Programming note: Join me tomorrow, Saturday, for another edition of my Serenade Radio show, On the Town. This week's episode includes yellow-striped trousers, mellow and non-mellow Number Ones, the lyricist of "Tea for Two" on songwriting before a party, and a pre-St Patrick's Day edition of our Sinatra Sextet. The fun starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe/ 1pm North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Welcome to the sixty-ninth audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time. After the sixty-eighth, Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, gave us the ultimate big finish, I thought we should eschew anything dark and apocalyptic and instead go for something cheery and escapist. We have a few comedic tales in our archive - including Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat and a certain other fellow's more contemporary The Prisoner of Windsor - but after Mr Benson I figured this was no time to mess about and we should cut straight to The Master. This is our second foray in the work of P G Wodehouse: the first, Psmith, Journalist, was our respite from the events of November 2020. So, if you need a twenty-minute nightly break from Hamas, Syria, Starmer, Carney and Ukraine, this is the place for you.
The Girl on the Boat, published in 1922, features not any of Wodehouse's A-list comic creations - Jeeves, Bertie, Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings - but just a boat, a girl, and a trio of frustrated suitors. After my introduction, Plum commences his tale with a reminder that it is set in an especially grim moment in American history:
About this time there was a good deal of suffering in the United States, for nearly every boat that arrived from England was bringing a fresh swarm of British lecturers to the country. Novelists, poets, scientists, philosophers, and plain, ordinary bores; some herd instinct seemed to affect them all simultaneously. It was like one of those great race movements of the Middle Ages. Men and women of widely differing views on religion, art, politics, and almost every other subject; on this one point the intellectuals of Great Britain were single-minded, that there was easy money to be picked up on the lecture-platforms of America, and that they might just as well grab it as the next person.
Mrs Hignett had come over with the first batch of immigrants; for, spiritual as her writings were, there was a solid streak of business sense in this woman, and she meant to get hers while the getting was good. She was half way across the Atlantic with a complete itinerary booked, before ninety per cent. of the poets and philosophers had finished sorting out their clean collars and getting their photographs taken for the passport.
To hear the first part of The Girl on the Boat, prefaced by my own introduction, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
~Thank you for all your kind comments on this month's encore presentation of To Build a Fire. From a First Year Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, John Marovich:
Does anyone need encouragement to read/hear this story? You simply must!
Steyn Clubber Dean May is grateful to his daughter:
Wow Mark, excellent reading of To Build a Fire part 1. I was just recently introduced to Call of the Wild by my 12-year-old daughter Claire which was required reading for her. Though short and simple, it was one of the best books I ever read.
Thanks and keep up the good work Mark!
Dean's fellow Coloradan Paul Cathey says:
This is the tale, in December of 2018, that got me on board The Mark Steyn Club.
Thank you, Mark, for presenting this story again, beautifully read, and paired with the perfect musical accompaniment to establish and maintain the mood.
Andrew Jones, a First Week Founding Member from Down Under, raves:
This is literally almost the most impactful short story I have ever experienced.
One more, from Margaret Hughes in Wales:
This was an enjoyable little yarn, although given my love of animals I was fretting all the way through that the little chap was going to end up dead alongside this idiot or form part of the menu, along with the frozen sandwiches (which he almost was).
Nicely read and paced reading and held my attention to the very end. More short stories maybe?
Well, there are plenty of short stories if you just scroll down our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page, Margaret. We have tales of all lengths and in all genres, roaming the centuries and the continents, starting with our very first adventure - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking caper of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see here. We've introduced a similar tile format for my Sunday Poems and also for our audio and video music specials.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club nearly eight years ago, and I'm overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, H G Wells, Baroness Orczy, Jane Austen, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a couple of pieces of non-classic fiction by yours truly. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live on our annual Mark Steyn Cruise, and sometimes with special guests.
I'm truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last seven-and-a-half years has been our nightly radio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as Wednesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark's Mailbox, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming my health ever permits another;
~Priority booking for the next Mark Steyn Cruise, and other live appearances around the world;
~Customised email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to The Girl on the Boat but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if this venture into Wodehouse leaves you far from gruntled, feel free to have at it. And do join us tomorrow for Part Two of The Girl on the Boat.