4. Women. There is no carnal imperative that the Inner Gentleman cannot subdue by a game of baccarat in the upstairs gaming room at White’s accompanied by a decanter of Sandeman’s port. You should not enter upon matrimony without the utmost circumspection, since the female mind will for ever remain a terra incognita. You may find it helpful to picture the unbridgeable differences between the sexes as similar to those between the clubs of St James’s: Women are from Boodle’s; Men are from Pratt’s.
OSCAR WILDE
tries to be an agony uncle
From Mr T. Blair of Downing Street, London sw1
Dear Uncle Oscar
I have had a long off-on relationship with a man called Peter. It always ends traumatically when he misbehaves, but a few months later I find I have taken him back. He is in Brussels at the minute. How can I break my cycle of dependency?
My dear Tony
To forgive is human but to err is divine. For myself, I make a habit of never making promises that I can keep; it renders one predictable, and predictability is the godfather of tedium. By the way, Brussels is all very well, but not for the whole weekend.
From Anon, 17, of Birmingham
Dear Uncle Oscar
Every time I go out clubbing my face comes out in a terrible rash. Do you think it’s because of the tasty Big Macs we have afterwards?
My dear Anon
A Mac is seldom big and never tasty. Your problem is caused by too much self-restraint. In matters of the mosh pit, a man should aim always to be like a pruned rose: half-cut. Try taking drugs. Remember: Ecstasy is life’s revenge on death. Do not practise safe sex; rehearsal only dulls performance. But if you must, remember that a French letter tells you less about its recipient than its sender.
From John, 21, of Exeter
Dear Uncle Oscar
I am due to be married in two weeks, but I think I have fallen in love with my fiancée’s mother. How shall I conceal it at the wedding?
My dear John
All men grow to like their mother-in-law; that is their tragedy. No woman does; that is yours. Incest is a triumph of hope over experience; and experience is the name we give to our lost loves. At the wedding, woo your mother-in-law by laying a trail of curried vol-au-vents to her bedroom door: it is the uneatable in pursuit of the unspeakable.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
goes to Chandlerland 2
I pushed a moody forkful of waffle and maple syrup round the plate as I cast an eye over the sunny purlieus of Benedict Canyon. Ask those who know him best and they will tell you that Wooster B. is seldom a ball of fire at the breakfast table; and this morning I had a particular reason to proceed gingerly with the forking and shovelling. The night before had seen the birthday revels of one of my oldest pals, Scarface Cholmondeley-Plunkett, who ran what is known in the business as a ‘numbers racket’ in Pasadena. To say that the revels had been prolonged would be an understatement, a – what’s the word I want? A li-something. Jeeves?
‘Litotes, sir. A young lady is waiting to see you, sir. I took the liberty of showing her to the jacuzzi, where I believe she has disrobed, sir.’
‘What? Completely, Jeeves?’
‘I fear so, sir.’
To skip over the sprinklers on the lawn, skirt the bougainvillaea and let myself into the abluting quarters was with me the work of an instant.
Installed in the old tub was a young popsy with the lips of Nobby Hopwood and the general oomph and espièglerie of Bobby Wickham. In short, the Wooster natural juices had not been so perky since the day I found young Pauline Stoker sitting up in bed in my heliotrope-striped pyjama jacket.
‘I say, Jeeves,’ I said. ‘This is the life.’
‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, sir.’
‘Exactly. One of your own, Jeeves?’
‘No, sir. It was the poet Herrick who so opined.’
‘Well, he hit the bally nail on the head, didn’t he?’
‘Jeeves,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re beginning to annoy me.’
‘Indeed, sir?’
‘Indeed,’ I said, and taking a snub-nosed automatic weapon from my dressing-gown pocket, I shot the supercilious fellow through the chest. Then stripping off the outer coverings, keeping on only the Old Etonian underpants that had caused my late gentleman’s gentleman so much visible discomfort, I leapt – at last – headlong into those bubbling depths.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
goes to a hen-party
Hermione sighed as she descended from the omnibus and entered the gloom of the London public house where she had engaged to meet the two young women for what they referred to as a ‘hen-night’. The swell of the capital rose up all round her in the sounds of costermonger, barrel organ and the brass band playing in the park. The eddying noise was attached to her, it sounded in her, it was a part of her.
The two young women stood at a wooden counter, a waist-high platform, a bar.
‘What you drinking, Hermione?’ said one of the young women. Her shrill tone, her small vulgar head gave her something of the sparrow, Hermione thought.
Hermione glanced down at her hand, empty beneath its white glove. ‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘But perhaps a glass of cordial. Elderflower, or mulberry perhaps.’ The words made her long for the touch of the evening air in the walled kitchen garden at Buntingfold.
The two young women talked loudly of shags. Why, Hermione wondered? Duncan smoked shag; Lytton smoked shag; but why were these two common little tarts so interested in tobacco? Unless, she thought in a fleeting moment, they were discussing a species of cormorant.
Then they spoke of someone called Klein, whose first name was apparently Calvin. But she did not know Mr Klein. He sounded like a Jew, Hermione thought; perhaps he was a usurer from Cheapside.
Her head ached from the dreadful noise of the music and she laid her hand across her brow. She felt tired, she felt etiolated; she felt exhausted.
‘Don’t you like garidge, Hermione?’ asked one of the little tarts.
‘Garage?’ she replied. ‘I have no experience of it. I leave all that to Walton.’
‘Who’s Walton then?’
‘My chauffeur,’ Hermione replied.
This whirlpool of life, she thought. She was in it, yet not in it; she felt tired out by it all. One is beside it, she thought, one is over it, one is under it, one is … past it.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
does a Lucy poem for today’s rapper
She dwelt among untrodden ways
Beside the skateboard track,
A bitch whom there were none to raise
And very few to smack.
Inside the car-park did I feel
The thrust of my desire;
And she I wanted turned my wheel
With looks and hands like fire.
My van moved on, mile after mile,
An ounce of skag and fourteen Es
Close by her hut I dropped.
What weird and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a gangsta’s head.
‘Oh, stone me,’ to myself I cried,
‘If my ho should be dead.’
W. B. YEATS
reports on the 2006 Ryder Cup at Kildare
The restless multitude is pressed where
The wild falcon and the linnet wing
By Kildare’s foam-thrashed sea:
More albatross than eagle, more
Eagle than birdie, less birdie than halved in par
In the afternoon four-balls
With Woods and Love.
Love and innocence is born in Seven Woods
At Sligo in the spring,
Though a five-wood’s all that’s needed with the wind behind.
I think now of Kiltartan’s sons whose names
The English Belfry tolled in widening gyres,
The Irish soldiery g
one beneath the mire:
Paul McGinley, Padraig Harrington, a tattered stick
Of Dublin rock upon the threatening fifth;
Christy O’Connor Senior, sixty years the pro at Lissadell,
Taken by the fairy as a child and shown the interlocking grip,
More overlapping than interlocking,
A public smiling man whose high slice
Loosed left-handed Eamonn Darcy on the world.
And in the final singles, as the sun falls behind
The lakeside tower, I watch him
Take the hickory stick. His limbs dance to a frenzied drum,
His unsure grip bespoke
By Lady Gregory’s own assiduous putting stroke
Perfected on the borr owing lawns at Coole.
An old man is a paltry thing who hides his head
And cannot watch the white orb roll towards the cup.
So may it be that when I am long stymied
And gone beneath the divot
Under bare Ben Hogan’s Head,
You may always pierce the veil and dream
Of Christy O’Connor Junior’s soaring three-iron
To the gull-tormented eighteenth green.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
A Fool’s Alphabet
Birdsong
The Fatal Englishman
Charlotte Gray
On Green Dolphin Street
Human Traces
FOOTNOTES
RAYMOND CHANDLER
1 As schoolboys, Chandler and Wodehouse were near-contemporaries at Dulwich College, London.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
2 See educational footnote on Raymond Chandler.