One Nude Brunette + One Vegetarian = ?

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

In between calls from my lawyer in New York,  I spent most of yesterday in our fruit cellar.  No, Mr. P and I were not acting out Psycho. I was in the fruit cellar because for the last 15 years it has been the repository of all things Peperium and it needed to be cleaned out. If I don't do it, no one will.

It was with some pleasure that I uncovered the crate of paperback books that had been the property of one of Mr. P's grandfathers.  This grandfather had resided in the suburbs of Chicago and had ridden the train into the City for work each day. The crate of books are all that remained of the vast collection of dime store paperback books he purchased over the decades to read while on the train. I knew this grandfather was a devotee of Agatha Christie, and I'm currently on a Agatha Christie kick so I began searching through the books looking for her.  But before I came across Agatha, I found Thorne Smith.  Or more accurately, Thorne Smith's,"The Passionate Witch"

Looking at the cover, I thought to myself "Mr. P's grandfather was reading this on the train?  Now I know where Mr. P gets it." I flipped the book over to read the blurb on the back,

One Nude Brunette + One Vegetarian = ?

It all began when T. Wallace Wooly, Jr., the soul of propriety and vegetarianism rescued the nude, strangely unharmed, and smolderingly attractive Jennifer from the burning hotel.  It was not time to quibble about how he would look in front-page photos coming down the stairs with a nude girl slung over his shoulders. But when he discovered a week later that he had married the lady he seriously wished he had shown more discretion and less valor.  For there was something extremely unconventional about Jennifer's antics. In fact, Mr. Wooly soon realized that the yellow-eyed Jennifer was a witch - the kind who would leave you in peace only when she lay buried at a crossroads with a stake through her heart. And the kind who made it necessary for Mr. Wooly to forsake carrot juice and seek peace in some monumental binges.

You can probably imagine my reaction, can't you? Well, being the type to not waste an God-given opportunity like this, I set the book aside and continued on searching through the crate looking to see what other treasures it might yield.  Then I packed the crate back up and went on with my cleaning.

Last evening when the lark was asleep on the wing; the snail was snoring on the thorn; Mr. P was puffing on his pipe in his chair; I was curled up in mine ; God was still in his Heaven - and all was right with the world, I interrupted the peace by speaking,

"Mr. P, I found the crate of Grandfather Peperium's paperback books in the fruit cellar today."

Closing his book on the Civil War and removing his pipe from his mouth Mr. P asked, "You did? Any Agatha Christie's?"

"Oh yes. He had quite the book collection."

"He was a big reader."

 "Obviously. Can I read one a loud to you?"

"Sure."

"I'm not starting at the beginning, ok?"

"Ok."

With that, I pulled out  the copy of the book from the pocket of my robe and began reading, keeping my eyes firmly focused on the book,

There are professional and there are amateurs in all lines of human endeavor. Mr. Wooly was a professional insurance man, a professional after-dinner orator, an amateur Christian (or perhaps here his standing was ambiguous), and also he was a professional true lover.  He had been faithful to the shadow of the shadow of Mrs. Wooly; now he glimpsed an opportunity to be faithful to another bearing the name of Jennifer.  He spoke his thoughts aloud, and even while he spoke them he felt a hand upon his shoulder. It burned through the fabric the padding, the cambric shirt, till it spoke to his very skin.  A real hand.

"Mr. Wooly!" said a tense, a singing, albeit nasal voice. 

He dared to look up.  It was not her ghost. It was Jennifer herself.  The blue velvet was in tatters; it hardly existed below her waist.  Its upper front, however hung, unfastened, miraculously remained...Mr. Wooly gazed at her, his eyes like those of a moribund horse.

"Forgive me," he sighed.

"This isn't Agatha Christie!" interrupted Mr. P.

Keeping my eyes on the book, I answered, "I know."

"Who is it?" he demanded.

"Thorne Smith."

"Never heard of him. What's it called?" 

"The Passionate Witch."

"The Passionate Witch? Hmmn, I'd forgotten what a man of taste Grandfather Peperium was. Keep reading."  Mr. P began puffing on his pipe again and I continued.

"Jennifer," Mr. Wooly said. "Jennifer" And then he heard himself saying: "Will you marry me?"

"She seemed to think,  She bowed her head. "Yes, Mr. Wooly." she said, and there was an incisive click in her voice, as if invisible handcuffs were being locked in. "Tomorrow."  Here her body went limp and he had to carry the wench.  He took her into his bedroom and across it to its massive door.  She moved slightly then. "Where are you taking me?" "Home," he said, contriving to press a button to summon Bentley.

"Put me to bed darling," she said and added: "You won't need Bentley."

What could a fundamentally kind and chivalrous man, do but obey the poor lady?  He gave the portrait of Mrs. Wooly an imploring look: the painted gleam behind the painted drooping eyeglasses did not, however, soften.

He begged her forgiveness with an agonized, beseeching roll of his big brown eyes and a shrug of his weighted shoulders.  He parted the blue brocade curtains of that bed, deposited the half-naked Jennifer and snapped on the soft, rosy glow of the reading light.

"My shoes," sighed the lady.  He understood that she meant him to take them off.  They were of gilded kid, and he thought - a little madly- that golden kid was as pagan as the golden calf had been, all the while within himself the tides of his soul dizzily alternated from ebb to flow, seeking an equilibrium that had for so many years been his.  He hated this interloper with all his being. He humbly kissed her silken toe. She sighed and softly laughed. "What a bed!" she sighed and softly laughed. "we shall live in it, sleep and eat and take our exercise.  A Madison Square Garden of a bed built for wrestling matches...

"THAT"S ENOUGH! STOP!!" said Mr. P  standing up.

"What?"  I said smiling looking up at him - the perfect picture of wifely innocence.

He walked over to me. Snatching the book out of my hands, he said "This is my book.  You go back to Agatha Christie."

"Oh no.  I'm going to read another one of your grandfather's books." I said as I pulled another paperback out of the pocket of my robe."

"By who?"

"Thorne Smith."

"What's it called?"

"The Glorious Pool. See!" And I held the book up for Mr. P's inspection.

"That's mine too. Give it to me."

I did. "You go back to Agatha Christie -now."  I did. Mr. P sat back down in his chair and began flipping through the 2 books while taking puffs on his pipe.  After a while he spoke, "Do you know what Thorne Smith is?"

"I choose not to answer."

"He's P. G. Wodehouse with sex."

"And line drawings."  I added.

"Yes, and line drawings."

.

Comments

[Mr. WAC]

Besides Wodehouse with sex, Smith also invented Topper.

[Old Dominion Tory]

Is time for a new organization: the Roman Catholic Boys for, er, Line Drawings?
Does Basil know about this author? Sounds like the type of writer with whom Basil would be most familiar.
Also, the title of the book mentioned on the cover of The Glorious Pool (and, gosh, where do I get myself one of those pools? It provides a mgnificent backdrop to some fine line drawings.) is especially intriguing. The Bishop's Jaegers. A bishop with his own company of German light infantry? Would this be a Lutheran bishop or, perhaps, because of the Hanoverian connection to the Crown, certain Anglican bishops have right to maintain their own bodyguard of Jaegers? Hmmmm . . .

[Old Dominion Tory]

I just checked information on Mr. Smith via Wikipedia. First thing: you're working your way backwards through Smith's ouevre. The Passionate Witch was his last book, and The Glorious Pool is next to last.
Mr. Smith, however, seems to be the type of fellow who would fit right in with the Patum Peperium crowd. His description in Wikipedia: "James Thorne Smith Jr. (March 27, 1892–June 21, 1934), was an American writer of humorous supernaturnal fantasy fiction. Best known today for his creation of Topper, Smith's comic fantasy fiction (most of it involving sex, lots of drinking, and supernatural transformations, and aided by racy illustrations) sold millions of copies in the early 1930s. Smith drank as steadily as his characters . . ."
Finally, make sure Mr. Peperium reads these books for they could provide him with inspiration for his own successful books. I say this because Smith's background also includes the following:
"[A]fter hungry years in Greenwich Village working as an advertising agent, Smith achieved meteoric success with the publication of Topper in 1926."
This could be the start of something big.

[Mr. Peperium]

Thanks for the good thoughts, ODT, but I would bollox up the whole thing.

I'd lampoon feminism. I'd lampoon liberalism. T. Smith probably wouldn't get away with it, either: he lampoons vegetarianism.

After a quarter of a century writing for other people's products and services, if I took up the keyboard in a serious effort to make cash it would have to be a book about what I liked and was interested in. And that, as my stunted career in poetry has taught me, is pretty much unmarketable.

I do mean what I said in Mrs. P's post: this is Wodehouse with sex. Another difference: While Wodehouse obviously liked his daily cocktail and populated an imaginary world with folks who did too, he never lived as they did, even after he had attained the riches that would make it all possible. For Smith, being in advertising--even as an "agent", whatever that was--the opposite course was probably preordained.

Yes, WAC, I'm waiting for The Baz to weigh in, too. Smith looks like just the sort of alley he would love to be up. (If indeed he hasn't been already) We'll find him, days later, festooned with old banana skins and coffee grounds, gibbering about line drawings and and the possibility of creating a late-night animated series for cable.

[Robbo]

It says that although the Passionate Witch was written by Smith, she was "completed" by Norman Matson.

The imagination boggles.

[George Pal]

The spectral Mr Smith has faded but is not yet gone. The unforgotten Thorne Smith AND the THORNE SMITH Newsletter.

http://www.thornesmith.net/

[NBS]

How lucky you are to have the complete AND unabridged version of The Glorious Pool.

[NBS]

Also: Your lawyer in New York is too damn expensive and you should not be calling him.

[Mr. WAC]

I think that, in this context, "complete and unabridged" was code for "dirty parts included."

[MCNS]

'...Most of it involving sex, lots of drinking, and supernatural transformations, and aided by racy illustrations...'

Genius! And as reading material, a lot more interesting-sounding than the Civil War...

[MCNS]

In the movie version, "I Married a Witch," Veronica Lake is wearing a robe when Fredric March rescues her from the burning building. See the trailer here:

http://www.spout.com/films/I_Married_a_Witch/16510/2357/trailers.aspx

[Mrs. Peperium]

That was the movie version? I LOVE that movie...