Helen Flanagan / TV Magazine

Helen Flanagan In ‘TV Magazine’ Nurse Photoshoot 

Septiembre 2014

Helen Flanagan / 2015 Calendar

Helen Flanagan

 2015 CALENDAR

Ralph Gibson / One Hundred Photos

Ralph Gibson

ONE HUNDRED PHOTOS

San Francisco 

1960-1961 

Hans Ruedi Giger / Alien and other monsters

Alien

Hans Ruedi Giger

ALIEN AND OTHER MONSTERS

Astro-Eunuchs, 1967 

Brain Salad Surgery, de Emerson, Lake and Palmer, 1973 

Li I, 1974 

Li II, 1974 

Jean-Baptiste Mondino / Women

WOMEN

by Jean-Baptiste Mondino

The 100 best novels: No 66 – Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)

PG Wodehouse’s elegiac Jeeves novel, written during his disastrous years in wartime Germany, remains his masterpiece

Robert McCrum
Monday 22 December 2014

F

or PG Wodehouse, this novel, completed amid the horrors of wartime Germany, was something of a miracle, “the supreme Jeeves novel of all time”, he wrote. Defying gravity, English literature’s “performing flea” effortlessly reminded his postwar readers of a world whose day was done and also of a literary sensibility that had entranced a generation now facing retirement. A late-season masterpiece, Joy in the Morning is both an elegy and an encore.

“The super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my uncle Percy…” is one of those imbroglios that Bertie Wooster believes his biographers will refer to as “The Steeple Bumpleigh Horror”.

A more brilliant example of Wodehouse’s literary escapism, his capacity to conjure sweetness and light out of airy nothing, would be hard to find. Not only does he weave together many of his best characters and themes around the old plot of a Wodehouse heroine (Florence Craye) and her matrimonial designs upon Bertie (“She was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove”), it was also conceived and written during the “phoney war”, and all but completed during the Nazi occupation of Le Touquet (Wodehouse’s interwar home).

PG Wodehouse

Joy in the Morning is an anthology of Wodehouse’s favourite comic situations: the impending doom of a mesalliance; a blazing country cottage; a nocturnal confrontation; a fancy-dress ball. Style and content achieve a perfect union when a running gag about “the fretful porpentine” culminates with “a hidden hand” concealing a hedgehog in Bertie’s bed. The novel also contains some of Wodehouse’s most immortal similes, including the moment when one of the characters, caught in the act, spins round “with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk”. There’s also, for readers troubled by Wodehouse’s terrible wartime gaffes, a line of oblique self-justification. “I doubt,” says Bertie, speaking of the writer Boko Fittleworth, “if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.”

A note on the text

Joy in the Morning was the novel Wodehouse was working on at home in Le Touquet when the German army burst into France with the blitzkrieg of May 1940. Two months later, he was interned as an “enemy alien” and had to leave his unfinished MS in the care of his wife Ethel.

During his internment in Upper Silesia (“If this is Upper Silesia,” he joked, “what must Lower Silesia be like?”) Wodehouse wrote another novel, Full Moon, and did not return to the final chapters of his incomplete Jeeves and Wooster novel until 1943, after his release from captivity, and more especially, after his disastrous radio broadcasts from wartime Berlin. Battered, and embarrassed, but unbowed, he took for his title a quotation from Psalm 30, verse 5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” This, perhaps, was a coded affirmation of his determination to ride out the controversy surrounding his wartime behaviour.

PG Wodehouse

Eventually, Joy in the Morning would be completed in the idyllic rural solitude of Degenershausen, a country house deep in the Harz mountains. From there, the typescript was shipped back to his American publisher, Doubleday Doran, which launched it, with some misgivings about its reception after the scandal of the broadcasts, on 22 August 1946. An English edition from Herbert Jenkins followed on 2 June 1947. In the event, the reviews were good, and the hardback sales respectable, some 20,000 copies at first.

For a writer who preferred to give little away, and (as he put it) “wear the mask”, Wodehouse’s preface to Joy in the Morning is surprisingly candid, revealing his creative anxiety about the effect of the second world war on his art and his audience. “The world of which I have been writing since I was so high…” he conceded, “has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it.” Although he would go on writing about silly young men in spats, butlers, posh girlfriends, and country houses for another 30 years, he never recovered his vintage prewar form (with the possible exception of The Mating Season, 1949). His best work was done. Some Wodehouse fans may want to dispute this, but Joy in the Morning stands, for me, as his masterpiece, rivalled only by Uncle Fred in the Springtime, The Code of the Woosters and Heavy Weather.

Three more from PG Wodehouse

Heavy Weather (1933); Right Ho, Jeeves (1934); The Code of the Woosters (1938).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)

059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

Dave Eggers / Accident

Short short stories

Accident

• 
  

  by Dave Eggers
  THE GUARDIAN
  Saturday 16 april 2005

You all get out of your cars. You are alone in yours, and there are three teenagers in theirs, an older Camaro in new condition. The accident was your fault, and you walk over to tell them this.

Marilyn Monroe / These Few Precious Days

Then-unknown actress Marilyn Monroe, 21, with Clifton Webb and Laurette Luez on the set of the 1948 comedy, Sitting Pretty.

Marilyn Monroe

THESE FEW PRECIOUS DAYS

A new book by Christopher Andersen, These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack With Jackie, is grabbing headlines not because of it repeats all the hoary old claims of John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs, but because it asserts that Marilyn Monroe actually phoned Jackie Kennedy in 1962 and told her that JFK was going to make her, Marilyn, his second wife. (To Jackie’s credit, she reportedly replied: “Marilyn, you’ll marry Jack, that’s great … and you’ll move into the White House and you’ll assume the responsibilities of first lady, and I’ll move out and you’ll have all the problems.”)

This sort of story — whether it has to do with Marilyn’s alleged trysts with JFK and other powerful men, or her erratic behavior, insecurities, addictions, depressive episodes, you name it — this sort of story somehow both deepens our fascination with the ultimate movie icon, while also removing yet one more layer of luster from her legend. At this point, of course, nothing we learn of Marilyn’s myriad weaknesses will stop us from paying attention whenever a tidbit of new information about her arises. In fact, as countless commentators have observed through the years, it’s at least in part because of her weaknesses that Marilyn holds such sway over the popular imagination and looms so large in the pop-culture landscape.

In light of the claims Andersen makes in These Few Precious Days, LIFE.com took a long look back through the LIFE archives, searching for a sign of the Marilyn Monroe who existed well before superstardom — or even before plain old regular stardom — took hold and began dragging her down. What we found was a series of pictures that LIFE’s Loomis Dean made a full 65 years ago, in 1948, when Marilyn was just 21 years old. None of Dean’s photos from that day — at least, none of those he made of Marilyn — were ever published in LIFE.

So. Here she is, with another then-aspiring actress, Laurette Luez, and Hollywood veteran Clifton Webb on the set of a comedy called Sitting Pretty. Neither Marilyn nor Luez were in that movie. But Luez was under contract to Twentieth Century Fox — the studio that released Sitting Pretty — and Marilyn had once been under contract to Fox, and eventually would be again, so the presence of the two women on the set, whether as young actresses looking for pointers, or for publicity purposes — isn’t all that surprising. In fact, as Marilyn and Laurette Luez change seats at one point (see slide #4), it’s highly unlikely that these are purely impromptu shots of the trio.

(Incidentally, Webb was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in the film — one of three Academy Award nods he earned in his long career.)

It’s always jarring to see Marilyn as, in effect, an ingenue. She long ago transcended the movies, Hollywood, the entire entertainment industry, and like a very small handful of other performers, she effectively entered a realm — of myth, legend, whatever one wants to call it — so rarefied and solitary that it must have felt something like death even while she was alive.

But in early 1948, all of the pain, loneliness and desperation to come was still far, far away — dark clouds massing, invisibly, beyond the horizon — and Marilyn Monroe was just another talented, engaging young actress who hoped to be famous someday. The pity is that, in Hollywood, as elsewhere, the lesson is always the same and goes largely unlearned: be careful what you wish for.

LIFE

Stanley Kubrick / The universe

THE UNIVERSE

by Stanley Kubrick

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Russell Lee / Kids

Children playing in the gutter on 139th Street just east of St. Anne's Avenue,
Bronx, New York, 1936

KIDS

by Russell Lee

Marbles is a favorite game on South Side of Chicago, Illinois, 1941

Mass jumping of rope by schoolchildren, San Augustine, Texas, 1939

Mexican children, San Antonio, Texas, 1939

Migrant keymaker's children with homemade scooters, Jefferson, Texas, 1939