my maternal feelings and congratulate you unreservedly...

...From a wisp of a plot suggested by his friend Herbert Westbrook, P.G...

...Nature, which provided me with balmy zephyrs that were more comforting than buttered toast...

...a clerk is referred to as a "ledger lugger...

...Margaret Goodwin is a maiden ablaze with love for her dissipated man, but we laugh and laugh and laugh...

...He tries to invade Bohemia and become one of "the charming and impoverished artists whom our country refuses to recognize...

...We predict along and productive career...

...Not that Wodehouse is Zola plus fizz...