Book Review: The Escapist (the letters of PG Wodehouse)
Wodehouse’s comic gift was built on his brilliant capacity for repressing unpleasantness.
P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters - By Sophie Ratcliffe (editor)
The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler’s Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying. “He’ll have to let it grow or shave it off,” said the Whisky and Splash. “He can’t go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache, or he has not. There can be no middle course.”
'A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.” He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.'
In the half decade between the fictional conversation at the Angler’s Rest and his light-as-a-feather account of his own experiences, Wodehouse had, as he noted, experienced the German invasion of France, the loss of his house in that country, the separation from his wife and beloved dogs, and internment in Belgium and Germany. What ensued was a sustained public campaign against his “traitorous” behavior in the English press and Parliament, and his decision, once the war culminated, to permanently relocate to the United States.
If this tumult left him slightly disjointed, he remained, as he might well have put it, essentially jointed. From a more “engaged” or serious person living in a time of war and atrocity, such imperturbability would perhaps have been commendable. In Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, an undoubtedly gentle soul, it was a sign that his habit of inventing Edenic universes was not limited to the printed page. Evelyn Waugh once wrote of Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, that they inhabited “a world as timeless as that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland.” Wodehouse, too, was timeless, but distinctly so: he could appear untouched by his era, untouched by his times.
This admittedly thumbnail sketch is delightfully complicated by Sophie Ratcliffe’s exemplary editing of a new collection of Wodehouse’s letters. The assembled trove does not demand a complete reconsideration of the sender, but it begs for an analysis that Jeeves might label as more suitably refined. Wodehouse’s critics have tended to condemn his guilelessness for landing him in the soup, while his admirers have celebrated or fallen back on this very innocence, often in the service of exculpating him for the broadcasts. But the letters—together with a close analysis of his fiction—reveal that Wodehouse not only was a canny appraiser of class distinctions and of the ironies underlying the Anglo-American relationship; he also detected that fascism signaled, in its absurdity, how sinister it actually was. His repression of this knowledge at the crucial moment of the century may make him a bloody fool; but a capacity for denial is not synonymous with being starry-eyed. Indeed, it is quite unlikely that the premier comic novelist of the past 100 years was really a complete naïf.
Wodehouse’s correspondence, which begins in 1899, before the death of Queen Victoria, and ends in 1975, just before his own death at age 93, conveys both the scope and the narrowness of his life. There need not be any contradiction here: Wodehouse wrote nearly 100 books over eight decades, while simultaneously engaging in one solid marriage, a limited number of friendships, and a private life consisting of reading, writing, and golf. (The Overlook Press is releasing all of Wodehouse’s books in handy, exceptionally handsome new hardback editions; this marks the first time that an American publishing house has released the entire oeuvre—surely what Bertie, via Jeeves, would admit is the mot juste.) Wodehouse spent considerable time in the United States writing movie scripts and musicals before the war, and he seemed to find in America an energy and verve that were lacking in Britain. After the war, he made his residence on Long Island his permanent home.
“Do you hate Dickens’s stuff?,” Wodehouse writes in a letter to Denis Mackail, a longtime friend. “I can’t read it.”..
The prime example of Wodehouse’s discernment is the absurd fascist Roderick Spode (described thusly: “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment”). Based on Oswald Mosley, Spode traipses about in black shorts trying to rally Britons to the call of fascism. In an essay for this magazine several years ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “It’s quite impossible that the man who had invented Sir Roderick Spode in 1938 was prey to any covert sympathy for fascism.” Undeniably true; but Spode also proves that Wodehouse saw through the designs of an ideology that managed to capture the imagination of much of European civilization. This is a step beyond simply not being a sympathizer. Look again at Wodehouse’s quote on life as an internee; there is more there than meets the eye. (Spode, incidentally, is said to possess “the sort of eye that can open an oyster at twenty paces.”)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-escapist/8989/
Some observations I made about PGW in response to a newspaper questionnaire in 2007:
Q.1 What prompted the setting up of the Wodehouse Society in St Stephen's College?
A/ There was an irreverence in PGW's style that appealed to us as undergraduates. The content of his fiction was so far removed from our immediate environment that it appealed to our sense of the nonsensical. Sheer absurdity became the meeting point between his world and ours. In a time of turmoil, PGW's gentle but intensely funny humour somehow brought us down to earth. He infused ordinary things with mischievous incongruity without being crude in any way - thus, Jeeves, the gentleman's personal gentleman who read Spinoza in his spare time; Aunt Agatha, who chewed broken glass and wore barbed wire next to skin; dogs with a secret sorrow; the American tycoon who
prided himself on being Third Vice President of the Amalgamated Nailcutter's and Eyebrow Tweezer's Corporation; or Mr Mulliner's pharmacist nephew with his famous invention, Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo. And the very name of the minor aristocrat, Lemuel Gengulphus, Bart.
The Wodehouse Society was our boyish response to the intensity of our times - the late sixties. We produced a rag named Spice, full of nonsensical articles, held Lord Ickenham Professor Imitation Contests, and hosted debates and essay competitions. And we poked fun at everyone and anyone, including the authorities. PGW made life interesting and bearable, because he taught us never to take ourselves too seriously. After you read him you could never get rid of the sneaking suspicion that in all of us there was a particle of the well-meaning oaf Bertie Wooster, lurching his way from one disaster to the next, and whose greatest achievement was his imitation of a hen laying an egg. And Wodehouse could evoke tender human feelings too, quite effortlessly, as in that most famous of short stories, Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend.
Q.2. What first attracted you to Wodehouse's stories?
A./ First, a correction. PGW wrote collections of stories, but he was primarily a novelist. What attracted me? My father's collection! He used to buy them religiously, and after I'd gone through the lot, I began reading whatever appeared. There were over seventy titles, and by my late twenties, I think I had read most of them.
Q.3 What, according to you, are the reasons, Wodehouse is popular in India?
A./ Perhaps the familiarity of Indians with colonial English manners makes them receptive to PGW's love for puncturing pomposity. He was always ridiculing the English aristocracy. After all, we have our own stuffed-shirt social strata with their noses in the air. Humour is the most subversive thing there is. The best way of dealing with high and mighty oppressors is to laugh at them. Wodehouse takes the clothes off all emperors.
Q. 4. Do you think the Wodehouse brand of humour is still relevant?
A./ Relevant? PG Wodehouse is timeless.
P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters - By Sophie Ratcliffe (editor)
The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler’s Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying. “He’ll have to let it grow or shave it off,” said the Whisky and Splash. “He can’t go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache, or he has not. There can be no middle course.”
'A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.” He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.'
In the half decade between the fictional conversation at the Angler’s Rest and his light-as-a-feather account of his own experiences, Wodehouse had, as he noted, experienced the German invasion of France, the loss of his house in that country, the separation from his wife and beloved dogs, and internment in Belgium and Germany. What ensued was a sustained public campaign against his “traitorous” behavior in the English press and Parliament, and his decision, once the war culminated, to permanently relocate to the United States.
If this tumult left him slightly disjointed, he remained, as he might well have put it, essentially jointed. From a more “engaged” or serious person living in a time of war and atrocity, such imperturbability would perhaps have been commendable. In Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, an undoubtedly gentle soul, it was a sign that his habit of inventing Edenic universes was not limited to the printed page. Evelyn Waugh once wrote of Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, that they inhabited “a world as timeless as that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland.” Wodehouse, too, was timeless, but distinctly so: he could appear untouched by his era, untouched by his times.
This admittedly thumbnail sketch is delightfully complicated by Sophie Ratcliffe’s exemplary editing of a new collection of Wodehouse’s letters. The assembled trove does not demand a complete reconsideration of the sender, but it begs for an analysis that Jeeves might label as more suitably refined. Wodehouse’s critics have tended to condemn his guilelessness for landing him in the soup, while his admirers have celebrated or fallen back on this very innocence, often in the service of exculpating him for the broadcasts. But the letters—together with a close analysis of his fiction—reveal that Wodehouse not only was a canny appraiser of class distinctions and of the ironies underlying the Anglo-American relationship; he also detected that fascism signaled, in its absurdity, how sinister it actually was. His repression of this knowledge at the crucial moment of the century may make him a bloody fool; but a capacity for denial is not synonymous with being starry-eyed. Indeed, it is quite unlikely that the premier comic novelist of the past 100 years was really a complete naïf.
Wodehouse’s correspondence, which begins in 1899, before the death of Queen Victoria, and ends in 1975, just before his own death at age 93, conveys both the scope and the narrowness of his life. There need not be any contradiction here: Wodehouse wrote nearly 100 books over eight decades, while simultaneously engaging in one solid marriage, a limited number of friendships, and a private life consisting of reading, writing, and golf. (The Overlook Press is releasing all of Wodehouse’s books in handy, exceptionally handsome new hardback editions; this marks the first time that an American publishing house has released the entire oeuvre—surely what Bertie, via Jeeves, would admit is the mot juste.) Wodehouse spent considerable time in the United States writing movie scripts and musicals before the war, and he seemed to find in America an energy and verve that were lacking in Britain. After the war, he made his residence on Long Island his permanent home.
“Do you hate Dickens’s stuff?,” Wodehouse writes in a letter to Denis Mackail, a longtime friend. “I can’t read it.”..
The prime example of Wodehouse’s discernment is the absurd fascist Roderick Spode (described thusly: “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment”). Based on Oswald Mosley, Spode traipses about in black shorts trying to rally Britons to the call of fascism. In an essay for this magazine several years ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “It’s quite impossible that the man who had invented Sir Roderick Spode in 1938 was prey to any covert sympathy for fascism.” Undeniably true; but Spode also proves that Wodehouse saw through the designs of an ideology that managed to capture the imagination of much of European civilization. This is a step beyond simply not being a sympathizer. Look again at Wodehouse’s quote on life as an internee; there is more there than meets the eye. (Spode, incidentally, is said to possess “the sort of eye that can open an oyster at twenty paces.”)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-escapist/8989/
Some observations I made about PGW in response to a newspaper questionnaire in 2007:
Q.1 What prompted the setting up of the Wodehouse Society in St Stephen's College?
A/ There was an irreverence in PGW's style that appealed to us as undergraduates. The content of his fiction was so far removed from our immediate environment that it appealed to our sense of the nonsensical. Sheer absurdity became the meeting point between his world and ours. In a time of turmoil, PGW's gentle but intensely funny humour somehow brought us down to earth. He infused ordinary things with mischievous incongruity without being crude in any way - thus, Jeeves, the gentleman's personal gentleman who read Spinoza in his spare time; Aunt Agatha, who chewed broken glass and wore barbed wire next to skin; dogs with a secret sorrow; the American tycoon who
prided himself on being Third Vice President of the Amalgamated Nailcutter's and Eyebrow Tweezer's Corporation; or Mr Mulliner's pharmacist nephew with his famous invention, Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo. And the very name of the minor aristocrat, Lemuel Gengulphus, Bart.
The Wodehouse Society was our boyish response to the intensity of our times - the late sixties. We produced a rag named Spice, full of nonsensical articles, held Lord Ickenham Professor Imitation Contests, and hosted debates and essay competitions. And we poked fun at everyone and anyone, including the authorities. PGW made life interesting and bearable, because he taught us never to take ourselves too seriously. After you read him you could never get rid of the sneaking suspicion that in all of us there was a particle of the well-meaning oaf Bertie Wooster, lurching his way from one disaster to the next, and whose greatest achievement was his imitation of a hen laying an egg. And Wodehouse could evoke tender human feelings too, quite effortlessly, as in that most famous of short stories, Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend.
Q.2. What first attracted you to Wodehouse's stories?
A./ First, a correction. PGW wrote collections of stories, but he was primarily a novelist. What attracted me? My father's collection! He used to buy them religiously, and after I'd gone through the lot, I began reading whatever appeared. There were over seventy titles, and by my late twenties, I think I had read most of them.
Q.3 What, according to you, are the reasons, Wodehouse is popular in India?
A./ Perhaps the familiarity of Indians with colonial English manners makes them receptive to PGW's love for puncturing pomposity. He was always ridiculing the English aristocracy. After all, we have our own stuffed-shirt social strata with their noses in the air. Humour is the most subversive thing there is. The best way of dealing with high and mighty oppressors is to laugh at them. Wodehouse takes the clothes off all emperors.
Q. 4. Do you think the Wodehouse brand of humour is still relevant?
A./ Relevant? PG Wodehouse is timeless.
