Friday 21 November 2008

You see them on every side

After yesterday's long-winded chuntering, some nice, leavening Wodehouse. I don't have a favourite Wodehouse, but Cocktail Time is certainly in the crackerjack division. Here are some quotations from it. I started to contextualise them, and then I stopped:

'The trouble in this world,’ said Lord Ickenham … ‘is that so many fellows deteriorate as they grow older. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all their finer qualities away, with the result that the frightfully good chap of twenty-five is changed little by little into the stinker of fifty.’

‘You could have got these views of yours on the younger generation off your chest in a novel. Something on the lines of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies – witty, bitter, satirical and calculated to make the younger generation see itself as in a mirror and wish that Brazil nuts had never been invented. But in your case, of course, that is out of the question. You couldn’t write a novel if you tried for a hundred years. Well, goodbye, my dear fellow,’ said Lord Ickenham.

‘I am convinced that, married to her, he would today be the lovable Beefy of thirty years ago, for she wouldn’t have stood that Captain Bligh stuff for a minute. Too bad the union blew a fuse, but how sadly often that happens. When you get to my age, young Pongo, you will realise that what’s wrong with the world is that there are far too many sundered hearts in it. I’ve noticed it again and again. It takes so little to set a couple of hearts asunder.’

‘Why the devil don’t you marry the girl, Johnny?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can. Better men than you have got married. Myself for one. Nor have I ever regretted it.’

‘You’re breaking that pen,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘and what is far, far worse, you are breaking the heart of a sweet blue-eyed girl with hair the colour of ripe corn.’

‘Did you read that last book of mine, Inspector Jervis at Bay?’
‘Well, what with one thing and another, trying to catch up with my Proust and Kafka and all that-’
‘Don’t apologize. The British Isles are stiff with people who didn’t read it. You see them on every side.’

‘Now listen, Bert. This “M’lord” stuff. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about it. I’m a Lord, yes, no doubt about that, but you don’t have to keep on rubbing it in all the time. It’s no use kidding ourselves. We know what lords are. Anachronistic parasites on the body of the state, is the kindest thing one can say of them. Well, a sensitive man doesn’t like to be reminded every half second that he is one of the untouchables liable at any moment to be strung up on a lamp post or to have his blood flowing in streams down Park Lane. Couldn’t you substitute something matier and less wounding to my feelings?’

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