Russians Led Me to My PG Wodehouse

The doctor in my mind wrote a prescription for me and the prescription was: Insert More Pelham Grenville into your life, daily, for several weeks.

I've been feeling droopy of late, lacking the ability to laugh at self, or to feel particularly chirpy about anything, let alone make a "Five Year Plan". This, coupled with a decided lack of sleep, and waking in the night a regular occurrence, finds me, these days, with my knuckles dragging on the ground. As it's the season when most things are coming alive, birdies are tweeting and gardens are growing, my state was irksome, to say the least.

The prescription was to re-read the very first P.G. Wodehouse book I ever read, preferably in the same paperback edition, for maximum impact. I knew that this book had made me laugh out loud, and laugh more than I had ever laughed reading any book ever. It was the one that confirmed me as a life long P.G. Wodehouse fan, particularly his Jeeves and Bertie series.

Problem was I had no idea which book it was. I'd borrowed the book from a friend at the time of reading. I knew it had a picture of someone in a boat, and a circular garden pavilion, and there was something about a hostile swan. But couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the collection. And there are quite a few novels and short story collections.

Thank you internet! Yesterday an online search for clues brought me to this wonderful compendium of Wodehouse, from the Russian Wodehouse Society. Yes, from the Russians! The really helpful thing was their inclusion of photos of the actual book covers used over many years of publication. I found my book! It was right there: the boat, the pavilion, the swan. I think the swan, anyway, the book cover is a bit tiny.

It was with me the work of a minute (or several minutes) to locate a used copy of the book online, for practically nothing. And soon my prescription will be winging its way to me. Thank you, oh nameless and meticulous Russians for your love and dedication to one of the wonders of English literature: P.G. Wodehouse, and for leading me back to a delightful pleasure from my past.

It's all the more charming that Russians have put this website together as Wodehouse liked to rib the Russian temperament regularly in his books. For example, this little excerpt from Wodehouse's Monkey Business:

I have a tender heart (said Mr Mulliner), and I dislike to dwell on the spectacle of a human being groaning under the iron heel of Fate. Such morbid gloating, I consider, is better left to the Russians.

I look forward to a lot less morbid gloating in my future.

Oh, Spy Magazine, how I miss you...

Every now and then, usually while web surfing, something reminds me of Spy Magazine and I'm thinking it may be time to drag out my old copies, saved from the 80s and early 90s.

Spy was a funny, very funny, scathingly brilliant publication with beautiful graphic design, edited by Graydon Carter, who is now the editor of Vanity Fair. (I think he's still there). It was the first to christen Donald Trump as a "short fingered vulgarian".

The title came in part from the society gossip magazine for which Jimmy Stewart’s character works in the suave 1940 movie The Philadelphia Story. With relatively little budget for design, however, Spy’s editors saw their best route forward in giving ambitious designers a free creative license. Doyle, who had recently quit M to form his new partnership, found his own inspiration for the prototype in the typographic density and variety of sixteenth-century Polyglot bibles and 1920s type-specimen books. He recalls a reverence in design circles at the time for art directors like Fabien Baron, who in the late 1980s gave Italian Vogue a spare elegance reminiscent of Alexey Brodovitch’s midcentury designs. “In the 1980s there was this annoying supposition that Baron had invented white space,” Doyle says. “This was our reaction against clean minimalism.”

Quote above is from a great article about Spy. Read more here. Some issues, one in particular (that I somehow lost), actually made me cry with laughter. It was an article that had something to do with made-up names, and the names themselves were the key to the unstoppable shrieking and guffawing.

I notice that a fellow Torontonian, Joe Clark, at Fawny.org is collecting Spy back issues. His site is called Ten Years Ago in Spy. Joe's own blog (linked above) is interesting as well. I enjoyed his critical review of Toronto's Jones Avenue the last time I was there.

Of course I can't remember the Spy issue or even the particular article that set off my marathon laughing fit, but I will be racking my brains trying to remember it. Off and on. When I remember.

Spy was also the venue of a monthly column about life by Ellis Weiner, who now writes on the Huffington Post and is very funny and brilliant. His columns were always one of my favourite things in Spy. It's great to find his writing again on the web. Here is his entertaining and informative deconstruction of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Ellis is also the author of a number of books: The Joy of Worry, the unjustly neglected but hilarious Drop Dead, My Lovely and The Big Boat to Bye-Bye, and Santa Lives! Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus.

He is co-author, with Barbara Davilman, of Yiddish With Dick and Jane and Yiddish With George and Laura, both published by Little, Brown.

More to add to my Amazon wish list.