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), 1881–1975.

Fore! the best of Wodehouse on golf.

Contents: The coming of gowf—The salvation of George Mackintosh—High Stakes—[etc.]

1. Golf—Fiction. I. Bensen, D. R. (Donald R.), date. II. Title.

PR6045.053A6 1983 823'.912 83-5097

ISBN 0-618-00927-2 (pbk.)

eISBN 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

Preface

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 age—but, 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 hole—he 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 Wodehouse’s 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 flâneurs, 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 knife’s 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 à l’outrance, 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 Little’s undying faith in a sure thing at the races; Gussie Fink-Nottle’s preoccupation with newts—all show Wodehouse’s 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

The Coming of Gowf

Prologue

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 hasn’t seen one of ours! we replied.

The editor placed a cigarette in a holder presented to him by a reigning monarch, and lit it with a match from a golden box, the gift of the millionaire president of the Amalgamated League of Working Plumbers.

What this magazine requires, he said, is red-blooded, one-hundred-percent dynamic stuff, palpitating with warm human interest and containing a strong, poignant love-motive.

That, we replied, is us all over, Mabel.

What I need at the moment, however, is a golf story.

By a singular coincidence, ours is a golf story.

Ha! say you so? said the editor, a flicker of interest passing over his finely-chiselled features. Then you may let me see it.

He kicked us in the face, and we withdrew.

The Story

On the broad terrace outside his palace, overlooking the fair expanse of the Royal gardens, King Merolchazzar of Oom stood leaning on the low parapet, his chin in his hand and a frown on his noble face. The day was fine, and a light breeze bore up to him from the garden below a fragrant scent of flowers. But, for all the pleasure it seemed to give him, it might have been bone-fertilizer.

The fact is, King Merolchazzar was in love, and his suit was not prospering. Enough to upset any man.

Royal love affairs in those days were conducted on the correspondence system. A monarch, hearing good reports of a neighbouring princess, would despatch messengers with gifts to her Court, beseeching an interview. The Princess would name a date, and a formal meeting would take place; after which everything usually buzzed along pretty smoothly. But in the case of King Merolchazzar’s courtship of the Princess of the Outer Isles there had been a regrettable hitch. She had acknowledged the gifts, saying that they were just what she had wanted and how had he guessed, and had added that, as regarded a meeting, she would let him know later. Since that day no word had come from her, and a gloomy spirit prevailed in the capital. At the Courtiers’ Club, the meeting-place of the aristocracy of Oom, five to one in pazazas was freely offered against Merolchazzar’s chances, but found no takers; while in the taverns of the common people, where less conservative odds were always to be had, you could get a snappy hundred to eight. For in good sooth, writes a chronicler of the time on a half-brick and a couple of paving-stones which have survived to this day, it did indeed begin to appear as though our beloved monarch, the son of the sun and the nephew of the moon, had been handed the bitter fruit of the citron.

The quaint old idiom is almost untranslatable, but one sees what he means.

As the King stood sombrely surveying the garden, his attention was attracted by a small, bearded man with bushy eyebrows and a face like a walnut, who stood not far away on a gravelled path flanked by rose bushes. For some minutes he eyed this man in silence, then he called to the Grand Vizier, who was standing in the little group of courtiers and officials at the other end of the terrace. The bearded man, apparently unconscious of the Royal scrutiny, had placed a rounded stone on the gravel, and was standing beside it making curious passes over it with his hoe. It was this singular behaviour that had attracted the King’s attention. Superficially it seemed silly, and yet Merolchazzar had a curious feeling that there was a deep, even a holy, meaning behind the action.

Who, he inquired, is that?

He is one of your Majesty’s gardeners, replied the Vizier.

I don’t remember seeing him before. Who is he?

The Vizier was a kind-hearted man, and he hesitated for a moment.

It seems a hard thing to say of anyone, your Majesty, he replied, but he is a Scotsman. One of your Majesty’s invincible admirals recently made a raid on the inhospitable coast of that country at a spot known to the natives as S’nandrews and brought away this man.

What does he think he’s doing? asked the King, as the bearded one slowly raised the hoe above his right shoulder, slightly bending the left knee as he did so.

It is some species of savage religious ceremony, your Majesty. According to the admiral, the dunes by the seashore where he landed were covered with a multitude of men behaving just as this man is doing. They had sticks in their hands, and they struck with these at small round objects. And every now and again—

Fo-o-ore! called a gruff voice from below.

And every now and again, went on the Vizier, they would utter the strange melancholy cry which you have just heard. It is a species of chant.

The Vizier broke off. The hoe had descended on the stone, and the stone, rising in a graceful arc, had sailed through the air and fallen within a foot of where the King stood.

Hi! exclaimed the Vizier.

The man looked up.

You mustn’t do that! You nearly hit his serene graciousness the King!

Mphm! said the bearded man, nonchalantly, and began to wave his hoe mystically over another stone.

Into the King’s careworn face there had crept a look of interest, almost of excitement.

What god does he hope to propitiate by these rites? he asked.

The deity, I learn from your Majesty’s admiral, is called Gowf.

Gowf? Gowf? King Merolchazzar ran over in his mind the muster-roll of the gods of Oom. There were sixty-seven of them, but Gowf was not of their number. It is a strange religion, he murmured. A strange religion, indeed. But, by Belus, distinctly attractive. I have an idea that Oom could do with a religion like that. It has a zip to it. A sort of fascination, if you know what I mean. It looks to me extraordinarily like what the Court physician ordered. I will talk to this fellow and learn more of these holy ceremonies.

And, followed by the Vizier, the King made his way into the garden. The Vizier was now in a state of some apprehension. He was exercised in his mind as to the effect which the embracing of a new religion by the King might have on the formidable Church party. It would be certain to cause displeasure among the priesthood; and in those days it was a ticklish business to offend the priesthood, even for a monarch. And, if Merolchazzar had a fault, it was a tendency to be a little tactless in his dealings with that powerful body. Only a few mornings back the High Priest of Hec had taken the Vizier aside to complain about the quality of the meat which the King had been using lately for his sacrifices. He might be a child in worldly matters, said the High Priest, but if the King supposed that he did not know the difference between home-grown domestic and frozen imported foreign, it was time his Majesty was disabused of the idea. If, on top of this little unpleasantness, King Merolchazzar were to become an adherent of this new Gowf, the Vizier did not know what might not happen.

The King stood beside the bearded foreigner, watching him closely. The second stone soared neatly on to the terrace. Merolchazzar uttered an excited cry. His eyes were glowing, and he breathed quickly.

It doesn’t look difficult, he muttered.

Hoots! said the bearded man.

I believe I could do it, went on the King, feverishly. "By the eight green gods of the mountain, I believe I could! By the holy fire that burns night and day before the altar of Belus, I’m sure I could! By Hec, I’m going to do it now! Gimme that hoe!"

Toots! said the bearded man.

It seemed to the King that the fellow spoke derisively, and his blood boiled angrily. He seized the hoe and raised it above his shoulder, bracing himself solidly on widely-parted feet. His pose was an exact reproduction of the one in which the Court sculptor had depicted him when working on the life-size statue (Our Athletic King) which stood in the principal square of the city; but it did not impress the stranger. He uttered a discordant laugh.

Ye puir gonuph! he cried, whit kin’ o’ a staunce is that?

The King was hurt. Hitherto the attitude had been generally admired.

It’s the way I always stand when killing lions, he said. ‘In killing lions,’ he added, quoting from the well-known treatise of Nimrod, the recognised text-book on the sport, ‘the weight at the top of the swing should be evenly balanced on both feet.’

Ah, weel, ye’re no’ killing lions the noo. Ye’re gowfing.

A sudden humility descended upon the King. He felt, as so many men were to feel in similar circumstances in ages to come, as though he were a child looking eagerly for guidance to an all-wise master—a child, moreover, handicapped by water on the brain, feet three sizes too large for him, and hands consisting mainly of thumbs.

O thou of noble ancestors and agreeable disposition! he said, humbly. Teach me the true way.

Use the interlocking grip and keep the staunce a wee bit open and slow back, and dinna press or sway the heid and keep yer e’e on the ba’.

My which on the what? said the King, bewildered.

I fancy, your Majesty, hazarded the Vizier, that he is respectfully suggesting that your serene graciousness should deign to keep your eye on the ball.

Oh, ah! said the King.

The first golf lesson ever seen in the kingdom of Oom had begun.

Up on the terrace, meanwhile, in the little group of courtiers and officials, a whispered consultation was in progress. Officially, the King’s unfortunate love affair was supposed to be a strict secret. But you know how it is. These things get about. The Grand Vizier tells the Lord High Chamberlain; the Lord High Chamberlain whispers it in confidence to the Supreme Hereditary Custodian of the Royal Pet Dog; the Supreme Hereditary Custodian hands it on to the Exalted Overseer of the King’s Wardrobe on the understanding that it is to go no farther; and, before you know where you are, the varlets and scurvy knaves are gossiping about it in the kitchens, and the Society journalists have started to carve it out on bricks for the next issue of Palace Prattlings.

The long and short of it is, said the Exalted Overseer of the King’s Wardrobe, we must cheer him up.

There was a murmur of approval. In those days of easy executions it was no light matter that a monarch should be a prey to gloom.

But how? queried the Lord High Chamberlain.

I know, said the Supreme Hereditary Custodian of the Royal Pet Dog. Try him with the minstrels.

Here! Why us! protested the leader of the minstrels.

Don’t be silly! said the Lord High Chamberlain. It’s for your good just as much as ours. He was asking only last night why he never got any music nowadays. He told me to find out whether you supposed he paid you simply to eat and sleep, because if so he knew what to do about it.

Oh, in that case! The leader of the minstrels started nervously. Collecting his assistants and tip-toeing down the garden, he took up his stand a few feet in Merolchazzar’s rear, just as that much-enduring monarch, after twenty-five futile attempts, was once more addressing his stone.

Lyric writers in those days had not reached the supreme pitch of excellence which has been produced by modern musical comedy. The art was in its infancy then, and the best the minstrels could do was this—and they did it just as Merolchazzar, raising the hoe with painful care, reached the top of his swing and started down:

"Oh, tune the string and let us sing

 Our godlike, great, and glorious King!

   He’s a bear! He’s a bear! He’s a bear!"

There were sixteen more verses, touching on their ruler’s prowess in the realms of sport and war, but they were not destined to be sung on that circuit. King Merolchazzar jumped like a stung bullock, lifted his head, and missed the globe for the twenty-sixth time. He spun round on the minstrels, who were working pluckily through their song of praise:

"Oh, may his triumphs never cease!

   He has the strength of ten!

First in war, first in peace,

   First in the hearts of his countrymen."

Get out! roared the King.

Your Majesty? quavered the leader of the minstrels.

Make a noise like an egg and beat it! (Again one finds the chronicler’s idiom impossible to reproduce in modern speech, and must be content with a literal translation.) By the bones of my ancestors, it’s a little hard! By the beard of the sacred goat, it’s tough! What in the name of Belus and Hec do you mean, you yowling misfits, by starting that sort of stuff when a man’s swinging? I was just shaping to hit it right that time when you butted in, you—

The minstrels melted away. The bearded man patted the fermenting monarch paternally on the shoulder.

Ma mannie, he said, ye may no’ be a gowfer yet, but hoots! ye’re learning the language fine!

King Merolchazzar’s fury died away. He simpered modestly at these words of commendation, the first his bearded preceptor had uttered. With exemplary patience he turned to address the stone for the twenty-seventh time.

That night it was all over the city that the King had gone crazy over a new religion, and the orthodox shook their heads.

We of the present day, living in the midst of a million marvels of a complex civilisation, have learned to adjust ourselves to conditions and to take for granted phenomena which in an earlier and less advanced age would have caused the profoundest excitement and even alarm. We accept without comment the telephone, the automobile, and the wireless telegraph, and we are unmoved by the spectacle of our fellow human beings in the grip of the first stages of golf fever. Far otherwise was it with the courtiers and officials about the Palace of Oom. The obsession of the King was the sole topic of conversation.

Every day now, starting forth at dawn and returning only with the falling of darkness, Merolchazzar was out on the Linx, as the outdoor temple of the new god was called. In a luxurious house adjoining this expanse the bearded Scotsman had been installed, and there he could be found at almost any hour of the day fashioning out of holy wood the weird implements indispensable to the new religion. As a recognition of his services, the King had bestowed upon him a large pension, innumerable kaddiz or slaves, and the title of Promoter of the King’s Happiness, which for the sake of convenience was generally shortened to The Pro.

At present, Oom being a conservative country, the worship of the new god had not attracted the public in great numbers. In fact, except for the Grand Vizier, who, always a faithful follower of his sovereign’s fortunes, had taken to Gowf from the start, the courtiers held aloof to a man. But the Vizier had thrown himself into the new worship with such vigour and earnestness that it was not long before he won from the King the title of Supreme Splendiferous Maintainer of the Twenty-Four Handicap Except on Windy Days when It Goes Up to Thirty—a title which in ordinary conversation was usually abbreviated to The Dub.

All these new titles, it should be said, were, so far as the courtiers were concerned, a fruitful source of discontent. There were black looks and mutinous whispers. The laws of precedence were being disturbed, and the courtiers did not like it. It jars a man who for years has had his social position all cut and dried—a man, to take an instance at random, who, as Second Deputy Shiner of the Royal Hunting Boots, knows that his place is just below the Keeper of the Eel-Hounds and just above the Second Tenor of the Corps of Minstrels—it jars him, we say, to find suddenly that he has got to go down a step into favour of the Hereditary Bearer of the King’s Baffy.

But it was from the