Not George Washington makes its American debut after having appeared in England more than 70 years ago. From a wisp of a plot suggested by his friend Herbert Westbrook, P. G. Wodehouse wrote this spoof of diffident bachelors, journalists and ghost writers when he was 26 years old. Far from being the product of an apprentice novelist, it reveals how early Wodehouse fell firmly into step with the eccentrics of English comedy: Ben Jonson, Thomas Love Peacock, Ronald Firbank, and the young Aldous Huxley. As in their works, he introduces idealisms only to mock them; worldly values triumph despite the fortunes of the characters; and an astringent humor dissolves whatever is not hard and durable.

At its most brutal and amoral, this tradition is frequently so shocking that its elegance and comedy are not appreciated. But Wodehouse always was one of its more genial practitioners. His characters are too boyish to be really nasty, and he is less interested in withering satire than in playful parody. It is possible to read this book, for example, without noticing how unromantic and unsentimental it is: After all, the unscrupulous journalist who is its hero finally quits Grub Street to marry his love. The laughs ought to beguile even the dourest moralist. Still, it is merely on the surface that this novel is less harrowing than, say, one of Ronald Firbank's.

According to his biographer, David A. Jasen, who edited this edition, Wodehouse made a point of reading Shakespeare all the way through at least once every year. The practice shows. There is an exuberance of language in Not George Washington that makes irrelevant the triviality of the subject and the author's sunny indifference to Important Issues….

The novel's several narrators each have the same giddy vigor of expression. But even though we can glimpse Wodehouse's wrists reaching into the puppets, their personalities are distinct. (p. 15)

[The hero] is James Orlebar Cloyster, a name as apt as any in Jonson's plays. For what suits Wodehouse men best is a cloister of bubbly bachelors who are absorbed in the childish pleasures of eating and drinking. They are always deceiving themselves that they have found the woman, but marriage means as little to them as it does to the roués in a Restoration comedy. When he must go to London to seek his fortune as a writer before he can marry Margaret, Cloyster is positively relieved. (pp. 15-16)

In his Introduction, Jasen shows that Not George Washington is in part autobiographical. The novelist, for instance, credits his hero with a romance bearing the Wodehousian title, When It Was Lurid, and with a piece he actually wrote himself significantly called, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings." The most salient likeness between creator and creation, though, is that both worked very hard and turned out a great deal of material on a wide range of subjects….

As in most Wodehouse novels, the plot is busy yet has the least number of moving parts necessary: Cloyster's conquest of London, his travails with the [ghost writers] he commissions and his rescue by his transcendantly resourceful fiancée. The froth splashes around an armature of steel.

I was surprised by how many "naturalistic" details there are in Not George Washington. Cloyster travels through several strata of contemporary London, affording us gritty views rarely associated with Wodehouse. There is a sodden bargee whom Cloyster uses as a ghost for his verse, an inarticulate lout who gets a reputation as "the modern Burns,"… and a few chapters set in a hall where Cloyster teaches lower class youths the art of boxing. Indeed, Wodehouse's rendition of the mishaps that befall "artistic" boxers when they confront a street brawler is as instructive as it is funny. Not that Wodehouse is Zola plus fizz; he simply paid more attention to the world around him than is commonly thought.

His characters, nonetheless, are cartoons. Margaret Goodwin is a maiden ablaze with love for her dissipated man, but we laugh and laugh and laugh. Such lack of depth is often condemned as a failing of the tradition Wodehouse inhabits, but he consciously, and cleverly, turns it to great advantage—often boobytrapping critics of his comic method. Listen to the opinion of Margaret's mother on [her daughter's romantic drama] The Girl Who Waited:

"That there is an absence, my dear Margie, of any relationship with life, that not a single character is in any degree human, that passion and virtue and vice and real feeling are wanting—this surprises me more than I can tell you…. You have proved that you happen to possess the quality … of surrounding a situation which is improbable enough to be convincing with that absurdly mechanical conversation which the theatre-going public demands. As your mother, I am disappointed. I had hoped for originality. As your literary well-wisher, I stifle my maternal feelings and congratulate you unreservedly."…

With accuracy of hindsight we can say, "Young Wodehouse shows a great deal of promise. We predict a long and productive career." (p. 16)