★★★★☆ Wodehouse lampoons golf

The Heart of a Goof

P.G. Wodehouse

In a tiny bit of writing for a Creative Writing class, I wanted to use the word "goof" as a jocular insult in a story set in 1925. Looking up the usage history of "goof", I discovered P.G. Wodehouse's The Heart of a Goof, published in 1926. So, home free! Except I have never had the sense to quit while I was ahead, and I got the book to find out if Wodehouse's usage is consistent with mine. It is not. (But I'm gonna do it, anyway.)

The consolation prize, though, was that The Heart of a Goof is Wodehouse at the top of his game. It is literally laugh-out-loud funny. It is, it must be admitted, a one-joke book. But the joke is funny and subject to infinite variation.

Heart of a Goof is about golf. It consists of nine stories (golf allusion there!) told by the Oldest Member of the Club. The Oldest Member is a sort of Ancient Mariner of golf, who traps the unwary with his gaze and voice and recounts golf stories. For the Oldest Member, golf is more like a religion than a pass-time. People who don't play golf are a subhuman (or at least subgolfer) species. Here, for instance, is one of his gems

I am not a narrow-minded man; I quite appreciate the fact that non-golfers are entitled to marry; but I could not countenance their marrying potential winners of the Ladies’ Invitation Tournament at Mossy Heath.

Wodehouse is of course mocking the excessive passion some golfers have for their sport (if you can call it that). But there is no doubt he does it out of a real love of the game. And of course he is P.G. Wodehouse, one of the greatest comic writers of the twentieth century, so he mocks with passion and skill.

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