The Boy: What Will He Become?

In chapter II of his more or less autobiographical book Over Seventy (1957) Wodehouse comments on the financial vicissitudes of his household during his formative years, which cast a shadow of doubt over his chances of getting a university education:

The result was that during my schooldays my future was always uncertain. The Boy: What Will He Become? was a question that received a different answer almost daily.

At least twice in his novels Wodehouse put the same question in the lips of two of his heroes. The first is Psmith:

"Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?"
"The last, for choice," said Mike, "but I've only just arrived, so I don't know."
"The boy—what will he become? Are you new here, too, then?"
"Yes! Why, are you new?"

The Lost Lambs, ch. III (1908; Mike, ch. XXXII)

The second is Jimmy Crocker:

"The boy, what will he become?" he said. He turned the pages. "How about an Auditor? What do you think of that?"
"Do you think you could audit?"
"That I could not say till I had tried. I might turn out to be very good at it. How about an Adjuster?"

Piccadilly Jim, ch. VIII (1917)

R. McCrum adopted the phrase as the title of chapter 2 of Wodehouse: A Life, devoted to the years 1894-1900. It is especially appropriate because, while not so familiar today, or even when Over Seventy was published, it was firmly engraved in everyone's minds during the Victorian years to which Wodehouse applied it. In this post I will attempt to reconstruct its origin and history up to the end of the 19th century.

* * *

The story begins with an article titled "The Influence of Morality or Immorality on the Countenance," published on April 17, 1852 in The Popular Educator (Vol. I No. 3). It was illustrated with a double sequence of successive stages in the life of a child, one showing how he would grow up if he received a proper education, and the other what happened if he didn't, in answer to the fundamental question "What will he become?":

(According to the article, the drawing was taken "from a popular French publication," which I haven't been able to trace. A farbourg, a footnote tells us, is a low suburb of a city, such as Paris.)

The article took a stance in the millennia-old nature-nurture debate, which boils down to whether one's character is determined by birth or by education. In this case it took the form of an opposition between two 19th century disciplines demoted today to the rank of pseudosciences: phrenology, which predicted mental traits from the shape of a person's skull, and physiognomy, which assessed a person's character from their appearance: "without depreciating the facts on which it is professedly based, we confess that we have a more profound faith in the doctrine of physiognomy." The two series of drawings clearly depict the same child in two very different possible futures, always with the same cranial structure from the phrenologist's viewpoint, but revealing to the physiognomist the impact of environment on his development:

Carefully examine the above engraving. Look at the head and face of the child represented in the first figure. Who can divine what that young intelligence will become in the future of his life? Is there anything in his features to indicate that he will act a conspicuous part on the great wide stage of this world? Or is he to sink in the scale of intelligent being, till he takes on the mere animal nature, or what is still worse, till he become the very personification of vice and sin? Even in the outlines of the infant countenance there may be the index of the future man. These outlines will become more marked and definite in the boy amid the studies and pursuits of the school. The period of boyhood is one of wondrous development; and if this were but carefully watched, the foundation might in many cases be laid for the erection of a true manly nobility; and that undermined, on which moral evil would otherwise rear her temple of darkness and impurity. Look at the eye, nose, and mouth of the boy as he is at school, or as he is located in one of the faubourgs of Paris, and who does not perceive, from the very contour of the countenance, that his destiny will very much depend on the influences by which he may be surrounded?

This was in line with the ideals and goals of John Cassell, founder of the Cassell & Co. publishing house which produced The Popular Educator: "He was a social reformer who recognised the importance of education in improving the life of the working class, and whose many publications, both magazines and books, brought learning and culture to the masses" (Wikipedia). The Educator was essentially an encyclopedia in weekly installments. The number that included our article contained lessons in Latin, Arithmetic, Botany, English Grammar, French, Physiology and Biography.

The Educator was an editorial success, and when it started to be reissued in the 1860s the engraving was redrawn and used in advertisements and posters. The caption accompanying the first drawing became "The Child—What will he become" and the rest varied slightly. Note that the French context was removed:

Ad in Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper, May 17, 1862

Ad in The Literary World, September 22, 1876

From S. Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, 1848-1958, p. 62 we learn that these posters were the work of a publicity manager called J. H. Puttock, and that new drawing was by Fred Barnard.

At some point it crossed the Atlantic. In Ballou's Monthly Magazine for April 1979 we find an article "Various Phases of Life" that is mostly copied from the Educator. The source is not credited: Ballou's is one of the many American periodicals that took advantage of the lack of protection for foreign material which so infuriated Charles Dickens. (In fact, I have come across one of James Payn's stories in Ballou's under a fictitious author's name.) The illustration is new:

The scientific literature of the time also took notice of the poster. In The Monthly Journal of Science for September 1879 an article "The Criminal Law of the Future" on the role of heredity in the development of criminal tendencies alluded to it in these terms:

we may ask if external influences, moral or social, can modify the conduct and character of the individual, what is our right to assume—as the author just quoted evidently does—that their effects must cease with his death, and fail to reach his posterity? Everyone has seen a series of parallel portraits entitled "The Child; what will he become?" Can we suppose that the diverse agencies which have moulded the one into intelligence, refinement, and integrity, but have warped the other into ignorance, vice, and brutality, will leave their descendants equal and similar, the minds of both groups being tabula rasa as easily open to good as to bad impressions? Unless we can grant this monstrous postulate we must, "vulgar" as it may seem, recognise heredity as an important factor in the generation of conduct and character.

In 1885 a humorous picture by Frank Dadd was presented at the yearly exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, bearing the title "The Boy—What will he become?" which is the final form of the phrase as we encounter in Wodehouse. It portrays a father taking his son to a phrenologist to have the boy's cranium measured:

The parent is awed by the scientific man's jargon but tries to conceal his ignorance; the crank looks superciliously from a lofty position; and the boy just wants to be somewhere else, the sulk on his face denouncing the idiocy of the whole situation (my interpretation). The picture was praised in several art journals, and got a cartoon in Punch, May 30, 1885:

I believe Dadd's painting is satirical in intent, but that didn't stop the advocates of phrenology using it to promote their practice:

Ad in Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1889

Another pictorial derivative is found in The Girl's Own Paper, October 6, 1894 with the title "The Child:—How will she develop?", too large to reproduce here. As could be expected, it contemplates not only education but a number of other desirable virtues in a lady of the age.

But it was the posters that lived for decades in popular memory, and most likely what Wodehouse had in mind when he quoted the phrase. References to them appear continuously from the 1870s onward in literature, journalism, comic strips etc., and start declining in the 1920s, when they usually take the form "like in those old posters."

Reviewing even only the most creative of these in the 20th century escapes the limits of this post about the origins of the phrase, but we could mention a 1934 one-act play of that title by Harold Brighouse that can be read here, and one very late allusion which brings us close to Over Seventy. In Punch for November 22, 1950 a report of a discussion in Parliament of the recently founded Council of Europe and its future prospects makes the following comparison:

But what struck the unbiased onlooker most was that the unfortunate infant's future seemed very unclear and uncertain. For neither side seemed to have any great faith in its ability to rise above difficulties to come. It was all rather like one of those old "The Child—What Will he Become?" charts, only with both life-courses more than a bit cloudy and unpromising.

* * *

Such, then, is the history of our phrase, at least up until the time it was applicable to Wodehouse and his early characters.

One last reflection: the three occurrences in the Wodehouse canon are equally unfamiliar to a 21st century reader, but in context they are slightly different. In The Lost Lambs and Piccadilly Jim the author could count on his public recognizing the phrase, either from their own experience or from repeated contemporary references. In Over Seventy the passage was more of an nostalgic evocation of a bygone era, conjuring up a memory which only those above a certain age would share.

Jimmy Pitt, Spike Mullins and Ulysses

There is a curious symmetry between the first and last chapters of Wodehouse's A Gentleman of Leisure (The Intrusion of Jimmy in the US). At the beginning of the novel Arthur Mifflin sums up Jimmy Pitt's life thus:

"Jimmy's had a queer life," said Mifflin. "He's been pretty nearly everything in his time. Did you know he was on the stage before he took up newspaper work? Only in touring companies, I believe. He got tired of it, and dropped it. That’s always been his trouble. He wouldn't settle down to anything. He studied Law at the 'Varsity, but he never kept it up. After he left the stage he moved all over the States without a cent, picking up any odd job he could get. He was a waiter once for a couple of days, but they sacked him for breaking plates. Then he got a job in a jeweller's shop. I believe he’s a bit of an expert on jewels. And another time he made a hundred dollars by staying three rounds against Kid Brady, when the Kid was touring the country after he got the championship away from Jimmy Garwin. The Kid was offering a hundred to anyone who could last three rounds with him. Jimmy did it on his head. He was the best amateur of his weight I ever saw. The Kid wanted him to take up scrapping seriously. But Jimmy wouldn't have stuck to anything long enough in those days. He's one of the gipsies of the world. He was never really happy unless he was on the move, and he doesn’t seem to have altered since he came into his money."
"Well, he can afford to keep on the move now," said Raikes. "I wish I——"
"Did you ever hear about Jimmy and——" Mifflin was beginning, when the Odyssey of Jimmy Pitt was interrupted by the opening of the door and the entrance of Ulysses in person.

(Most of the episodes alluded to will have a bearing of some kind in the course of the novel.) In the final scene Jimmy, having won te girl and reached journey's end, is seeing off Spike Mullins, the red-headed burglar, at Southampton:

"It’s a pity you're so set on going, Spike. Why not change your mind and stop?"
For a moment Spike looked wistful. Then his countenance resumed its woodenness. "Dere ain't no use for me dis side, boss," he said. "New York's de spot. Youse don't want none of me now you’re married."
...
"It seems to me that you're the only one of us who doesn't end happily, Spike. I'm married. McEachern's butted into society so deep that it would take an excavating party with dynamite to get him out of it. Molly—well, Molly's made a bad bargain, but I hope she won't regret it. We're all going some, except you. You're going out on the old trail again—which begins in Third Avenue and ends in Sing Sing. Why tear yourself away, Spike?"
Spike concentrated his gaze on a weedy young emigrant in a blue jersey, who was having his eye examined by the overworked doctor, and seemed to be resenting it.
"Dere's nuttin' doin' dis side, boss," he said at length. "I want to get busy."
"Ulysses Mullins!" said Jimmy, looking at him curiously. "I know the feeling. There's only one cure. I sketched it out for you once, but I doubt if you’ll ever take it. You don't think a lot of women, do you? You're the rugged bachelor."
"Goils——!" began Spike comprehensively, and abandoned the topic without dilating on it further.

So, Jimmy at the outset was compared to Ulysses (Odysseus), the hero whose adventures on land and sea are the subject of Homer's Odyssey. In the Greek poem Odysseus, after the Trojan war is over, spends ten long years returning home, travelling against his will from one part of the Mediterranean to the other; "many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted." In the end he comes back to his home Ithaca and his wife Penelope. Jimmy for his part acquires a wife and settles down presumably to a life of married bliss; no more travellin for him.

At the conclusion of the novel it is Spike who becomes "Ulysses Mullins," unable to stay put in one place. Jimmy warns him that the path he is choosing "ends in Sing Sing," and speaking from experience ("I know the feeling") tells him that the only cure is to find a woman's love. Spike dismisses the idea. He has higher ends in mind: "I'm goin' to sit in at anodder game dis time—politics, boss. A fr'en' of a mug what I knows has gotten a pull. He'll find me a job."

We hear nothing of Jimmy's future in this epilogue, because it is all about Spike. Very appropiately the last image we see is a stray ray of sun filtering through the clouds and falling on the ship, and "it shone on a red head." There is more than a suggestion that here begin the Adventures of Spike, most likely to end, despite Jimmy's warning, in wedding bells. Whether Wodehouse actually intended to write a continuation, or we are only meant to imagine it, is anyone's guess. The fact is that A Gentleman of Leisure ends where it began, with a hero whom wanderlust spurs to be always on the move.

So now he must depart again
and start again his gondola,
for ever still a messenger,
a passenger, a tarrier,
a-roving as a feather does,
a weather-driven mariner.

* * *

It ought to be mentioned that the association of Ulysses with the overwhelming urge to travel is not at all a Homeric trait. The hero of the Greek epic, very sensibly, is driven by home-sickness, and asks for nothing more than to be allowed to get back to his island and rule his people. The problem is that early on he made an enemy of the sea-god Poseidon, never a wise move when your only way back is by sea.

But Ulysses is the paradigm of the changing hero. Already in Homer we meet contrasting aspects of his character, and as writers over the millenia went back to his figure he became a villain, a politician, a sophist, a Stoic model, a romantic hero, a Christian saint, a Christian sinner, an ordinary 20th century Dubliner, and the list goes on. One could write a whole book about the many incarnations of Ulysses throuhout history, if W. B. Stanford hadn't done it already. From his classic study The Ulysses Theme (2nd. ed., 1963, p. 202) we learn that

no ancient author seems to have portrayed Ulysses as a victim of mere wanderlust: his reasons for leaving Ithaca again were political, religious, or economic, rather than psychological—that is, as far as one can judge from the scanty references that survive. It was Dante who revolutionized the interpretation of Ulysses's final fate by presenting him as a man possessed by an irresistible desire for knowledge and experience of the unknown world. This conception of an outward-bound, home-deserting hero inspired some remarkable modern presentations of Ulysses.

Dante's Ulysses says, in Canto XXVI of the Inferno (transl. J. R. Sibbald):

No softness for my son, nor reverence sad
For my old father, nor the love I owed
Penelope with which to make her glad,
Could quench the ardour that within me glowed
A full experience of the world to gain—
Of human vice and worth. But I abroad
Launched out upon the high and open main
With but one bark and but the little band
Which ne’er deserted me.

But in English letters the epitome of the wandering hero is Tennyson's 1833 poem Ulysses:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Jimmy Pitt and Spike Mullins belong in this branch of the Ulysses tradition, and if a direct source of inspiration is required Tennyson's poem will always be the safest bet.

"If you don’t kill mother, I will!"

Wodehouse's brief comment on the Broadway production of Leo Tolstoy's lugubrious play The Power of Darkness, between January and March 1920, begins with a quotation from memory:

I once heard a definition of Greek Tragedy as the sort of drama where one character comes to another and says 'If you don't kill mother, I will!' The description fits most Russian peasant plays admirably, and fittingly introduces the Theatre Guild’s new production of Tolstoi's Power of Darkness down at the Garrick. If you want to read a real boost of the little opus, how is this, from Kenneth MacGowan's critique in the Globe?—"Its horror walks by night and fills a theatre with the dread of sin. The bitterest and most horrible picture of debased human nature ever drawn for the stage." How about toddling round and doing a bit of sin-dreading next Monday?

It was just after this that he wrote an often quoted sentence in The Little Warrior ch. 8:

No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle empty.

which is is pretty much what happens to Nikita, the protagonist of The Power, minus the vodka bottle.

The first part of the commentary obviously alludes to one of the best known episodes of Greek tragedy, the plot to murder Clytemnestra by her own children, preserved as luck will have it in works by all three major playwrights: Aeschylus' Choephorae, Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' Electra. In fact, "If you don't kill mother, I will" is Sopocles' version lines 938-1057 in a nutsell, where Electra, convinced that her brother Orestes has died abroad, tries to enlist her sister Chrysothemis' help to do the deed themselves, weak women though they are. Chrysothemis refuses, and Electra decides to do it on her own.

As far as our current ability to search across millions of digitized books, journals, newspapers and every other kind of written record shows, Wodehouse was the first to cause it to be printed. His column appeared in April 1920, but a few American newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune (March 26) had already quoted him:

Tolstoi's "Power of Darkness" reminds P. G. Wodehouse of a definition of Greek tragedy—the sort of drama in which one character comes to another and says, "If you don't kill mother, I will!"

Very likely he expressed this after witnessing a performance, a reporter picked it up, it was repeated in other newspapers, and W. decided to use it in his Vanity Fair column.

Subsequently the epigram circulated either quoting Wodehouse or anonymously, until around the mid-40s it began to appear attached to 20th-Century Fox president Spyros Skouras (1893-1971), who gets the credit in modern quotation collections.

On the other hand, John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) attributes the dictum to Helen Choate Bell (1830-1918) in an unfinished book of Retrospections, cited in John Jay Chapman and His Letters, p. 195:

I recall one of Mrs. Bell's sallies. She had been taken to Cambridge to attend a Greek play, and on being asked about it, replied, "Oh, it was one of those Greek tragedies where one of the characters on the stage says to another, 'If you don't kill mother, I will.'"

This was only published in 1937. H. C. Bell was a wit, very well known and respected in literary circles in Boston towards the end of the 19th century. A graduate prize in American literature is awarded in her honor by Harvard University. A book of reminiscences of her, Mrs. Bell (as she was usually called), was published by her friend Paulina Cony Drown in 1931. It includes many memorable quotations, but not the definition of Greek tragedy.

It is not easy to decide who to put down as the definitive author of the sentence. Mrs. Bell's claim seems to be the strongest: Chapman, after all, speaks from his personal recollections of her. His manuscript of Retrospections was written around 1932, when Chapman's health was already failing, but there is no reason to suppose that his memory was faulty.

Wodehouse disavows authorship of the phrase, and again one ought to take his word for it unless some proof to the contrary is produced. Stylistically there could be no objection, since the contrast between tragic matter and airy expression was his speciality—see his passage from The Little Warrior above. But this kind of argument cuts both ways: he may have heard the definition, liked it and adopted it precisely because it fits so well with his own style.

The real question is, if Wodehouse is indeed quoting, how did the phrase ever reach him? It can only have happened orally. He may have heard it from any of the characters involved in the story so far (Mrs. Bell, Chapman, Skouras), or it may have circulated in literary and cinematic circles, and he could have heard it second- or third-hand.

Skouras' claim cannot be disregarded altogether either, but it seems the weakest of all. It is true that he was already involved in the motion picture industry in 1920, building and buying theaters in partnership with his two brothers, with whom he had moved to the United States from Greece in 1910. But the lateness of the date militates against it, and the fact that the association of the epigram with his name occurred after he rose to the summit of fame as president of Fox is suspicious, since fame can easily act as a magnet for such things. Also, it's not as if he had used it in an interview, or it was even recounted in a personal anecdote (as fas as I know), but it always appears in vague attributions and later in never-to-be-relied-on collections of sayings.

The Small Bachelor: a variorum edition

The Small Bachelor (variorum edition) (PDF, 1,365 KB)

This is the second project of its kind that I've completed. The presentation to Leave It to Psmith should serve for this new one too.

In a way this was both simpler and harder than LItP. It is true that this novel didn't undergo the major changes that made it neccessary to resort to parallel texts. At the same time, the number of minor differences between main versions is much larger, and so is the count of changes introduced by later British editions. This results in an apparatus of 840+ entries vs. 500+ in LItP.

Speaking of LItP, I recently made some corrections and enhancements, and replaced the published PDF file.

I hope to finish at least one more of these editions before the end of the year. At present, Tales of St. Austin's and The Little Warrior are the main candidates, as most of the preliminary work is already done.

Cachinnagenic or cachinnogenic

There is this funny word cachinnogenic that Wodehouse used in America, I Like You p. 161:

[...] it used to be obligatory to laugh whenever anyone on the television screen mentioned Brooklyn. If there was one credo rooted in the minds of the citizenry it was that the word Brooklyn was cachinnogenic. And now there has been a shift in the party line, and today you have to laugh at Texas.
Nobody knows why. It is just an order that has come down from the men higher up. It is perfectly permissible under the new rules to keep a straight face when somebody speaks of Oshkosh, Kalamazoo or the Gowanus Canal [...]

But the Punch article from which this chapter is adapted ("This Happy Breed of Men", June 1, 1955) reads cachinnagenic instead.

Of the two, cachinnogenic is more correct from a linguistic point of view, since the word is composed of Latin cachinnus "a laugh, esp. of a loud or boisterous kind, guffaw" and the suffix -genic, which makes the whole mean "productive of (loud) laughter". But there is no reason for a Latin noun of the second declension to produce compounds in -a-: for that you need to have with a noun that ends in a, like mediagenic "attractive as a subject for reporting by news media".

Now, cachinnagenic is interesting because it leads (via a Google search) to Wodehouse's probable source for the Punch piece. This was an article titled "Analysis of the Boffolo Texensis" by Stanley Walker in the New York Times, March 12, 1955. Walker writes:

Texas has become the most cachinnagenic (chew on that one a while, you microcephalic Yankee hyenas) of the American states, clearly outdistancing Arkansas. The belly laugh at the expense of the Lone Star State (boffolo texensis) has made the customers with a low titillation point forget Gowanus, Walla Walla, Bridgeport, Oshkosh and Kalamazoo.

(A captivating essay about Walker and his native Texas is "Stanley Walker: The Retread Texan" by Jay Milner available here.) Both the argument and the examples given (as well as the dates) point to a derivation between the two. Wodehouse seems to have taken the word from Walker with a, and somewhere along the process of preparing the text for the book either he or his editor corrected a to o.

The story of the word and its correct application to American toponymy didn't end there. In Variety, Jan 9, 1957 one sees an ongoing discussion as to whether Texas had really dethroned Brooklyn.

It is likely that Wodehouse knew about Walker or even met him, although the only shred of evidence of any contact between the two I've found so far is the following mention in a letter to W. Townend (December 1934 in Performing Flea, or September in Author! Author!):

Then I had a cable from the Herald Tribune which said, "Happy about Lord Havershot"—that was the name of the hero of the novelette—from which I inferred that it was all right. But I do hate these ambiguous cables. I mean, the editor might quite easily have written "Not happy" and the French postal officials might have cut out the word "Not" as not seeming to them important. Finally, however, a letter arrived, just about the time I heard the news of the success of the show, saying that they liked the story.

Walker was still editor of the New York HT during this period, so he was probably Wodehouse's correspondent.

Be that as it may, the next time you want to describe Gussie Fink-Nottle's prize-giving scene as "productive of (loud) laughter", you need no longer hesitate between the two spellings.

"Trixie" and "Cocktail Time"

The annotations to P. G. Wodehouse's Cocktail Time (1958) point out that a mysterious character, Mr. Lucas-Gore, a member of the Demosthenes Club, can be found in The Author of "Trixie", a 1924 novel by William Caine, in very much the same role as in Wodehouse's story—a club bore mentioned in passing who tells anecdotes concerning Henry James. So in Cocktail Time ch. 25 we read:

Members who could sit without flinching through Sir Roderick Glossop’s stories about his patients or old Mr. Lucas-Gore's anecdotes of Henry James, paled beneath their tan when Howard Saxby senior started to tell the tale.

Two years later, Wodehouse introduced him again in Ice in the Bedroom ch. 14, still going on about H. James:

At lunch at his club, the Demosthenes, he had been cornered by old Mr. Lucas-Gore, whose conversation was always a bleating melange of anecdotes about Henry James, an author in whom the solicitor's interest had never been anything but tepid.

Caine's novel was unavaliable at the time, but since then it has entered the public domain in the US, and so can be read online at the Internet Archive. There we learn that in chapter I.3 the protagonist, while enjoying a cigar and a glass of cognac at his club, is struck with an idea:

The idea now pleased rather than amused him. He dismissed it (for old Mr. Lucas-Gore had started out upon an anecdote concerning Henry James, the point of which escaped him just as he got there), and it sank quietly into his subconscious mind.

This ought to be enough to show the filiation between the two passages. But the similarity goes deeper than that, because the story of The Author of "Trixie" is essentially the same as that of Cocktail Time. In Caine's novel, an Archdeacon (Samson Roach), an expert on Lactantius and author of a booklet of spirituality, has written a novel unsuitable for his position, so he has his prospective son-in-law (Bisham Dunkle, an unsuccessful modern poet) pose as the author. The novel is a success, money comes rolling in, and the latter part of the novel deals with the litigations around the authorship, as the Archdeacon regrets his decision. In Wodehouse's version, Sir Raymond Bastable, a respectable barrister, writes a successful novel under a pseudonym, but acknowledging it would ruin his political aspirations, so he gets his nephew Cosmo Wisdom to take responsibility for it. Sir Raymond too changes his mind later.

The Author begins: "'Every man and woman,' said the bishop of Pontefract, 'has one novel in them.'" This is the same phrase we find in chapter 2 of Cocktail: "Every man, they say, has one novel in him." The first conversation takes place at the Athenaeum—a real London club with which the annotator of Cocktail has identified the fictitious Demosthenes Club to which Sir Raymond belongs and where we hear of Mr. Lucas-Gore.

There is a dialogue between the two halves of the Archdeacon's personality that alludes to the Baconian theory when the idea is first proposed:

He suggested to the Pastor of Souls the adoption of an alias. The Pastor shook his head. He gravely misdoubted the security of an alias. To adopt an alias is to set every busybody to the work of discovering whom it conceals; and sooner or later the truth is ferreted out. And this particular truth must, simply, not be ferreted out.

Anonymity, then? How about anonymity?

No, thought the Pastor; anonymity wouldn't do either. Anonymity was just as dangerous as pseudonymity. Equally calculated to set the busybodies going.

"Why, then," said the Artist, "I'll tell you what."

"What?" inquired the Pastor of Souls.

"Do," said the Artist, "as Bacon did. Get a Shakespeare. Publish 'Trixie' under the name of some other man, someone who can actually be pointed out as the author, someone whose photograph can be published in the magazines, someone who can be interviewed and run after."

Compare chapter 3 of Cocktail:

If there is one thing the popular press of today is, it is nosey. It tracks down, it ferrets out. Richard Blunt becomes front page news, and it is not long before it is asking itself who is this Richard Blunt? It wants photographs of him smoking a pipe or being kind to the dog and interviews with him telling the world what his favourite breakfast cereal is and what he thinks of the modern girl.

and ch. 4:

Lord Ickenham was silent for some moments. From the frown of concentration on his forehead he appeared to be exercising that ingenious brain of his.

"Yes," he said, "they do find things out. I suppose that's what worried Bacon."

"Bacon?"

"And made him, according to the Baconians, get hold of Shakespeare and slip him a little something to say he had written the plays. After knocking off a couple of them, he got cold feet. 'Come, come, Francis,' he said to himself, 'this won't do at all. Let it become known that you go in for this sort of thing, and they'll be looking around for another Chancellor of the Exchequer before you can say What-ho. You must find some needy young fellow who for a consideration will consent to take the rap.' And he went out and fixed it up with Shakespeare."

* * *

But these similarities end very soon. First of all, The Author is a short novel (about 32,000 words), with a much simpler plot than Cocktail (twice as long). The Archdeacon, his daughter Chloë and Dunkle are practically the only characters. "Trixie" is first written out of curiosity, as Roach just wanted to test if he too "had a novel in him." His book is not immoral like Sir Raymond's, but hopelessly sappy: "The reviewers either damned the book for a preposterous lump of false and sentimental twaddle or praised it for a notable masterpiece of pathetic and elevating sincerity" (ch. V.2); Dunkle's sensitivity as a modern poet is the main obstacle to being known as its author, as his literary friends would have expected something rather more indecent out of him ("Obscenely wholesome," they call "Trixie"); his price is Chloë's hand. Parallel plots and subplots are entirely absent: there are no counterparts to Uncle Fred and Pongo Twistleton, Johnny Pearce and Bunny, Albert Peasemarch and Phoebe, the Carlisles or Howard Saxby.

The tone is also different. While both are comic novels, The Author is mostly satirical, bitterly so at times. The characters don't degrade morally as the novel progresses only because they were not too noble to begin with. Chloë's lack of filial piety is at times shocking, but then again Roach didn't really deserve better. The resolution only provides happy endings of sorts for the petty aspirations of the characters.

* * *

Unlike the fictional "Trixie," The Author was not a success. It received indifferent reviews and never got a reprint. Apparently it was also edited by Tauchnitz for the European market, but at that time every other new novel was.

It is light and very easy to read. I did it in one sitting (no more than three hours, and I was taking notes) and enjoyed it, but I wouldn't call it good overall. The plot struck me as clumsily constructed; the characters' motivations are shallow and their changes of mind feel forced. I'm not a literary critic and I may have missed its merits, but in that case so did the public at the time it appeared.

Which is not to say that it doesn't have some quality passages that can make you smile or chuckle, like the time the unscrupulous poet declares "I would commit any crime to get Chloë, short of marrying her on an insufficient income," or "Oh! cursed gold! And now to get some more of it."

Caine clearly used the novel as a vehicle for his reflections on the literary life. (In fact, the disclaimer at the beginning takes the form: "The people in this story are all purely imaginary, with the exception of one of the members of the Committee of Authors, who is intended to be a caricature of myself.") These make up (for me at least) the best bits, like:

The prizes of the fiction market are substantial, but at their biggest they look very small potatoes beside those which are to be gained elsewhere. If you want to acquire money in impressive quantities, don't waste your time making something that people can read; make something that they can eat or smoke or chew or wear or dance to or wash with or apply externally or take three times a day after meals.

Wodehouse readers will enjoy the welter of terms of endearment between Dunkle and Chloë, which any of W.'s characters could be proud of. He calls her old plum, old jug, old cork, old geyser, old knob, old chip, old pill, old stub, old root, old tick, old scream, old stitch, old stunt, old hoot, old tub and old germ. She calls him old lobster and old tuft.

* * *

Apart from modern digitalization projects and search engines, there is one factor that has kept the memory of The Author alive at all. It is mentioned in passing in Vladimir Nabokov's first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and students of the Russian-American writer have been wondering for decades what caused him to put this obscurest of books in the following company:

Hamlet, La morte d’Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le Temps Retrouvé, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, About Buying a Horse, Ulysses, King Lear...

Here's an interesting essay by M. S. Strickland (if I understood correctly, it will eventually become a chapter in a book about Nabokov) that develops the question fully. Half way through it draws a comparison between The Author and The Inimitable Jeeves, with Wodehouse getting the loser's end. Cocktail Time and its obvious link with The Author are not mentioned—understandably, as the writer is clearly not a fan of Plum and cannot be asked to spot a similarity with one of his less known novels, written more than 30 years after Caine's. Strickland keeps a very useful list of book he has read since 1992, and Wodehouse is c. for his a. Caine, on the other hand, has 32 entries since 2022, although several of them are actually rereads.

To Nabokov's influence must be also attributed the fact that last year the first translation ever of The Author appeared: Qui a écrit Trixie?, by Hervé Lavergne with a preface by Olivier Barrot. The legend Dans la bibliothèque de Vladimir Nabokov on the cover speaks for itself.

* * *

Finally, there remains the question of how the obvious dependence between the two novels can be explained and evaluated. Wodehouse may have read Caine's book when it was published and jotted down an interesting plot idea which had to wait 34 years to come to fruition; or he may have come across a copy of The Author in 1958 or a little before. The fact that the Lucas-Gore part is reproduced so closely, along with some scattered coincidences of vocabulary (like "ferret out" above), makes me think that he must have had the book at hand or fresh in his memory while writing Cocktail.

But it is the presence of Lucas-Gore that seems most significant to me. He is completely irrelevant to either plot, and exists only to create the right kind of atmosphere at the Athenaeum/Demosthenes. It can hardly be regarded as a normal literary reference of the type W.'s readers are familiar with (Shakespeare, Coleridge, Tennyson, Kipling and a long etcetera) because if anything was certain in 1958 it is that nobody could be reasonably expected to catch it. He could also have modified the names of Lucas-Gore and James, and then probably not even we with our 21th century tools would ever have spotted it.

Precisely because Lucas-Gore was so unnecessary I tend to believe that Wodehouse allowed him to stay on purpose, as who would say: "Yes, I lifted the basic plot from a long-forgotten novel, and in case you unlikely reader were wondering if the similarity is mere coincidence, I left Caine's signature in there for you to confirm your base suspicions. Congratulations, now enjoy the prize for the petty endeavors of the literary critic."

Leave It to Psmith: a variorum edition

Leave It to Psmith (variorum edition) (PDF, 1,618 KB)

Hopefully this is only the first of several similar projects: an edition of a Wodehouse book that has already entered the public domain in the US, recording all the differences between the various versions of its text: magazines, UK and US books, and later editions. To do this I've used the fist edition of UK book as base text, and added footnotes with all the variants observed in other versions. (In one case in this particular book one section was so heavily rewritten that it was more practical to print the text in two columns.)

Although all the footnotes are presented at the same level, the differences they contain are really of two kinds. On the one hand, differences between its serialization in magazines prior to the publication of the novel in book form, and between the UK and US book, very often represent authorial decisions: additions and deletions, choices of vocabulary and other changes made by Wodehouse to accomodate the text to its intended audience; or they may mark stages in the composition, as he found ways to improve the narrative or detected errors (such as lack of continuity). Sometimes these can be attributed to his editors, and at this distance in time it may be impossible to find out which was the case.

Differences in later editions (particularly British), on the other hand, may at times have been due to Wodehouse when they were published during his lifetime, but more often are either conscious decisions made by editors, or mere errors that are unavoidably introduced during a resetting of the text. They tend to be perpetuated in successive editions, since each new one is usually based not on the first (and theoretically best) but on the latest. In this case, the variorum edition may be useful to determine at what point each change entered the history of the text and whether it should be maintained in an ideal edition.

This edition presents the bare differences, without attempting to explain the reasons behind each change. This is best done in a running commentary, which already exists in the Annotations published at Madame Eulalie's Rare Plums, where the most significant of the differences described here are discussed from a literary and editorial perspective.

A short introduction provides full details of the texts and conventions used, plus additional resources and bibliography. In the text, I've tried to distinguish between the actual text and the editorial intervention using dark red for the latter.

This is not a reading text. The page is perhaps too large, and the footnotes are somewhat intrusive. I like to think of it as a scholar's text, that could be useful as a tool for studying its composition and history. If you just want to enjoy the novel, nothing beats a traditional printed book.

This edition has been prepared using Google Docs. GDocs is very limited in terms of the formatting possibilities it offers, and I'm not too happy about some of the issues resulting from these limitations, such as the fact that footnote callouts can be separated at the end of a line. Better results could be obtained with other word processors like MS Word, but they all have shortcomings when used for this kind of work. Ideally should be done using a critical text editing software, with numbered lines and a proper critical apparatus, but I don't have one at present. So rather than converting it to a better word processor I'll wait until I can have continued access to a professional tool.

I don't suppose for a moment that this variorum edition is perfect or complete. I'm quite confident about the analysis of the four main texts, but there are 500+ footnotes recording differences, and it is very easy for errors to creep in when you're dealing with such a large amont of data. I would also like to analyze the later editions better, and include others that are not available to me now, and to establish the dependence between book editions (now only tentatively done n the introduction). So I will probably update this file in the future, changing the date given at the end of the introduction.