The Oldest Member’s Guide to Love

Most of the stories in The Clicking of Cuthbert are love stories. This may surprise anyone who has only heard of them as golf stories, but it would not surprise the Oldest Member. To him the two subjects are one. A man’s conduct on the links reveals his character, and his character decides whom he ought to marry. The heart, in this view, is simply another club in the bag, and not always the most reliable one.

The old gentleman doesn’t disapprove of love, exactly. He just regards it as an unknown quantity, liable to improve a man’s game or ruin it with no warning either way. Several of the stories in the Library’s edition set out to test the proposition. Here are the three we would hand to anyone contemplating marriage, or a mixed foursome.

Peter, James and the pink sweater

“A Woman Is Only a Woman” concerns Peter Willard and James Todd, two men so evenly matched in incompetence that the club’s experts have never decided which is the worse player. They took up the game within days of each other, they play together morning and evening, and after dark they visit each other’s houses to read golf books.

Then both fall for Grace Forrester, whom the Oldest Member barely knows, though he once admired the freedom of wrist with which she killed wasps at a picnic. The friendship cools at once. As the narrator puts it, “Love is a fever which, so to speak, drives off without wasting time on the address.” Golf dates are cancelled on the grounds of sprained wrists and headaches, and both invalids turn up at Miss Forrester’s for tea.

The courtship is pure Wodehouse. The village lays bets on the outcome. When Grace is seen knitting a sweater, the two rivals try to estimate from her purls and plains whose chest it is meant for, a large one meaning Peter and a small one James. Eventually they settle the matter the only honourable way: an eighteen-hole match under strict rules, with the loser to leave the district. The account of that round, with its scores in the twenties and a lake hole somehow halved in two, is one of the funniest pieces of golf writing in the book.

We won’t say who wins. We will say that the title is the first half of the Oldest Member’s closing moral, and that the second half — “a hefty drive is a slosh” — tells you on whose side the story finally comes down.

Mortimer Sturgis, in two instalments

Mortimer Sturgis gets two stories, and they are best read together.

In “A Mixed Threesome” he is a placid thirty-eight-year-old who collects porcelain vases, has never touched a club, and is engaged to Betty Weston. Then his old school friend Eddie Denton arrives home from Central Africa, full of stories about crocodiles. Betty, a romantic girl, is soon gazing at the explorer, and the Oldest Member, an old friend of hers, devises a plan to free her. Meanwhile Mortimer asks the old man for secret golf lessons, meaning to surprise Betty on her birthday. He hits one good drive, and that is the end of him. Within days he owns enough clubs to open a shop.

The moral, the Oldest Member explains, is that “Golf, like measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.” A late convert has no resistance.

“Sundered Hearts” picks Mortimer up a few years later. He is now forty-two, a wobbly twelve-handicapper with ninety-four clubs, and convinced that the finest golfers are all married men. On his winter visit to the South of France he meets a fragile girl with her wrist in a sling, who says she hurt it playing in the championship and gives her name as Somerset. Mortimer, who has read about Mary Somerset winning the Ladies’ Open, can hardly believe his luck. His proposal on the moonlit terrace is a small masterpiece:

“Will you fix up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?”

Mortimer has, of course, misunderstood something important. The truth comes out on the first tee after the honeymoon, and it involves a sport the Oldest Member can barely bring himself to name. His bride flees. Then, in the narrator’s words, “She had scratched the match.” What follows takes in private detectives, a Christmas Eve snowfall and an indoor drive through the glass of a china cupboard, and we will leave you to enjoy it.

The real fun of “Sundered Hearts” is in the way it is told. The young man listening keeps interrupting, convinced the Oldest Member is about to spring a tragic ending on him, and threatening to go home if anyone dies in the snow. Wodehouse lets his narrator tease the listener and the reader together.

A note on method

What makes these stories work is not the golf jokes, though there are plenty. It is the absolute seriousness of everyone involved. Peter and James go into their match like duellists. Mortimer weighs a girl’s character by whether she has heard of Harry Vardon. Wodehouse never winks. He gives his characters a wholly absurd scale of values and then lets them live by it with total sincerity, which is why the stories still feel affectionate rather than mocking.

The same logic runs through “Ordeal by Golf,” which is less a love story than the tale of a young man whose hopes of a promotion, and so of marriage, depend on keeping his temper. His fiancée, Millicent, tries to see him through it by reading out improving thoughts from a mail-order book of philosophy, mostly borrowed from Marcus Aurelius, while he hunts for his ball in the rough. It goes about as well as you would expect.

Where to begin

If you have one evening, read “A Woman Is Only a Woman.” If you have two, read the Mortimer Sturgis stories in order, “A Mixed Threesome” first. And if you haven’t yet met the Oldest Member at all, start with the title story, “The Clicking of Cuthbert,” which we wrote about in “The first tee is a promise of a better day.”

The Oldest Member never married. He says so himself in “Sundered Hearts.” On the evidence of these stories, that may be why he understands love so well. He has watched it from his chair on the terrace for years, as he watches everything else on the course, without ever once being put off his stroke.