"Domesticated"

 I admit to strong opinions about politics, our national debt, the purpose of our schools and universities, gender identity, woke culture and myriad other subjects. However, when overwrought, and my pen fails me, I take a few deep breaths and pick up something comic, like a Wodehouse novel or collection of his short stories. There are over a hundred to choose from, beginning with The Pothunters in 1902 (written at age 21) and ending with Sunset at Blandings, written in 1975 (at age 93), and published posthumously in 1977. But I also try my hand at more personal essays, such as this one which I hope will provide some cheer regardless of the weather or one’s political affiliation.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Domesticated”

March 29, 2025

 

“I’m not very good at being domesticated. I’ve tried. The domestic

life I find claustrophobic – the rituals and habits and patterns.”

                                                                                                Ralph Fiennes (1962-)

                                                                                                British actor – Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series

 

The other day, while folding my second load of laundry, with breakfast dishes still in the sink and the bed still unmade, I thought of how domesticated I have become since retiring and moving to Essex Meadows – domesticated in the sense of sharing daily chores. I don’t mean domesticated like a dog. I was house-trained before Caroline and I were married sixty-one years ago. For the first fifty years of our married life Caroline did the laundry, made the bed and cleaned up the kitchen. I assumed some of those responsibilities when we moved to our apartment in January of 2016

 

Domestication was not a primary consideration for my parents; both artists, they scorned traditional roles. My father did not grab his dinner pail or take his briefcase and go off for the day. And my mother did not put on an apron, clean the house and set out my father’s slippers and prepare his dinner. Nevertheless, they had rituals. After breakfast, with us on the school bus, they would head to the barn where my father milked the half-dozen goats and my mother looked after the horses. They had a small business, Red Shed Rubber Animals. My mother modeled animals out of clay and my father prepared the molds to produce a rubber animal. The house was left to care for itself, at least until my older sister turned fifteen and mastered the vacuum cleaner.

 

I did not inherit my parents’ artistic genes. Examples of my early talents can be seen in a falling-apart 1947 photo album in which I placed ads for Westinghouse, Mickey Mouse and Schlitz, and in a rubber dog with two legs that I had modeled in clay. It was of no surprise to my family that I became a stockbroker. 

 

As I have grown older, my hair has become unruly, but, having been domesticated, my life has become more – if there is such a word – ruly. Now, upon waking and with no office to go to, I check the mouse traps – placed after discovering a forlorn little mouse in our washing machine (I have found none since putting them out) – take my pills, prepare and eat breakfast, glance through the newspapers, consider ideas for essays, make the bed, do the laundry on every third day, and run the dishwasher when it fills up. 

 

Unlike Mr. Fiennes, I enjoy the regimen domestication brings, which still allows me time to use what creative skills I have in writing. While I did not exactly come from a “wild or natural state,” making beds and doing laundry were not my natural focus. First married, and in our one-bedroom second-floor apartment – where to reach the bathroom one had to crawl across the bed – Caroline took command. And I became blissfully oblivious of how the household worked – clothes placed in the hamper appeared, miraculously, a few days later in my bureau, dirty dishes were washed and back in the cupboard, floors and rugs cleaned. That has now changed.

 

Now, you must excuse me; I have to go. I am being told the heating vents need vacuuming.

Burrowing into Books - Uncle Dynamite, P.G. Wodehouse

Sydney M. Williams

www.burrowingintobooks.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                      March 10, 2019

“Uncle Dynamite”

P.G. Wodehouse

“He looked pleased with himself, and who shall blame him? A man whose

 mission is to spread sweetness and light and to bring the young folk together may

 surely be forgiven a touch of complacency when happy endings start going off like

 crackers all around him and he sees the young folk coming together in droves.”

                                                                                                            P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

                                                                                                            Uncle Dynamite, 1948

Wodehouse published his first book, The Pothunters, in 1902, when he was twenty-one – his last, an unfinished novel, Sunset at Blandings, two years after his death at age 93, in 1977. In between were almost a hundred books – novels, short stories, collections and memoirs. He also teamed up with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern writing lyrics for a number of Broadway musicals, including “Sitting Pretty,” “Have a Heart” and “Oh, Lady! Lady!”. He was busy. Shortly before he died, Wodehouse sat for an interview with “The Paris Review: “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

Uncle Dynamite is, in reality, Pongo Twistleton’s Uncle Fred, a sixtyish gentleman whose full name is Frederick Altamont Cornwallis, Fifth Earl of Ickenham. He is a terror to his pleasant but witless and docile nephew, getting him into and then out of scrapes. Uncle Fred is described: “A tall, slim distinguished looking man…with a jaunty grey moustache and a bright enterprising eye, whose air was that of one who had lived life to the full every minute of an enjoyable life and intends to go on doing so till further notice. His hat was on the side of his head, and he bore his cigar like a banner.” His mission, as the rubric declares, is to spread sweetness and light.

Besides his unparalleled mastery of the English language, Wodehouse’s genius was his ability to create plots beyond the imagination of the most visionary reader. He then employs a character with the brains of a Jeeves or the impish resourcefulness of an Uncle Fred to unwind what had appeared to be a skein of knotted yarn. And he does so in a surprising and humorous fashion. This is the third of five books in which Uncle Fred plays the principal character. As a reader you will wish for ten times that number.

Wodehouse’s ‘bon mots’ are inimitable and they are found on almost every page: “A sort of writhing movement behind the moustache showed that Sir Aylmer was smiling.” “It frequently happens that prospective sons-in-laws come as a rather painful shock to their prospective mothers-in-law.” “She is taking a trip to the West Indies.” Jamaica?” “No, she went of her own free will.” “A thing I’ve noticed all my life is that the nicest girls always have the ghastliest brothers.” “’H’ar yer?’ roared Sir Aylmer like a lion which just received an ounce of small shot in the rear quarters.”

In this story Uncle Fred is confronted with three young couples – one not paired as he believes they should be, two individuals are estranged and a third couple has the male is in need of the moxie to pledge his troth. The situation, to the reader, seems impossible to resolve. As Uncle Fred goes to work, Pongo (and the reader) become convinced Uncle Fred should be institutionalized. But resolutely and confidently he leads us down the path only he can see. In the final pages webs of intrigue and mayhem are untangled. Sweetness and light prevail.

So, tomorrow, forget your favorite newspaper about some self-serving, hypocritical politician written by a snot-nosed, sanctimonious reporter; rather, pick up a Wodehouse. Instead of being depressed by the state of affairs in the country and the world, you will find yourself in the make-believe world of Edwardian England. A smile will chase away the frowns, laughter will replace tears of despair. You will be happier and so will your family and friends.

"Burrowing into Books - Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse"

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                     July 26, 2017

“Uneasy Money”

P.G. Wodehouse

“He was rather a melancholy young man,

with a long face, not unlike a pessimistic horse.”

                                                                                                P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

                                                                                                Uneasy Money, 1917

Laughter, it is said, keeps one young, and what better place to find humor than in the books of P.G. Wodehouse. One can never read too much Wodehouse, nor re-read one’s favorites too often. He wrote over a hundred novels, dozens of short stories, along with scripts and screen plays. He teamed up with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern to write lyrics for Broadway shows like “Oh, Boy!” “Have a Heart” and “Leave it too Jane.” In fact, the year Wodehouse wrote Uneasy Money he had five shows running simultaneously on Broadway.

While Wodehouse never went to University – his schooling ended with graduation from Dulwich College in 1900 – he was well read, especially in the classics. Wodehouse used Jeeves, a valet for Bertie Wooster who ate fish and whose forehead bulged, as his fount of knowledge, particularly when speaking to the hapless Wooster and his friends. In the Clicking of Cuthbert, Wodehouse placed himself next to Leo Tolstoi. His character, the “great” Russian novelist Vladimir Brusiloff speaks: “No novelists anywhere any good except me. P.G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.”

Uneasy Money is one of Wodehouse’s early novels, written in 1917. It was the second novel he sold to the “Saturday Evening Post,” cementing his relationship with that magazine, thus always one of Wodehouse’s favorites. As he writes in its preface, it had given him a “…minimum of trouble, the golden words pouring out like syrup.” It came before his better-known works: the stories of Jeeves and Bertie, and the Blandings’ series, with Lord Emsworth and his “Empress of Blandings,” an enormous black Berkshire sow. Uneasy Money which mainly takes place on Long Island, was written while the author was living there.

Lord Dawlish, or Bill to his friends, is a young man of large stature whose principal assets are a pleasing personality and a good game of golf. While amiable, he had low self-esteem: “He had always looked upon himself as rather a chump – well meaning, perhaps, but an awful ass.” Wodehouse describes him: “As a dancer, he resembled a Newfoundland puppy trying to run across a field.” He is engaged to a beautiful young actress Claire, but she doesn’t want to live on a shoestring. Without giving the story away – too convoluted for a short review anyway – Bill, by chance and due to his prowess at golf, inherits a million dollars, but feels the need to discover who the rightful beneficiaries were, thus his embarkation from London to New York. Bill admits to having little knowledge about the new world: “He knew there had been some unpleasantness between England and the United States in seventeen-something and again in eighteen-something, but that things had eventually been straightened out…Of American cocktails he had a fair working knowledge, and he appreciated ragtime. But of the other great American institutions he was completely ignorant.”

As in all his novels, the ball of twisted twine eventually untangles. The right young men get matched with the right young women. The sun shines. Peace and love prevail. And the reader, like the characters we have come to know, sits back contentedly in the knowledge that all is well.  For Wodehouse, like his lovable character Uncle Fred, knew his job was to “spread sweetness and light.” This he still does, even from beyond the grave.

Read Wodehouse, any of his books, and you will smile all day long! J