Animal control

Today's Wodehouse.

I was sauntering on the river bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking and a large hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal's face. Upon which it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.

Comments

[mrs. norman maine]

Ah, there it is!

Yesterday I spent waaaaay too much time wondering if Lord Peter Wimsey -- who was apt to launch into Woosterian dialogue to disarm his suspects -- would have considered Bertie an insufferable ass, or if he might have actually liked him.

I think he would have liked Bertie. Wimsey may have only played at being the kind of chipper-but-clueless fop that Bertie actually was, but ultimately the codes of the Woosters and the Wimseys are one in the same.

Wimsey reserved his contempt for truly callow heiresses (and whatever their male counterparts would be called -- heirs?) who never quite grasped the concept of noblesse oblige.

He might never have actually asked Bertie over for a cigar to help him figure how a murder could have happened in a locked room with no other entry points, but he would have appreciated Bertie's simple, good heart.

It's so nice to read accounts of Wodehouse himself, who was apparently one of London and Long Island's premier good eggs. Unlike that prick Thurber.

By the way, I came across this website while looking for that "cat" quote the other week. It's probably the only piece dedicated to Wodehouse in which most of the laughs aren't generated by his prose. Of course, that's because it's poorly-translated Russian, so I guess my amusement makes me one ugly American. But anyway:

http://ssmith.wodehouse.ru/biogeng.html