The Heart of a Goof

I am an aficionada of soccer and tennis to wildly magnified proportions. Accompanying the likes is my devotion to metal. If the above mentioned hobbies were religion, I would be a fanatic. And to me, therefore a sport like golf would be more uninteresting than umm….well…it would be most uninteresting and unappreciated. But it is commendable how Wodehouse manages to portray golf as a sport that is not just a sport but a way of life, a criterion for the flawless spouse and an ambition for middle-aged Englishmen. And so let me proceed to mention that golf is the theme upon which Wodehouse’s ‘The Heart of a Goof’ is painted on.

With his stories, Wodehouse depicts his generation of English Society and the life of the affluent Englishmen. And thus, the protagonists of Wodehouse’s short stories are (in at least the books that I have read) the affluent English of masculine gender, middle age and not engaged to any damsel that they are so desperate to fall in love with. Not yet.

The Heart of a Goof is a collection of nine short stories and the Oldest Member is the link between each of them. The Oldest Member is a man who has grown old witnessing people with high spirits and aspiration to master golf, among them are a few who he finds appreciable for the game they play and other few with whom he has shared pieces of his life, all this on a golf course. He is old and thus wise and feels (hilariously) that his duty is to impart his knowledge on matters that trouble others by relating events that he had witnessed when he was younger (apparently events that took place only in the golf course). He holds nothing but scorn for people who do not find golf endearing or much of a man’s game. The most striking/intriguing part though is how he forces his knowledge upon people who do not intend to receive it. His victims are persons who are in a stick themselves, bothered by some intensely disappointing situation, and yet so pathetically gullible to the Oldest Member’s harassment (the stories are the harassment and they are very unintentional on the Old man’s behalf). The victims desperately try to flee but each of them fails owing to the fact that the Oldest Member is way more dominating (figuratively….he pulls the escaping victim back to the chair next to him so that he can proceed with his wisdom talk). And so, each victim succumbs and is subjected to a story that closely relates to that stick that they have caught themselves in. No, no, it does not relate, it is the exact replica. The author makes it very obvious that the victims themselves come to the Oldest Member with their woes and so the Oldest Member has no alternative but to relate events that seem so familiar, and he does it with so much of delight. The victims’ troubles are the introduction of his stories and by the end of the story the solution is presented. The only difference is that the story involves different characters. The Oldest Member does not speak of an event as a solution to the doleful listener’s problem. He simply narrates it and probably leaves it to the listener to grasp an idea as to how he should proceed to resolve his setback. The short story never comes back to the characters who come to the Oldest Member with their crisis. Every short story ends with the Oldest Member’s narration. So the reader never really knows what happens to the characters of the short stories. Thus, readers are victimized at the Oldest Member’s hands too.

The stories are similar in terms of plot, as, the characters are all tortured by the same object…women. They are deeply in love and have in mind proposals for the women to be their wives. As we all are aware, women have great self-esteem and will not divulge their love for men till the men have come out of the closet and expressed their affection for the women. So, the plot thickens as the men suffer from lack of confidence. They are either cowardly, or would like to make themselves worthy of the women (by evidently bettering themselves at golf), or find themselves rendered helpless due to the emergence of another man in the woman’s life. When they are so hopelessly demoralised, the Oldest Member is introduced into the scene. Wodehouse combines travesty, humor and irony to express the drama that is capable of stirring even on a golf course. The stories are very amusing indeed and the readers are left pleased and satisfied as the characters of the Oldest Member’s story always have a ‘happy ending’. They win the women over and improve their game on several levels.

If you are bored of novels of genres like suspense, murder, adventure etc., Wodehouse’s stories are the ones you are looking for. Actually, even otherwise. I would even bet that reading his stories is the best way of improving your vocabulary. As for ‘The Heart of a Goof’, the book IS a must read for it is comical accomplishment in a bizarrely rare setting!