The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written
If we’re talking about
culture that makes people happy, we have to start with the works
of P. G. Wodehouse. There are two reasons why. One reason is that making
people happy was Wodehouse’s overriding ambition. The other reason is that
he was better at it than any other writer in history.
Some authors may want
to expose the world’s injustices, or elevate us with their psychological
insights. Wodehouse, in his words, preferred to spread “sweetness and
light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the
Morning. With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character,
every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description
of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a flutter on the
choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk
us far away from our worries. Writing about being a humourist in his
autobiography Over Seventy, Wodehouse quoted two people in the Talmud
who had earnt their place in Heaven: “We are merrymakers. When we see a person
who is downhearted, we cheer him up.”
My own introduction to
this supreme merrymaker came via Jeeves and Wooster, the television series
adapted from some of his most beloved stories about a young toff and his
unflappable manservant. Hugh Laurie starred as Bertie Wooster, the moneyed
bachelor who seemed to care about nothing except food, drink and fashionable
socks, but who always came to the aid of the numerous old schoolmates who were
even more stupid than he was. Stephen Fry co-starred as Jeeves, who had the
brains that his young master lacked. As an undernourished, overworked student,
stressed by essays and exams, I was always relieved when I could nip down to
the college’s TV room (yes, it was a long time ago) for my weekly escape into a
jazz-age wonderland of art-deco flats and panelled gentlemen’s clubs,
“tissue-restoring” cocktails and buffet breakfasts served on silver platters.
A crafter of
perfect sentences
Nearly three decades
on, I’m currently rewatching the DVDs with my daughter, and Jeeves and Wooster
is still pretty much flawless. When I interviewed Laurie in 2000, I gushed
about the series, and he cited what was, at the time, his
favourite Wodehouse line: “The drowsy stillness of the afternoon
was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like GK Chesterton falling
on a sheet of tin.”
There are so many
other lines he could have gone for. How about this one?
“It is never difficult
to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”
Or this?
“It isn’t often that
Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb
trees and pull them up after them.”
Or this?
“Like so many
substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying,
springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag
to crag.”
The one that has me
chuckling to myself on a regular basis is this Bertie Wooster gem from the
novel Right Ho, Jeeves: “‘Very good,” I said coldly. ‘In that
case, tinkerty tonk.’ And I meant it to sting.”
We could keep listing
zingers like that all day: there were 96 Wodehouse books published in
his lifetime, and he was drafting another when he died in 1975 at the age of
93. What these excerpts prove is that, however much we may cherish the bumbling
aristocratic characters and their convoluted escapades, what really
makes Wodehouse so addictive is the prose: the phrases which
appear to float along so effortlessly, but which came about because he
would, he said, “write every sentence 10 times”. ...
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