Literary societies are necessarily full of people with tastes from an earlier age. Is that why so few of them have websites?

Yet most lit. socs. also have the problem of how to involve a membership that is scattered over the country, perhaps over the globe. Those whose centres are in London may have an advantage, but then the provinces, even including some of their most enthusiastic members, feel betrayed. The web is the natural answer.

I am on the committee of the UK Wodehouse Society answerable for the website: www.eclipse.co.uk/wodehouse. We have a website including these pages:

·       details of the Society, including a downloadable membership application form;
·       links to other Wodehouse society websites;
·       reports on recent events;
·       press cuttings of interest to members;
·       notification of future events;
·       a Wodehouse bibliography;
·       information about  Wodehouse’s life;
·       a quiz;
·       and an archival section.
All of these are of value and different members contribute to them. The Quiz is a good example.  Literary quizzes are features of literary papers.  Wodehousians like to show off their knowledge more than most, and several show interest in a quiz even if they don’t answer the questions. The Quizmaster or Quizmistress sets four rounds, each round containing three or four questions; sometimes multiple-choice. The deadline for answers is a week later.  After each round the QM posts the answers and the names of the winners, and after the fourth round names the winner of the four rounds.  This winner receives the only prize, which is to be QM for the next four rounds; so the Quiz runs itself. We store all previous questions and answers.

The joint QMs for the 100th Quiz are two Indians called Harish and Rashmi Rao.  I asked them about their Pelham G Wodehouse (
Plum
for short) lives, and they answered as follows.  Both of them show how website literary quizzes can bring in otherwise remote supporters.  Rashmi Rao first.

I live in Bangalore, India. My father's been a huge fan, too, and I remember his collection of old Penguin editions. (A collection that got more and more tattered as first me, and then my sister, scribbled in them!)  My family tried introducing me to Wodehouse in my mid-teens.  I was into Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes then, and didn't much like the first few books (one can't really appreciate Plum's subtle sense of humour at 15). It took a much respected older cousin, a few years later, to make a hard core fan of me. I read recently that Douglas Adams had the same problem in his teens. When new readers ask me to recommend books, I DON'T start them off on any of the sagas, but rather on the standalone books (Sam the Sudden, Hot Water, Money in the Bank, Big Money, Spring Fever and Piccadilly Jim).  Something Fresh is an exception, though, it being the first Blandings story, and can be plunged into without any preparation.

My collection dates back to 1991. There's this lovely book shop in Bangalore that I couldn't pass without popping into to augment my library. Barring a few books that I've never seen in the country (Love Among The Chickens, Bill the Conqueror and William Tell Told Again), I think I've the entire lot now; and frequently indulge in Wodehousian orgies.

I haven't played a single game of golf, but can actually have meaningful conversations with any active golfer, thanks mainly to The Clicking of Cuthbert and The Heart of a Goof.

And yes, I still like Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle's outputs as much as ever!

I discovered the web site a few months ago, when I was browsing for Wodehouse trivia. My first move was to try and answer all the previous quizzes, and then make my entry for the current one. I haven't missed a quiz since (even going to the extent of begging the then quizmaster to consider one late entry, after assuring him that I'd scrupulously avoided looking at the answers!).

  Being quizmistress is a lovely experience. Harish and I have good fun deciding on the theme, and then quizzing each other with possible questions. I've had a great time getting in touch with other hard-core Plummies (all of them spouting Plum-talk); though I've almost disappeared behind a stack of books, researching and re-researching questions. I've even compiled a set of 'just in case I'm quiz master again' quizzes.

This set of 4 quizzes has a 'disreputable' theme (Harish's idea). Disreputable friends, relatives, businessmen. The 4th is probably going to be 'scaly neighbourhoods' or 'disreputable places' in Wodehouse. We'd like to continue with it, if it's okay with you, and if Harish also agrees.

Now T K Harish’s story:

I am currently in Singapore on assignment by my company. I live in Delhi, India. I am a Software Consultant by profession.

I was born in the southern Indian State of Kerala, and over the years have lived in 7 different states for various periods of time. It was during my peregrinations that I really became acquainted with Wodehouse. When I was a kid of some 14 summers, we moved for the first time, to a small one horse town in another state. It was while I was trying to cope with the new place, the new language, and a complete absence of kids my age in the vicinity, that a kindly neighbour lent me cards for the District library. It had precious few books in English, but the few books that were there consisted almost entirely of Wodehouse. The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories was my first book. I remember thinking at the time, that this guy Wodehouse can write a bit. However the more I got into the Jeeves saga, and the Blandings series, the more I found myself being afflicted incurably by Wodehousitis.  And the extraordinary thing was I did it entirely on my own. Nobody in my entire family had even heard of him by that time. Frankly, many of them thought for a long time that I was well off my onion, an opinion fostered by frequently spying me with an open book, laughing helplessly to myself for no apparent reason.

Around that time, discovering Wodehouse meant that I needed no longer pine for company. Later on, Wodehouse has resulted in several long lasting friendships. Anyone who reads Wodehouse is guaranteed to be a jolly sort of guy. I later sicked a cousin of mine onto this fount of humour. This cousin being a brainy sort of guy, spent a lot of time, building up a massive collection of quotations, and wrote some kind of software thingummy that would pick a quote at random from the file and attach it to your mail, thereby ensuring that every single mail had its own different signature. he very kindly allowed me to use it, and I brightened up many a colleagues day with this device.

I badgered my father into buying me my first Wodehouse in 1985. I currently have about 70 of Wodehouse's works, another ten assorted omnibi, and collections, and have read almost all the books in the canon.

I came across the Wodehouse Society quiz, quite by accident (take a line through Wordsworth and the daffodils). I have been answering the quizzes for well over a year now. It became a regular activity for me, during my current enforced exile in a foreign land, quite far from my stock of Wodehouse. I really enjoyed pitting my brains against the brainiest coves out there. I was not always very successful, partly because I was doing it entirely from memory, without having a chance to cross check doubtful answers, but it was good fun all the same, and the regular correspondence with whoever was the current quizmaster enlivened many a dreary day. Came a day, when perseverance was rewarded and I actually came out on top.  I almost lost the chance to have anything to do with the quiz, as I did not feel up to it without having access to my Wodehouse library. But Rashmi has very kindly allowed me to become a partner. It is an equal partnership. I suggest the idea. She does the research, sets the questions, posts them to the web site, goes through the various responses, responds to the answers.... Well, almost equal. It has been quite an enjoyable experience, interacting with Rashmi and the other Gods of Wodehouse world. Somewhat humbling too, I thought I knew my Wodehouse, but there are a lot of people out there who can give me a couple of bisques and be dormy one on the eighteenth.

An aspect that strikes me as humorous now is that the first time I read Brinkley Manor (which was I think, the third Wodehouse I read), the trials and tribulations of Bertie Wooster almost drove me to tears. Having grown up on a diet of Hardy and Dickens must have contributed to that. There were shades of Oliver Twist to the whole thing, the way Bertie used to quit the frying pan only to jump into the fire with monotonous regularity.  I must be unique in this respect. Except in moments of stress, I tend to hush this up.

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