Plum Blogging

How 'bout a little P.G. Wodehouse to start out the morning? I'm currently cantering through Summer Moonshine for the umpteenth time. This novel is something of a curiosity because it contains, so far as I know, the only genuinely evil character Plum ever created, the Princess Von und zu Dwornitzchek, an American fortune and title hunter.

Her nastiness is detailed early on in a scene in which the hero of the novel, Joe Vanringham, who is also the Princess' stepson, explains to the heroine Jane Abbott why he left home years earlier with only ten dollars in his pocket to take his chances in the world:

"And now about my reasons for parting company with the Princess Dwornitzchek. I left because I have a constitutional dislike for watching murder done - especially slow, cold-blooded murder."

"What do you mean?"

"My father. He was alive then - just. She didn't actually succeed in killing him till about a year later."

Jane stared at him. He appeared to be serious.

"Killing him?"

"Oh, I don't mean little-known Asiatic poisons. A resourceful woman with a sensitive subject to work on can make out quite well without the help of strychnine in the soup. Her method was just to make life hell for him."

Jane said nothing. He went on. There was a brooding look in his eyes, and his voice had taken on an edge.
..........

"If you want to know her better, go and see that play of mine. I've put her in it, hide, heels and hair, with every pet phrase and mannerism she's got and all her gigolos and everything, and it's a scream. Thank goodness she is - or was when I knew her - a regular theatregoer, and she's sure to see it when she comes back. It'll take the skin off her."

Jane was feeling cold and unhappy.

"You're very bitter," she said.

"I am a little bitter. I was fond of my father. Yes, she's going to get a shock when she sees that play. I'm counting on it to have much the same effect as the one in Hamlet. There was a good dramatist too, by the way - Shakespeare. But I'm afraid that's all it will do - give her a jolt. It won't cure her. She's past curing. The time I'm speaking of was years ago, but she's still at it."

"At it?"

"Making a fool of herself with boys half her age. She was doing it when father was alive, and she's doing it now. I suppose if we looked up the recent Von und zu Dwornitzchek, we should find he was a lad in the twenties with lavender spats and a permanent wave. She's undefeatable. She'll be just the same when she's eighty. Or maybe she'll decide to settle down before that and I shall find myself with a step-step-father half a dozen years younger than myself who looks like a Shubert chorus boy."

This is strong stuff for Plum. There are plenty of comic villains in Wodehouse's work, imperious aunts, shady crooks and so forth, but none of them - not even Bertie Wooster's nemesis Roderick Spode (who is a lampoon on the 30's British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley), is painted in such stark terms or with such a black soul as the Princess. Even in the heart of his complex plots of love, money and intrigue, Wodehouse avoided unpleasantness. Here, he tackles it head on and the result is, well, unusual enough that I'm posting about it. And while the novel contains all the usual Wodehouse devices, a complex plot, some great slapstick scenes and two of Wodehouse's classic supporting characters - Prudence Whittaker and Sam Bulpitt, there is also about it a depth of emotion not often seen in his work. And as I say, the Princess is the focal point of the darkest feelings.

I confess that I rather lost interest in Robert McCrum's biography of Wodehouse before it got to this point in his career (1937), but I am curious to go back and check to see what might have been up with him to prompt such an unusually biting outburst.