"he Adventures of Sally," P.G. Wodehouse - A Review

Peggy Noonan’s weekend column in yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal struck a chord: “We Are Starting to Enjoy Hatred.” I fear there is truth in what she writes. But laughter, boldly, confronts hatred. William James (1842-1910), father of modern psychology and author of The Varieties of Religious Experiences allegedly once wrote: “We don’t laugh because were happy – we’re happy because we laugh.” I have found that to be a truism, whether laughter comes from being with family and/or friends, from watching a Mel Brooks movie, or from reading one of P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful books. Laughter is also healthy; it is good for one’s stomach muscles.

 

My essays are not critical reviews. I only write about books I have enjoyed. This one is short – less than 450 words – but I hope contagious.

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Adventures of Sally, P.G. Wodehouse

June 2, 2024

 

“A sweet-tempered girl, Sally, like most women of a generous spirit, had cyclonic potentialities.”

                                                                                                                                The Adventures of Sally, 1922

                                                                                                                                P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

 

P.G. Wodehouse is best known for his 1915 creation of the pleasant but dim-witted Bertie Wooster and his pedantic and brainy (fish-eating) valet Jeeves. But at the time this book was written, Wodehouse – aged forty – had also become a big name on Broadway, where he collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. In 1920, he had written the lyrics for the show Sally, which ran for 570 performances. Unsurprisingly, much of this story revolves around the theater: “The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong.”

 

We meet Sally Nicholas, having inherited $25,000 on her 21^st birthday, as she is about to leave Mrs. Meecher’s “select” boarding house in New York. She is engaged to the caddish Gerald Foster and has a brother Fillmore who, at 25, also inherited $25,000. The two are quite different: As for Sally, “she carried youth like a banner.” On the other hand, “Fillmore Nicholas had not worn well. At the age of seven he had been an extraordinarily beautiful child, but after that he had gone all to pieces, and now, at the age of twenty-five, it would be idle to deny that he was something of a mess.”

 

But Sally does approve of her Harvard-educated brother’s choice of mate, Gladys Winch: “And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”

 

In reading Wodehouse one can always anticipate a happy end; though how the complexity of the plot gets unwound and his characters guided into satisfactory positions is a marvel to readers like me, those of us with Bertie-like minds. The joy of any Wodehouse novel is in the way he offers humor in descriptions, advice and metaphors. A sample from The Adventures of Sally:

                

                “He dug a spoon sombrely into his grapefruit.”

 

“An inscrutable cat picked its way daintily across the road.”

 

               “Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump…All the unhappy marriages come from the husbands having brains”

 

                “And quietly and methodically, like a respectable wolf settling on the trail of a Red Riding Hood, he prepared to pursue.”

 

                “Uncle Donald’s walrus mustache heaved gently upon his laboured breath, like seaweed upon a ground-swell.”

                “

I am often asked, which Wodehouse should be read first? My answer: Whichever is nearest.