P.G. Wodehouse · 1922
The Clicking of Cuthbert
P.G. Wodehouse’s first collection of golf stories, and the best place to begin the Library. Most of the ten stories are told by the Oldest Member, a clubhouse sage who sits in the smoking-room with his pipe and has an anecdote for every crisis a golfer can face: lost matches, lost tempers and, most often, lost hearts.
Wodehouse had taken up golf only a couple of years before, and in his preface he presents himself as a long-suffering eighteen-handicapper who wrote the book “in blood.” The result is some of the funniest writing ever devoted to a game. Start with the title story, in which a champion golfer finds himself out of his depth at a literary society, then try “The Long Hole,” a single hole played sixteen miles across country, and finish with “The Coming of Gowf,” Wodehouse’s mock history of how the game began.
The book was published in Britain in 1922 and in the United States as Golf Without Tears in 1924.
This text is in the public domain in the United States and is reproduced as first published. It reflects the language and attitudes of its time.
Contents
Essays on this book
- The LibraryThe first tee is a promise of a better day.A century on, P.G. Wodehouse’s golf stories still read like dispatches from your own clubhouse — and they begin with a young man trying to give his clubs away.
- The Good LifeThe 19th HoleOn good food, great company and the traditions that make the clubhouse the best part of the day for so many golfers.
- People & HistoryThe Spirit of the Early AmateursTalent, character and a different kind of greatness. What the golfers of a century ago can still teach us about playing for the love of it.
- The LibraryA Golfer’s BookshelfFive classic golf books, free to read in full in the GolfProse Library — and where to begin with each.
- People & HistoryBefore Golf Was GolfDutch players on the ice, Scottish golfers in jail, and a Rembrandt etching. On the long, disputed and delightful prehistory of the game.
- The LibraryHarry Vardon’s Lessons, a Century OnThe greatest golfer of his age grew up making clubs from hawthorn in Jersey. His book is part memoir, part manual, and still full of good sense.
- The LibraryThe Oldest Member’s Guide to LoveIn The Clicking of Cuthbert, Wodehouse’s clubhouse sage has firm views on romance — chiefly that it should never be allowed to interfere with a man’s short game.
- The Good LifeThe Joys of Winter GolfFrost on the fairways, the light gone by four, and the whole course to yourself. A case for keeping the clubs out of the cupboard when the weather turns.