Barmy in Wonderland by P.G. Wodehouse – #1952Club

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every club year will have appearances by Georges Simenon and Georgette Heyer – but there’s another prolific mid-century writer who usually turns up too. While P.G. Wodehouse didn’t write a novel every year, he did for 1952 – and I picked up Barmy in Wonderland back in 2018 in Hay-on-Wye.

Barmy – real name Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps – is exactly the sort of person you’d expect from (a) that name and (b) his featuring in a Wodehouse novel. He’s a member of the Drones Club and a very posh, very inept, very well-meaning gentleman. Despite his poshness, he is not wealthy – heaven knows how he’s paying for the Drones Club – and is in the unusual position for a Wodehouse hero of having a pretty lowly job. He works as a desk clerk for J.G. Anderson, the owner of a couple of hotels in America, who loathes him.

I can do no better, to introduce you to the characters, than to share from the Wikipedia summary: “He [Anderson] is angered after a hotel guest, the famous but obnoxious actor Mervyn Potter, and Anderson’s desk clerk, amiable and impressionable Cyril ‘Barmy’ Fotheringay-Phipps, wake him at 3 a.m. to give him a frog.”

Mervyn Potter is a matinee idol type, and also a near-constant drunk. It allows Wodehouse to write this sort of wonderfully Wodehousian understatement:

A female Mervyn Potter fan, seeing her idol face to face like this, would probably have blown bubbles at the mouth and collapsed in a swoon. At the least, she would have gazed at him with ecstasy. From Mr. Anderson’s gaze ecstasy was conspicuously absent.

Barmy has recently come into some money from an inheritance, and Anderson has hopes that he will buy one of the hotels – but it isn’t enough money for that. Instead, he is persuaded to invest as a producer in the new play that Potter is starring in. He is unsure until he realises that the production’s secretary is Dinty Moore – a woman whom (bear with me) he fell in love with after setting her hat on fire. As he says later…

“I fell in love with you at first sight, don’t you know, and all that sort of rot, but I had rather intended to hush it up till a more suitable moment.”

Any fan of Wodehouse will know what Dinty is like: she’s one of his capable, funny, unsentimental-until-she’s-won-over types. ‘Capable’ is perhaps top of the list, and she has to be, with Barmy’s lovable uselessness.

I found all the stuff with Anderson and a complex attempt for Potter to woo someone with Barmy’s help – during which Barmy unwillingly scales a tree – fun enough but didn’t really lead anywhere. Barmy in Wonderland really picks up when it becomes about the play. It’s obvious to the reader that Sacrifice is a dud, and Wodehouse has fun mocking the American world of theatrical productions, not least the fact that nobody remembers or cares about the name of the author. I only learned from the Wikipedia page just now that Barmy in Wonderland is adapted from a play – The Butter and Egg Man by George S. Kaufman – which seems to have largely focused on this stage of the plot. The characters’ names are different and, of course, the title is, so it seems to have been a slightly coy adaptation.

This part of the novel is a lot of fun, much pacier than the earlier section, and particularly enjoyable when the first night of the play is a disaster. In the aftermath, with people trying to solve the problems, I particularly loved a character called Fanny – famed for her juggling act, though in this case hanging around as the wife of a producer – who ridicules them all and throws in useless suggestions to amuse herself. Here, for instance, one of the actresses is trying to make her character more likeable:

“No sympathy. That’s the answer. Something ought to be put in to show that I’m really all right at heart and not just a frivolous Society butterfly.”

“How about giving out pamphlets?” said Fanny.

Towards the end of the book, it really picks up and works very well. But overall, I think this is mid-level Wodehouse. At his best, his way with words is wonderful, and the examples I’ve quoted so far definitely amused me. But there was a far higher quota than usual of lines that didn’t quite land, or felt a little underworked. For example:

If the Lithuanian chambermaid who at half-past nine that night came to turn Barmy’s bed down had been at all psychic — which, of course, very few Lithuanian chambermaids are — she would have sensed, as she went about her work, a strange, almost eerie atmosphere in Room 726, as of a room in a haunted house that is waiting for its spectre to clock in and start haunting.

It doesn’t quite land, in my opinion. I particularly thought of that ‘of course’ in the section in dashes. Wouldn’t it have been better as ‘distressingly’ or ‘regrettably’ or something along those lines? Perhaps it’s unfair to pick a section at random and do close reading on it, and humour is naturally subjective, but there felt like lots of slightly wasted opportunities to me – like Wodehouse was getting it out in a rush.

Look, it’s a P.G. Wodehouse novel, so of course it was a fun time. I have a weakness for novels about the theatre, so I loved that. It’s just that, at his peak, Wodehouse has a genius for combining plot, character, and his own brand of witty exaggeration and understatement. There’s enough of that in Barmy in Wonderland to make it a good time – but I don’t think it’s the best place to start with him.