Clubmen at Play

By Helen Rogan

THE GOLF OMNIBUS by P.O. WODEHOUSE 467 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

There is one thing to be said for golf. It gave the Oldest Member (alias P.G. Wodehouse, 92 and still spinning yarns on the clubhouse terrace) an excuse to look up from his lemonade and variously celebrate valor at the ninth-hole water hazard and the triumph of love over a fifteen handicap. These 31 stories, a Masters tournament of golfing tales, stretch gloriously from The Clicking of Cuthbert (1916) to Sleepy Time (1968) and pass such milestones as The Heart of a Goof and The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh on the way.

Wodehouse characters, Waugh once said, "have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden." Indeed, a wonderful, innocent foolishness makes them all irresistible: Wallace Chesney, Rodney Spelvin, Blizzard the butler, and the Wrecking Crew (four retired businessmen whose progress over the course resembles "one of those great race migrations of the Middle Ages"). As befits an idyl, the weather is routinely gorgeous ("butterflies loafed languidly, birds panted in the shady recesses of the trees"), and the sun shines gently on.

Even nongolfers, that quietly bitter minority group, stretch and bask, albeit sheepishly, in the Wodehouse prose. In self-justification they cite his storytelling powers. Faced with an important question like "Who was Legs Mortimer?" only Wodehouse could reply, "That was precisely what Angus McTavish wanted to know when he saw him blowing kisses at Evangeline Brackett from the clubhouse canteen," thereby ensuring a rapt and docile audience. Gloom is kept down to the essential minimum and balanced by modest quantities of sex and violence, as in The Salvation of George Mackintosh, in which the beautiful Celia attempts to murder him (George) with, of all things, her niblick. (He had. after all, addressed her while she was addressing her ball.)

The book also offers cautionary tales, on subjects ranging from golf as adventure through golf, success at, leading to deterioration of the character, and golf, failure at, caused by thinking too hard about your backswing.

Other sorts of trouble are coming to paradise, it appears. Those magical Scottish names, the cleek, and the spoon, the baffy and of course that old standby the mashie niblick, says Wodehouse, are about to become as rare--not to say mythological--as Scottish golfing champions themselves. It is rumored that golf is less "a thing of the spirit" than it once was. Given such commercial-calamitous times, golfers and nongolfers alike must swiftly turn for solace to The Oldest Member. Who better than Wodehouse can guard against creeping greed and gallopping solemnity, on the page or on the fairway?

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