Among the genres of popular fiction which I have never so
much as sampled, whether from idle curiosity or prophylactic alarm,
figures not only the old-fashioned
cowpoke tales (now perhaps extinct, in America if not in Europe), but the much
larger and still thriving genre of what we may call the Harlequin romance. Were I stranded in a railway carriage
on a non-stop express from Berlin to Trebizond, with no companion but a dozing deaf-mute
retired parson, and no reading-matter but a Harlequin left behind by some
previous passenger, I should recite to that parson the story of my life, beginning
with infancy, clarifying the subtler points with hand-gestures, and
proceeding through the Lehrjahre and the Wanderjahre and so forth; or else I would read and re-read the
posted railway regulations (“Non sporgersi!”), noting points of etymology and
style; or even (in default of any
other exemplifications of the alphabet) practice the farther reaches of the “times” table, alert to
any possible number-theoretical surprises, -- before I would pick up that dog-eared cardioid-bespotted object.
And
yet the following point obtrudes itself, as I read the umpty-seventh of
P.G.Wodehouse’s innumerable, perhaps indeed literally numberless series of
tales (in the Steady State Theory, a new one pops out posthumously and spontaneously every so
often, as the universe expands):
that in any one of these tales
-- select at random as you like, from the early, late, or middle run of
the oeuvre – if there figure a wholesome young woman, and a wholesome young
man (typically denominated "Jane" and "Bill"), then, despite a heap of obstacles thrown up, both by Fate (abetted by the
author’s art) and by their own respective fat-headednesses, they will
get betrothed.
And this result, I acknowledge, is as welcome to me, as the
crisp air at sunrise, the brandy after dinner, or the climax of the act of
love. Yet it is exactly the same end which is repetitiously compassed by those
distaff harlequinades (which, unaccountably, I persist in disdaining to savor).
From
the standpoint of modern geometry, there is but one possible conclusion: that,
though I can never know hér mind, nor she know mine, yet we are gazing, from
different angles, at the same real solid object – the same sacrament, given
from heaven.
*
These
two light genres, whether or not twinned in Platonic paradise, could perhaps do
with a dose of gravitas. Herewith,
therefore, two links to the classic past:
Firstly: As
Byron puts it in Don Juan: "Tragedy ends in death; comedy, in
marriage." (The observation may perhaps go back to Aristotle.)
Secondly, concerning the Wodehouse golf series in
particular: Though the martial note is muted in these tales, and though the
ancient gods and heroes are here more likely to appear as something
half-remembered from the sixth form, than as actual protagonists, yet there is
an echo of the Iliad. For as
there, the warriors, pawns upon a board, might act as they would, by will or
upon impulse, yet their shot shaft must suffer a crucial mid-air nudge from
this interested deity or that one: so too in Wodehousia, as the dim
plus-foured figures potter tragicomedically about the green. For it is all very well for you to
rummage among your armamentarium of brassies, drivers, mashies and niblicks –
the full recital of which would take longer than the Catalogue of the Ships –
be you ever so skillful or never so duff – this fact of the Fates remains: that little round white metaphor of
human destiny will (Ulysses-like) at last reach the safe haven of the tin cup,
or on the contrary (tel the lesser Ajax) land smack dab in a sand-trap,
according as the favors of Aphrodite, or of her meddlesome son, have or have
not been propitiated. In the
Wodehouse world, the best way to hole out under bogey is to propose marriage on
the putting green, and be received.
