I'm really grateful to Chris Reece at the UK Wodehouse Society for preserving this and for allowing me to use it.
[A few weeks previously the presenter, David Stenhouse, of "Open Book"
(Radio 4, Sunday 28th November 4 PM, repeated on Friday 3rd December at 4 PM)
had set listeners a fiendish competition: to rewrite the end of Moby Dick in
the style of P G Wodehouse. Jonathan Cecil, the voice of Blandings and Jeeves
in the Chivers audio series, judged the competition.]
DS: You've read lots of Wodehouse. Do you think it would
be easy to do, to take off?
JC: Well, d'you know, I thought it was almost impossible, because
I've read in so many newspaper competitions in the past, the New Statesman and
The Spectator and all that; it always sounds quite wrong to me. I mean, it always
sounds more like Lord Snooty and his pals from the Beano, or Billy Bunter. It's
all "What Ho!" "Topping stuff, what? old cove!"; just a
whole lot of old-fashioned schoolboy stuff. And the actual beautiful stylishness
of the original is completely lost. And all the quotations. It's almost impossible
to parody because it is in a sense a parody in itself, Wodehouse's style. He
slips into quotations from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from the Oxford Book
of English Verse, and then back into good old silly-ass Englishmen stuff. He
nips in and out in an amazing way.
DS: Well, we were looking for two things. We were looking for
the Moby Dick, and we were also looking for the Wodehouse, the two together.
Give us a line from the runner-up.
JC: I'll tell you what I think is very good about this one.
It's very true to Moby Dick. And also it's got that particular narrative climax
which Wodehouse suddenly has. And so Captain Ahab is saying to our hero, whoever
he is, a Bertie Woosterish male, it's not quite clear: "Hast seen the white
whale?" "A big fish with a sort of soapy appearance? Bits of metal
sticking out of him?" "Hast killed him?" "I say, what a
beastly idea." Just at that moment the aforementioned Leviathan hove into
view. Dispensing with introductions, both whale and chappie went to the mat
and started chewing pieces out of each other. The whale made a goodish dent
in his ship, and finally, after a particularly unsporting jab to the noggin,
Long John Silver got tangled up in his own braces and hauled off. Rum.
DS: That was by Gary Dexter. But there can only be one winner.
JC: And so I've chosen Colin Lusk of Hounslow: I was wakened
next morning by a tremendous crashing without, and went up on deck in search
of the reviving eggs and b. The hake was on the wing, the herring on the thorn,
but I was far from gruntled. For the perpetrator of the outrage now made himself
known: Moby Dick, thrice winner of the Big Whales Medal of the Cape Cod Agricultural
Show, reared up, covered in harpoons like quills upon the fretful porpentine,
and spouting like an aunt. Old Barmy Ahab reeled and would have fallen had he
not been entangled by a passing rope. If you know what "excesses"
are, those are what the w. w. proceeded to commit. Looking now like an aunt
short-changed by a costermonger, he smote the ship, just below where its third
waistcoat button would have been had it been wearing a waistcoat. We sank like
a - what is it? Queegeg would know.