Books: Gorilla-Faced Earl

LAUGHING GAS—P. G. Wodehouse— Doubletlay, Doran ($2).

Reginald John Peter Swithin, third Earl of Havershot, had a face like a gorilla,— “much more so, indeed,” he confessed, “than most gorillas have.” No Earl at birth, he prided himself on having worked his way up, with an uncle dying here, a cousin there, until the title fell to him.

Before he got it, the sturdy young nobleman had been in love with a U. S. newspaper girl named Ann Bannister, but their engagement was broken when he kissed her on the back of her neck. The trouble was, he had forgotten to take a lighted cigar from his mouth. Ann called him a soulless plug-ugly, rushed off to Hollywood, where she got a job as pressagent to a child star, vicious, golden-haired Joey Cooley. Meanwhile, back in London, when he could tear himself away from heavy meals by means of which he forgot his heartbreak, the Earl of Havershot was straightening out the affairs of an alcoholic cousin. This cousin had fallen into the clutches of a designing female who, according to the classic formula of Wodehouse novels, turned out to be the lovely girl whose neck the Earl had burned.

Around this melancholy setup, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse has written his 45th book, a dead ringer for other Wodehouse fantasies with its collection of imbecilic gentlemen, appallingly mistaken identities, mouth-filling English slang and story that sizzles and fusses as senselessly as water spilled into hot grease. Not a humorist in an ironic or satirical sense of the term, Wodehouse gets away with comic murder by a species of inspired silliness that is funny only because it is so uninhibited and because it goes on so tirelessly. In Laughing Gas, his plot involves a transfer of personality between the child star and the amiable, gorilla-faced Earl, with the result that the Earl romps around, paying off childhood scores, until he becomes known as the fiend of Hollywood, while the golden-haired child star takes to whiskey and soda and pays calls on cinema queens. But to speak of Wodehouse’s plot is like speaking of the plot of a trapeze act, for his characters merely leap from one precarious situation to another, defying time and space, in an exhibition that will please old Wodehouse admirers, but win no new ones.