P. G. Wodehouse - Fore!: The Best of Wodehouse on Golf

First Mariner Books edition 1999

Copyright 1983 by the Estate of P. G. Wodehouse
Preface copyright 1983 by D. R. Bensen

The Coming of Gowf, The Salvation of George Mackintosh, The Heel of Achilles, A Mixed Threesome, and The Long Hole were originally collected in Golf Without Tears, copyright 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1924 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1952. High Stakes, Chester Forgets Himself, The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh, Rodney Fails to Qualify, and The Heart of a Goof were originally collected in Divots, copyright 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1927 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, and 1955. Tangled Hearts and Excelsior were originally collected in Nothing Serious, copyright 1939, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1951 by P. G. Wodehouse; renewed 1967.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville), 18811975.

Fore! the best of Wodehouse on golf.
Contents: The coming of gowfThe salvation of George MackintoshHigh Stakes[etc.]
1. GolfFiction. I. Bensen, D. R. (Donald R.), date. II. Title.
PR 6045.053 A 6 1983 823'.912 83-5097
ISBN 0-618-00927-2 (pbk.)

e ISBN 978-0-547-52772-7
v3.0915

This collection of slices (and hooks) of life
is affectionately dedicated to
Jimmy Heineman
Wodehouseian extraordinary
and golfer (emeritus) ordinary
in observance of whose performance on the links
the term tee and sympathy
was coined

P. G. Wodehouse was perhaps the most amiable of modern writers, his work reflecting little of the conflict, stress and tragic sense so present in that of such contemporaries as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Robert Ludlum. (Any man who chooses to have a writing career beginning in 1901 and going on to 1975 has to expect to accumulate a mixed bag of contemporaries.) One topic only aroused the Wodehouse passions and stirred him to depict scenes of tormented emotions and violent action: golf.

He said of his first collection of golf stories, Golf without Tears, This book marks an epoch of my literary life. It is written in blood. Bitten by the golf bug in what he then saw as middle agebut, as it took him nearly sixty more years to play out the course, he must at that point be considered actually to have been teeing up on the seventh holehe was instantly and permanently infected, producing in the next half-century-plus some three dozen stories dealing with his obsession.

Obsession! There, perhaps, is the key to Wodehouses work which so many have vainly sought. In fact, nobody may have been looking for it, but that need not deter us. Take Bertie Wooster, that Mayfair mayfly. The casual reader will see Bertram Wilberforce Wooster as the most idle of flneurs, yet any constancy of attention will reveal his passion for being dressed in a way which combines the aspirations of the avant-garde with the surety of accepted tradition. That is living on the knifes edge, and no mistake about it. The moral rigor Bertie brings to his decisions about socks, or cummerbunds v. waistcoats would have done credit to Camus or Heidegger.

And take Clarence, Ninth Earl of Emsworth. Jeeves characterized Bertie as mentally negligible, and one wonders what he would have made of Lord Emsworth, beside whom Wooster looms as a mental giant. Yet this walking vacuum is capable of action, interest, and something approaching thought, when in the grip of an obsession. At an early period it was scarabs; for a brief time later, pumpkins; but in his riper years it found full flower in his devotion to the growth and nurture of his black Berkshire sow, Empress of Blandings. Many, perhaps most, of his family and acquaintances find Emsworth irritating loutrance, but the reader will see him as ennobled by his ruling passion for the prodigious porker.

Stanley Ukridge and his enduring quest for his personal grail, the foolproof con game; Bingo Littles undying faith in a sure thing at the races; Gussie Fink-Nottles preoccupation with newtsall show Wodehouses keen appreciation of the story value of the driving force of obsession.

Nowhere is this seen more strongly than in the golf stories. Mortimer Sturgis, deeply in love though he was, abandoned romance to remain true to the links. When Rollo Bingham and Otis Jukes found themselves rivals for the same girl, it was to the most peculiar golf match ever played that they resorted to settle the matter. Bradbury Fisher, gripped by his mania for the memorabilia of the sport, risked the direst fate conceivable for a prize collectible. Rather than lose to a customer, Horace Bewstridge threw away his business future. Even that unplayable-through foursome, the Wrecking Crew, though certifiably subhuman, is (partly) redeemed by the fervor of its members for golf.

And, of course, the Oldest Member, recipient of a thousand confidences (and dispenser of all of them to any potential auditor not very fast on his feet), is the Spirit of Golf itself, though he is never shown with a club in his hands. Like the Ancient Mariner, to whom he is often fondly compared by those compelled to hear his stories, the O.M. is so imbued with his obsession that its actual practice is no longer required. He is forever at the nineteenth hole, in no danger of being caught in a rough lie.

Choosing the stories for this volume has been a pleasurable agony. The professional obligation to reread Wodehouse cannot but be a pleasure; the need to pick a mere handful of jewels from the treasure-chest cannot but be painful. Where, knowledgeable readers will ask, is Vladimir Brusiloff, the Bolshevist golfer? Why are the sagas of Rodney Spelvin (torn between golf and that baser side of his nature which calls him to poetry) and of Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo (perpetually engaged and disengaged) incomplete? Have I really left Wallace Chesney and his magic plus-fours in the tee-box? these readers will mournfully demand. On this matter I must be firm. If you are doing a Best of... collection, something has got to go (unless you follow the example of a writer I know, who shoehorned forty-five stories into his own best-of book, which I think amounted to about ninety-eight per cent of his production to date), and the decisions of the handicapping committee must prevail.

Wodehouse once wrote, Whenever you see me with a furrowed brow you can be sure that what is on my mind is the thought that if only I had taken up golf earlier and devoted my whole time to it instead of fooling about writing stories and things, I might have got my handicap down to under eighteen. It is our good fortune that he took that wrong turning; no scratch man could have brought to these stories the poignant insight that pervades them, as their author put it, like the scent of muddy shoes in a locker-room.

D. R. Bensen
Croton-on-Hudson
August 1983

After we had sent in our card and waited for a few hours in the marbled ante-room, a bell rang and the major-domo, parting the priceless curtains, ushered us in to where the editor sat writing at his desk. We advanced on all fours, knocking our head reverently on the Aubusson carpet.

Well? he said at length, laying down his jewelled pen.

We just looked in, we said, humbly, to ask if it would be all right if we sent you an historical story.

The public does not want historical stories, he said, frowning coldly.

Ah, but the public hasnt seen one of ours! we replied.