A Wodehouse Miscellany | Page 7

and come upon suddenly by nervous people and invalids.
And yet, just because I am an author, I have to keep on being photographed. It is the fault
of publishers and editors, of course, really, but it is the photographer who comes in for
the author's hate.
Something has got to be done about this practice of publishing authors' photographs. We
have to submit to it, because editors and publishers insist. They have an extraordinary
superstition that it helps an author's sales. The idea is that the public sees the photograph,
pauses spell-bound for an instant, and then with a cry of ecstasy rushes off to the
book-shop and buys copy after copy of the gargoyle's latest novel.
Of course, in practice, it works out just the other way. People read a review of an author's
book and are told that it throbs with a passion so intense as almost to be painful, and are
on the point of digging seven-and-sixpence out of their child's money-box to secure a
copy, when their eyes fall on the man's photograph at the side of the review, and they find
that he has a face like a rabbit and wears spectacles and a low collar. And this man is the
man who is said to have laid bare the soul of a woman as with a scalpel.
Naturally their faith is shaken. They feel that a man like that cannot possibly know
anything about Woman or any other subject except where to go for a vegetarian lunch,
and the next moment they have put down the hair-pin and the child is seven-and-six in
hand and the author his ten per cent., or whatever it is, to the bad. And all because of a
photograph.
For the ordinary man, the recent introduction of high-art methods into photography has
done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the operation. In the old days of crude and
direct posing, there was no escape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic
stile and a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straight into the camera.
To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spiky thing was shoved firmly into the
back of his head leaving him with the choice of being taken as he stood or having an inch
of steel jabbed into his skull. Modern methods have changed all that.
There are no photographs nowadays. Only "camera portraits" and "lens impressions." The
full face has been abolished. The ideal of the present-day photographer is to eliminate the
sitter as far as possible and concentrate on a general cloudy effect. I have in my
possession two studies of my Uncle Theodore--one taken in the early 'nineties, the other
in the present year. The first shows him, evidently in pain, staring before him with a fixed
expression. In his right hand he grasps a scroll. His left rests on a moss-covered wall.
Two sea-gulls are flying against a stormy sky.
As a likeness, it is almost brutally exact. My uncle stands forever condemned as the
wearer of a made-up tie.
The second is different in every respect. Not only has the sitter been taken in the popular
modern "one-twentieth face," showing only the back of the head, the left ear and what is
either a pimple or a flaw in the print, but the whole thing is plunged in the deepest
shadow. It is as if my uncle had been surprised by the camera while chasing a black cat in
his coal-cellar on a moonlight night. There is no question as to which of the two makes

the more attractive picture. My family resemble me in that respect. The less you see of us,
the better we look.

A PLEA FOR INDOOR GOLF
Indoor golf is that which is played in the home. Whether you live in a palace or a hovel,
an indoor golf-course, be it only of nine holes, is well within your reach. A house offers
greater facilities than an apartment, and I have found my game greatly improved since I
went to live in the country. I can, perhaps, scarcely do better than give a brief description
of the sporting nine-hole course which I have recently laid out in my present residence.
All authorities agree that the first hole on every links should be moderately easy, in order
to give the nervous player a temporary and fictitious confidence.
At Wodehouse Manor, therefore, we drive off from the front door--in order to get the
benefit of the door-mat--down an entry fairway, carpeted with rugs and without traps.
The hole--a loving-cup--is just under the stairs; and a good player ought to have no
difficulty in doing it in two.
The second hole, a short and simple one, takes you into the