On Scaffolding, Spoons, and the Direction One Eats

The restaurant Wodehouse had chosen was, naturally, wrong. Not wrong in any way he would have recognized — it was perfectly decent, a wood-panelled place in Mayfair where the napkins were folded into small architectural ambitions and the menu arrived without prices, which is the English upper-class way of saying that if you need to know, you have already disqualified yourself. But Smith had taken one look at the bread basket, which contained three artisanal rolls arranged on a linen cloth like museum exhibits, and said, “Oh, we’re doing this, are we,” and I knew we were in for it.

I had arrived first, which was a mistake I could not undo. I’d ordered sparkling water and then worried that sparkling water signaled something — effort, perhaps, or a desire to seem continental. By the time Wodehouse materialized at the table — and he did materialize, arriving with the frictionless certainty of a man who has never once had to wonder whether he was in the right room — I had already changed my water order to still and then back to sparkling, and the waiter was looking at me with the calm pity of a professional.

“Marvelous spot,” Wodehouse said, settling into his chair as though he and the chair had been old friends at school. “Do you know, I once wrote a scene set in a place rather like this. The souffle collapsed. Tremendously funny. The whole evening came apart because of the souffle.”

“What happened to the people eating the souffle?” Smith said. She had arrived without my noticing — just appeared in the chair opposite, coat already hung, reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She had a way of being suddenly present that made you feel you’d been the one who was late.

“The people?” Wodehouse looked mildly puzzled, as though she’d asked about the weather in a country he hadn’t visited. “Well, they were at a dinner party. One of them was engaged to the wrong woman. Another had bet a hundred pounds that a vicar could eat an entire treacle pudding, which is beside the point but rather good. The souffle was the — what’s the word — the catalytic event.”

“Right. The mechanism.” Smith picked up a bread roll and broke it in half. No ceremony, no linen cloth consultation. Just broke it. “The souffle collapses, the evening collapses, everyone reveals themselves. Very neat. Very clean. A clock with a spring inside it.”

“You say that as though neatness were a deficiency.”

“I say it as though neatness were a choice. And sometimes the wrong one.”

I should have interjected here. I had things to say about the story we were meant to discuss — the one about food and class and dining societies and who belongs at the table. I had notes. I’d been thinking about artichokes, specifically, about the artichoke as a kind of vegetable shibboleth, and I wanted to propose this idea before they ran away from me. But the two of them had a gravitational pull that I was still learning to navigate, and what I actually said was: “Should we order?”

Nobody responded. They were looking at each other across the bread basket with the wariness of two people who suspect they might agree about something and would rather not.

“Here is what I know about dining,” Wodehouse said, once the starters had arrived — a crab something for him, a salad for Smith, a soup for me that I immediately regretted because soup requires management and I was trying to take notes. “Dining is a machine. A social machine with very specific gears. The gears are: the seating arrangement, the quality of the claret, the behaviour of one’s neighbour, and the absolute impossibility of eating asparagus with dignity. Every comic dining scene I’ve ever written runs on one principle: someone doesn’t know the rules, and the rules are ridiculous, and the comedy lives in the gap.”

“The gap between the person and the rule.”

“Precisely. Bertie reaches for the wrong fork. Gussie Fink-Nottle delivers a speech while intoxicated. The machinery grinds, the human gets caught in it, and the result is farce.”

“But who built the machinery?” Smith said. She was eating her salad with the focused attention of someone who was also thinking about three other things. “That’s what I keep coming back to. You write the machine beautifully — the gears, the springs, the collapse — but the machine exists because someone decided these forks go here, these people sit there, these words are acceptable and these are common. And the someone who decided is never in the room. They’re always offstage, invisible, and the people in the room are all performing for an audience that left two hundred years ago.”

“Well, yes. That’s what makes it funny.”

“That’s what makes it tragic.”

There was a pause. Wodehouse ate a piece of crab with the mechanical precision of a man who had never once worried about how to eat crab because the knowledge lived in his hands, pre-installed, like the operating system on a computer that shipped fully loaded. Smith watched him do it.

“Both,” I said. “It’s both, isn’t it? That’s the — the engine of the story. It’s funny because the rules are absurd, and it’s painful because someone is destroying themselves trying to follow them.”

“Destroying themselves is a bit strong,” Wodehouse said. “My people don’t destroy themselves. They get into scrapes. They emerge. The world is elastic.”

“Your people are already inside the world,” Smith said. “Your people have the luxury of scrapes. Bertie Wooster gets the wrong fork and it’s embarrassing. But if someone who isn’t Bertie gets the wrong fork — someone who fought their way into that room, who spent money they didn’t have on the right shoes, who studied the spoon protocol — then the wrong fork isn’t a scrape. It’s a verdict.”

Wodehouse set down his fork. It was, I noticed, the correct fork. “You’re talking about stakes.”

“I’m talking about who gets to be funny. In your world, incompetence is charming because the incompetent person already belongs. They can’t actually fall. The net is made of family and class and institutional memory, and it catches them every time. The comedy is weightless because the comedian is safe. I want to know what happens when the comedian is not safe. When the wrong fork means something.”

I told them about the artichoke. The idea I’d been carrying around for weeks — a whole globe artichoke served at a formal dinner, and a character who doesn’t know how to eat it. Not the quick version, where you google it under the table. The full version. A character who eats the leaves whole, the fibrous, inedible outer leaves, and commits to it, leaf after leaf, because admitting ignorance would cost more than the pain of chewing through something that was never meant to be chewed.

“That’s very good,” Wodehouse said. “The artichoke as social obstacle. The leaf as — what — as battleground.”

“The leaf as test,” Smith said. “But the question is: who’s administering the test? And do they know they’re doing it?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters. If the other diners watch him eat the leaf and they’re appalled, that’s one story. If they watch him and they’re politely pretending not to notice, that’s a different story. And if they planted the artichoke specifically to see what he’d do — if the whole thing is an initiation ritual dressed up as a dinner course — that’s a third story, and it’s the one that makes me angry.”

“Angry?” Wodehouse looked genuinely surprised. “It’s an artichoke.”

“It’s never an artichoke. It’s a door. You put something impossible in front of someone and you watch them handle it and you learn everything you need to know about whether they’re one of you. Every institution does this. Every club, every school, every —” She stopped. Started again. “I grew up in Willesden. Northwest London. And I went to Cambridge. And the distance between those two places is not measured in miles, it’s measured in artichokes. In all the small tests you don’t know you’re being given until you’ve already failed them, and then someone smiles and says ‘well done’ and you realize the smile is the failure, the smile is them filing you away.”

Wodehouse was quiet for a moment. He turned his wine glass by the stem, a quarter rotation, very precise. “You’re describing a world I recognize. I simply — I come at it from the other side of the table. I write the people who set the test, and they don’t think of themselves as cruel. They think of themselves as keeping up standards. Maintaining the form. And they’re absurd, of course. My God, they’re absurd. Half of them can barely dress themselves without a valet. But they don’t think they’re gatekeeping. They think they’re hosting.”

“That’s the funniest thing about them,” Smith said. “And the most unforgivable.”

I tried, somewhere around the main course — lamb for the table, a decision Wodehouse had made unilaterally and Smith had accepted with the particular silence of someone saving their ammunition — to raise the question of narrative voice. The story needed a narrator, and I was stuck on who it should be.

“First person,” I said. “I think it has to be first person. The character eating the artichoke. But here’s what I can’t decide: does he know what happened to him? When he’s telling the story, looking back, does he understand that the dinner was a test and he was the subject, or does he still believe it was a triumph?”

“He believes it was a triumph,” Wodehouse said, without hesitation. “That’s where the comedy lives. He’s telling you this story as evidence of his successful integration, and every detail he offers — the shoes he researched, the spoon technique he practiced, the grouse conversation he faked — every detail is a confession he doesn’t know he’s making.”

“Stevens,” Smith said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Stevens. From The Remains of the Day. The butler who spends the entire novel telling you about his dignity and his professionalism and his loyalty, and what he’s actually telling you is that he missed his entire life. He gave everything to a man who didn’t deserve it and a house that didn’t want him, and he can’t see it. The reader sees it. The narrator doesn’t. The gap is where the novel lives.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. That gap. But Stevens is — Stevens is heartbreaking. He’s tragic. I want this character to be funny.”

“Funny and heartbreaking,” Smith said. “Not funny or heartbreaking. The whole point is that they’re the same thing. When someone tells you they’re fine and they’re clearly not fine, that’s comedy and that’s tragedy and the proportions depend on who’s watching.”

“My dear girl,” Wodehouse said, and Smith’s eyebrows did something that suggested ‘my dear girl’ was not going to fly, “I have been writing funny for sixty years and I can tell you that the surest way to kill a comic scene is to explain why it’s sad. Let the reader work it out. The character should be funny. Genuinely, bracingly, technically funny. The baroque sentences, the extended similes that overshoot their target by a quarter mile, the cheerful obliviousness. If you do that properly, the sadness arrives on its own, uninvited, like a relative at Christmas.”

Smith almost smiled. “You know, that’s not wrong.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t push it. But the voice — if the voice is Wodehousian, all that gorgeous clockwork, those sentences where you can feel the mechanism turning — then you also need the moments where the clock slips. Where the narrator says something that he thinks is a witty observation about dinner and it’s actually a confession about his mother’s hair salon, about Tottenham, about the three hundred pounds he spent on shoes that would signal to everyone in that room that he was one of them.”

“Tottenham,” Wodehouse said, as though the word were a piece of furniture he’d never encountered.

“Tottenham. Real London. The London where people don’t have fish fork collections. Where the artichoke is just a vegetable, if anyone’s buying artichokes at all, which they’re mostly not.”

“And the character comes from there.”

“The character comes from there and goes to — wherever the dining society is. St. James’s. Pall Mall. One of those streets that feel like they’re holding their stomach in. And the comedy is the translation. The labour of making yourself legible to a world that reads a different language. Every choice — the shoes, the wine knowledge, the arrival time calculated to the minute — every choice is a performance, and the performance is of not performing, which is the hardest performance of all.”

I was writing furiously. Lamb going cold. “So the narrator is — he’s an unreliable narrator, but he’s unreliable in a specific way. He’s not lying. He’s not hiding anything. He’s telling you everything, proudly, and the things he’s proud of are the things that give him away.”

“The consomme detail,” Smith said. “If he mentions how he practised eating consomme in his flat, spooning it the right direction — practised, alone, watching tutorial videos — and he mentions it as evidence of his thoroughness, his preparation, his belonging — that’s devastating. And funny. Because who practises soup?”

“Someone who wasn’t born knowing which direction the spoon goes,” Wodehouse said quietly.

The cheese arrived. Wodehouse knew all their names. Smith ate the cheddar and ignored the rest. I was still thinking about the ending — how the story should end — and I made the mistake of asking.

“He should find out,” I said. “At the dinner, someone tells him the artichoke was a test. An initiation. They’ve been watching him the whole time. And he —”

“And he what?” Smith leaned forward. “That’s the question, isn’t it. What does he do with that information? Does he leave? Does he rage? Does he flip the table?”

“He stays,” Wodehouse said. “He thanks them. He says something perfectly composed. He goes home and he still thinks it was a triumph. Or he tells himself it was. The last paragraph should be him telling you, the reader, that the evening was a success, and you should believe him and not believe him simultaneously.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” I said. “End on that ambiguity. End with him still inside the delusion.”

“It’s not a delusion,” Smith said. “Or it’s not only a delusion. Here’s what’s complicated: maybe the dinner was a triumph, for him, in his terms. He survived it. He ate the impossible leaves and didn’t break. He performed belonging so thoroughly that even the people testing him were impressed. The fact that they were testing him — the fact that the whole thing was a ritual of exclusion dressed as inclusion — doesn’t mean he didn’t pass. He passed their test. He just doesn’t realize the test was the insult.”

“Crikey,” Wodehouse said.

“What?”

“I said crikey. It’s an exclamation. Meaning: you’ve just described something I would have written as a three-page comic sequence about a man wrestling with a vegetable, and you’ve made it into a — a —”

“A social autopsy.”

“I was going to say a rather serious piece of fiction, but yours is better.”

Smith laughed. An actual laugh, not a polite one. “It can be both. That’s what I keep saying. The three-page comic sequence about the man wrestling with the vegetable IS the social autopsy. You don’t choose. The artichoke is funny and the artichoke is cruel and the man eating it is heroic and pathetic and doing the only thing he knows how to do, which is commit. Commit completely. Six leaves when everyone else would have stopped at two.”

“Roger Davenport managed four in ‘08,” I said, testing out a sentence that had arrived in my head fully formed, though I didn’t know where it had come from.

“Who is Roger Davenport?” Wodehouse asked.

“I have no idea. But someone at the dinner should mention him. As though the artichoke thing has a leaderboard.”

“Oh,” said Wodehouse. “Oh, that’s good. A leaderboard for artichoke consumption at a dining society. The institutional memory of who ate the most inedible leaves. That’s — yes. That’s the thing. That’s the machine.”

Smith shook her head, but she was still smiling. “You two. You find the mechanism and you think the work is done. The leaderboard is funny, fine. But who’s on the leaderboard? Whose leaves are being counted? Not anyone who was born at that table.”

She picked up the last piece of cheddar. Ate it. Set down her knife with the clean finality of someone who has said what she came to say and is now calculating whether the Tube or a taxi gets her home faster.

“The shoes,” she said. “Don’t forget the shoes. Three hundred and forty pounds for a pair of oxblood Oxfords. That’s the detail that does the work. Not the artichoke. The artichoke is the set piece. The shoes are the story.”

Wodehouse signalled for the bill. He did it with a motion so slight I almost missed it — a raised finger, barely an inch, and the waiter was there. I’d been trying to get the waiter’s attention for twenty minutes.

“The shoes and the artichoke,” he said. “Both. The shoes are the preparation and the artichoke is the catastrophe and the space between them is where I live. You want the shoes to mean something. I want the artichoke to be funny. And our friend here” — he gestured at me with his dessert spoon, as though I were a minor character in one of his own stories, which perhaps I was — “has to write the whole thing.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Best of luck with the leaves,” Smith said, and put on her coat.