P.G. Flitters On

NOTHING SERIOUS (222 pp.) -- P.G. Wodehouse--Doubleday ($2.50).

"A crusty roll, whizzing like a meteor out of the unknown, shot past the Crumpet . . . and shattered itself against the wall. Noting that his guest had risen some eighteen inches into the air, the Crumpet begged him not to give the thing another thought. 'Just someone being civil,' he explained."

In an era of the impolite grenade, the civil roll may come as a pleasant intrusion, especially if it doesn't hit anybody. And P.G. Wodehouse never hits anybody. In his new book of short stories, as in dozens of his previous volumes of fiction, there is nobody to hit. Rather, there is a pawky plenty of the same nobodies that have populated all his stories, the same fluffy crumbs off the British upper crust. In Nothing Serious, Wodehouse gathers his crumbs as gracefully as ever into amusing little heaps of no significance whatever--except as reminders that there used to be a cake.

Here's Your Muffler. The impeccable Jeeves and the peccant Bertie Wooster, P.G.'s most famous characters, do not figure in these stories. Instead, there is the terrible Lord Bodsham, "The Curse of the Eastern Counties," and his dimwit daughter, Mavis Peasmarch. There is Freddie Widgeon, "a pretty clear-thinking chap [who] realized that you can't go strewing babies all over the place"; and Horace Bewstridge, an indomitable golfer who "clasped [Vera Witherby] to his bosom, using the interlocking grip."

Fate whacks at Wodehouse characters like a duffer with a No. 7 iron. There is the problem of Agnes Flack, when a Pekingese picks up her ball on the 18th green and carries it into the clubhouse--should she blast out with a niblick? And there is the predicament of Bingo Little, when his child's nurse, a motherly woman, trails him to an assignation to give him his woolly muffler.

Speak Civilly to Blondes. In the mazes of such quandaries, Wodehouse characters frequently wander down mysterious passages of prose: "Like so many young doctors with agreeable manners and frank blue eyes, Ambrose Gussett continued to be an iodoform-scented butterfly flitting from flower to flower but never resting on any individual bloom long enough to run the risk of having to sign on the dotted line." But in the end they generally find their way out, bearing on their lips a word of Wodehouse wisdom.

"Many a man may look respectable," says Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, himself the most respectable of cadgers, "and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase." Lord Emsworth opines: "Speak civilly to blondes, and they will speak civilly to you." And one of the deepest truths in all Wodehouse is expressed by the Oldest Member--a figure who sounds suspiciously like the author himself, now 69. "The true golfing spirit," says the Oldest Member. "That is what matters in this life."

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