Bludleigh prototype?

An update to Life and death in Bludleigh.

There's just been a thread on LibraryThing's "Name that Book" forum: ghost story -- England -- couple changed by house. The work sought sounded remarkably like PG Wodehouse's Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court - which features a young artistic couple who become hunting-obsessed due to the malign influence of a country mansion belonging to one of their relatives. Collective effort, however, tracked it to John Buchan's story Fullcircle: Martin Peckwether's Story.

This concerns an earnest young intellectual couple ...

"Julian and Ursula Giffen. . . . I daresay you know the names. They always hunt in couples, and write books about sociology and advanced ethics and psychics--books called either 'The New This or That,' or 'Towards Something or Other.' You know the sort of thing.

... who move into a small Restoration manor house inherited from one of their relatives, and become benignly altered by it until their attitudes are in tune with those of its amiable Catholic originator, Lord Carteron.

It's the final story of Buchan's The Runagates Club, his 1928 anthology of stories connected by the framing device of storytelling by dining club members (who include Richard Hannay and other Buchan heroes). Given the date and strong similarity in premise and plot, I think it's very likely that the 1929 Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court is a pastiche of Fullcircle.

Wodehouse was, after all, a skilled parodist. This isn't generally remembered because - compare Stella Gibbons and Cold Comfort Farm - the objects of his parody have gone into obscurity. Jaime J. Weinman sums it up well:

Almost everything he wrote began life as a parody of some then-popular genre of stories. Stories about idle young men who belong to clubs (the Drones Club stories, the Bertie and Jeeves stories), "frame" stories told by old adventurers (Mr. Mulliner; the golf stories), stories about stern Aunts who won't consent to their niece's marriage (the Blandings series); these were all familiar to readers when Wodehouse started doing funny versions of them ... At the time Wodehouse started writing for the Saturday Evening Post, these were types of stories that were being told seriously in the Post and many other magazines, and Wodehouse basically made his name by writing stories that took those elements and rechannelled them into farce.

- Wodehouse the parodist, Something Old, Nothing New: Thoughts on Popular Culture and Unpopular Culture, Jaime J. Weinman

Jaime goes on to mention, for instance, the connection with Ethel M Dell, who appears in Wodehouse works as Rosie M Banks.

Addendum. More complex, it seems. In a follow-up - Reciprocal Wodehouse Linkage - Jaime points out that the 'malign house' theme is widespread, and also appears in Wodehouse's earlier Honeysuckle Cottage (1925) in which a writer of hardboiled crime novels, James Rodman, moves into the cottage of a late aunt who was a successful romantic novelist, and finds himself increasingly under the malign influence of sentimental fiction.

Judging by The Figure in the Carpet of "Honeysuckle Cottage": P. G. Wodehouse and Henry James, Wernsman, Marijane R. Davis, The Henry James Review, Volume 26, Number 1, Winter 2005, pp. 99-104), Honeysuckle Cottage draws strongly on Henry James and The Turn of the Screw, which it even mentions:

"Do you believe in haunted houses? Do you believe that it is possible for a malign influence to envelop a place and work a spell on all who come within its radius?" ...
"Of course, ... one has read stories. Henry James's Turn of the Screw ...

Then again, I just found that Buchan's Fullcircle first appeared in magazine form in 1920, putting it among the many possible precursors to Honeysuckle Cottage too.

- Ray

Life and death in Bludleigh

The plot thickens. Previously - Life and death in Budleigh - I mentioned the apparent unverifiability, as reported by Devon Perspectives, of a connection between PG Wodehouse and Budleigh Salterton. I thought I'd cracked the problem on finding references to a story called Unpleasantness at Budleigh Court (see Google, which finds multiple hits, including the filming of the story in the 1975 Wodehouse Playhouse series). However, a more thorough search on plot details finds that the story is actually titled Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court in primary sources such as the original Strand Magazine appearance: the mutation of the name to "Budleigh" in various secondary and tertiary sources may well be the explanation.

As described here, the story concerns a budding romance between two gentle poets, Aubrey Trefusis and Charlotte Mulliner, that is interrupted by the malign effects of a country house - Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire - that afflicts everyone who stays in it with a lust for hunting. Charlotte thinks she has been unaffected until she finds herself aggrieved that one of her poems has been rejected by The Animal-Lovers' Gazette

Good Gnus
(A Vignette in Verse)

When cares attack and life seems black,
How sweet it is to pot a yak,
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears,
And others I could mention;
But in my Animals "Who's Who"
No name stands higher than the Gnu;
And each new gnu that comes in view
Receives my prompt attention.

When Afric's sun is sinking low,
And shadows wander to and fro,
And everywhere there's in the air
A hush that's deep and solemn;
Then is the time good men and true
With View Halloo pursue the gnu;
(The safest spot to put your shot
is through the spinal column).

To take the creature by surprise
We must adopt some rude disguise,
Although deceit is never sweet,
And falsehoods don't attract us;
So, as with gun in hand you wait,
Remember to impersonate
A tuft of grass, a mountain-pass,
A kopje or a cactus.

A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting's o'er, the vigil past;
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It's done. You've pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail;
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger)

Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court first appeared in the Strand Magazine, Volume LXXVIII, January-June, 1929. It can be read online in A Wodehouse Bestiary. Although it's comic in tone, its premise is quite Lovecraftian, and the story was reprinted in The Magazine of fantasy & science fiction in 1952.

Addendum, 21 Sept 2009. There's just been a thread on LibraryThing's "Name that Book" forum: ghost story -- England -- couple changed by house. The work sought sounded remarkably like Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court, but collective effort tracked it to John Buchan's story Fullcircle: Martin Peckwether's Story. It concerns an earnest young intellectual couple ...

"Julian and Ursula Giffen. . . . I daresay you know the names. They always hunt in couples, and write books about sociology and advanced ethics and psychics--books called either 'The New This or That,' or 'Towards Something or Other.' You know the sort of thing.

who move into a Restoration mansion and become altered by the house until their attitudes become those of its amiable Catholic originator, Lord Carteron. It's the final story of Buchan's The Runagates Club, his 1928 anthology of stories connected by the framing device of storytelling by dining club members (who include Richard Hannay and other Buchan heroes). Given the date and strong similarity in premise and plot, I think it's very likely that the 1929 Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court is a pastiche of Fullcircle.

- Ray