WODEHOUSE, P.G. Heavily annotated typescript and manuscript draft of The Girl in Blue.

‘Do Nice Girls Steal Things?’

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Heavily annotated typescript and manuscript draft of The Girl in Blue. [Remsenburg. Autumn 1969?]

[with:]

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Diary for 1968 containing preparatory notes for The Girl in Blue. Westhampton Beach, NY: The Westhampton Insurance Agency Inc. 1968.

Typescript: 4to. Unbound typescript with several pages in manuscript, the leaves secured through a single punched hole at the upper left corner tied with string, housed in a custom quarter morocco clamshell box with marbled sides, spine lettered in black; ff. ‘187’ (i.e. 196), of which 52 pp. in manuscript in Wodehouse’s hand, the whole largely foliated in ink; typescript heavily annotated and corrected by Wodehouse in red and black ink, final leaf signed ‘P.G. Wodehouse’; exceptionally well preserved.

Diary: Publisher’s leatherette ring binding, upper board lettered in gilt with Westhampton Insurance logo to upper board; pp. [48], comprising the period of 29 July–31 December 1968 with 32 pp. manuscript notes in Wodehouse’s hand in black and red ink and pencil (see below); ink bleeding to 2 pp. affecting a few words, else very well preserved; housed in a custom quarter morocco clamshell box with marbled sides, spine lettered in black.

P.G. Wodehouse’s heavily annotated typescript for The Girl in Blue – with over fifty pages of manuscript in his hand – accompanied by a 1968 diary containing Wodehouse’s working notes, comprising sequencing, narrative points, and dialogue.

The Girl in Blue was Wodehouse’s ninety-sixth book, published when he was eighty-nine years old. It was published in London on 29 October 1970 by Barrie & Jenkins, and in New York on 22 February 1971 by Simon & Schuster, both – unusually for Wodehouse’s books – published under the same title and with identical dust-jackets designed by Osbert Lancaster. The protagonist, cartoonist Jerry West, falls in love with flight attendant Jane Hunnicut, whom he meets on jury duty. He is engaged, however, to the writer Vera Upshaw, who insists that Jerry demand his inheritance – to be held in trust for another three years – from his uncle, Bill Scrope, the owner of a Gainsborough miniature of an ancestor, The Girl in Blue. When the miniature is stolen, Bill promises the early release of Jerry’s inheritance if he can steal it back.

In spite of Wodehouse’s enormous output, comparatively few drafts and scenarios for his works have survived. For each work, he generally produced ‘three complete drafts, all typed, revising each until the final, seemingly effortless comic text was achieved [...] Wodehouse would often work for days, weeks, or even months, on ideas for plots, only to discard them. He might spend considerable time on another set of ideas, then throw them out and return to the original inspiration. Characters were frequently switched, their names, genders, and narrative roles fluctuating dramatically’ (Thompson).

Wodehouse’s extensive preparatory notes – reusing a 1968 diary from an insurance agency in Westhampton Beach, near his Long Island home in Remsenburg – provide key insights into the intermediate phase of his working process, indicating that he toyed with several titles before settling on The Girl in Blue, wavering amongst Do Nice Girls Steal Things?, Nice Girls Don’t Steal Things, and Do Nice Women Steal Things? The diary appears to have been used as a living document of sorts. Numerous leaves have been torn out, one of which has been bound into the accompanying annotated typescript draft of The Girl in Blue as f. 106 (21 October–24 October), which lays out whole sentences of core dialogue and narration.

Four other of the leaves torn from from our forty-eight-page diary fragment (11–14 December 1968, 16–19 December 1968, 20–24 December 1968, and 1–4 January 1969) were used by Wodehouse to work out scenarios for the draft of The Girl in Blue (at the time using the working title Be My Guest) now held at Eton College and donated by Edward Cazalet, Wodehouse’s grandson (MS 786).

The diary forms what Wodehouse called, in a 1975 interview with The Paris Review, his ‘incoherent’ phase of note-taking: ‘For a humorous novel you’ve got to have a scenario, and you’ve got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in… splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible … And I very often find that I’ve got something which ought to come in another place, a scene which originally I put in chapter two and then when I get to chapter ten, I feel it would come in much better there. I’m sort of molding the whole time’. The 1968 diary is full of notes trying out different orders of events, often numbered and explicitly introduced by notes to self, generally opening ‘Try this:’. He also experiments with chapter names, like ‘All Aboard for Mellingham’ and ‘Trouble Down at Mellingham’, although these appear to have been abandoned before publication and are merely numbered in both UK and US editions.

Crucially, the diary – with corresponding manuscript corrections to the typescript – also introduces the character of Bernadette and her nickname, Barney, as it would appear in the final version of the text. Wodehouse also carries this development over to his annotated typescript, in which the character initially appears as Nicole, nicknamed ‘Nick’ (f. 2r). The September 1969 Eton draft, written under the working title Be My Guest, makes no mention of Bernadette (or Barney); the fact that Be My Guest does not appear in Wodehouse’s list of potential titles, and that they all feature ‘girl’, ‘girls’, or ‘women’, seem to indicate that he was moving closer to the final title of The Girl in Blue.

Although this draft is evidently slightly later than Eton MS 786, Wodehouse’s revisions to the typescript are extensive, with new snatches of dialogue added, turns of phrase significantly altered, and lines – or whole passages – struck out. Where Eton’s typescript draft contains manuscript versions of chapters 1 and 2, the present draft features the most concentrated reworking to Chapters 10–13, alternating between whole pages of fleshed-out text and increasingly detailed three- or four-part scenarios, building on the loose scaffolding detailed in the 1968 diary.

Provenance:

1. Sotheby’s, 19th Century and Modern First Editions (15 December 1970), lot 872, to J. Wilson.

2. Sotheby’s, Fine Books and Manuscripts Including Americana. Property of the Estate of James H. Heineman (26 June 1998), lot 132 (not sold).

See Thompson, Manuscript Material for P.G. Wodehouse’s The Girl in Blue (Eton MS 786).

SKU: 2126344