WODEHOUSE, P.G. Hot Water.

America as ‘Wobbly and Depressed’

WODEHOUSE, P.G. Hot Water. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company. 1932.

8vo. Publisher’s black cloth, decorated and lettered in red to spine and upper board, in the illustrated jacket by Rea Irvin, top-edge stained red, fore-edge uncut; top-edge of textblock stained red; pp. [12], 307, [1 (blank)]; frontispiece, title-page vignette, and 5 in-text illustrations by Rea Irvin; a few nicks to jacket, lettering to spine of jacket faded, small loss to jacket at foot of spine not touching text, old archival tape repair to foot of jacket verso; otherwise a very good copy.

First US edition in book form, first printing of the novel following the American businessman Packy Franklyn during his stay in England with his fiancée, Lady Beatrice Bracken, where an apparently straightforward visit quickly descends into a series of romantic complications.

Wodehouse wrote the novel while working at the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Studios in Hollywood. In a letter to his friend William Townend, he described the situation in America as ‘very wobbly and depressed’, noting MGM were showing no desire to extend his contract (Performing Flea, p. 66). Despite these difficulties, Wodehouse found encouragement in his work on Hot Water, also recording in his letter he’d written sixty-thousand words by May 1931.

The US edition was published simultaneously with the UK on 17 August 1932. The novel had previously been serialised in the US in Collier’s magazine. It is set in the fictitious town of St Rocque, in Brittany. Wodehouse would later reuse this location in his novel French Leave.

McIlvaine A47b.

SKU: 2126103