Intermission: Ground Laid for the Future.

Part of the point of this blog (and, no, this isn’t the official introduction, just a little context for the following) is to give me a place to jot down thoughts on whatever I’m reading or watching or listening to. So, I just finished reading Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers.

I’m going to have more to say about Mr. Biggers at a later time, but for now, I wanted to mention that Love Insurance is a fine sub-Wodehousian light comedy. It dates from 1914, when even Wodehouse was still sub-Wodehousian, and its original life as a magazine serial is a little too obvious (it’s meanderingly episodic, rather than tightly-plotted), but its preposterous central conceit — a gambling-addicted fiancé takes out an insurance policy against the eventuality of his not getting married at a certain date — is well-done. Of course the insurance company sends their best man to make sure the goof gets married; and of course he falls in love with the beautiful fiancée. The love scenes are mush, but then they always are; though the sudden insertion of two down-on-their-luck newspapermen about halfway through liven things up to such an amazing extent that for a moment I could have thought I was reading something by the brilliantly verbose Damon Runyon, instead of the pleasantly bland (if possessed of a sly wit) Biggers. Too bad they're only walk-ons.

There are several references throughout the novel — it’s set in an upper-class resort in pre-boom Florida — to the scenery looking like the set of a musical comedy (“I keep expecting the boys of the chorus to enter from just behind that potted palm”) , and it wouldn’t have taken much work to turn the book into a musical comedy of the period, the kind that kept Biggers’ friend Wodehouse busy. This was proabbly intentional on Biggers’ part; a smash play was definitely preferable to a bestseller, if you were a light writer. The bestseller wouldn’t last long, but a play could keep touring companies busy for years, and royalty checks all the while. Today, musicals are as self-important as any other part of the theater, which is why light writers are just about extinct.

This is what’s known as foreshadowing.