There are some authors I think of as ‘break glass in case of emergency’ authors. And I didn’t have a particular emergency the other day, only nothing I was picking up felt right. I had a few books on the go, but wasn’t in the mood for any of them. So… I went to my Wodehouse shelves.
As he was so prolific, and copies of his books abound cheaply, I have an awful lot of unread Wodehouse books. I picked Uneasy Money (1917) off the shelves more or less at random – and had a lovely time. I could write down almost any sentence from a Wodehouse novel as an example of his mastery of language – this is from the second page, as our hero Lord Dawlish is approached by someone asking for money.
For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him and observed that he had a wife and four children at home, all starving.
Lord Dawlish ‘has always looked on himself as rather a chump – well-meaning, perhaps, but an awful ass’, and he is accurate in that. Of course he is; he is a Wodehouse hero and they’re almost all like that. Being well-meaning, he gives the man some money – but appearances are deceptive. He might be a Lord, but he doesn’t have much money. He earns an income as a secretary at a club, though this is really pity money, and otherwise is stony broke. Much to the chagrin of Claire, his fiancée, who refuses to marry him unless he gets a better income.
It’s always relatively clear in a Wodehouse novel which characters are to be cheered on and which to be disliked, and Claire is in the latter camp. She is fixated on money, rigidly unkind to our Lord Dawlish, and we never for a moment dream that they will end up together. Though they do end up both heading off to America, unbeknownst to each other. Lord Dawlish is informed that anybody can make millions in the Land of the Free, while Claire goes to visit a friend (and also with her eyes set on a rich middle-aged bachelor whom she knows is travelling by boat at the same time).
All is set up for a fun plot – which gets all the more fun when Lord Dawlish learns he has inherited a million dollars from an old man whom he once helped with his golf swing. He is chuffed – but also horrified that thus is disinherited the old man’s nephew and (more to the point) niece. He somewhat disregards the nephew, but writes to the niece (Elizabeth) to offer her half the money. She, however, refuses. And Lord Dawlish makes it his mission to find Elizabeth and persuade her to take the money – albeit, for reason, under an alias.
The plot is as brilliantly worked and completely unlikely as any Wodehouse novel, and the characters come alive with his trademark vivacity and vim. I loved the whole lot of them, even the ones we weren’t meant to like. But the star of the show is, of course, Wodehouse’s writing. His mix of exaggeration and understatement is always brilliant; his pithy descriptions of people (‘his appearance was that of a bewildered drainpipe’) are always a delight.
As I’ve often said, and others have too, if Wodehouse had written a handful of novels, they’d all be classics we learn by heart. Because he was so prolific, and so consistently good, there aren’t many that are individually well-known. He is a victim of his own brilliance. But Uneasy Money is certainly up there with his most enjoyable of the 20 or so I’ve read, and now I’m going to have to work hard not to just chain-read Wodehouse for months…