"Old Blighter"

A FEW QUICK ONES (213 pp.)--P. G. Wodehouse--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

Today's dean of British humorists is a 77-year-old U.S. citizen who has lived in America on and off for half a century and now resides permanently at Remsenberg, L.I. The blurb to his new book of ten short stories suggests that "the sound of [his] clicking typewriter keys beats a gentle staccato against the roar of the ocean surf." The volume is recognizable Wodehouse, gently satirical, its barbs wielded with whimsy. But the more remarkable thing about Pelham Grenville Wodehouse in his twilight years is the way the decades of ocean-hopping have scrambled his language until all international date lines and regional distinctions tend to disappear. In a sense, he reflects the overall scrambling of English and American speech ever since the first World War II G.I.s came home spouting such Briticisms as "bloody" and "old top."

Most Wodehouse characters live in England, but they have a curiously American shine to their ways. His heroines would seem the image of Harry Leon Wilson flappers of pre-World War I America--the America first known to Wodehouse--were it not for the fact that they are simultaneously as British as Poet John Betjeman's strong-armed Dianas; they display the "outer crust ... of Miss Marilyn Monroe," and yet still manage to draw from their swains such modish endearments of the British '20s as a "tenderly" spoken "old blighter." Wodehouse heroes are often golfers, but they play upon courses which seem to be suspended in mid-Atlantic, uncertain whether to nationalize in yesterday's Surrey or today's Eastern Seaboard. His people voice such dated Americanisms as "bozo" or "They said a mouthful." and also manage to class themselves with London's Angry Young Men of today.

In a Wodehouse story it is perfectly natural for the cartoonist of a syndicated U.S. comic strip to find himself sharing a British beach resort with contenders in an American-type "Beautiful Babies" contest, for a New York publisher to be found naked in the hothouse of a dwelling on Wimbledon Common, or even for a member of Edwardian London's Drones Club to consult Webster's Dictionary rather than the Oxford. Victorian and Edwardian euphemisms such as "bally" and "ruddy" work their way into the tale of a British knight who once "allowed some hornswoggling highbinder to stick him with . . . dud Smelly River Ordinaries"*--and, of course, there are the usual Wodehousian references to or quotations from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Lord Tennyson and Publishers Knopf, Holt, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster--all balled up together.

The latest ten stories from the dean are the same bally old mixtures as before and will be ruddily gulped down by Wodehouse fans. The serious student of English will not fare so well: any page chosen at random will leave him (in the Wodehouse phrase) with the "drawn, haggard look . . . a man wears when one of his drives, intended to go due north, has gone nor'-nor'-east."

* Loosely translated: a crook sold him some worthless shares of common stock.

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