The Divine Intimacy

The strength of a short story may be evaluated by various quality-judgements. And, as the nomenclature suggests, short stories haven’t the time to unimpress. Fortunately, there are many routes that one may take to perform such a feat; the best-cobbled path is, however, in the same fashion as one would win the heart of a lover: intimacy. Dennis Johnson’s collection of linked short stories, Jesus’ Son, not only deeply affects the reader, but also possesses one’s soul with a devilish intimacy nearly divine in its courtship. Some might moot artistic afflatus; some might point to the rampant drug abuse. I remain nevertheless steadfast in the opinion that these slices of someone’s literary heaven exist from a mastery of craft. It may be interpreted that Johnson completes this coaxing, in part, by three forms of ingratiation: a conversational first-person-reportage narrative style, the acknowledgment of the reader with the second-person, and the Big Kiss Goodnight ending.

Johnson’s stories feel like a shifty, likely armed man in a dusty jean jacket whispering unspeakables. Whenever a shifty, likely armed man in a dusty jean jacket descries us at a social gathering and, after cornering us with his broad shoulders, proceeds to delineate to us his heaviest moments, we normally fear for our lives. Though this is often the prudent choice for those in favor of a full life, the opposite is likely our response to Jesus’ Son. Johnson earns our affections with his conversational first-person-reportage narrative style. Reportage, though often considered unliterary, is pungent with authenticity, for it most closely imitates someone speaking directly to us about one’s life. The reportage style is told using the past perfect tense, “I’d been staying at the holiday Inn with my girlfriend,” in conjunction with the simple past tense, “we made love in the bed,” often also using signifying wording, such as “I remember.” Neither does it hurt to compare one’s Holiday Inn romance with a heroin-junkie to Dante’s climb to Paradiso and the Empyrean with his truest love, Beatrice: “we…carried one another to heaven.”

What do you think about the use of the second person to acknowledge the reader? I am not certain about it, but I shall leave that up to you to decide. I trust your judgement. In any case, it certainly is personal. On the wrong day in Germany, you could get the bamboo cane for it. But, in Jesus’ Son, you understand the second person to be a term of endearment, as this usage suggests: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Consider this supremely yarn-like confidence that Johnson unravels, after confiding in us some heavy exposition about the characters in his story Two Men: “My two friends and I went to get into my little green Volkswagen, and we discovered the man I started to tell you about, the first man, sleeping in the backseat.” Remember?

What is the Big Kiss Goodnight ending? It is what everyone wants. Moreover, it also seems to be a tactic of writers who enjoy finishing stories with a smooch of the angelic. In accordance with the aforementioned considerations as regards a short story’s incapacity to allow a moment’s somnolence, its ending might perhaps be its most important time to excite, and the stories in Jesus’ Son do not leave us blue. Indeed, each story ends with a bang. 

Consider this coda at the end of a story about a less than gentle man named Dundun: “Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.” Or this uplifting bit: “Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”

Of course, this narrator had no filial connection with the barmaid about whom he is reporting, but that has never been a qualification when considering if one has been another’s mother. 

The Mystery of the Modern Narrative

The contemporary reader, whenever she is not watching Netflix, assumes that she is a detective. Since Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, readers, rather than experience literature, investigate it. Previous to Poe’s invention in Detective Fiction, literature pursued a very different mystery: the portrayal of empathy, human intuition, and their combined relationship with our imponderable Human Condition and its connection to the meaning of all. Good things. However, from the Enlightenment’s rampant rise of science and Modernity’s subsequent Industrial Revolution came electric lighting, from electric lighting the ability to combat darkness, from the ability to combat darkness the opportunity to read books late into the night, from the opportunity to read books late into the night to highly increased literacy rates, from highly increased literacy rates to the profuse outpouring of a million new authors, nearly all of whom learning their trade by way of the Detective Story, the most seminal of those being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation in Sherlock Holmes. This is what bakers call bitter-sweet, for more people can read, but, as with all businesses that bloat beyond good means, the quality of the readership, and–as can be readily reviewed today by a cursory dekko at contemporary bookstores–the quality of the authors, and, therefore, the work. Our infatuation with Sherlock Holmes and the narrative form pursuant thereto thusly permeated into all writerly attempts. Identical to the formulaic armature of a Sherlock Holmes story, the familiar Preferred Modern Narrative includes a gripping introduction to warrant the case, suspense by way of narrative secret, sleuthing by way of narrative clues, the ever-ubiquitous Red Herring, and finally the story’s solving. To modestly bolster the assertion that we are indeed, until this very moment, unknowingly rewriting Sherlock Holmes, a brief investigation of Silver Blaze, Doyle’s first story from his collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, may be in order.

 First impressions are not everything, but they are darn close. Story introductions retain a similar logic. And the contemporary reader, an entity exceedingly impatient with such initial conferences, does not like to pursue a subject without an official writ issued by the normative authorial power. To warrant the case of a story is to create, through the pithy portrayal of narrative circumstances, enough reasonable suspicion for the reader to begin investigation. The contemporary reader, as do the junkies at the main train station, lives hard and fast, and similar dossiers arrive fresh at the grocery store daily; therefore, this warrant should arrive first-thing and full of intrigue. What the contemporary reader finds intriguing is up to the color of her humors, but it is the swiftness with which it is served where the Detective Story, unfortunately, excels. Consider Silver Blaze’s immediate writ of narrative execution in the following:

“The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so  many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute, undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns. On Tuesday evening…”

There is much promised here: tragedy, personal importance, surmise, conjecture, hypothesis, social critique, Truth—Doyle even posits the meta-suggestion that it is our, the readers’, duty to see what inferences may be drawn, even being so kind as to supply us with the information that it all began on a Tuesday evening. Herein provided are the contemporary craft essentials so sought-after by those so hungry to make it to the supermarket shelves, or, nowadays, any shelf at all: a sense of tension, meaning, reader participation, mystery, and the much envied  sense-of-time—all within the first-two-page instant gratification we desire. Someone’s life is on the line. The issue with this model, however, remains: why we should care? The Modern writer says to herself, between said binge-bouts of Netflix, as Classical Literature, she knows, is merely social control (isn’t university easy?): Why write good character when one can write a secret?

We shall all go to our graves having hid something from those we love. Thus, the establishment of a narrative motive by way of secret is indeed a natural and poignant choice. Contemporary fiction would stand dumbfounded, mouth and eyes agape, without this Detective Fiction-based parlor trick. From Humbert Humbert’s arguably illegal psychology portrayed in Lolita to the farcically low-stakes outings propelling any P.G. Wodehouse story, a secret may be of any magnitude. How a secret is written, however, has been relatively similar since the Detective Fiction’s incipience. Something as simple as the expositive confirmation that “it [was] obvious…that there were many people who had the strongest interest in preventing Silver Blaze [a horse] from being there at the fall of the flag, next Tuesday” is enough.

The trail would go blue-cold, however, without an air of general suspicion and distrust—an atmosphere rife for sleuthing—from which the reader could deduce the most pertinent facts. This may be done in any story by way of clever, perfectly paced exposition that, unbeknownst to the reader, sends her on the hunt for narrative clues. It is indeed no mystery at all as to why the Silver Blaze’s second page should, with its familiar set up, leave the contemporary reader’s ears pricked upward and in belief that the game be afoot:

“…At King’s Pyland, where the Colonel’s training-stable is situated. Every precaution was taken to guard the favorite. The trainer, John Straker, is a retired jockey, who rode in Colonel Ross’s colors before he became too heavy for the weighing-chair. He has served the Colonel for five years as a jockey, and for seven as a trainer, and has always shown himself to be a zealous and honest servant. Under him were three lads, for the establishment was a small one, containing only four horses in all. One of these lads sat up each night in the stable, while the others slept in the loft. All three bore excellent characters. John Straker, who is a married man, lived in a small villa about two hundred yards from the stables. He has no children, keeps one maid-servant, and is comfortably off. The country round is very lonely, but about half a mile to the north there is a small cluster of villas which have been built by a Travistock contractor for the use of invalids and others who may wish to enjoy the pure Dartmoor air. Travistock itself lies two miles to the west, while across the moor, also about two miles distant, is the larger training establishment of Capleton, which belongs to Lord Backwater, and is managed by Silas Brown. In every other direction the moor is complete wilderness, inhabited only by a few roaming gypsies. Such was the general situation last Monday night when the catastrophe occurred.”

Just like Mama MFA made, the above expository fiesta contains just enough precise yet enigmatic information as regards all pertinent actors and associations appurtenant to the plot that the reader has therefrom gathered enough evidence to bypass the stage of reasonable suspicion and pursue the dictates afforded to probable cause.

Due narrative process, however, gets in the way of even the most veteran literati. Familiarity with administering arrests by the dictates of lexical law proves to that reader the red herring’s reign as powerful as ever. The red herring takes many forms. The red herring is a now-common literary device that presents a kind of narrative clue to the reader that intends to mislead or distract that same reader away from the true object of pursuit. The red herring now takes on many forms of deception, but the most traditional form comes from Detective Fiction’s redirection of suspicion upon an otherwise innocent party. Silver Blaze employs a classic Sherlockian misdirection contrived by meandering the reader away from the logic of a case and towards that of an otherwise innocent character’s possible motivations for wrongdoing: “‘Yes, and that is a factor which we must certainly not neglect. As Desborough, their horse, was second in the betting, they had an interest in the disappearance of the favourite. Silas Brown, the trainer, is known to have had large bets upon the event, and he was no friend to poor Straker.’” 

So, whodunit?

Again: who cares?

Consider the meta-mouthpiece for the modern narrative, Sherlock Holmes, and his egotistical epilogues at the end of each story, which are equally a treat and a chore to read. In the Silver Blaze’s case, Colonel Ross’s dialogue, during Sherlock’s ending analyses, stands in for the thoughts of the contemporary reader, stating “‘You take my breath away.” Admitting that “‘(He) ha[s] been blind.” Further confessing that “You have made it perfectly clear, Mr. Holmes.” And it is this logic-machine of a man with an athletic form of Aspergers, sociopathic cold-bloodedness, a simultaneous cocaine/heroine addiction, a near-robotic man suffering from perpetual sleep-deprived torment—Doyle’s anthropomorphized cautionary tale of Modernity’s effects on the spirit for the world—to whom we owe our thanks for the modern narrative.

Pissed from a Distance

Angry, bellowing men with pythons for arms and peanuts for brains are no laughing matter. Disenchanted, seething gentlemen, whose arms exist merely for decoration and whose wits are tucked away in the dark steeples of brooding misanthropy are often a gaggle of laughs. Why we prefer one over the other is uncertain, yet the conundrum remains: why is being pissed from a distance so funny? 

As if Holden Caufield found himself a trifle more well-adjusted English don, the hero from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon, sets the modern gold-standard for amusingly irritated young men. However, unlike Caufield, Dixon, despite his patent literary-level hatred for the Post-War English University, is regarded by most of today’s literati primarily as a childish perpetrator of mildly lascivious high jinks. This is not an untruth. How, then, amongst all the griping, does Dixon keep sneaking in the ole’ rib-tickler? By examining a few of Amis’s distancing narrative techniques, and their effects on our humorous interpretation of novel, one may gather how merely being miffed is enough to blister the knees.

It is no happenstance that Lucky Jim is written in the close-third-person narrative style. This narrative choice sets the perfect level of impersonality necessary for harmless irritation and subsequent schadenfreude. Where in more than a few cases the first-person narration style, with its highly intimate connection with authorial intention, might perhaps flounder, the close-third-person succeeds in creating just enough distance between the snappish views of the character and the author who wrote them. This faux distance is important for the reader, as it allows him to fully experience all the fun of the hatred whilst relieving him from any of the personal responsibility for enjoying it. The distant-third-person would ostensibly also be quite effective in the pursuit for amicable animosity, but in its stark dissociation from direct emotional experience, it often cannot quite achieve the level of intimacy needed for one to feel that humbling pang of guilt so closely linked with humor. Therefore, in depicting the Displeased, the close-third-person reigns as the supreme line-walker. How, then, does Amis apply this balanced mode, in conjunction with other techniques, to Jim Dixon’s understanding of the provincial university at which he works and the pedantic characters who inhabit it?

One technique Amis employs to achieve a safe proximity with the Scathing is to affect the first comedic commandment of Euphemism. How does one scathe euphemistically? It is in this very field where Lucky Jim displays its unique brand of genius. The idea here is similar to the effect of outboxing an opponent, whilst simultaneously inquiring into whether he endeavors to continue, yet reminding him he cannot stop the round; it is a kind of controlled, gentle viciousness that is a bit difficult to have happen upon one’s own person, but highly entertaining to watch. Dixon is not bashful about whom he targets for what is more than solely pugnacious satire, rather a kind of ruthless portrayal of truths. For an example of this, seek no further than the first scene of the novel, during which Dixon’s interpretations of Professor of History and mentor, Professor Welch, are described. Welch tells an anecdote to Dixon regarding his playing recorder and piano with a few music aficionados around the school, and how he was observed by and reported on by a local gazette. Whereupon, beginning with Welch, the following takes place:

 “(B)ut what do you think they said then?”

 “I don’t know, Professor,’ he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor.” 

 “‘Flute and piano.”

 “Oh?”

 “Flute and piano; not recorder and piano.” Welch laughed briefly.

A veritable knee-slapper. And Dixon felt the very same way, going as far as to mention that “the older man… began speaking almost in a shout, with a tremolo imparted by unshared laughter”. And, though the laughs indeed remained in the singular form, Welch continued on absently and without consideration for the human constraints of boredom. Dixon, however, like a decent lad, attempts to honor this insufferable codger by “tr[ying] to flail his features into some sort of response to humor”. May we see now how Dixon is following the standards for decorum, responding in seemly ways, seemingly adhering to societal expectations, whilst also taking the piss? This is the very essence of being pissed from a distance. It is a kind of Bad Faith agreement wherein one conforms yet kicks dust. A subtle rebellion. 

Let us now tackle the subject of Bertrand, the unequivocal coxcomb of the novel. Dixon treats Bertrand with palpable discontent. Fitting to the temperament of an exasperated young man, Dixon behaves the opposite way to his contemporary, Bertrand, than he does through his begrudging subservience to Professor Welch. Bertrand is rendered as something of a laughingstock. We are meant to laugh at Bertrand, not with him. Bertrand is described as a kind of Post-War beatnik; he is a self-proclaimed painter and caricature-grade clown; and Dixon sees this to its core. Through his persistent commentary on Bertrand’s madcap insistence on perpetually wearing a blue beret, Dixon dances not around his distaste of Bertrand, stating his claims outright: “He was wearing a blue beret, which had much the same effect on Dixon as Welch senior’s fishing-hat. If such headgear was a protection, what was it a protection against? If it wasn’t a protection, what was it for? What was it for?” Can we not hear Dixon’s irritation? Inevitably, one of the final elements of the novel is a, due to an ignominious lack of physical conditioning on the part of both participants, graceless affray between Bertrand and Dixon, of which event Dixon narrowly claims victory. 

Lucky Jim is a young man’s novel. It preaches to the soul of the forthcoming thirty-years-of-age existential crisis, incisively arguing with, and often fittingly ignorant to, the antithetical notions of career versus freedom, love versus happiness, and suffering fools versus societal dissociation. Lucky Jim, truly a late-stage bildungsroman book, by Amis’s use of the close-third-person narrative style and tastefully detached prose style, a Looney Toons steam-whistle-escaping-from-the-shirt-collar hot-temperedness is rendered irascibility-light, a stiff scotch cut with water, heavy on the ice.  

The Importance of the Unnecessary

Though a common misconception and favorite mantra of jealous minimalists the world over, “Charles Dickens was” not “paid by the word.” Rather, he was paid by installment. He did have, however, one highly enviable up on Twenty First Century lexoslaves in that he was paid. Nevertheless, no matter how one might want to spin Dickens’s preternatural ability to describe at length any and all things as merely a by-the-word, middle-brow money laundering scam, the fact remains that the gentleman could indeed describe. 

The Description is a lost art. And the Description has received this predicate nominative adjectival pejoration due to our unhealthy obsession with The Useful, The Economic, The Necessary. Why, when one failed poet in brown corduroy asks another yawning novelist on hiatus what his favorite epoch of literature is, does that same overweight adjunct professor always respond with “the Nineteenth Century?” The Nineteenth Century was the heyday of the novel—the heyday of Realism. And it is likely this truth that forces that same school-debt encumbered, part-time bike courier to reply with the century aforementioned.

Good Realist writers were/are concerned with (un)necessary detail. And it seems to be the unnecessary and not the necessary that reminds us of our world. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, written in 1836, during only his twenty-fifth year on this earth, is not only a post-doctorate-level mirth-driven abdominal workout, but also an A-1 exercise in The Unnecessary. 

So, how does one write The Unnecessary? First, gather together all of your friends who are fluent in Ancient Greek. Now, perform the same task for those who are fluent in Latin. Very good. Now that you are still alone and with quite a bit of free time on your hands, this could be a great time to ponder the fact that the average sentence length, as compared from the time of Shakespeare to today, has decreased over seventy-five percent, from over seventy words per sentence to under fifteen. A much-needed decrease in convoluted thinking, some might say. A woeful increase in small ideas, others would riposte. Either way, it remains true that we use fewer words than ever to describe our world. 

In the olden days, before divorce and UberEATS, there was this thing called a Classical Education, whose interests were, briefly stated, to bestow onto its students a deep, rich, fulfilling connection with the roots of human civilization and a meaningful, unfractured perspective of the world. Sixteenth through Nineteenth Century students were ensconced in this education, and Charles Dickens was one of those lucky students, although he left formal schooling at eleven-years-old to work in a factory in order to amass the funds required to bail his father out of a debtors prison. Students of this time were well-versed in Ancient Greek and Latin, languages heavily reliant on the long sentence, or what is known to better people as hypotaxis. 

Hypotaxis enjoys many long-since-forgotten philological entreaties. A well-constructed bout of hypotaxis is scintillatingly complex. You remember complexity. Although there is much historical and contemporary evidence for the contrary, we do sometimes listen to and trust in those who actually think. Whether it proves competent or incompetent, hypotaxis of a good variety gains the reader’s trust, as it verifies that the narrator or character has thought a goodish deal about what he is saying. Try to convince an editor today to publish an opening sentence like the opening sentence of The Pickwick Papers:

“The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”

Immediate trust.

Hypotaxis is also inherently polite. Moreover, hypotaxis is sexy; we inherently like to strip away its layers of meaning and tease our mental faculties with its hidden parts. 

Around 1900 or thereabouts, however, there came this newer and therefore, obviously, much better idea called a Progressive Education, which decided hypotaxis evil and the frenetic acquisition of office workers to be the most important pedagogical endeavor. 

In a contemporary world thoroughly wanting in hypotaxis, it is simplicity itself to find the correlation between the loss of the long sentence and the loss of the lengthy description. Consider just one of the hundreds of painstakingly detailed passages in Dickens’s description of a debtors prison:

“It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in this place which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening, which had set in outside. As it was rather warm, some of the tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand, had set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as he passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining room, some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole crowd of children, might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground, or upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, the noise, and the beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards, all came over again in greater force than before.”

According to James Wood’s How Fiction Works, nineteenth-century Realism bolstered the birth of the unnecessary detail: “19^th-century realism…creates such an abundance of detail…that it will always contain a certain superfluidity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other words, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail.” Dickens’s above passage is uncommon in today’s fiction because of its overabundance of detail. Of course, it paints a nineteenth-century picture, but it serves no ulterior motive but to describe for the reader the scene; it describes itself for itself; it enjoys the existence of itself for itself. The Detail is enough; it is its own end.

Let us turn to a man unafraid to let his pen run wild, the prince of petty himself, Oscar Wilde: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

Plotting over Plodding

If a story were to perform less like a contention with after-dinner bloat and more like a nimble creature flitting across the open plain, then it is likely plotted well. There are a goodish many reasons why one might write a story that plods—saunters in its pilgrimage over antique wooden bridges, stops to contemplate a riverside cowslip—but to incite action is not one of them. The illustrious humorist Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, amongst his many writerly talents, is known for his highly successful snappiness of story and preeminent command of plot. Though he eventually became known as the king of the plotline, Wodehouse reported that his plotting of a story was often his most difficult task. Something of confessed monomaniac himself, he required plotted perfection, a vaudeville-like story so intelligently manipulated and crafted for quickness, that the reader hardly has time to stop and smell the Realism. Nevertheless, even realistic narratives need to move. In Ukridge, Wodehouse’s 1924 collection of linked short stories, “The Exit of Battling Billson” is a typically agile Wodehousian story, through which, upon an analysis of the story’s six major scene-location changes, one may better understand the art of story-movement, and therefore learn to become a bit more up and at ‘em himself.

We begin our jaunt at The Theatre Royal, Llunindnno. It is here where our narrator, Corky, espies “a large man…(whose) air was that of one who has recently passed through some trying experience.” This man is none other than the notorious Stanley Featherstone Ukridge, and it is he who had just experienced the mild ignominy of being forcibly removed from that same theatre. After Corky denies Ukridge’s request “to bung a brick through the window,” the story, only one-page-old and already riddled with tension and expectation, wastes no time pub-crawling to a different public-house, whose “lights… shone like heartening beacons,” in which location a conversation is had, the story develops, and the prospect of movement again looms large. 

Said conversation involves such familiar tones as Ukridge’s managing of a familiar pugilist named Wilberforce Billson, aptly nicknamed Battling Billson, and how Ukridge “couldn’t be more in the velvet if they gave (Ukridge) a sack and a shovel and let (him) loose in the Mint.” Upon a short repartee about this less than likely aspect of grand fortune, Wodehouse shows no fear in beginning the next paragraph with Corky’s saying: “I was in a curiously uplifted mood on the following morning as I set out to pay my respects to Mr Billson.” And in the short span of three pages, we have already been to three locations, presently culminating at another public house, in which Mr Billson is “‘spillin’ (patrons’) beers’” because “‘(b)eer, he proceeded, with cold austerity, ‘ain’t right. Sinful, that’s what beer is.’” After this sound conception, Wodehouse frog-marches us to the next location: “I stood on the steps of Number Seven Caerleon Street,” Ukridge’s trappings. 

At Ukridge’s digs, Corky and Ukridge discuss the unfortunate circumstance of Battling Billson’s new Puritanical attitudes, from which they suffer to learn that Billson, in addition to the consumption of beer, now also believes that ‘fighting’s sinful.’” It is also described, with great dispatch, that Ukridge, fresh out of boxers to manage, decides to fight the match himself. A rigged fight, but a fight nonetheless. We are swimming right along when we enjoy another swift movement to Oddfellow’s Hall for the lacing up of Ukridge’s gloves. Wodehouse summons the occasion with celerity unmatched, the introduction to the hall occurring in the first sentence of page 187’s main expository paragraph.

For the proceeding six pages, a long scene (by Wodehousian standards) depicts Ukridge’s surprisingly capable boxing prowess, and the sudden relapse of Battling Billson into the throes of prizefighting. As it is viewed from more than a few angles, the scene feels something very much like movement or location change itself, each angle containing new happenings. After this highly entertaining fiasco, directly after learning that “a hush fell” on the audience, we awaken back at Ukridge’s flat: “The little sitting-room of Number Seven Caerleon Street was very quiet and gave the impression of being dark.” Even during the last scene, much action is had, and ultimately the story completes itself, as many Wodehouse creations do, on-time, with in a kind of red-herring-led, fully logical, ironically full-circle ending.

Need every story to thrive off a razor-sharp plot such as Wodehouse’s? Yes—if one wants the feeling of movement and action, the feeling of sprinting alongside a story. Some of us might ask: but when do we change scenes? Wodehouse might argue the answer to be right now. Wodehouse does not linger; a sentence is all it takes for us to traipse across villages, cities, and ideas. This lightning-fast teleportation style is a challenge in wit. To be pithy enough to complete such a cross-town leap is, indeed, also a challenge in prose. More still, it is a challenge in plot. And it is whenever these three writerly elements decide to hold hands that we readers behold something truly special.