
To The Lighthouse
David Stuart Davies looks at the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels.
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May
05
May
10
There have been numerous dramatic productions of
Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel, Three Men in a Boat on stage screen and radio.
Many have been successful and satisfying but none, I believe, have quite
captured the full power and humorous spirit of the novel because the true joy
and subtle comedy of the narrative is in the way the story is presented on the
page. It is the writing, the arrangement of the words and clever recital of the
amusing anecdotal scenarios, which make this book unique and a classic.
The premise of the novel is a simple one: three men
decide to take a trip down the River Thames for a holiday, believing that a
short time communing with nature in amiable company will add a reviving glow to
their tired lives as they all believe they are suffering from ‘overwork.’ The narrative records a series of incidents
and mishaps that occur as they journey down the river. In essence the trip is a
typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. These pleasure jaunts became popular and fashionable just after
commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out.
The three men are
based on Jerome himself who acts as the narrator J., and his two real-life
friends, George Wingrave, who became a senior manager at Barclays Bank and Carl
Hentschel, called Harris in the book. A great deal of the humour derives from
the interaction of their diverse personalities. Jerome reveals that when thrown
together in close proximity for a certain length of time even very good friends
can get on each other’s nerves and reveal idiosyncrasies that had not been
observed before. Martyrs to hypochondria
and general seediness, J. and his friends could hardly have envisaged the
troubles that lay ahead of them on their river trip with tow-ropes, unreliable
weather forecasts and those impenetrable tins of pineapple chunks - not to
mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency.
However, ultimately, Three
Men in a Boat is a study of friendship, human foibles and forgiveness. The
three men are closer in friendship than ever by the time they reach the end of
their journey.
Interestingly, Three Men in a Boat began life as a travel commission
for the magazine Home Chimes. Its author later
described how the focus and the nature of the volume changed: ‘I did not know I
was a humorist,’ he admitted. ‘The book was to have been 'The Story of the
Thames', its scenery and history… I never got there. It seemed to be all
'humorous relief'. By grim determination I succeeded, before the end, in
writing a dozen or so slabs of history and working them in, one to each
chapter, and F.W. Robinson, who was publishing the book serially, promptly
slung them out.’
When
the book was first published in 1889 it was reviled
by the critics for its lowbrow language and its
triumvirate of hopeless, neurotic protagonists, but Three Men in a Boat was an instant success with
the public and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful
evocation of the late Victorian ‘clerking classes’, it hilariously captured the
spirit of its age. However, the book has a timeless appeal and, as in the very best picaresque tales, the trip down the river to Oxford is
little more than a convenient peg on which to hang a series of observations and
athorial asides about life, in all its minute, baffling and absurd
complexities. Jerome wrings the most improbable humour from the most mundane
situations. For example, the digression about his Uncle Podger's efforts to
hang a picture is so delicately crafted that it has all the glorious hilarity
of cinematic slapstick. And any book that includes a discussion on ‘the advantages of
cheese as a travelling companion’ is bound to raise a laugh.
The immediate
success of the novel prompted a female take on the scenario in
1891, when Three Women in One Boat: A River Sketch by Constance MacEwen
was published. This book relates the journey of three young university women
who set out to emulate the river trip in Three Men in a Boat in an
effort to raise the spirits of one of them, who is about to be expelled from
university. To take the place of Montmorency, they bring a cat called
Tintoretto.
The
first movie version of Jerome’s novel appeared in 1926, followed by two others
in 1933 and 1956. The latter starred David
Tomlinson as J., Jimmy
Edwards as Harris and Laurence
Harvey as George. In 1981 A one-man
show adaptation earned Jeremy Nicholas
a Best
Newcomer in a Play nomination at the 1981 Laurence Olivier Awards.
In 2005 the comedians Griff Rhys
Jones, Dara Ó
Briain, and Rory
McGrath embarked on a recreation of
the novel for a BBC
TV series, Three Men in a Boat.
There has even been a musical version filmed for Soviet television in 1979. The
book has also made its way into the world of art. A sculpture of a
stylised boat was created in 1999 to commemorate Three Men in a Boat on
the Millennium Green in New Southgate, London, where
the author lived as a child. In 2012 a mosaic of a dog's head was created on the
same Green to commemorate Montmorency.
In 1898, Jerome
produced a sequel Three Men
on the Bummel, inspired by a short stay in
Germany. The book involved the same characters in the setting of a foreign
bicycle tour but it failed to capture the freshness and simple humour of the
original, which remains a supremely satisfying, engaging and funny read. It is
no wonder that Three
Men in a Boat has never been out of print. The
Guardian ranked it as number 25 of The 100 Greatest
Novels of All Time in 2015 - and Esquire placed is at number 2 in the 50 Funniest
Books Ever in 2009.