Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin - A laugh riot by PG Wodehouse

Can a misfit be called a misfit in a more polite way?

In the West End of London – say at the Drones Club in Dover Street, of which he was a popular member- you would have encountered him without surprise. In the executive building of the Superba – Llewellyn, he seemed out of place. You felt he ought not to be there.

A latecomers guide to audacious cover-up

Sorry, I’m late.....Anything sensational happened in my absence?

`No’

`No earthquakes or other Acts of God?’

`No’

`No trouble brewing in the writers kraals? The natives not restless?

`No’

One liner to handle the surprises of life

In this world we must be prepared for anybody to say anything.

You too would love to be frustrated after reading this line

Sandy’s exasperation became too much for her. If she had had any more lethal weapon than a small notebook, she would have thrown it at him.

If a mere chronicler in these circumstances has a feeling of bafflement and frustration, as though he had raced to catch a train on Saturday morning and found on arrival at the station that it was Sunday.

Hen-pecked husbands, more invective words cannot describe us.

At her command he jumps through hoops and snaps lumps of sugar off his nose. He weeps with delight when she gives him a smile and trembles with fear at her frown.

Customs inspectors terrified him, but not nearly so much as she did, and he had good reason for his termors. In her professional days she had been one of the best known panther women on the silver screen, once a panther woman, always a panther woman. So he reached the conclusion that however unpleasant the alternative her wishes would have to be obeyed. But he didn’t like the prospect.

There is no better way to describe these cruel fathers of beautiful girls.

The emotions of a young lover who has planned to lunch with the girl he adores and gets her father instead are more readily imagined than described.

Is this Marital Trust or a Vouching Of The Husband’s timidness?

`Don’t be a damned fool’ said Grace `My husband wouldn’t have the nerve to cheat on me if you brought him all the girls in the Christmas number of Playboy asleep on a chair’

A Diet Detective?

`He’s on a diet’ said Grace `It was my daughter’s suggestion. And I’m going to see he sticks to it. No alcohol, no starchy foods. So search his room from time to time, and if you find he’s hiding cakes and candy and all that, tell me immediately and I’ll attend to it’.

That’s not the kindest way to describe an individual

Mr Molloy’s resemblance to an American senator of the better sort inspired in those he met, a confidence which was of the greatest help to him in life-work of selling stock in non-existent oil wells.

If only couples took inspiration from Mr and Mrs Molloy

Each respected the other’s Art, which is recognised as being the firmest foundation for a happy marriage. If Soapy Molloy made a killing, nobody could be more eager to celebrate than Dolly, and he was the first to applaud when she returned from an afternoon at the stores with objects that would come in useful about the home.

There is no better way to abash a rival

`Three heads are better than one, even if one of them’s Soapy’s’

`What’s wrong with my head?’ Soapy demanded with some heat.

`Solid Ivory’ said Chimp `And it doesn’t even look nice’

The golden rule for all married men

Married men don’t assert themselves, not if they know what’s good for them.

The golden rule for all men wanting to get married

Never marry anyone who makes conditions, and says she won’t on the dotted line unless you do something or other.

The golden rule for all women wanting to get married

I’ve had too many friend who’ve married Greek gods and spent the rest of their leisure time kicking themselves.

The hen possibly didn’t know in the future an Indian Actor will come who will make Monty look a saint

And Indeed Monty had given the wheel a dangerous twiddle, causing a meditative hen which had stepped into the road to take to itself the wings of the dove and disappear over the horizon.

If only all Bosses reposed such confidence in their subordinates

Fire you? I wouldn’t fire you if the President of the United States and his entire Cabinet fell on their knees and begged me to. If this son of a Butterwick thinks he can get to first base with me, he’s very much mistaken `Butterwick’ I shall say to him – after I’ve had my lunch, of course - `You’re a low hound, and you’ve as much chance of wheedling me into giving young Bodkin the pink slip as I have of getting my wife to let me eat a chocolate eclair. Drop dead, Butterwick” I shall say’

For some, being in command is important for some is as much important as it is for a fish to be in water

It added to her gratification that she would now be able to go home. She had found her visit pleasant enough, but she never enjoyed being a guest and having no say in the running of the establishment. It cramped her not to be in command.

Thats’ what they call made for each other, because only one of them, can and gets to do the thinking.

Dolly and Soapy were deep in thought, the former musing on her plan, the latter trying to make a guess of what that plan could be. It was to what virtually amounted to an assembly of waxworks that Grayce re-entered.

You shouldn’t cheat an individual so much!!!

`Talk sense, sweetie. Once seen, never forgotten, that map of yours, so dignified’ said Dolly with touch of wifey pride. `He could pick you out of any police line-up if the had catracts in both eyes’.

When you have led such a distinguished life that the long arms of law have always had you in its grasp

Only once in his life had Chimp experienced the thrill these words sent tingling through his weedy little body. That was when he had heard the foreman of the jury say `not guilty’ when he had been expecting to be shipped to Dartmoor for a five-year stay.

Some people are alive because it is a crime to murder themselves

Her only hope of avoiding conversation with him would have been to run over him in the car, a step which despite its obvious appeal she thought it would be unwise to take. She did not waiver in the view she had always held that there was no good Chimp but a dead Chimp, but she knew how fussy the police can be about these things.

When you are a hen-pecked husband, and you dare not to get kicked

A stronger man might have offered the suggestion that the thing for her to do was to get out of here and leave him to catch up with his sleep, but Mr Llewllyn, though resentful, was not quite capable of it.

`I don’t want any piece of it. Who does she think I am? One of those dauntless death-defying guys who go into cages at the circus and look murderous man-eating monarchs of the jungle in the eye and make them wilt? I wouldn’t have the nerve to talk to Grayce like that on long-distance telephone. No, sir, not if I was in Paris, France, and she was in Honolulu.’

You can either be a successful business man or an honest one, the choice is yours.

You can’t go by what a man in my position promises. You don’t really suppose, do you, that you can can run a big studio successfully if you go about keeping your promises all the time? If you want me to keep a promise, have me put it in writing and take it to a public notary and get it stamped. And even after that you’ll have my lawyers to deal with.

A Few Gems From `Ice In The Bedroom' By PG Wodehouse

                Ben Schott once remarked `To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language’. Anybody who has read a PG Wodehouse masterpiece will agree to this even his/her mother-in-law says it.

                One of the masterpieces of PG Wodehouse is `Ice In The Bedroom’. This book published in 1961 has the usual inter-wined sub-plots so common in PG Wodehouse novels. A love story with a heist in its background or vice-versa or whatever it is, I  read a PG Wodehouse novel for the joy it. Presented in the subsequent paragraphs are a few gems from this masterpiece.

                Have you ever read a funnier rendition on two broken hearts or rib-tickling description of an act of betrayal?

                There had been a time, and not so long ago, when he and Sally had been closer than the paper on the wall – everything as smooth as dammit, each thinking the other the biggest thing since sliced bread and not a cloud on the horizon. And then, just because she found him kissing that dumb brick of a Bunting girl at that cocktail party – the merest civil gesture, as he had tried to explain, due entirely to the fact that he had run out of conversation and felt that he had to do something to keep things going – she had blown a gasket and forbidden the banns.

                Why the lawyers of that day didn’t ask for a ban on this book or deletion of this portion after reading it or were they too busy to read this book?

                In the inner lair where he lurked during business hours, Mr Shoesmith was talking to his daughter, Mrs Myrtle Prosser, who had looked in for a chat as she did sometimes – too often, in Mr Shoesmith’s opinion, for he disliked having to give up his valuable time to someone to whom he could not send in a bill.

                How many of your bosses have or had to say this about you?

                `I didn’t know he worked here’

                `It is a point on which I am somewhat doubtful myself’ said Mr Shoesmith `Much depends on what interpretation you place on the word `work’. To oblige his uncle Lord Blicester, whose affairs have been in my hands for many years. I took him into my employment and he arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening, but apart from a rudimentary skill in watching the clock, probably instinctive, I would describe him as essentially a lily of the field, Ah, Mr Widegon’.

                Mr PG Wodehouse, thank heavens that you were not in India writing this line about any fictional legend.

                She did not resemble her father, who looked like a cassowary, but suggested rather one of those engravings of the mistress of Bourbon kings which make on feel that monarchs who selected them must have been men of iron, impervious to fear, or else short-sighted. She always scared Freddie to the marrow. With most of the other sex he was on easy terms – too easy was the view of his late fiancée – but the moon of Oofy Prosser’s delight never failed to give him an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of the stomach and the illusion that his hands and feet had swelled unpleasantly.

You surely don’t want to hear this from your boss

`You see, when you fail to appear, we become nervous and jumpy. Some accident must have occurred, we whisper to each other, and these gruesome speculations, so bad for office morale, continue until some clear thinker like Mr Jervis points out that it would be a far greater accident if you were ever on time’

The lawyers of that day were truly gracious

Johnny doesn’t even embezzle his client’s money, which I should have thought was about the only fun a solicitor can get out of life.

This is epic

                The problem of how to attract his attention had presented itself. `Hi’ seemed lacking in dignity. `Hoy’ had the same defect. And `Freddie’ was much too friendly. What she would really have liked, of course, would have been to throw a brick at him, but the grounds of Castlewood, though park-like, were unfortunately lacking in bricks

Men admit you have felt the same

There is something about the monosyllable `Oh?’, when uttered in a cold, level voice by the girl he loves, that makes the most intrepid man uneasy. Freddie had been gifted by Nature with much of the gall of an Army mule, but even he lost a little of his animation.

Women you cannot be this unfair.

Nothing is more irritating to a woman of impatient habit, wanting to get the news headlines quick, than to try to obtain them from a man who seems intent on speaking in riddles, and a less affectionate wife than Dolly might well at this point have endeavoured to accelerate her husband by striking him with cocktail shaker. It is to her credit that she confined herself to words.

It is rather difficult if you come across a female like this

When you’re up against a dame with glittering eyes and one finger on the trigger of a shot-gun, that’s an ordeal, and don’t tell any tell you different

We all have this Senior or Colleague

To set the seal on his happiness, someone at the office, just before he left, had dropped a heavy ledger on the foot of Mr Jervis, the managing clerk, causing him a good deal of pain, for he suffered from corns. In the six months during which he had served under the Shoesmith banner Freddie had come to dislike Mr Jervis with an intensity quite foreign to his normally genial nature, and he held very strongly that the more ledgers that were dropped on him, the better. His only regret was that it had not been a ton of bricks.

Yes, We just don’t want to meet some people again for various reasons some clandestine also

It is inevitable, as we pass through life, that we meet individuals whom we are reluctant to meet again. Sometimes it is the way they clear their throats that offends us, sometimes the noise they make when drinking soup or possibly remind us of relatives whom we wish to forget. It was for none of these fanciful reasons that Dolly preferred not to encounter Mrytlle Prosser.

This Dolly is the type of wife every man wants

She loved him dearly and yielded to no one in her respect for his ability to sell worthless oil stock to the least promising of prospects, but, except for this one great gift of his, she had no illusions about his intelligence. She knew that she had taken for better or worse one who was practically solid concrete from the neck up, and she liked it. It was her view that brains only unsettle a husband, an she was comfortably conscious of herself possessing enough for the two of them.

We all have more of the second type of lunches with colleagues whom we don’t like

There are lunches which are rollicking from start to finish, with gay shafts of wit flickering to and fro like lightning flashes, and others where the going is on the sticky side, and a sense of oppression seems to weigh the revelers down like a London fog. The one presided over by Lord Blicester at the restaurant of Barribault’s Hotel fell into the second class.

Those relatives, they are always fair weather friends.

The difference between the way an uncle looks at a nephew who has lost his job and whom there is a danger of him having to support, and a nephew who has large holdings a fabulously rich oil company is always subtle but well marked.

These lovers, they just don’t move on

He turned away, with sinking heart. He knew what happened when young men and girls stood in earnest conversation on any given spot. They stayed fixed to it for hours.

This is how to deal with women, men should learn

A man experienced in dealing with the female sex knows that the policy to pursue, when a woman issues an order, is not to stand arguing but to acquiesce and then go off and disobey it.

A Few Quotes From `Full Moon' by PG Wodehouse

The Master could have very well named this book as `Full Fun’. This must be one of the funniest works of PG Wodehouse, very difficult to pick the few good ones. I’m re-reading this book. This blog is written for Indiblogger’s Indispire edition number 171 on Favourite Authors

Unlike the rest of the female members of her family, who were tall and stately, Lady Herimone Wedge was short and dumpy and looked like a cook – in her softer moods, a cook well satisfied with her latest soufflé; when stirred to anger, a cook about to give notice; but always a cook of strong character. Neverthless for the eye of love is not affected by externals, it was with courtly devotion that her husband, avoiding the face cream, bent and kissed the top of her boudoir cap. They were a happy and united couple.

Colonel Wedge was exhibiting that slight sheepishness which comes to married men when the names of those whom they themselves esteem highly but of whom they are aware that their wives disapprove crop up in the course of conversation.

Fredie straightened his tie

`The boys generally seem to wish to hear my views’ he admitted modestly

`And I’ll bet they get their wish if you’re within a mile of th

The face that gazed from the picture was not that of a strictly handsome man. It was, indeed, that of one who would have had to receive a considerable number of bisques to make it worth his while to enter even the most minor of beauty contests. The nose was broad, the ears prominent, the chin prognathous. This might, in fact, have been the photograph of a kindly gorilla. Kindly, because even in this amateur snapshot one could discern the pleasant honest and geniality of the eyes.

                The body this face surmounted was very large and obviously a man of the finest muscle. The whole, in short, was what a female novelist of the Victorian era would have called a `magnificent ugly man’, and Freddie’s first feeling was a mild wonder that such a person should every have consented to have his photograph taken.

Ever since the tempestuous entry into his life of Prudence Garland, he had been feeling almost without interruption rather as one might imagine a leaf to feel when caught up and whirled about in an autumn gale. Bill’s was essentially a simple, orderly mind. Nature had intended him to be one of those men to whom love, when it comes, comes gently and gradually, progressing in easy stages from the first meeting in rigidly conventional circumstances to the decorous wedding with the ushers showing friends and relatives into the ringside pews. If ever there was a man born to be the morning-coated central figure in a wedding group photograph, it was William Galahad Lister.

The thoughtful soul who built the bar at Barribault’s Hotel constructed the upper half of its door of glass, so that young me about town, coming to slake their thirst, should be able to take a preliminary peeop into its interior and assure themselves that it contained none of their creditors.

Too often, in English country houses, dinner is apt to prove a dull and uninspiring meal. If the ruling classes of the Island kingdom have a fault, it is that they are inclined when at table to sit chomping their food in a glassy eyed silence, doing nothing to promote a feast of reason and a flow of soul. But to-night in the smaller of Blandings Castle’s two dining rooms, a very different not was stuck. One would not be going too far in describing the atmosphere at the board as one of rollicking gaiety.