This Saturday I am reviewing, discussing, and contrasting two British authors' attempts to write light, humorous stories, namely Dornford Yates and P G Wodehouse.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Berry And Co. by Dornford Yates DNF 32% (up to chapter 5)
Berry and Co is a 1920 collection of short stories featuring five cousins, the namesake, Berry i.e. Major Bertram Pleydell who is married to his first cousin Daphne, plus Daphne's brother Boy Pleydell,(the first person narrator) plus Jonathan (Jonah) Mansel, along with Jonah's younger sister Jill, all of which, I must admit seems a bit strange, if not a little creepy cast of characters. But I guess if marrying a first cousin is good enough for the royalty of Europe, its good enough for this upper class cast of humous characters. The book is a collection of short stories originally published in The Windsor Magazine, a monthly literary magazine of the time. My copy of the book is a Gutenberg ebook version.
The premise of the story is that these cousins are wealthy enough to not have to work, at least as far as I could tell from the limited number of stories that I've read. The series began in the pre-war world of 1914, and the series continued after the war, once the men had returned from war, in which Berry we know had been an army officer. The stories in this book take place after the war, as they are reestablishing themselves in society. The stories are very light. For example the first one has them all together at the family home "White Ladies" on a Sunday for the first time in five years. They go to church, during which their new acquired 1914 Rolls Royce is stolen (you apparently didn't need keys to start a 1914 Rolls) despite having asked a fellow watch over it for them. Boy, with the help of a girl in a car, trace the Rolls in her car (until it runs out of gas) and spot it parked in front of an inn. They take off with it - only to discover upon arriving home that their own Rolls had been found previously, it being very short of petrol hadn't been driven far, so that they had actually stolen someone else's identical Rolls. Then the police then arrive with the second car's owner... You get the idea.
Since I didn't finish the book, you can correctly assume that I did not find these stories as amusing as they were intended to be. Humor's that way, some of it works, some doesn't. It all depends upon the recipient. Given that, I thought it might be interesting to talk about why this is, by comparing it to another British author of Humorous stories, P. G. Wodehouse. To better compare them, I picked a Wodehouse book off my shelf and read it. A quick review below, and then the discussion of why one worked, and the other didn't.
Heavy Weather by P. G. Wodehouse B+
This is the 5th book in Wodehouse's Blandings Castle Saga of 11 novels and nine short stories. Blanding Castle is the home of the prize fattest pig obsessed Lord Elmsworth, his sister Lady Constance, his younger gadabout brother, the Honorable Galahad Treepwood, who are all faithfully served by their butler, Beach. And into this venerable English country estate, where it's always summer, comes a host of Wodehouse characters, many of them drawn from the Drones Club, as well crooks, private investigators, plus other sundry characters.
In this case we have Monty Bodkin, who has to hold down a job for a year to marry get his sweetheart's father's approval for marriage, Ronny Fish who needs Lord Elmsworth to release some of the money held in trust for him so that he can marry his true love, the ex-chorus girl Sue Brown, a wedding opposed by his mother, Julia Fish, sister to Constance, Elmsworth, and Galahad. She and her sister Connie hope to browbeat Elmsworth into not giving Ronnie the money and nix the marriage. And then there is the memoir of Galahad, who, along with most of the now peers of the land, was a man about town in the 90's and whose stories about the antics of the now respectable people in those days would cause an outrage amongst his peers. Constance and Julia hope to keep the manuscript suppressed (as it was in the previous installment of the saga) while the publisher, Lord Tilbury hopes to steal it and publish it, as originally promised... And being Wodehouse, it get pretty involved...
This book is not an apples to apples comparison to Berry & Co. as it is a novel, not a collection of short stories, and not a first person narrative. The Bertie Wooster short stories would be a more apples to apples comparison, but I had reread some of those in the last year or two, so I chose this book more or less randomly off the shelf to read to refresh my impression of Wodehouse, though I am fonder of his Bertie Wooster stories.
The contrast between Yates' stories and Wodehouse's stories could not be, in my opinion, greater, despite sharing more or less the same premise; they feature the lighthearted misadventures of people many of whom have inherited enough money to live on without having to work. There are several factors that contribute to this contrast.
The first difference between the two writers, is that the characters of the Yates books are portrayed as adults. Berry is an (ex?)army major, and one would have to assume to be at least middle aged. In contrast, while Wodehouse's protagonists while university educated young men about town, retain a rather carefree, if not juvenile attitude. The female cast of characters vary greatly, from the young, often independent, pretty women who the Drones Club members inevitably fall in love with, to the formidable aunts who these members must get around to marry their true love. There is an air of youthful cheerfulness in these Wodehouse characters that somehow seems lacking in the Yates cousins. Yates' cousins come off as, well, wealthy, idle, and bored snobs. While some members of the Drone Club may or may not be wealthy and many are often idle, living on inherited money like Bertie Wooster, others have to work as tutors or private secretaries, at least until their quarterly allowances, which they lost on unfortunate horses, is paid, and as often as not, get sacked before it does. They come across as far more likeable, if perhaps less likely, chaps than the company of Berry & Co. They are people you would like to believe could exist.
And while Yates' short stories are somewhat similar, Wodehouse's are usually far more involved. Which brings us around to the writing. Yates' humor relies on having his characters use witty/silly dialog. Take this example, Here is Berry describing his time in a local jail;
'How did you spend your time?' said Jonah.
'B-b-beating my wings against the crool b-b-bars,' said Berry. 'My flutterings were most painful. Several turnkeys broke down. The rat which was attached to me for pay and rations gambolled to assuage my grief. Greatly affected by the little animal's antics, I mounted the plank bed and rang the b-b-bell for the b-b-boots. In due course they appeared full of the feet of a gigantic warder. I told him that I had not ordered vermin and should prefer a fire, and asked if they'd mind if I didn't dress for dinner. I added that I thought flowers always improved a cell, and would he buy me some white carnations and a b-b-begonia. His replay was evasive and so coarse that I told the rat not to listen, and recited what I could remember of "The Lost Chord."' He turned to me. 'The remainder of my time I occupied in making plans for the disposal of your corpse.'
Berry, at least, and the others as well, often ask or answer questions with such flights of fancy, being bright, carefree people of the post war jazz age. They were popular stories, so I am sure some people, and perhaps you as well, might find them funny. There are several books of these stories on the Gutenberg project for free if you think you might.
Wodehouse's humor is more intricate and often grounded in slang. Take this passage I choose amongst half a dozen I found within a minute of opening the first pages of The Inimtable Jeeves between Bertie and Bingo Little.
'Jeeves tells me you want to talk to me about something,' I said.
'Eh?' said Bingo, with a start. 'Oh yes, yes. Yes.'
I waited for him to unleash the topic of the day, but he didn't seem to want to get going. Conversation languished. He stared straight ahead of him in a glassy sort of manner.
'I say, Bertie,' he said, after a pause of about an hour and a quarter.
'Hallo!'
'Do you like the name of Mabel?'
'No.'
'No?'
'No.'
'You don't think there's a kind of music in the word, like the wind rustling gently through the tree-tops?'
'No.'
He seemed disappointed for a moment; then cheered up.
'Of course, you wouldn't. You always were a a fat-headed worm without any soul, weren't you?'
'Just as you say. Who is she? Tell me all.'
For I realized now that poor old Bingo was going through it once again. Ever since I have known him - and we were at school together - he has been perpetually falling in love with someone, generally in the spring, which seems to act on him like magic. At school he had the finest collection of actresses' photographs of anyone of his time; and at Oxford his romantic nature was a byword.
'You'd better come along and meet her at lunch,' he said, looking at his watch.
'A ripe suggestion,' I said. 'Where are you meeting her? At the Ritz?'
'Near the Ritz.'
He was geographically accurate. About fifty yards east of the Ritz there is one of those blighted tea-and-bun shops you see dotted about all over London, and into this, if you'll believe me, young Bingo dived like a homing rabbit; and before I had time to say a word we were wedged in at a table, on the brink of a silent pool of coffee left there by an early luncher.
Bright, brisk, with a bit of silliness in the slang of his characters, while still being grounded in characters and indeed, a world, which you would very much like to believe once existed.
And perhaps the greatest difference is that Wodehouse tells the entire story with a great deal of dash, cleverness, and humor, whereas Yates tells it with a light touch, but with an ordinariness that is broken by the occasional flights of fancy and silly/faux clever dialog that strikes me to be out of character for his characters.
Humor is very subjective, so that if you should find Berry and Co. funny, I can't find fault in that. Sadly, I didn't.
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