"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."