As promised earlier, printed below you will find the first few paragraphs of “Jeeves and the Final Outrage”, my P.G Wodehouse Travesty. It contains a few characters I have appropriated and a few I have made up. Although I have attempted to maintain the Wodehousian tone, obviously the subject matter forces the intrusion of Stephenesque-isms. The embryonic plot is satirical, symbolic, Soviet social realist, questionable in polite society, and ultimately sophomoric.
JEEVES AND THE FINAL OUTRAGE
Despite God being in His heaven and the poor man being at his gate and so on, I found myself not wandering dreamily amid fragrant gardens, but unable to tear myself away from the rim of a distinctly unfragrant throne de toilette. For Bertram wooster was experiencing a slight malfunction of the sluice gates operating the formerly peachily pristine Wooster derriere. What my old chum Gawain Gaye-Eernibble used to call “a case of the licorice.” Or in terms more familiar to the layman, I was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhea. A condition brought on my dining on bread rolls discovered in the Drones Club beneath the mighty posterior of Sir Launcelot Cushioncrusher.
“Jeeves…” I called from my porcelain perch through the open door - never let it be whispered in non-hygienic circles that Bertram Wooster is one who sports the bathroom oak – “I say, Jeeves…”
Alas, there was no reply from that stout wiper of unhappy and disconsolate bottoms.
And then an extremely disagreeable and unshaven memory socked me in the old Wooster gray matter with a brass knuckle duster: in the tradition of a certain Iscariot J., my man Jeeves had trousered his thirty pieces of the silvery stuff and hightailed it to the village of Parson’s Knee to administer his patented soothing balms to the formidable forehead of my Aunt Agatha; the old relation had been head-butting the beasts of the field again, one of that considerable personage’s favorite pastimes.
So ailing, berefted Bertie would be playing a man down for the whole week! But never fear. Stiff upper lip and all that. Although it has never been Wooster tradition to apply the family lips to whatever trumpet we might possess and blow a fulsome family fanfare, neither are the Bertrams of this world famous for piping that melancholy Italian military tune known as “The Retreat.”
No. In the absence of Jeeves, that able manipulator of the dexterous elbow and wrist, I would wipe my own bottom with a flourish that would shame even the most fabled of wipers whose bronze statues line the marbled halls of the Academe Mysterioso Posterium.
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Continues in the same vein for two hundred pages while Bertie attempts unsuccessfully to wipe his own bottom until Jeeves returns– includes hilarious sequence featuring newts nesting in an unusual place!
I recall reading that Sir Pelham used to enjoy writing his books in a rowboat in the middle of a lake of a country estate. Should one hazard to ask where you were sitting when you wrote your novel? Also, does Pop Stoker make an appearance?
Posted by: Janet Jackson | July 01, 2004 at 22:31
Pop Stoker most certainly has a role to play - although it is not one I think he would like!
Posted by: stephenesque | July 02, 2004 at 10:55
The Original Boston Cooking School (1896) contains under the Recipes Prepared For the Sick an entry for Clam Water. This delicacy for the cobbly-wobblies naturally turns one's thoughts to Chichester Clam hiding out in the potting shed at Steeple Bumpleigh. What ho, Mr. Baldwin?
Posted by: Janet Jackson | July 02, 2004 at 12:56