Wodehouse's Top Twelve in 1935

In an interview published in the Christmas 1935 number of The Book Window: A Guide to Book Buying and Book Reading Wodehouse was asked what were the twelve funniest books he had read, which is an uncharitable question to spring on anyone, especially if you're going to print the answer. I haven't seen the interview (very few libraries even keep copies of The Book Window, and it's certainly impossible to find online), but fortunately several newspapers quoted extracts from it in 1936.

Here's Wodehouse's list as quoted. I'm adding dates for reference, and links to copies of each in the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg when available:

• The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens) 1836 IA PG
• Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Stephen Leacock) 1912 IA PG
• Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh) 1928 IA
• My Life and Hard Times (James Thurber) 1933 IA
• Poor Relations (Compton Mackenzie) 1919 IA PG
• A Master of Craft (W. W. Jacobs) 1900 IA PG
• At Sunwich Port (W. W. Jacobs) 1902 IA PG
• Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome) 1889 IA PG
• Ma Pettengill (Harry Leon Wilson) 1919 IA PG
• Vice Versa (F. Anstey) 1882 IA PG
• Mop Fair (Arthur M. Binstead) 1905 IA
• Edwards (Barry Pain) 1915

I doubt that Wodehouse meant the list to be ranked, although the Dickensian for the next March didn't fail to notice that Pickwick was at the head of it. The selection is well-distributed and representative of different periods, with the latest choice being as recent as 1933. Some of the authors are established classics, and others like Waugh were rapidly rising stars at the time. The least known may be Binstead. Pain was very popular until the 20s, but a lot of his books have not been digitized yet. Edwards was first serialized in Pearson's Magazine during 1914, so it can be read at Google Books (vol. 37, vol 38) or HathiTrust (vol. 37, vol. 38).

Six of them (Dickens, Leacock, Jacobs, Jerome, Wilson, Pain) had pieces in A Century of Humour, which Wodehouse had edited the previous year. In the prologue he had bragged that the fact that the editor had asked him to edit the anthology entitled him "to wear pince-nez and talk about Trends and Cycles and the Spirit of Comedy and What Is The Difference Between Humour and Wit," only to dodge the question of the alleged difference. Perhaps it was this that led the interviewer to ask for a new statement on the subject, which came out in this form:

I agree as to the unsatisfactory nature of the usual definitions of wit and humour, due, no doubt, to the difficulty of distinguishing the one from the other.
If I may attempt a solution, I should say that wit is unkinder than humour. The idea inherent in wit would seem to be that it is an attempt to score a hit; it is an effort to get back on someone else. to get back on someone else. Humour is kindly, and seeks to give pleasure to others; wit is regardless of others, and aims at personal triumph.
Perhaps that is why humorous writing seems to require a long apprenticeship. That, at any rate, appears to be the moral of my own experience. I had actually written twenty-one books before one sold to the extent of more than two thousand copies. Why? Probably they were not very good, and it was necessary for me to try and try again before I was able to achieve something which had a general appeal.

Another interesting bit of the interview is quoted, where W. somehow apologizes for the preference given to British authors:

Only two of these are American, but I am a great admirer of American humour. Most of the best of it, however, does not appear in book form, but in columns of the daily papers, and in weeklies like the 'New Yorker.'

The Americans are Wilson and Thurber (and one ought to remember that Leacock was mostly Canadian). This reflection should be read in connection with what he had said twenty years earlier in an interview published in the New York Times, about Britain having lost much of its sense of humor and being behind the United States in that regard.

[The main question is how many of these titles one had already read at the time of discovering the list. For the record, my own personal score is 6 out of 12, which is not so bad.]

Something Different

In his column for Punch, July 17, 1957 Wodehouse wrote:

Leonard F. Genz of Greenwich, Conn., is a man who can be pushed just so far. When they upped his Federal and State taxes, as they are doing all the time these days, he did not wince nor cry aloud but wrote a cheque and posted it to the local vampire bats. But when he got a New York State tax form which included the words "Give complete address used for 1956 if different than the above" he felt the time had come to make a stand. He wrote to Governor Harriman about it. I don't know what he said, but it was probably something not very different than "Well, youse guys up in Albany certainly laid an egg that time. Ain't you never been to school and been learned grammar? Where do you get that 'different than' stuff? Different from, you poor uneducated slobs."
The point, in the opinion of most taxpayers, is well taken. What I mean to say, ginks like I and you and the rest of us we don't mind having our blood sucked annually by a bunch of Draculas, but we think they got a nerve when they suck it like as if they'd never of heard of any such a bozo as Fowler, if you see what I mean.

To be fair, they wouldn't have found an answer in the first edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), which doesn't even mention "different than" in its discussion of whether different can only be followed by from or if to is also admissible. Fowler derides the idea that to is to be rejected on the basis that it never accompanies the root verb differ (i.e., "You do not say differ to; therefore you cannot say different to" is mere superstition and/or pedantry). They would have to wait for Burchfield's New Fowler (1996) to be enlightened, only to find that all forms—from, to, than—are equally valid in the new editor's opinion, based both on Fowler's logic and on the history of English, since the OED shows that all the combinations have been used for centuries.

But at the time Mr. Genz actually won the argument. As it happens, we do know exactly what he wrote to Governor W. A. Harriman and what the Governor replied and did, because the incident was reported in many newspapers since around May 1957, with more or less creativity on the part of the reporters. The Buffalo Courier-Express for May 5 writes, for example:

Harvard. Princeton Men Are Blamed
Tax Blanks' Grammatical Error Vexes Yale Grad
ALBANY, May 4 (AP)—Gov. Harriman today advised a fellow Yale graduate that a grammatical error on New York's income tax form was the work of a Harvard man and "an untutored editor who professes to be 'a Princetonian at heart.'"
Harriman wrote to Leonard F. Genz of Greenwich, Conn., that Genz had been the first in years to spot the error, and assured Genz it would be corrected on next year's forms.
Genz wrote to the Governor and complained that the form said: "Give complete address used for 1955 if different than above."
"On next year's forms," Genz asked, "may we please have English and Connecticut grammar (instead of New York grammar) and the expression 'different from?'"
Harriman replied that investigation had turned up the Harvard and Princeton men as the culprits.
He said that "for reasons now obscure, they chose to disregard the purists and cling to the "'different than'—perhaps for emphasis or because of common usage."
The Governor said the correction would cause no extra expense, since new forms must be printed anyway.
And he assured Genz that "the amount of your 1957 tax will not, on that account at all events, be different from last year's."

I haven't been able to find copies of NY income tax forms from that period to compare them—or rather, I waded through dozens of Google hits, but couldn't locate the exact forms with the offending phrase and its correction, but then I am not a NY taxpayer so I haven't been brought up to navigate that maze of paperwork.

Other periodicals provide more color or interesting additional information. The Schenectady Gazette for May 7 has: "Gov. Harriman said Mr. Genz was the first to notice the error although millions of tax forms have been distributed. The governor is mistaken. A number of persons have noticed the error. But most people are so anxious to get to the point where the tax is computed that they have little inclination to ponder over wording that is different from, or different than, what it should be." A later summary in the Albany Times-Union for August 20 informs us that "The Herald Tribune went so far as to take a dig at those 'ignorant fools in Albany who don't know anything except how to separate the citizen from his money." A new Jersey paper ridiculed the controversy with this sentence: 'A man and a dog are both different from a fox, but the man is more different than the dog.'" We also learn from the second source that "Genz, the man who started it all, is a business executive in New York who makes a hobby of spotting grammatical errors. Once he caught Winston Churchill in a slip, in one of his books, which won him a lunch with Churchill aboard the Queen Elizabeth." I haven't traced this last incident, which if true promises to be fraught with interest.

* * *

Going back to Wodehouse, given his strong opposition to than in this construction, it is to be expected that he stuck to from always. And so he did, as far as I've been able to ascertain. The only exception (apart from the ironic "something not very different than" in Punch above) would be the phrase "it's no different than marrying an heiress" in chapter 15 of The Luck of the Bodkins. But this is found only in the British edition (Jenkins 1935 and its successors Autograph, Penguin, Overlook). The American edition (Little 1936), which prints an earlier, shorter version of the novel, has in chapter 14 "it's not different from marrying an heiress," and the two serializations agree: "it wouldn't be any different from marrying an heiress" (Redbook in the UK and The Passing Show in the US). I have no doubt that Wodehouse's first and only choice here was from, and that than is the work of his British editor or a typesetter.

Searching digital repositories for more instances of "different than" produces what turns out to be a false positive. In chapter 14.7 of Bring On the Girls the somewhat convoluted sentence "It is hard to imagine two worlds more different than the one the authors said good-bye to as they left the Impney and that into which they plunged upon disembarking from the Aquitania" may appear at first glance to contain the solecism, but a closer look reveals that "than" in this case is governed not by "different" but by "more." This becomes clearer if one restores the elided complement of different: "two worlds more different [from each other] than the one ... and that into which ..."

The Little Warrior: a variorum edition

The Little Warrior (variorum edition) (PDF, 4,732 KB)

The Little Warrior (Jill the Reckless in the UK) is Wodehouse's longest book ever. At more than 117,000 words in its most complete form it is even longer than Mike, which is in reality two novels rolled into one. This variorum edition—the fourth of its kind published in this blog—analyzes four versions (two magazines and two books), and not surprisingly it has a bulky apparatus, with 1250 footnotes. It has taken a very long time: if I recall correctly, I have been working on it intermittently for the last two and a half years.

However, the edition itself is not as complex as those of other, shorter novels. A close look at the apparatus will show that the vast majority of the changes between the longest version and the rest are mere deletions, some of them substantial, and never affect the plot or the characterization. Even the dialectal differences between British and American texts are relatively scarce, more so than in the case of other books with a double edition; and apart from that the cases of rewriting are minimal. One suspects that most if not all of the changes are due not to Wodehouse but to his editors.

There is a difference of almost 4,000 words between the US book (used as base text here) and its British counterpart. It is a pity that the full version was not reprinted again after the 1920s: all later official editions, including the current Everyman/Overlook and Penguin, have the shorter version. Fortunately the novel was early enough that digitized copies are easily found on the internet, not to mention the Gutenberg project (and print-on-demand services picked it up immediately), but still it would be nice to have a proper edition of the American text.

I suppose this variorum is even more riddled with errors than usual. I will probably review it at some point in the future. Some of the texts I would like to check in case they contain any interesting changes are the (first) Canadian version in Maclean's, and the few British editions published, Autograph and Everyman/Overlook. I also think that I omitted to mention some notable typesetter's errors. But for the moment I'd rather let this text rest for a while and turn to something fresh.