The Luck of the Bodkins [1935], and Pnin [1953]

This afternoon, to the Stanford Math library (to browse) on my bike, then to the University bookstore, where just outside the front door they were selling extra books at discounts.

I had about given up on finding anything interesting when I suddenly spotted a copy of P. G. Wodehouse's The Luck of the Bodkins.

"OK, then, let's read the first page, and then we'll decide," I thought—(although in reality, no thought comes to me with the clarity suggested by such a 'self-dialog' quotation).

Paydirt:

Chapter 1

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed upon Monty Bodkin when he left for this holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude's word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:

'Er, garçon.'

'M'sieur?'

'Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l'encre et une pièce de papier—note-papier, vous savez—et une enveloppe et une plume?'

'Bien, m'sieur.'

The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.

'I want to write a letter,' he said...

The Luck of the Bodkins was first published in October 1935—just a few days after my mother was born.

Another book I've been reading and enjoying immensely is Nabokov's Pnin. Timofey Pnin has the opposite problem—he's a professor and Russian emigre who can't speak English well. Here is Nabokov in a masterful passage describing a telephone call from Pnin to a character named Joan, who has a room for let:

Technically speaking, the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes. When Joan, in her brisk long-limbed way, got to the compelling instrument before it gave up, and said hullo (eyebrows up, eyes roaming), a hollow quiet greeted her; all she could hear was the informal sound of a steady breathing; presently the breather's voice said, with a cozy foreign accent: "One moment, excuse me"—this was quite casual, and he continued to breathe and perhaps hem and hum or even sign a little to the crepitation that evoked the turning over of small pages.

"Hullo!" she repeated.

"You are," suggested the voice warily, "Mrs. Fire?"

"No," said Joan, and hung up. "And besides," she went on, swinging back into the kitchen and addressing her husband who was sampling the bacon she had prepared for herself, "you cannot deny that Jack Cockerell considers Blorenge to be a first-rate administrator."

"What was that telephone call?"

"Somebody wanting Mrs. Feuer or Fayer. Look here, if you deliberately neglect everything George—" [Dr. O. G. Helm, their family doctor]

"Joan," said Laurence, who felt much better after that opalescent rasher, "Joan, my dear, you are aware, aren't you, that you told Margaret Thayer yesterday you wanted a roomer?"

"Oh gosh," said Joan—and obligingly the telephone rang again.

"It is evident," said the same voice, comfortably resuming the conversation, "that I employed by mistake the name of the informer. I am connected with Mrs. Clement?"

"Yes, this is Mrs. Clements," said Joan.

"Here speaks Professor—" There followed a preposterous little explosion. "I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs. Fire, who is now working at the library part time—"

"Yes, Mrs. Thayer, I know. Well, do you want to see that room?"

He did. Could he come to inspect it in approximately half an hour? Yes, she would be in. Untenderly she cradled the receiver...

If you find that passage in the least bit amusing, you going to want to read this book! Highly recommended.

The German Atrocity

I seem to be completely incapable of remembering whether an "Assistant" or "Associate" Professor is the one with tenure.

For the record, here's what one school of medicine gives as its definition:

An Assistant Professor is a junior faculty member hired on a 7-year non-renewable contract. During their 6th year, they are evaluated for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. A tenured faculty member is one whose job is secured for life except under certain circumstances. In order to obtain tenure the assistant professor must undergo a peer review process that generally takes the entire 6th year in which the candidate must gain approval from various committees and department heads.

Here is Edmund Wilson in "The Fruits of the MLA":

[Mr. Mumford] said that we do not want served up to us the writer's rejected garbage. He had no doubt shuddered at the thought—which is likely to trouble any careful writer—that all his early notes and drafts might survive and fall into the hands of the MLA editors or be handed over to those of the young Ph.D. candidates, who could only benefit from them—the brighter ones—by becoming convinced of the absurdity of our oppressive Ph.D. system of which we would have been well rid of, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap it as a German atrocity.