"Meet Mr. Mulliner," P.G. Wodehouse

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“Meet Mr. Mulliner,” P.G. Wodehouse

November 8, 2020

 

“He was a short, stout, comfortable man of middle age, and the thing that struck me

first was the extraordinarily childlike candour of his eyes. They were large and

round and honest. I would have bought oil stock from him without a tremor.”

                                                                                                                                P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

                                                                                                                                Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927

 

Wodehouse wrote three Mulliner books, all short-story collections. This is the first; the last was published in 1933. While not as well-known as his Jeeves and Bertie series, these were written when he was at the height of his powers. And they are as funny as anything he ever wrote. Wodehouse was a master humorist, which is why, in this essay, I have let him speak. Nobody has ever been able to ring so much joy from a body of words.

 

As the title suggests, in this novel we first meet Mr. Mulliner, described in the rubric above. The bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest is where a few men meet, usually on Sunday after Evensong, to listen to tales from Mr. Mulliner. Apart from Mr. Mulliner and the barmaid Miss Postlethwaite, everyone is referred to by his spirituous sobriquet, for example a “Stout and Mild,” a “Gin-and Ginger-Ale,” or a “Tankard and Ale.” Mr. Mulliner favored drink is a “Hot Scotch and Lemon.”

 

While each story is unique (there are nine stories in this collection), the structure is formulaic: A group of men nursing drinks when a comment or observation triggers a memory in Mr. Mulliner: A story ensues about a nephew, uncle, brother or cousin. A favorite, “Portrait of a Disciplinarian” involves his nephew Frederick who is invited to have tea with his old nurse: “…it is a moot point whether a man of sensibility can ever be entirely at his ease in the presence of a woman who has frequently spanked him with the flat side of a hairbrush.” Another, “Came the Dawn,” involves another nephew Lancelot, just down from Oxford: “He recalled now having heard a sort of harsh, grating noise toward the end of luncheon; but at the time he had merely thought it was his uncle eating celery. Too late he realized that it must have been the raising of the anchor chain.” In “The Bishop’s Move,” we read of Mr. Mulliner’s nephew, Augustine, a young curate who serves as secretary to his Bishop. The Bishop has been invited by an old school mate, the Reverend “Catsmeat” Entwhistle, now Headmaster of Harchester, their old school, to unveil a statue of a third classmate, Lord Hemel “Fatty” Hempstead. The evening before, under the influence of Augustine’s Buck-U-Uppo, the Bishop and “Catsmeat” cover the statue with pink paint and top it with the Bishop’s mitre. The next morning, a groggy Bishop remembers: “It all came back to him now. Yes, he could remember putting the hat on the statue’s head. It had seemed a good thing to do at the time, and he had done it. How little we guess at the moment how far reaching our most trivial actions may be!”

 

Wodehouse was a master of the synonym. In “The Story of William” (Mr. Mulliner’s Uncle), William has gone on an alcoholic binge after being abstinent for twenty-nine years: “Intoxicated? The word did not express it by a mile. He was oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto.” If it is laughter the doctor ordered, you won’t be disappointed.

 

A hundred years ago Wodehouse was hitting his stride. The passage of time has done nothing to diminish his humor.