Everyone has heard of the Jeeves and Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse and many know his tales set at Blandings Castle, less well known are the ones relating to Mr Mulliner’s numerous relatives as recounted by Mr Mulliner himself in the bar-parlour of The Anglers Rest. Altogether there are three books of short stories and whilst I was originally planning on just dealing with the first one ‘Meet Mr Mulliner’ once started I ended up reading all three one after another so it only feels right to deal with them all in one blog. Each story starts in the bar with various customers present all of whom, apart from Mr Mulliner, are unnamed and are simply referred to by what they are drinking, as for example this passage immediately before Mr Mulliner first interrupts the conversation from ‘The Reverent Wooing of Archibald’ which is the first story in ‘Mr Mulliner Speaking’
“I can remember the days,” said the Gin-and-Ginger-Ale, “when every other girl you met stood about six feet two in her dancing-shoes, and had as many curves as a Scenic Railway. Now they are all five foot nothing and you can’t see them sideways. Why is this?”
The Draught Stout shook his head.
“Nobody can say. It’s the same with dogs. One moment the world is full of pugs as far as the eye can reach; the next, not a pug in sight, only Pekes and Alsatians. Odd!”
The Small Bass and the Double-Whisky-and-Splash admitted that these things were very mysterious, and supposed we should never know the reason for them. Probably we were not meant to know.
This story is one of my favourites of the twenty seven featuring Mr Mulliner spread over the three volumes, Archibald is one of his nephews and he is in awe of a young woman called Aurelia Cammarleigh whom he is terrified to ask out, he is also far from bright in fact he is described in typical Wodebouseian dead pan prose as follows:
Even at the Drones Club, where the average intellect is not high, it was often said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.
This inclusion of The Drones Club, which also includes Bertie Wooster as one of its members, beautifully ties this group of books to others from PG Wodehouse and adds some familiarity for the reader. The Wooster books started with ‘The Inimitable Jeeves’ in 1923 although there were some short stories before then, whilst Mr Mulliner first appeared in 1927 with the other two volumes being 1929 and 1933 respectively. Like most of Wodehouse’s books they are set in an indefinable period, one that had certainly vanished by the 1930’s, if indeed it had ever truly existed, with large houses hosting guests for weekends or even weeks at a time and young women whose main preoccupation appears to be the finding of a suitable, i.e. rich, husband, with the males trying for the most part to avoid them. Stories of that type certainly do appear in the Mulliner books, such as Archibald, but for the most part Mr Mulliner’s relatives do actually do some sort of work although they often have sufficient funds to exist without it.
Another great story concerns a property called Honeysuckle Cottage which is inherited, on the death of his aunt, by a distant cousin of Mr Mulliner, James. Now James is a writer of hard boiled detective stories and his aunt wrote what is described as ‘Squashily Sentimental’ tales so they never really got on. However he gained the house in her will and when he arrived he found that it was imbued with the spirit of the stories she wrote, so that things happened as if he was living in an unbearable romantic stor. It even threatened to disturb his books, with him introducing a girlfriend for his normally disinterested detective. The slow takeover of James by the aura of the house is hysterical as he is aware it is happening but powerless to resist until finally… Well that would be telling, Honeysuckle Cottage is the last story in ‘Meet Mr Mulliner’.
These three books are from the excellent Everyman’s Library series which collects for the first time all of Wodehouse’s novels and short stories in one uniform edition comprising of ninety nine beautifully presented volumes.I shall probably eventually get almost all of them, with the exception of the twenty one titles which I already have that were published by the Folio Society.
If you are intrigued as to what it is Mr Mulliner is drinking as he isn’t referred to by his drink of choice but by name. His favourite tipple is a hot scotch and lemon, a drink which I for one would go a long way to avoid unless as a cure for a cold, and that only on the basis that it may not cure the cold but it will help towards you forgetting about it. It’s been great fun exploring another set of stories by Wodehouse only one of which I had read before. It occurs to me that the setting of all the stories in the form of tales in a bar by the noted raconteur and regular Mr Mulliner possibly inspired Arthur C Clarke to write his ‘Tales from The White Hart’ in 1957 which I have touched on before in a blog from eight years ago ‘Fables From The Fountain‘.
