P.G. Wodehouse on American Composers

 

Piccadilly Circus, London, England

 

In the P.G. Wodehouse 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress, American composer George Bevan has traveled to London. He's been helping the director of a musical fine-tune his American show so that it works well for a British audience. One afternoon, he takes a cab in Piccadilly Circus, and a beautiful woman jumps inside. He agrees to hide her from a pursuer, and forces his chest out the window to hide her from view.

Not only is George a gentleman, but also he has fallen head-over-heels in love with her.

After an altercation with her pursuer, they arrive at his hotel. Even though she has not told him her name, he agrees to loan her money for train fare home. When he returns to the lobby, the woman and the taxi are gone. In her place stands her pursuer. The man asserts that it was bad enough that George knocked his expensive hat off in the street. 

Now George refuses to admit he's obviously sheltering her in his hotel room!

The man gets demonstrative. The hotel staff call the police. The man, who it seems is the young woman's brother, strikes a policeman who attempts to calm him. The woman's brother is hauled away to jail. 

The next morning, George pieces together the woman's identity and whereabouts from an article in the newspaper about her brother's arrest. He must see her again. So he forgets about his musical, boards a train, and sets out after her.

 

George rents a cottage near the family castle. Her learns her name is Maud. Eventually her father, an English Lord, who likes him from the outset, learns how rich George is. It would seem that royalties from all the songs George has written, which are performed daily in his musicals, make George a hefty packet. Still, her aunt is holding-out for her niece to marry a titled member of the British nobility.

Whatever will George do?

By the time P.G. Wodehouse wrote A Damsel in Distress, he had already created the characters that would regularly appear in his most famous series, such as Jeeves and Wooster and the Blandings novels. But what's most interesting to me is that this period of his career is defined more by his work on musicals. As an British songwriter, Woehouse found tremendous success writing songs for Broadway shows. Thus, his portrayal of George in A Damsel in Distress seems autobiographical in nature, if from an opposite point of view.

So, while historians suggest that P.G. Wodehouse played an important role in the development of the American musical, readers today regard him mainly as a British humor novelist. Clearly, he was so much more.

Dragon Dave