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A Gentleman of Leisure

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"A Gentleman of Leisure" was first published under the title "The Intrusion of Jimmy" in the U.S. on May 11, 1910 by W. J. Watt and Co., and in the U.K. it was published under this title on November 15, 1910 by Alston Rivers, Ltd., which makes it one of Wodehouse's earlier works. The edition I am reviewoing is from The Collector's Wodehouse series being released by The Overlook Press (in the U.K. it is The Everyman's Wodehouse series from Everyman's Library). The series is very nicely produced, the bindings are excellent, and the paper quality is high.

This particular story is about Jimmy Pitt, who makes a bet that "any man of ordinary intelligence could break into a house." There is some pre-history to the characters, which the reader is given in a hurry, and it feels a bit more forced than other Wodehouse books that I have read. I do not want to go into much detail about the plot because there are many twists and turns which are undoubtedly familiar to readers of Wodehouse. Still, there is something missing in the telling of this story. It lacks the easy flow that many of his later stories have. However, one can see the early elements of what would eventually make P. G. Wodehouse one of the great humorists of all time.

First published in 1910, this is one of Wodehouse's earliest adult novels, and it shows. Wodehouse's fine comic prose is very much in evidence and makes it readable enough; the trouble is the blandly flawless straight-arrow protagonist and the soppy generic romance plot. There are some more successful comical secondary characters, including a New York burglar (whose colourful New York criminal dialect begins to grate after a while), and a jelly-spined hard-up-for-cash English Lord tyrannised by his overbearing Uncle.

Having read and loved some later Wodehouse, especially the Jeeves and Bertie stories, I soon found the more interesting elements of the book to be the foreshadowings of what was to come, viz:

· Lord Dreever is rather like Bertie Wooster might be if he was dependent on Aunt Agatha;
· Lord Dreever's unwanted betrothal would be relived by Bertie countless times;
· Jimmy is mistaken for a professional thief;
· and in the contrast between Jimmy's standard English and Spike's New York dialect lies the seeds of the juxtaposed Jeeves-speak and Bertie-speak that is one of the joys of those stories.

In brief, this is chiefly for the Wodehouse fan interested in following the Master's development as a writer.

Also published under the title 'The Intrusion of Jimmy'.

Very interesting one this. While obviously not of the quality of his later work(i.e. from Leave It To Psmith onwards) this is a key early Wodehouse text. It almost reads like an early prototype for the aforementioned Psmith book, with it's country estate setting complete with valuable jewellery and potential thieves. Add in a very Threepwood-like peer with the backbone of a jellyfish having to contend with a formidable Uncle and Aunt and you have all the key ingredients for a classic Wodehouse.

If you've read Leave It To Psmith then on no account miss this one, it's not the best of his early books(probably Pmith in the City) but it's the most prophetic.

A Gentleman of Leisure is the first Wodehouse novel I have read which is not in the series which includes Jeeves. My initials misgivings were quickly overcome, however, when within the first chapters our main hero has not only made a bet that "any man of ordinary intelligence could break into a house," but is also attempting to win the bet. Sounds like a silly setup but the style with which Wodehouse leads the reader into it more than assured me I was going to enjoy the rest of the book.

Wodehouse's characters almost never work, rarely know what is going on, and are incredibly prone to misunderstandings. In other words, P.G. would have been a great writer for such sit-coms as Friends or Three's Company (with the caveat that Wodehouse is too consistently funny for either of these shows).

Wodehouse has a style of prose that makes everything he writes incredibly easy to read, even 90 years later as with A Gentleman of Leisure. His sense of comic dialogue is always right on and somehow the shear unlikeliness of every coincidental encounter goes unnoticed.

As always the plot (Jimmy Pitt, our lovable hero, is trying to woo his true love, Molly McEachern) is simpler than the characters. Fortunately it is upon the characters, and not the plot, that this novel relies.

_ A Gentleman of Leisure_ is a heavily-rewritten version of _The Gem Collector_ for the American market. Presumably America could not deal with a somewhat serious and plausible novel whose protagonist was an English ex-thief, though McCrum's biography lacks any explanation of the rewrite. In the American version, rather than being a baronet who was expelled from Eton and became a jewel thief, the protagonist is a Yale man who acts like a jewel thief one night on a bet, and implausibly fails to explain this for most of the book.

The revised plot shows the typical weaknesses, amusements, and impostors of the later Wodehouse, though this time presumably done from necessity, not for comic affect. It depends crucially on preposterous coincidences and misunderstandings which could easily be cleared up in a moment. The romance also loses all its subtlety and believability, and is replaced with the typical (for the late Wodehouse) dependency on repeated coincidence and the unwillingness of the protagonist to do the obvious.

Surprisingly, the revised version was very successful, twice being made into silent films. Wodehouse later used these implausibilities (impostors at castles, mistaken identities which could easily be cleared up but aren't, and preposterous romances) to much better effect in his Blandings Castle stories. But they seem to have had their origin here, where they were forced upon him by the lazy recycling of a much more grown-up plot.

My Penguin paperback edition of this novel contains a dedication by Wodehouse "to Douglas Fairbanks, who many years ago played Jimmy in the dramatised version of this novel". The novel first appeared as a Penguin book in 1991. It's original publication was by Herbert Jenkins Ltd. in 1921. So it's not obvious which edition Plum wrote the dedication for.

As other reviewers have pointed out, A Gentleman of Leisure is a fair rework of The Intrusion of Jimmy, which dates from about 1910. So the story ran from novel to stage (screen?) and back to novel. It also interestingly foreshadows many of Wodehouse's later devices that would become hallmarks of his (seemingly) effortless style. What's really lacking in this book is Jeeves, who of course had not yet shimmered in at this early date. While the pieces of the plot would reappear with countless twists, here's early evidence that he could write a really good love scene. Later, he'd back off a bit on such vignettes while beefing up on the stock characters. The overall effect is to render this a book for Wodehouse completists, which heralds glad tidings of things to come.

This is early Wodehouse that prefigures the later greats--the complicated plot and misunderstandings are all here, and while you don't get anything approaching Bertie's voice, you do get a fun couple of hours. Worth picking up if you see it for a buck or two. Good book for the train.