»Galahad at Blandings

After the delightful experience of re-reading Psmith in the City, I picked up a copy of Galahad at Blandings from a going-out-of-business second-hand bookstore (why are the works of Wodehouse available only erratically in the States? I should have bought the lush stack I espied at Dutton's tidy new location in Beverly Hills). The going is a bit slower than the other Blandings books, which I recall with great fondness as being especially light. Wodehouse famously said of his novels: "I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn". I have a faint memory of our sixth-grade English teacher reading Psmith and Mike aloud to us, emphasizing that the initial "P" was silent, and spurious (our hero Rupert could not abide having such a common name on his uncommon character), but I cannot imagine how such a book, filled not only with anachronistic English school-boy humour but also with many mentions of typical British institutions, came across to eleven-year-old Americans. No wonder Anar says that I have more affectations in my language than she does after three-odd years of living in London.
Galahad is the epitome of a type in Wodehouse: dashing and socially clairvoyant, he is uniquely able to negotiate the social strata "without a bean to his name". He brings sundered hearts together through the most outlandish schemes, and always emerges himself unscathed.