Review: The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories

The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Minor and early Wodehouse, before he settled into his classic style. It's marked as "Jeeves, #0.5" on Goodreads, but it's really more like 0.05 - Jeeves is mentioned once in one story, and has a single unimportant line and no part in the plot. An early version of Bertie (possibly with a different surname; it's not made explicit) and his formidable and disapproving Aunt Agatha (fully developed, or as much so as she would ever become) also feature in that story.

This was a period when Wodehouse was writing for both the British and US markets, and it's sometimes difficult to get a feel for which market a particular story was aimed at, or even which of the two countries it takes place in. While of course there is humour, and the voice is recognisably Plum, these are often more sentimental stories than comic stories, almost slices of life; a good many of them feature a basic romance, something that was often a feature in his early work, and they end in some cases more with a resolution of the mood than a resolution of the plot. (This is an entirely valid way to end a short story.)

Several of the stories use the device, later a staple of sitcoms, of people in close relationships deceiving one another and/or trying to manipulate one another for what seem to them at the time to be good reasons, often in order to impress a would-be or existing romantic partner. This inevitably causes problems, but (as in sitcoms) all they need to do is confess the truth in order to be forgiven.

One story is written from the viewpoint of a dog, and pulls off a nice example of the innocent narrator who doesn't understand what's going on but tells us enough that we can figure it out. A couple of them involve people whose despair with life reaches the point of attempting, or planning to attempt, suicide, which is a lot darker than classic Wodehouse ever gets.

Overall, this collection shows Wodehouse still looking for his note, and sometimes hitting it and sometimes not. His early work shows a lot more variety of protagonists and situations than the idle-rich-country-house shenanigans that he's best known for. I feel like he made some of them work, but ultimately it was the sparkling prose and the farcical comedy that brought him his greatest success.

One thing he does usually manage to do, though, is make the reader (at least, this reader) care about the concerns of the protagonist, whoever and whatever they are: an ugly policeman, a mongrel dog, a dull bank clerk who can't dance, a young woman who fails to make it on the stage, a lazy gourmand, a couple of struggling writers, a baseball fanatic who misses New York, a world-weary young woman employed by a tea-dance establishment, or an unsuccessful detective. To me, this is a big part of his true genius, and what I most want to imitate from him: the ability to tell anyone's story and make it feel important because it's important to them.

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