The Girl on the Boat by P. G. Wodehouse

Eustace closed his eyes.  After all, this girl had fought lions, tigers, pumas, cannibals, and alligators in her time with a good deal of success.  There might be a sporting chance of victory for her when she moved a step up in the animal kingdom and tackled his mother. 

It's time to cross the Atlantic with a bunch of wealthy goofballs and the women they love!  Yes, it's more P. G. Wodehouse, just what my readers were clamoring for!  Today's subject: The Girl on the Boat, published in book form in 1922 after being serialized in the Woman's Home Companion in late 1921 under the title Three Men and a Maid, which was also the title of American book edition.  I read a scan of a 1978 edition available at the internet archive.

The girl of the title is American Wilhelmina Bennett, a young redhead who loves golf and Tennyson.  Billie, as her friends call her, is in high demand.  In fact, in the space of a few weeks she is engaged to three different young men, Eustace Hignett, Sam Marlowe, and Bream Mortimer.

Englishman Eustace Hignett and Billie bonded over a mutual love of Tennyson; Billie was also impressed by Eustace's singing voice.  But there is a problem, in the form of Eustace's domineering mother, a writer on Theosophy who is in America on a lecture tour.  You see, Mrs. Hignett loves the Hignett country estate, Windles, but she doesn't own it outright--she holds it in trust for Eustace, and it will pass to him as soon as he gets married.  Not wanting to lose the estate, Mrs. Hignett has worked hard to keep Eustace from meeting any young ladies.

The novel begins in New York City, on the day Eustace and Billie are to be secretly married.  Mrs. Hignett learns her son has been meeting Billie behind her back and even gotten engaged to her and sabotages the wedding by hiding all of Eustace's pants; Eustace can't go out without pants, and so poor Billie is left at the altar.  Billie, who wants a husband who is brave and resourceful like Sir Galahad or Sir Lancelot (Tennyson's Idylls of the King is a formative text when it comes to her idea of the ideal man), decides she couldn't ever marry a man who lets his mother dominate him (and couldn't figure out a way to buy, borrow or steal pants on short notice) and dumps Eustace.

A month or so later Eustace, leaving his mother behind, sails back home to England on the liner Atlantic, sharing a cabin with his cousin, Sam Marlowe, son of Mrs. Hignett's brother, Sir Mallaby Marlowe, the successful lawyer.  While Eustace is bookish and weak (he spends almost the entire voyage in bed, green with sea sickness), Sam is a hearty sportsman.  Unknown to Eustace, Billie is also aboard, travelling with her childhood friend, Bream Mortimer.  Bream is in love with Billie, but she is not interested, and treats him like a servant.  

Sam falls in love with Billie immediately upon meeting her, and borrows Eustace's copy of The Idylls of the King and courts her.  She falls for the athletic hunk, but disaster strikes after she convinces him to put on a performance at the Atlantic's amateur talent show--Sam's performance is so terrible, makes him look so ridiculous, that Billie's vision of him as a 20th-century Sir Galahad is dashed, and she declares she would be too embarrassed to be married to him, and dumps him; soon after she accepts Bream's proposal of marriage.  

Eustace has better luck on the ship.  Billie's friend Jane Hubbard, a big game hunter who seems to have spent most of her life in Africa shooting animals, browbeating native bearers and attending "witch dances," is looking for a weak man she can mother, and Eustace is just the man for her.  

Billie's father and Bream's father are good friends, and share a desire to rent Windles, the Hignett estate; Mrs. Hignett has been rejecting their generous offers for ages.  But when Eustace finds himself alone in England, bucked up by the attentions of Jane, he goes against all his mother's wishes and lets the estate to the Bennetts and Mortimers, who bring along Jane, just as Eustace had hoped they would.  At Windles this crew engagee in various hijinks (e.g., Mr. Bennett is a hypochondriac and the most minor of maladies--a piece of lobster shell embedded in his tongue--leads him to think he is dying until Jane, an expert in rough and ready field medicine after her years in Africa, cures him as readily as she cured Eustace of sea sickness.)

Meanwhile, Sam is trying to forget about Billie by studying the law under the tutelage of his father Sir Mallaby.  But events quickly lead to Billie and Sam coming into close proximity again, and Sam launches a series of crazy schemes, working in concert with or at the expense of additional wacky characters whom Wodehouse introduces, to win Billie back.  Sam's efforts, and Eustace's romance with Jane, are complicated when Mrs. Hignett unexpectedly returns to England, having cancelled her tour of America because of a suspicion Eustace might get mixed up with a woman if left on his own.   Luckily for Sam, when Jane, thinking Bream is a burglar, shoots at him with an elephant gun, Bream is so scared Billie loses all respect for him, and her love for Sam is revived.    

The Girl in the Boat has many elements and themes in common with The Luck of the Bodkins, which I read recently.  In that 1930s novel there is a redhead on the Atlantic with a pet alligator that bites people--here we have a redhead on that very vessel with a dog who bites people.  Alfred Lord Tennyson plays a role in both novels.  In The Luck of the Bodkins the male lead gives a Mickey Mouse doll to the redhead, and she returns it to dramatize the ending of their engagement--in The Girl on the Boat Sam (who is the male lead even though I personally find Eustace and Jane more compelling than Sam and Billie) gives Billie a golliwog (link NSFW) and Billie returns it.  And so on.

Whatever the similarities, The Girl on the Boat is, in my opinion, superior to The Luck of the Bodkins.  The paragraphs and chapters seem longer and denser, but this verbosity does not significantly slow down the book--the extra detail is not superfluous gingerbread, but more material for jokes, and I actually laughed more reading The Girl on the Boat than I did The Luck of the Bodkins.  

One reason we read these old books is to learn about the past first hand, from primary sources, and The Girl on the Boat offers some information about the world of one hundred years ago that was new to me as well as elements that demonstrate the differences one hundred years can make.  Perhaps most memorable is Sam's disastrous performance on the Atlantic.  Unable to sing like his pal Eustace, Sam, also unable to escape putting on some kind of performance thanks to Billie, decides to do an imitation of famous comedian Frank Tinney, of whom I had never heard.  Tinney, whose career took a nosedive in 1924 after he was credibly accused of beating up his mistress, Ziegfeld dancer Imogene Wilson (AKA Mary Nolan), was a blackface comedian, and so Sam puts on blackface.  Sam's performance is a fiasco because Bream refuses to play piano for him, and so Eustace is enlisted, and when Sam appears on stage with a cigar as part of his imitation, the smell of it makes the sensitive Eustace sick and drives him to flee the stage, leaving Sam flatfooted--without a straight man to work against, Sam is at a loss and flees himself.  Billie later indicates that because he said nothing she thought Sam was imitating Bert Williams, a pioneering African-American comedian and actor and another person I'd never heard of. 

The novel thus provides grist for the mill of people interested in the depiction of race in popular culture.  But Wodehouse in The Girl on the Boat doesn't neglect all the gender studies types who might read his book a century after he penned it!  A recurring theme of the novel, exemplified by an extended gender-bending allusion to Othello, is how Jane is like a man and Eustace is like a woman.  

Very good; MPorcius Fiction Log, the blog that regularly tries to convince you to read weirdos like A. E. van Vogt and Barry N. Malzberg, gives its enthusiastic endorsement to P. G. Wodehouse's bit of mainstream popular entertainment, The Girl on the Boat.