A Gentleman of Leisure: a variorum edition

 A Gentleman of Leisure (variorum edition, PDF)

This is the third project of its kind I've completed. It is out of schedule: the next one was supposed to be The Little Warrior (UK Jill the Reckless), but a flurry of activity at Madame Eulalie around the 1910 book editions of A Gentleman of Leisure (US The Intrusion of Jimmy) made it more practical to concentrate on this one while it was still fresh in the mind.

The preparation of each of these texts has its own challenges, and forces the editor to make decisions that require some kind of justification. In the case of AGoL, the choice of the base text took some thinking. For other texts the first UK edition seemed a natural choice, as it clearly was in itself an evolution on previous versions, and also was more or less the established text for all subsequent editions, barring minor corrections or editorial deviations. AGoL, on the other hand, underwent at a relatively early stage a substantial revision between the first UK edition (Alston Rivers, 1910) and the 1921 Jenkins text, which would become the standard for the novel's later history. This alone would seem to mark it as the author's "definitive" version, and to justify giving it priority. But things are not so simple, since the Jenkins edition has some significant deletions from the previous version, and one always has misgivings about relegating genuine Wodehouse text to the footnotes. In the end, after much hesitation, the Jenkins text came on top.

The apparatus is longer than that of the two previous variorums, and this is due mostly to the British editors removing many of the peculiarities of Spike Mullins' speech. Again I was in doubt whether it was really worth it to record every time an' and fer in the American edition was changed to and and for. In the end I decided to keep them, on the principle that it will be easier to remove them later if I ever change my policy in this regard, and also that drawing the line between what is worth noting and what isn't is not so simple. As a result, the number of footnotes soared to over a thousand—or t'ousand, as Spike would say.

Side note: since I hope to keep adding to the number of variorum editions, I've created a separate page with a general presentation of the project, a list of finished documents and (eventually) ancillary material. This will be permanently available as a link in the nagivation bar at the left of the blog.

George Morrow's "Sports" Series

Wodehouse's "forgotten sports" gag spans 46 years:

• Forgotten Sports of the Past—Splitting the Straw. (The Little Warrior ch. 14, 1920)
• Forgotten Sports of the Past—Number Three, Meeting the Mater. ("Something Squishy", 1924)
• Forgotten sport of the past—Waving the Tortoise. (Sam the Sudden ch. 24, 1925)
• Cruel Sports of the Past—Beating the Steak. (Spring Fever ch. 17, 1948)
• Forgotten sports of the past. Squaring the housemaid. (Uncle Dynamite ch. 9, 1948)
• Forgotten Sports of the Past—Getting The Scenario. ("Genesis of a Novel", 1966)

All these are a reference to the equally long-lived "Sports" series of cartoons by George Morrow (1869-1955), published in Punch since at least 1910 as variations of "Cruel/Forgotten Sports of the Past". These generally had the structure "X-ing the Y", Y often being the name of an animal, and involved a pun.

Morrow has a fairly complete Wikipedia page. See also his obituary in Punch, January 26, 1955, and his entry in the Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists. Add to the bibliography George Morrow, His Book (1920) available online; and see a collection of cartoons at the Punch website.

Below are all the examples I could find of "Sports" in Punch, ranging 30 years. Click each image to expand. Possibly there are others, but they are not so easy to locate in online repositories like the Internet Archive or HathiTrust. A complete index to the magazine for the 20th century might reveal more items that I missed (like the May 4, 1910 item—thanks to Neil M. for bringing that one to my attention).

Wodehouse also recalled two of these in "Falconry: Who Needs It?", published in Playboy in November 1956:

READING A BOOK not long ago about popular sports of the past, I was interested to note how few of them have succeeded in keeping their grip on the public taste. They had their day and vanished never to be heard of again. I suppose about the only one that has survived into our modern age is haberdashery. You still find dashing the haber going on. But what of knurr and spell? Or boxing the compass? Or mocking the turtle? (A cruel sport, this last. The players stood in front of their turtles and made wisecracks about their faces, and the competitor who was the first to get his turtle good and sore won the chukker.)

March 23, 1910

April 27, 1910

May 4, 1910

May 11, 1910

July 20, 1910

February 21, 1912

June 27, 1917

February 18, 1925

May 18, 1931

June 15, 1932

March 20, 1940

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 the 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 travelling 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 throughout 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!"

Perhaps 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. Or could it be that he shared a draft of his review before publishing it?

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)

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.