“You don’t think Wodehouse is funny? Then I consider you a tiresome prig and I don’t care to know you.”
A philosophy that will make you miss a very few people worth knowing, and a great many people not worth knowing.
JB
J Bryant
4 months ago
A very enjoyable essay. Thank you.
SS
Saigon Sally
4 months ago
A lot more links Wodehouse with Gilbert & Sullivan in their joint gentle amusing and playful irreverant portrayal of the upper classes than the author had time to say.
Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!
Bow, bow, ye tradesmen! Bow, ye masses!
Blow the trumpets, bang the brasses!
We are peers of highest station
Paragons of legislation
Pillars of the British nation etc etc…
And the very fact that they could mock and joke at the establishment’s expense has tended to set us apart from some other nations that take themselves more seriously.
Whenever I see a sartorial oddity I think of Jeeves seeing a pair of Bertie’s brightly coloured socks, whereupon “he bridled like a startled mustang.”
PM
Paul MacDonnell
4 months ago
This is a very sound reading of Wodehouse. I have always seen some of his writing as a Christian allegory. Somebody once argued that Bertie Wooster’s role is that of Jesus, redeeming his friends at his own expense, as arranged by the all-knowing Jeeves, who stands in place of God the Father.
That’s a bit fancival but Bertie certainly knows his Scripture.
PL
peter lucey
4 months ago
PGW always said he loved his schooldays, and followed Dulwich College all his life – especially their cricket team.
He was an apolitical writer. Auberon Waugh wrote: “Politicians may be prepared to countenance subversive political jokes, but the deeper subversion of totally non-political jokes is something they can neither comprehend or forgive.”
SG
Sayantani Gupta
4 months ago
Thank you for a most delightful essay.
I have never given such deep thought to analysing the works mentioned, though not a week passes without reading at least one chapter of his books.
Plum’s winning trademark may well be his ironic irreverence couching ever present realities.
” Unseen in the background Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove” and describing the inmates of the HOC as a ” weird gaggle of freaks and sub- humans as could be collected in one spot” could well describe the contemporary events of today.
AL
Alex Lekas
4 months ago
His protagonist, Mike, is a representative of that untraumatised majority.
Well, small wonder the average leftist of today would freak out over this book. The idea of anyone being untraumatized is anathema to the SJWs of the day. One can’t simply be; one must be a victim or aggressor, oppressor or oppressed. No wonder young people today are fraught with mental issues. So few of them had the luxury of experiencing childhood.
Or the luxury of experiencing laughter. A wonderful old priest I once knew told me that when he was 15 or so, ‘I got very depressed. My father gave me PG Wodehouse to read and I have never looked back.’ He loved Wodehouse so much that he gave up reading him every Lent as a penance. And he was a little bit like a character out of Wodehouse himself.
AB
Allison Barrows
4 months ago
That was fun! Jeeves and Wooster never fail to delight, but it is the Blandings crowd that I adore. The books inspired the absolutely brilliant (and too short) BBC series. Tim Spall and Jack Farthing are perfect as Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth and his silly son Freddie, but it is Jennifer Saunders as Constance, the Earl’s formidable sister, who steals the show every time.
She delivers this dripping line to over-sexed, dim and drunken Freddie: “If your brain were dynamite it couldn’t blow fuzz off a peach.”
That said, I’m going. To my room.
MO
mike otter
4 months ago
I expect if Roderick Spode had been real he too would have railed against Wodehouse. That tells you all you need to now about PGW’s detractors. PGW was a fool to try and get peace with Germany and that is a very typical Brit middle class failing. He thought you can negotiate with socialists like the NSDAP. Well you can’t, same as you can’t negotiate with pigeons or rats.
Lovely article. The quote from a later book that “the P is silent” never ceases to crack me up and I have tried to use that line in real life whenever possible. Not often, but there have been times. I would also like to add the golf stories to the endless list of unmissable books written by the master. I was never a fan of Jeeves and Wooster though, don’t really know why. Thanks for making my day.
C
Chipoko
4 months ago
Excellent essay!
SS
Sue Sims
4 months ago
Of course, the monocled dandy, who encourages the school jock to ignore Sedleigh cricket, turns out to be an excellent slow left-arm bowler. Wodehouse’s characters may apparently be stereotypes, but they almost always break the mould.
JB
jane baker
4 months ago
Laughing Gas is laugh out loud and roll on the floor funny.
CS
Charles Stanhope
4 months ago
Wodehouse was very fortunate not to be hanged in 1946, unlike for example William Joyce* and John Amery.
He also managed to ‘miss’ the Great War, 1914-1918, apparently because of poor eyesight, unlike for example John Kipling** who was similarly afflicted.
(*Despite not being a British citizen.)
(** ‘My boy Jack’.)
How can you compare the founder of the British Free Corps and an active member of the N Party to someone who probably acted like his own creation( Bertram W)?
He did pay a steep price for those broadcasts with his exile.
He was sixty years and knew what he was doing, and unlike Joyce was actually BRITISH!
In the old days as you will recall, we used to say “play the white man” and Wodehouse lamentably didn’t, to his eternal shame and that of Dulwich College.
Merely tried to ” spread sweetness and light” and rather erroneously so, just as BW goofed on everything from cow- creamers to plotting how to get out of the clutches of Ms Basset.
If only Jeeves was there to save his silly master.
Hasn’t DC also produced Mr Farage?
Indeed it has, and also Ernest Shackleton.
The Prep School dining room used to be graced with the two metre high portraits/photos of the schools six VCs.
Perhaps it still is.Jeeves would be proud!
As a former active member of the Plum Society Calcutta chapter don’t agree he wasn’t a good writer.
Though I daresay he would agree with you” I sit at my typewriter and curse a bit”!
Ooh. Not sure. Chandler and Wodehouse both have places among the most brilliant writers ever in English and the world would be a better place if more people read them. How about that?
John Kipling would have failed the eyesight test too; he was very short-sighted. But Kipling pulled strings for him among the top brass, so off he went. I think Kipling never forgave himself.
MO
mike otter
4 months ago
Interesting article though we could do w/o revisiting Orwell/Eric Blair. IMO he was a rat and its a good thing he fought against the Spanish people not on our side. In addition to his Jonah status he was by all accounts a liability to his own side. As were the other authors, poets, drinkers and wasters that fought alongside him and his russian pals.
If you think Orwell was pals with the Russians in Spain, I suggest you read “Homage to Catalonia.” Or anything else he wrote about the Spanish Civil War. Or “Animal Farm.”
TD
Tyler Durden
4 months ago
Amis (K) or Wodehouse, I don’t read these books as they speak only of the chummy established English classes usually in the south of the country. A better prism on the early half of the century is provided by the Edwardian noir of Patrick Hamilton, or even Jean Rhys although Paris was really her city.
You can usually tell who is a decent cove by whether they enjoy P G Wodehouse or not.
“You don’t think Wodehouse is funny? Then I consider you a tiresome prig and I don’t care to know you.”
A philosophy that will make you miss a very few people worth knowing, and a great many people not worth knowing.
A very enjoyable essay. Thank you.
A lot more links Wodehouse with Gilbert & Sullivan in their joint gentle amusing and playful irreverant portrayal of the upper classes than the author had time to say.
Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!
Bow, bow, ye tradesmen! Bow, ye masses!
Blow the trumpets, bang the brasses!
We are peers of highest station
Paragons of legislation
Pillars of the British nation etc etc…
And the very fact that they could mock and joke at the establishment’s expense has tended to set us apart from some other nations that take themselves more seriously.
Totalitarianism cannot tolerate being laughed at.
Whenever I see a sartorial oddity I think of Jeeves seeing a pair of Bertie’s brightly coloured socks, whereupon “he bridled like a startled mustang.”
This is a very sound reading of Wodehouse. I have always seen some of his writing as a Christian allegory. Somebody once argued that Bertie Wooster’s role is that of Jesus, redeeming his friends at his own expense, as arranged by the all-knowing Jeeves, who stands in place of God the Father.
That’s a bit fancival but Bertie certainly knows his Scripture.
PGW always said he loved his schooldays, and followed Dulwich College all his life – especially their cricket team.
He was an apolitical writer. Auberon Waugh wrote: “Politicians may be prepared to countenance subversive political jokes, but the deeper subversion of totally non-political jokes is something they can neither comprehend or forgive.”
Thank you for a most delightful essay.
I have never given such deep thought to analysing the works mentioned, though not a week passes without reading at least one chapter of his books.
Plum’s winning trademark may well be his ironic irreverence couching ever present realities.
” Unseen in the background Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove” and describing the inmates of the HOC as a ” weird gaggle of freaks and sub- humans as could be collected in one spot” could well describe the contemporary events of today.
His protagonist, Mike, is a representative of that untraumatised majority.
Well, small wonder the average leftist of today would freak out over this book. The idea of anyone being untraumatized is anathema to the SJWs of the day. One can’t simply be; one must be a victim or aggressor, oppressor or oppressed. No wonder young people today are fraught with mental issues. So few of them had the luxury of experiencing childhood.
Or the luxury of experiencing laughter. A wonderful old priest I once knew told me that when he was 15 or so, ‘I got very depressed. My father gave me PG Wodehouse to read and I have never looked back.’ He loved Wodehouse so much that he gave up reading him every Lent as a penance. And he was a little bit like a character out of Wodehouse himself.
That was fun! Jeeves and Wooster never fail to delight, but it is the Blandings crowd that I adore. The books inspired the absolutely brilliant (and too short) BBC series. Tim Spall and Jack Farthing are perfect as Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth and his silly son Freddie, but it is Jennifer Saunders as Constance, the Earl’s formidable sister, who steals the show every time.
She delivers this dripping line to over-sexed, dim and drunken Freddie: “If your brain were dynamite it couldn’t blow fuzz off a peach.”
That said, I’m going. To my room.
I expect if Roderick Spode had been real he too would have railed against Wodehouse. That tells you all you need to now about PGW’s detractors. PGW was a fool to try and get peace with Germany and that is a very typical Brit middle class failing. He thought you can negotiate with socialists like the NSDAP. Well you can’t, same as you can’t negotiate with pigeons or rats.
But British Bicycles, well, they’re all right.
Wodehouse’s humour is timeless. Always worthy going back to.
ITV;s 1990’s? series Jeeves & Wooster was superb.Wonder what Jeeves would think of the way Stephen Fry who played him has turned out politically?
” Decidedly odd”?!
Lovely article. The quote from a later book that “the P is silent” never ceases to crack me up and I have tried to use that line in real life whenever possible. Not often, but there have been times. I would also like to add the golf stories to the endless list of unmissable books written by the master. I was never a fan of Jeeves and Wooster though, don’t really know why. Thanks for making my day.
Excellent essay!
Of course, the monocled dandy, who encourages the school jock to ignore Sedleigh cricket, turns out to be an excellent slow left-arm bowler. Wodehouse’s characters may apparently be stereotypes, but they almost always break the mould.
Laughing Gas is laugh out loud and roll on the floor funny.
Wodehouse was very fortunate not to be hanged in 1946, unlike for example William Joyce* and John Amery.
He also managed to ‘miss’ the Great War, 1914-1918, apparently because of poor eyesight, unlike for example John Kipling** who was similarly afflicted.
(*Despite not being a British citizen.)
(** ‘My boy Jack’.)
Fortunately his conduct passed a close examination by a young Malcolm Muggeridge – which of us would have survived that?
How can you compare the founder of the British Free Corps and an active member of the N Party to someone who probably acted like his own creation( Bertram W)?
He did pay a steep price for those broadcasts with his exile.
He was sixty years and knew what he was doing, and unlike Joyce was actually BRITISH!
In the old days as you will recall, we used to say “play the white man” and Wodehouse lamentably didn’t, to his eternal shame and that of Dulwich College.
Merely tried to ” spread sweetness and light” and rather erroneously so, just as BW goofed on everything from cow- creamers to plotting how to get out of the clutches of Ms Basset.
If only Jeeves was there to save his silly master.
Hasn’t DC also produced Mr Farage?
Indeed it has, and also Ernest Shackleton.
The Prep School dining room used to be graced with the two metre high portraits/photos of the schools six VCs.
Perhaps it still is.Jeeves would be proud!
DC has produced many, not least Chandler, a much better writer.
As a former active member of the Plum Society Calcutta chapter don’t agree he wasn’t a good writer.
Though I daresay he would agree with you” I sit at my typewriter and curse a bit”!
Chandler is not a better writer; he is a different writer. You can’t compare them. Both superb stylists.
Ooh. Not sure. Chandler and Wodehouse both have places among the most brilliant writers ever in English and the world would be a better place if more people read them. How about that?
John Kipling would have failed the eyesight test too; he was very short-sighted. But Kipling pulled strings for him among the top brass, so off he went. I think Kipling never forgave himself.
Interesting article though we could do w/o revisiting Orwell/Eric Blair. IMO he was a rat and its a good thing he fought against the Spanish people not on our side. In addition to his Jonah status he was by all accounts a liability to his own side. As were the other authors, poets, drinkers and wasters that fought alongside him and his russian pals.
If you think Orwell was pals with the Russians in Spain, I suggest you read “Homage to Catalonia.” Or anything else he wrote about the Spanish Civil War. Or “Animal Farm.”
Amis (K) or Wodehouse, I don’t read these books as they speak only of the chummy established English classes usually in the south of the country. A better prism on the early half of the century is provided by the Edwardian noir of Patrick Hamilton, or even Jean Rhys although Paris was really her city.
Keep trying PGW, one day you may learn a sense of humour
I think you are born with a sense of humour or you aren’t. A sense of humour doesn’t ‘develop’, in my experience.