On Monday evening we went to Mayfair for the launch of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters by Dr. Sophie Ratcliffe.

I had the immense pleasure of working, a little, on the book. About two years ago, Sophie asked me if I’d like to be her research assistant. She was heavily pregnant with her first child, and I would show up at her house in the early afternoon to do some Wodehouse. It was a very hot summer, and sometimes we’d take a break to drink elderflower cordial and watch Wimbledon; Andy Murray was doing very well, I seem to remember, until he one day he wasn’t.

Then this little creature – a baby boy – materialized. The thing I always think about babies is how suddenly they appear, even after nine months of anticipation. Where there had been no one, there was someone: a son, an actual human being. It sounds stupid – of course you know this is how birth works. But when I returned to recommence the Wodehouse work, I kept thinking: last time I was in this house this child did not exist. And now this child does exist.

I think books might be a little the same way: not as momentous, but equally surprising, even after all that time. My involvement was ad hoc, part time, and only spans the last two years; but this book has been in the works for nearly six years. There were a lot of letters, and consequently, even after editing (I can tell you with some confidence that once you’ve read one of the elderly Wodehouse’s letters listing various physical ailments, you’ve basically read all of the elderly Wodehouse’s letters listing various physical ailments), it’s a big book. (“I have been looking through my diary,” Wodehouse writes to Denis Mackail in 1946, “and I realize that I must be one of the world’s great correspondents. This is the 43rd letter I have written this month, and my monthly average for the last year has been over thirty”). So its presence now on my desk seems miraculous to me, even though, not so long ago, I delivered the manuscript to Random House (it was so big I had to carry it in a rucksack) after Sophie had made some final edits, and it seemed at that point a very real thing.

Anyhow, I didn’t know the first thing about babies, and to be honest I didn’t know all that much about Wodehouse, either, but Sophie was kind enough to believe in my ability to pick up on the basics of both, and I spent many happy hours pushing a pram, making tea, steaming milk bottles, leafing through old copies of Punch and The Captain at the Bodleian, researching obscure silent film stars, transcribing letters, reading and re-reading passages from Robert McCrum’s epic biography, formatting footnotes. It was easily the best, most enjoyable and ultimately satisfying work I have ever had the honor of being allowed to do.

In fact I’ve spent the last two years feeling a little like I’m living in Wodehouse’s backyard, like I have this view of him that no one else has. I’m not even sure I like Wodehouse, as a man, all the time, but I feel close to him, or to his words, anyway. Perhaps the joy of letters is not just their historical and academic importance, but the way you can sometimes be made to feel that a letter was, in a way, meant for you – how comforting as a writer, for instance, to read the insecurities of such a great author. “Gosh, Bill, will one never learn to write?” wonders Wodehouse in 1954, even after so many successes. Gosh, I tell myself, often, and after very few successes: will one never learn to write?

I first read Wodehouse in my teens; I was lonely, and obsessed by the discrepancy between what I perceived to be the beauty of the early 20th century, as embodied by the tragic decadence of, say, Brideshead Revisited, and the ugliness of these very early days of the 21st century. I had voluntarily exiled myself from the community of my peers; I forced them to reject me by rejecting them first. Instead of joining in, I chose to live simultaneously in the past (I wrote by copying the cadences of Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh – something I’m not sure even now I’ve been able to fully correct) and the future (I worked hard in high school so that I could get into college so that I could be successful in whatever my chosen career was, which seems comic now).

What appealed to me about Wodehouse, of course, was the nostalgia. “Let’s face it,” Wodehouse writes in 1973,

“the world I write about, always a small one, – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say, – is now not even small, it is nonexistent…This is pointed out to me every time a new book of mine dealing with the Drones Club and the lads who congregate there is published. ‘Edwardian’ the critics cry, and I shuffle my feet and blush a good deal and say ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’…But sometimes I am in a more defiant mood. Mine, I protest, are historical novels.”

Someone better versed in 20th century British history than myself might argue that the world Wodehouse wrote about had never existed at all, but I’m not sure matters. The nostalgia for it is as fresh now as it was in 1973 or 1933. On Monday I found myself face-to-face with Norman Murphy, a man of seemingly limitless knowledge about Wodehouse. He is old and bright eyed; he approached me after the speeches, caught me starting my second glass of wine, leaning against a stack of books on a table, trying to look nonchalant and friendly at the same time. He asked who I was; I told him, or at least I said my name, and my reason for being here.

“Ah,” he said. “Now, what did you read, and where did you read it?”

I did not point out, but I could have pointed out, I guess, that Wodehouse never went to Oxbridge, either. I suppose in a sense I had passed a test simply by understanding what he was asking (later, I told the story to a friend of mine who really did go to Oxford; “I don’t get it,” he said). I felt revolted by the antiquated assumption that, in order to contribute to anything worth contributing to, one must have read a subject at an appropriate institution (I was educated in Boston, but not even at Harvard!). But a part of me felt also comforted, or at least sympathetic: it was an act of nostalgia, I felt, to ask such a question, in such a way. After all, I had felt so initially drawn to Oxford as a place because it placed me as near a thing that doesn’t exist (the Oxford of literature) as I could be; my living here, in England, was in a way also an act of nostalgia.

To be contrary (but also truthful), I told Murphy that I had grown up in California (“I think Californian scenery is the most loathsome on earth,” Wodehouse wrote while living in Hollywood). I told him I was writing a book about a rock n’ roll band. I disagreed when he suggested that Beerbohm’s fictional Judas College was based on Christ Church. And he was, I flatter myself, delighted and horrified in equal measure.

The question people often ask, when confronted with this book, or a book like this, a book of correspondence, is what will happen next. Will there be any more lives in letters? Is this one of the last? “A Life in Email,” after all, doesn’t have the same gravitas.

I find the question doesn’t really interest me. Perhaps the teenage me, speeding through the loathsome, beautiful California landscape, wanting to be a part of the modern world and reject it at the same time, would have come down on the side of the doubters, the ones who say that because tweets are disposable, the art of correspondence has died. Now, though, I remain hopeful that there will nearly always be enough contradiction in the world, and enough nostalgia, to keep correspondence – whatever that may come to mean – alive. And in the meantime I mean to further develop my relationship with Wodehouse by reading his letters again, in their final form, and seeing what narrative makes itself apparent this time.

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So, banks. We all use them, right? I guess some people don’t. Some people probably don’t trust banks, and keep their cash in neat little stacks under the mattress (doesn’t that get uncomfortable?), but a lot of us use banks. They’re a necessary evil. And I’ve never met someone who was enthusiastically supportive of their bank. No one has ever said to me, “Yes! I LOVE my bank! They make things easy for me and they give me cake and whisky when I’ve been especially good at managing my money!” No one has ever even said to me, “Oh yeah, my bank, they’re pretty helpful, actually.”

People have often, however, indicated how terrible/horrible/painful/stressful the experience of using a bank is. They say things like, “Wow! It would be easier to saw my own left leg off with a butter knife than access my account online!” and, “Oh yeah! Last time I went into a bank, I waited seven weeks to talk to someone. It was really boring, but at least I finally got to see what I’d look like with a beard.”

My life is quadruply stressful, because I have a bank in the USA and a bank in the UK. Do you know how many things can go wrong when you have TWO banks to deal with? Especially two banks that can’t interact with each other, because there’s a magic force field halfway across the Atlantic which prevents transatlantic transactions?

Here are just a few of my favorite bank-related memories:

- That time I wanted to wire some of my own money from my bank account in the USA to my bank account in the UK. My UK bank was like, “Sure! We can do that, no problem! Just fork over a 50% fee, wait four weeks, and you’ll be on your way!” And my US bank was like, “Um, you want to send money WHERE? To ENGLAND? I think I’ve heard of it, didn’t we beat them in a war once?” And then, after a lot of hemming and hawing and looking up of obscure codes, they were like, “Ohhhh yeahhhh, THAT place. No problem. Just fork over a 50% fee, wait another four weeks, and you’ll be on your way!” Unfortunately there was no money left to send myself after I’d paid all the fees.

- That time I wanted to access my account online. In fact, every time I have ever wanted to access my account online. In order to do this, I need a pointless little keypad that I stick my card into to produce a code. Which means I obviously also need my card. But! That’s not enough! I ALSO need a special (very lengthy) code that’s written on a laminated piece of paper they once sent me in the post. These things allow me to successfully log in about 80% of the time. The remaining 20% of the time I get a little red error message that says, “Sorry! We’re unable to log you in because WE’RE IDIOTS you recently used the back button on your browser.” Yes, yes I did use the back button on my browser, once, in 2004. SORRY.

- That time my card got eaten up by the cash point outside my local Tesco. I asked an important-looking Tesco employee if he could help, but of course he couldn’t help, because the cash points attached to his store are nothing to do with him. He pointed out that a lot of people had lost their cards in those machines lately. “Maybe you should ring your bank!” he said. So I rang my bank. At first all they could say was, “Um, I dunno, we can’t really help you, have you talked to the store manager?” But finally they suggested I go into a branch the next day. As the next day was Sunday, I went in the following Monday, and was seen by a very friendly representative who could see that some unusual activity had been flagged up on my account, but who couldn’t understand what that unusual activity was, because the person who had flagged it up hadn’t put anything in the notes. Finally he looked through all my recent transactions and decided that it was probably because I had withdrawn some cash in Wales last weekend. He lifted the restriction on my account, and ordered me a new card, which arrived promptly three weeks later.

- That time my US bank cancelled my debit card. Luckily, I was in the US at the time, so I went into a branch and asked the lady at the counter, above which was hung a sign that said, “We’re here to help!”, if she could help me.
“Oh no,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly help you. You’ll have to call that number, see, on the back of your card? They can help you.”
So I called the number. I sat on hold for a day, maybe two, and presently I was put through to a chirpy woman who was able to identify the problem immediately.
“You went abroad without telling us,” she admonished. I felt like a child who has been caught doing something he knows he shouldn’t do but can’t help doing, like eating ice cream before dinner.
“But I live abroad!” I said. “You know this. You regularly send mail to my address in the UK.”
“No,” said the chirpy lady. “We have no record of any address abroad.”
“But you send mail to my address in the UK!”
“No,” said the chirpy lady. “We have an address in California.”

So now, every time I move an inch, I feel like I should call both of my banks and assure them that IT’S OKAY! IT’S JUST ME! SHIFTING POSITION A LITTLE, BECAUSE MY FOOT HAS FALLEN ASLEEP!

But if I’m honest, some of my aggression towards banks – maybe most of it – can be accounted for by the fact that banks are all about money, and money stresses me out, even at the best of times. Banks stand there, on high streets and in strip malls, like living monuments to mortgages, loans, debt, wealth, capitalism, materialism, social (im)mobility, long work weeks, the American dream, the credit crunch. They represent what we have but also what we don’t, what we can never, have. And they add unnecessary complication to an already complicated thing.

Maybe I’d be willing to live with a lumpy mattress after all.

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On Thursday I was on BBC Radio Oxford, talking about the project I’m doing with Oxford band Little Fish. If you’re one of the two people I haven’t guilted into listening to it yet, don’t worry! It’s available online for another four days [edit: my bit starts at around 1:12:00). I haven’t actually listened yet, because every time I hear my own voice I cringe, but I enjoyed the experience. I arrived very early and I’d had too much coffee beforehand, which may explain why every other word out of my mouth is “exciting!” or “excited!”, but mostly it went well, and the Jo, the host, made me feel comfortable and even vaguely interesting. Yay!

In other news the leaves outside my study window are red, the ice cream truck is still driving around the block on weekend afternoons, I can’t seem to find a decent pair of jeans anywhere (but that might be because I can’t seem to bear being in a shop for more than five minutes at a time), I’m alternating between D.H. Lawrence and David Sedaris before bed, and I’ve had cheese on toast for five out of seven lunches this week.

How’s your October been?

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In New York, it was hot. I forgot to be amazed that we’d just crossed the Atlantic ocean in seven hours. I wore shorts and sandals a lot. We went to Coney Island, enjoying the air conditioning in the F train all the way to Stillwell Avenue. The last time we were there we saw a pair of newlyweds having their photo taken outside of Nathan’s. It was December and almost unbearably cold; the bride wore a long sleeveless gown and stood motionless, her shoulders bare and her face frozen into a smile, while the photographer, in a heavy coat and fingerless gloves, darted around the wedding party. Then the place was photogenic; now it was sort of eerie, all set up for Halloween but inhabited by sun-seekers, shirtless men on bicycles and girls in bikinis lying on towels or splashing at the shoreline. I stood in front of a zombie-like figure, blood on his plastic shirt, trying to get some shade. This place was becoming a haunt of ours, I thought.

***

We were staying in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, up six flights of stairs. A few doors down was a café with a bench shaped like the Brooklyn Bridge; at the end of the street was a playground, at the other end, an Italian restaurant. At breakfast I re-read Hemingway because I’d just seen the latest Woody Allen film. There was a good desk in the corner of the room from where you could look out at the Manhattan skyline, but the chair had wheels and the floor sloped, so you couldn’t sit there for too long without sliding away. There was a roofdeck, and on the hottest nights we went up and watched the sun set over the buildings and had a Sam Adams. I’d had an apartment like this in Boston, a tiny, well-lit 2 bedroom apartment with access to an empty roofdeck. I couldn’t tell if I was nostalgic about it – even some of the smells reminded me of that place – or grateful to be somewhere else now, metaphysically I mean. I remember once coming back late after serving drinks at some swanky function (I was a temp for a catering company; I owned a polyester tuxedo, complete with clip-on bow tie and trousers with an adjustable waist) and wanting a beer – it was spring, quite hot out. My roommate had left some Harvest Moon pumpkin ales in the fridge, so I opened one and took it up to the roof where, not very long ago, we had made snowmen during a St. Patrick’s day blizzard.

***

Later in the week, when the weather had turned (not cold and Autumnal, but wet, humid, the skyline shrouded in a queasy mist), we went to the Brooklyn Museum. Somehow I found myself in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, although I had no particular interest in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I stood in a dark room. On one wall was a gilded mirror; on the other, a large screen, onto which was being projected the image of a room. In the center of the actual room was a chandelier, lit up, upside down. And into the projected room a woman in period dress walked. She entered, looked around, exited. A few moments later she reappeared, standing on the ceiling, upside down. She began to recite a speech, or perhaps a series of speeches. I was alone in the room with her. Then I was joined by a woman in a leather jacket. She looked around, took a flash photograph of the exhibit, left. She was not part of the exhibit. I was not part of the exhibit. On the wall outside the room I read: “In The Spirit and the Letter, the viewer enters as space where sculptural elements, including a softly glowing crystal chandelier balanced upright on the floor and a framed mirror hanging upside down on the opposite wall, invert physical assumptions to produce an uncanny sense of dislocation.” I did not know what this had to do with feminism, exactly, though I had to admit that later, looking at my photographs of the exhibit, the image of the woman standing on the ceiling made me feel a little disoriented.

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I just got back from a trip to New York. I’m one of those people who really enjoys the process of getting somewhere, particularly the bit where you’re not allowed to use your phone, or the internet (I’ve used wifi on a plane once; the thrill lasted approximately a minute, after which point I was a) frustrated with how slow it was, and b) annoyed that I could now see that I had a bunch of work-related emails that I was definitely not going to answer, because I was ON A PLANE, but was nevertheless going to worry about for the remaining three hours of the flight). I’d probably like it if you still had to take ships across the Atlantic. Think about it: two weeks (I’ve made that timeframe up, I have no idea how long it takes to get a boat from England to the USA) of uninterrupted reading, writing and thinking time, all set against the dramatic backdrop of the sea!

Anyway, the advantage of air travel (apart from, you know, the advantage of air travel) is that you get to watch films. As this is basically the only time I watch films, I have to cram a lot into a few hours, so I watched three on the way out. And I know I’m behind the times here, but Bridesmaids? Really?

If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a woman called Annie who gets picked as her best friend’s maid of honor even though her life isn’t perfect. I mean, other stuff happens, but I think that’s the crux of it, and I had been led to believe that it was some sort of brilliant, funny, clever example of how women can be brilliant, funny and clever in films. In theory I’m not much of a feminist, but I’m willing to get behind something that portrays women as independently hilarious and witty, and who doesn’t like to laugh?

So imagine my chagrin when, having reclined my seat back and asked for a glass of red wine to accompany my chicken and root vegetable mush, I discovered that I wasn’t laughing.

At first I thought maybe it was me. I was being judgmental, I needed to loosen up, my brain was too focused on worrying about whether or not I’d locked the back door and turned the gas off. Then I thought it was probably just a bit slow; maybe they were just getting all the bad gags out of the way before building up to a mind-blowing climax. But somewhere during the seemingly interminable “two bridesmaids trying to one-up-each-other-with-not-very-amusing-speeches-at-an-engagement-party” scene I began to think that maybe I was forming what might be called an Opinion.

Here’s what I see: this film is the female equivalent to something like The Hangover (by the way, I almost never read reviews or articles about films – which may make my writing about a film somewhat questionable – but I’m 99% sure that about a million more qualified people have already said that).

I don’t mean female equivalent in the sense that it’s taken the things that The Hangover does for men and adapted them for a female audience, I mean it’s exactly the same, but with women as the principle characters. Which is fine! It’s great, actually. I mean, I guess it’s great. I guess it’s great that it’s now okay for there to be a scene in a film during which a bunch of women vomit on each other’s heads and shit onto expensive dresses, or during which a woman gets wasted on a plane and the end result is not a questionable one night stand but a comedy tackle from an air marshall. So yay! Crass, heavy-handed physical comedy is now gender-neutral! But wait. It’s still crass, heavy-handed physical comedy, even if women are doing it too.

In fairness, there were a few good things. I really like Kristen Wiig. I wanted to give her a hug and then hang out with her. And it was pretty weird to see Sookie from Gilmore Girls not being Sookie (wow, I think this is the most times I have made pop culture references in a blog post, or possibly my life, ever).

My absolute favorite moment in the film happens when Annie, exasperated and exhausted, is sitting at a bar with her cop (boy)friend, talking about how her best friend from childhood is getting married and seems to have all her shit together. “I feel like her life is going off and getting perfect and mine is just like phrrr.. [makes sound of things going bad],” she says.

I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t had a thought like that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have thoughts like that a lot. That’s a good line. That’s a good moment for a film to have.

But it was not really a laugh-out-loud-funny film, not most of the time. There was too much noise and too much padding around something that was strong enough to stand on its own. I’m inclined to like a film about a woman who doesn’t really know how to make her life work in the way she wants it to. I don’t need a scene where her housemate’s Vicky Pollard-inspired sister (see! pop culture!) lifts up her tracksuit top to reveal that the huge tattoo she accidentally got last night is now infected to make me like it. I don’t need a scene where a bride-to-be shits in the street under cover of a merengue-like wedding dress to make me like it. In fact, as you may have gathered, these things make me less inclined to like it.

I keep wondering what happened to subtlety. Why is subtlety not cool? Why can’t we just make and enjoy a film that celebrates how funny it is that none of us have any clue how to be grownups, how funny it is that we don’t all have cup-holders in our cars or a lot of money or a job we like or a sense of what’s good for us? That stuff is funny, and it’s funny because it’s true, and because it’s a little painful but less painful when we realize we’re not alone, not because it resembles the cartoons we used to watch when we were kids.

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