Ode to P. G. Wodehouse on his 90th birthday, by B. A. Young

This brief tribute in verse appeared in the London Financial Times on October 14, 1971:

Ode to P. G. Wodehouse on his 90th birthday

by B. A. Young

Proclaim great Wodehouse, with a blare of trumpets,
And his great cohort of eggs, beans and crumpets—
Each one of them as instantly familiar
If not as Hamlet, anyway as Ophelia!
Here is Lord Emsworth, that immortal peer,
Scratching his Empress at her starboard ear,
With lesser Threepwoods jostling in the rear;
And ever lurking readily in reach,
Efficient Baxter and the butler, Beach.
Here idiotic Bertie Wooster weaves
His endless problems, all resolved by Jeeves;
Here Ukridge, Mulliner and Corky loom,
Infinite riches in a little room
(To pinch a phrase from Marlowe): and therewith
That seminal figure, polyvalent Psmith;
While, far but still unfaded, see young Mike in
His first eleven finery at Wrykyn.
Jeeves's ad libs had frequent wisdom in them:
Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum
Might have been one (and he'd have made it scan
More elegantly than it seems I can).
Dear Plum, I needn't translate this for you,
Who doubtless know Horace through and through—
You've come to Corinth, and Olympus too.

The author, Bertram Alfred "Freddie" Young (1912-2001), was a long-time drama critic for the Financial Times. There isn't much information about him online, but here is an complete obituary in The Guardian. Some of his books are online: Bechuanaland (1966), The Colonists from Space (1979), The Mirror Up to Nature (1982) and The Rattigan Version (1988).

Some of Young's rhymes are quite clever, and his literary references are worthy of the subject. Christopher Marlowe's line comes from The Jew of Malta (1590), Act I: 

This is the ware wherein consists my wealth;
And thus methinks should men of judgment frame
Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade,
And, as their wealth increaseth, so inclose
Infinite riches in a little room.

The speaker is Barabas, a wealthy merchant sitting in his counting-house. He is surrounded by heaps of gold, but he expresses a preference for jewels and precious stones over bulky metal coins. 

The Latin line is a hexameter from Horace's Epistles, Book I.17:

Res gerere et captos ostendere civibus hostis
attingit solium Iovis et caelestia temptat:
principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est.
non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.
sedit qui timuit ne non succederet.

To achieve great deeds and to display captive foemen to one's fellow-citizens is to touch the throne of Jove and to scale the skies. Yet to have won favour with the foremost men is not the lowest glory. It is not every man's lot to get to Corinth. He who feared he might not win sat still.

The translator (H. Rushton Fairclough, in the Loeb edition) observes that the sentence is a "rendering of the Greek proverb, Οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθον ἔσθ᾿ ὁ πλοῦς, which originally referred to the great expense of a self-indulgent life in Corinth. Here, however, the application is very different, viz. that not everyone can gain the prize of virtue."

Leonora Wodehouse: A short bibliography

In 1928 P. G. Wodehouse's stepdaughter Leonora decided to try her hand at writing. She described the circumstances in the brief autobiography that accompanied her 1931 article "The Mysterious Affair of the Skyscraper" thus:

Beverl[e]y Nichols said that to get something published you had to have some sort of a flair for writing. So we had a bet on it and I wrote my first article for the Evening Standard, proving I s'pose that anything, however bad, can be published. [...] The only magazines I've written for are Harper's Bazaar and the American, and the Strand in England, oh and the American Sketch here.

Here follows a list of all the essays and stories published under her own name or with a pseudonym that I have been able to find, with links to digitized copies (most of them, I'm afraid, behind paywalls) and other sources.

• My Public, The Evening Standard (UK), August 2, 1928
  (short humorous essay, evidently her first: it begins "Those are the first words I have ever written for publication, and it is a very grand sensation.")
• I'm Glad I'm Not a Man, The Evening Standard (UK), September 15, 1928
  (another short essay)
• P. G. Wodehouse at Home, The Strand Magazine (UK), January 1929
  (published at Madame Eulalie here)
• Myself as I Think Others See Me, The Queen (UK), November 27, 1929
  (essay)
• Where I Mean to Spend My Honeymoon, Harper's Bazaar (US), January 1930
  (humorous short story)
• The Mysterious Affair of the Skyscraper, The Jersey Journal (US), March 28, 1931
  (essay; earliest found among among many reprints)
• What His Daughter Thinks About P. G. Wodehouse, The American Magazine (US), December 1931
  (abridged and slightly rewritten version of "at Home" above)
• Inquest, The Strand Magazine (UK), April 1932
  (detective story, signed "Loel Yeo"; collected in D. L. Sayers' 1935 anthology The Third Omnibus of Crime)
• Poor Old Deadly Sins—They've Lost Their Glamour!, Liverpool Evening Express (UK), March 8, 1934
  (essay)

The list is probably incomplete; I will update it if any new material turns up. As can be seen, in the paragraph quoted above she left out the Queen article, and mentioned the American Sketch, a society magazine edited at the time by Beverley Nichols. I haven't been able to find any issues of this, but excerpts from "I'm Glad" appeared in some newspapers in February 1929; since one of them gives as its source "the current American Sketch" this must be later than its appearance in the Evening Standard in September 1928. Still, there may be other contributions left to discover in the Sketch.

It is not clear yet what contribution to the American Magazine she is referring to, since "What His Daughter" appeared in December 1931, many months later than "Skyscraper." Her father wrote to D. Mackail on April 12, 1931 (Yours, Plum, p. 80):

[Leonora] wrote a short story and sent it in to the American Magazine without any name on it, so that it got no pull from the fact that I am writing for the American, and each of the four editors sent it on with enthusiastic comments, and they bought it for $300 and want lots more. She also sold an article for $150.
She really can write like blazes, and, thank goodness, is now very keen on it. Her stuff has a terrific amount of charm, and she has only got to stick to it to do awfully well.

Contributions to the American for that period are generally signed and their authors well identified at the FictionMags Index, and I haven't been able to pinpoint any likely candidate. Of course, it is possible that the story was paid for but never actually used. It may even be the same as "Inquest," only published in the UK. In any case, when the full text of the magazine for 1931 enters the public domain at the end of the year I intend to examine a few stories more closely.

It is only natural that she should be concerned that her articles weren't being accepted on their own merits. "My Public," for example, presents the writer as "daughter of P. G. Wodehouse, the novelist, who has decided to follow in her father's footsteps," and "I'm Glad" as "Daughter of P. G. Wodehouse, the Famous Novelist." So "Inquest," her longest work and the only "serious" narrative found so far, was published under the pseudonym "Loel Yeo," whose identity remained a mystery for decades. As noted above, it was first singled out by D. L. Sayers and kept being included in anthologies, including E. Lee, Murder Mixture (1963), J. G. M. Merson, Nine Detective Stories (1964), J. Adrian, Detective Stories from the Strand (1991), R. Collings, A Body in the Library (1991), and M. Edwards, Serpents in Eden (2016). As far as I know, the first to reveal the identity of the author was B. Phelps in P. G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth (1990), p. 112, but Adrian in his 1991 anthology missed that. He wrote (p. 214):

About Loel Yeo no information is to be gleaned apart from the fact that he (she?) wrote a single story, 'Inquest', for the Strand in 1932. Perhaps the author was the same Yeo (no given name appended) who published a number of light sketches on the war (gathered from the Daily Mail, Punch, and Outlook) under the title Soldier Man in 1917? And perhaps not. Loel Yeo does not appear to have written anything else for any other magazine of the day, and this, to say the least, is odd. Whoever he was, and whether or not Loel Yeo was his real name (anagrammatically, it doesn't make much sense), he could write. And not merely competently, either. There is assurance in the style, an authoritative building-up of tension, convincing characterization, a telling use of irony. No wonder Dorothy L. Sayers, a fine judge of good writing, snapped 'Inquest' up in 1934 [...]

His conjecture about the 1917 "Yeo" was way off the mark, but his praise would have made Wodehouse burst with paternal pride. Criticism of the story was always unanimously positive, even enthusiastic. Reviewing Adrian's anthology, K. Schactman wrote in Scarlet Street, Fall 1993:

Finally, Adrian presents us with an unsolved mystery—namely, the true identity of the author of "Inquest." The name "Loel Yeo" pops up once as the name of the author of this story and is never heard from again. Adrian has searched other magazines in vain, and has even tried using the name as an anagram, to no avail. He cannot believe that the wit, style, and substance shown in "Inquest" were whipped up as a one-shot deal, and neither can I. My best guess is that some literary giant, publicly disdainful of the genre, created it, but who? Here is a case demanding some genuine detective work. Happy hunting!

Similarly E. Dorall in New Straits Times, March 26, 1994:

Only 'Inquest' by an unknown writer, Loel Yeo, whose sole work of fiction this seems to be, is a total success. A simple but perfect crime story, it is stylistically, in its telling use of irony and building up of tension, probably the best piece in the volume.

And several others, all along the same lines.

———

I started collecting this material some months ago, and until last week I thought that Leonora had stopped writing after her marriage to Peter Cazalet in late 1932, naturally absorbed by her familial and social obligations. The discovery of "Deadly Sins" from 1934 proved me wrong, and opened up the possibility that there are yet more articles and stories to be unearthed from the thirties and maybe even early forties. All the ones I have read so far are certainly worth the archaeological effort. They show, in varying degrees, some of the qualities justly recognized in "Inquest," and deserve to be better known and perhaps collected and republished at some point.

(Special thanks to Ananth K. for his help in getting access to several of these items.)

Ukridge: a variorum edition

 Ukridge (variorum edition, PDF)

Ukridge (UK) / He Rather Enjoyed It (US) is the second story collection and the seventh book overall for which I have completed a variorum edition. Once more, it was greatly facilitated by previous work done by the Madame Eulalie team on the magazine versions of these stories.

It is well known that their texts are broadly divided into two groups: the Cosmopolitan versions on one hand, and the Strand versions on the other which were used as the base for all book editions. This is reflected in the apparatus, where the Cs will be seen to predominate. Still, the changes introduced in both first editions and in later British editions have some interest.

I have also formatted into a publishable form the long tables of textual differences that I always compile before putting together a variorum edition. For the moment they are available in the Drafts & WIP page linked on the right; with time I hope to have a separate page with a proper introduction. They are sometimes incomplete, and the information is essentially the same as that provided by the variorums, but they offer an overview of the relationships between the texts that is not as evident in the continuous text.

Dedicated to P. G. Wodehouse

Some weeks ago Madame Eulalie inaugurated a Books section, which included some interesting extended dedications from Wodehouse's early books. This made me wonder about people who had in turn dedicated their books to him, and I started hunting around for those. What follows is a list, most likely incomplete, of books dedicated to Wodehouse during his lifetime, with links to online copies when available, and to reliable sources when not. I will probably update this list as new examples come to my notice.

A few of these, like Agathe Christie, are well known, while others I had never heard of. Some of Wodehouse's personal and professional relationships with other authors, like Ian Hay or Gerald Fairlie, are documented in his biographies or correspondence, and attested by the dedications themselves. In other cases one may assume that the dedication was inspired by a general admiration of his books, without a personal connection.

1912 Leslie Havergal Bradshaw, The Right Sort (see R. Usborne, "New P. G. Wodehouse Material"):

To P. G. Wodehouse, the right sort.

———

1925 Edgar Wallace, A King by Night:

To my friend P. G. Wodehouse

———

1925 Edgar Wallace, The Gaunt Stranger (see W. O. G. Lofts and D. Adley, British Bibliography of Edgar Wallace):

To my friend P. G. Wodehouse

———

1930 Compton Mackenzie, April Fools:

To P. G. WODEHOUSE

My dear Plummy,
A short while ago you told me you were re-reading Poor Relations. With that in mind I am venturing to dedicate the sequel to you. But, of course, the real reason for writing your name on this page is that I want to be registered as one of your most devoted readers and to sign myself in admiration

Yours gratefully,

Compton Mackenzie

———

1931 E. Phillips Oppenheim, Up the Ladder of Gold:

To

My Friend

"PLUM" WODEHOUSE

Who tells me what I can scarcely believe,
that he enjoys my stories as much as I do his.

———

1931 Gerald Fairlie, The Man with Talent:

Dedication

For P. G. Wodehouse because of many happy hours with Plum before ever I knew him.

———

1934 Ian Hay, David and Destiny:

To

my friend

P. G. Wodehouse

under whose remorseless goadings I have at last contrived to finish this book after seven years of labour grievously interrupted by periodical excursions (thrice in his company) into other and more frivolous fields of endeavour

———

1937 Anthony Berkeley, Trial and Error:

To P. G. Wodehouse

———

1960 Agatha Christie, Hallowe'en Party:

To P. G. Wodehouse——
whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me that he enjoys my books.

———

1970 Douglas Enefer, The Deadline Dolly:

To P. G. Wodehouse
for the unending pleasure
of all his books