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unearths some literary gems.
***
Mr. White retired behind his formidable eyebrows and sulked there.
***
"Life, as somebody has remarked, is like a pack of cards. I have forgotten the precise argument; but the aphorism, I think, is sound."
***
"I am fascinated by your monocle, Mr. Holderness," she said. "What would you do if it were broken?"
The eye that gripped the monocle relaxed; the glass wafer fell crashing to the deck. Ford Holderness kicked the broken pieces into the water. From his waistcoat pocket he brought up a second patch of crystal and stuck it firmly in his eye. No smile accompanied the transaction.
"I carry spares, Miss Oliver," he bowed. "Your question is such a popular one, when I am out of England, that I never venture out without a pocketful."
[The more I study that scene, the more I find to enjoy. The basic premise is wonderful, of course, and then there's the "observer effect" implied by the fact that what makes his monocles break is, in effect, people asking about his monocles breaking. I love the precursing of Schroeder's closet full of spare Beethoven busts; and I'm also impressed at how the author avoids saying "monocle" too often by resorting to the phrases "glass wafer" and "patch of crystal."]
***
"Marbles!" said Blackwood profanely.
***
Here again was the big black car...strolling along with its hands in its pockets, having no difficulty at all in keeping just the right distance in the rear.
***
He hoped that he would never see another adjectival tree. The poet who could sing of trees was full of bats and mice and fleas.
***
Her words were now tumbling out and piling up on top of one another like the letters of a typewriter.
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Eliza, by Barry Pain:
***
Eliza, entirely misunderstanding the word that I next used, got up and said that she would not stop in the room to hear her poor mother sworn at.
"The word I used," I said, calmly, "was alabaster, and not what you suppose."
"You pronounced it just like the other thing."
"I pronounced it in an exclamatory manner," I replied, "from contempt! You seem to me very ready to think evil. This is not the first time!"
Eliza apologized. As a matter of fact, I really did say alabaster. But I said it emphatically, and I own that it relieved my feelings.
***
How true it is, as one of our English poets has remarked, that it is always darkest before the silver lining!
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Blotto, Twinks and the Intimate Revue, by Simon Brett:
***[Airheaded toff Blotto compliments a woman on her looks]"You're a real bellbuzzer with three veg and gravy."***"The cream of Scotland Yard are all clotted."***"Don't nit-pick noodles!"***He didn't think Araminta fffrench-Wyndeau looked very happy either. She was still as silent as the second and third fs in her surname.[Btw, I note the one-upping theme here, as Brett outdoes the real British lexicon. First "with three veg" (as opposed to the more familiar two), and now a three-f fffrench.]***"Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the cigarette holder." [This is one of many defective witticisms uttered by a character who is supposedly "the wittiest man in London," and whose repertoire consists of broken Wildeisms, epigrams that begin like quips but end like boring, literal observations, and so on.]***"Lawkins!" said Twinks. And she meant it.***"Tickey-Tockey," said Twinks, though without the vim she usually put into a "Tickey-Tockey."***[Bonus: In sending up 1920s aristo types, as you may have gathered, Brett favors silly pseudo-slang that he's apparently coined himself over historically authentic slang. Here's my favorite from this book: giving someone the idiomatic cold shoulder becomes giving them "the ice cream's elbow."]
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unearths some literary gems.
From Jeeves and the Leap of Faith, by Ben Schott:
***
"I suppose there's a snag?"....
"Two, actually: Evadne and Lancelot."
"Eh?"
"Her Ma and Pa."
This sounded like one large, amalgamated snag, but Gussie informed me otherwise.
***
"We should strike while the whatnot is hot."
***
Jeeves permitted himself a riotous twitch of the eyebrow.
***
"Why don't you just make things up? I bet no one would twig if you invented a dowager duchess or two."
**
"I knew those cummerbunds were an incident waiting to happen."
**
"The garden looks like...a birthday cake!"
[The character who says this turns out to be Wittgenstein--and, according to Schott's endnotes (remember, his reputation rests on trivia, not fiction) a remark along those lines can actually be traced to real-life Wittgenstein's criticism of the grounds at Cambridge.]
***
A smile inched across Gussie's face, transforming it from lugubrious haddock to exuberant flat-fish.
***
"[I have] News. Pages of it. You might use me to wrap fish 'n' chips."
***
How Jeeves accomplishes his effortless omniscience is one of those eternal, unfathomable mysteries, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or Percy Gorringe's side-whiskers--which, now I picture them, also hang pretty Babylonically.
***
He unleashed the italics.
"Sir?"
***
The emotions that swept across Aunt Agatha's face--shock, bafflement, fury, doubt--wove a Bayeux Tapestry of indignation.
***
[Bonus: "Toe over kettle" as an alternative to "head over heels" or "base over "apex." Googling suggests that this is a Schott original.]
[Bonus: When Bertie gives a fake name and address to a constable (as of course is traditional in the canon), it turns out in the endnotes that Schott has used a "real" fake address--namely, the street address of a real-life London facade that was built merely "to conceal a venting area of the Metropolitan Railway."]
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unearths some literary gems.
From Wodehouse's Spring Fever:***"Oh, very well, very well. Here is five pounds.""Couldn't you make it ten?""No, I could not make it ten," said Lady Adela, with the testiness of a conjurer asked to do too difficult a trick.***[Gratuitously Quantifying Things dept.]“Don’t you see what a wonderful opportunity this will be for you to become hep to my hidden depths?”“You haven’t any.”“I have, too. Dozens.”**[Nonsense dept.]Nobody, of course, who enjoyed the pleasure of intimacy with him, expected him to talk anything but nonsense, but he need not, she felt, have descended to such utter nonsense, as that of which he had been guilty last night.
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