The Heart of a Goof is a collection of nine of Wodehouse’s most humorous golf stories, a companion piece, the back nine if you will, to The Clicking of Cuthbert published two years earlier (also a Classics of Golf selection). Thanks to a timeless writing style, and a lack of historical touchstones, the twists and turns of these Wodehousian narratives engross the reader so thoroughly that one might not guess these classics are more than 75 years old. The Classics of Golf edition of The Heart of a Goof uses text from the U. S. version (released under a different title, Divots), as there were minor text alterations for the American audience. While certainly an English author, Wodehouse situated some stories in America, where he spent the final 28 years of his life.

The title story in this compilation opens with typical poetic promise: “It was a morning when all nature shouted ‘Fore!’” It is a loosely romantic tale-within-a-tale, as are many of Wodehouse’s golf stories. Barbara, the heroine, has many suitors, the least known of whom is Ferdinand Dibble. A reoccurring character, The Oldest Member, spins the yarn. While he is past his playing days, his sage advice and vivid remembrances captivate his comrades on the clubhouse veranda. “Golf is the great mystery,” the Oldest Member pronounces. “On every side we see big two-fisted men floundering around in three figures, stopping every few minutes to let through little shrimps with knock knees and hollow cheeks, who are tearing off snappy seventy-fours. Men capable of governing empires fail to control a small, white ball, which presents no difficulties whatsoever to others with one ounce more brain than a cuckoo-clock.” The location of the drama, Marvis Bay, portends high jinx. “The hotel links were a sort of Sargasso Sea into which has drifted all the pitiful flotsam and jetsam of golf. I have seen things done on that course at which I shuttered and averted my eyes,” the old storyteller reveals. As a matter of course our hero wins the heart of his beloved, the story merely acting as a gallery to exhibit Wodehouse’s consummate portraits of hapless souls trapped by human foibles.

The riotous story, High Stakes, revolves around a golf wager between Long Island millionaires Bradbury Fisher and Gladstone Bott. The stakes are small in the beginning, a few hundred thousand dollars, but quickly the bet escalates into the millions, and finally into the realm of the infinite. Bott announces he will gamble the priceless baffy Bobby Jones used in winning his first important contest, the Infants All-In Championship of Atlanta, if Fisher puts up his prized English butler, Blizzard, to cover the wager. Blizzard was the quintessential manservant and the envy of all the neighbors and much is made of his stereotypically perfect appearance. Blizzard “radiated port and pop-eyed dignity. He had splay feet and three chins, and when he walked his curving waistcoat preceded him like the advance guard of some royal procession.” With a gaming proposition such as this, you can be sure the golf match is a comedy of the highest order.

In Wodehouse’s world, young men are always trying desperately to get into or out of a relationship with a pretty girl. His characters display the boundless energy and insane antics of the love-smitten. In Rodney Fails to Qualify, we discover feminine dedication far superior to the modern Tin Cup story. An “agonized scream rent the air. She saw a boat upon the water, a man rowing the boat, another man, hatless, gesticulating in the stern, a girl beating the water with a niblick. She nodded placidly and understandingly. A niblick was the club she would have used in such circumstances…Splash! Splash! Splash! Playing forty-four… Splash! Splash! Splash! Eighty-three?” Another story deals with a timeless and universal fantasy of man: invincibility. Just suppose circumstances were such you could never be beaten at golf? Meet Wallace Chesney in The Magic Plus Fours; it reads like one of the encounters from The Twilight Zone.

Was Wodehouse a golfer? Most definitely, but better skilled with the pen than the putter. Wodehouse writes as if he is describing one of his characters when he speaks of himself in the Preface: “I won my first and only trophy—an umbrella in a hotel tournament in Aiken, South Carolina, where, playing to a handicap of sixteen, I went through a field consisting of some of the fattest retired businessmen in America like a devouring flame.” You will find the stories in The Heart of a Goof delightfully innocent, richly rewarding and never boring. Herbert Warren Wind, in his biography The World of P. G. Wodehouse (1981), sums up the simple attraction: “In short, he possesses the uncommon gift of being able to tell a story that is great fun to read.” Enjoy these nine holes on the links of Wodehouse.

The Heart of a Goof by P. G. Wodehouse
London: Herbert Jenkins, first edition 1926, 314 pages, decorative cloth.
Divots (American title) New York: George H. Doran, first edition 1927, 316 pages, decorative cloth.
The Heart of a Goof New York: Classics of Golf, 1990, 316 pages, decorative cloth. Foreword by Herbert Warren Wind, Afterword by Michael M. Thomas. This edition uses the Divots text with minor alterations for the American audience from The Heart of a Goof.

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