"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."