Happy Birthday PG Wodehouse

Last updated on: October 15, 2015 at 4:08 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Happy Birthday PG Wodehouse 2015-10-15T16:08:34-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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If I am very sad, I turn to the complete Sherlock Holmes for soothing reading. If I need to laugh, I read PG Wodehouse. If you do not know him, get any book he wrote, especially any book on the genial Wooster and his butler Jeeves.

These are not stories of great meaning, but of great wit. Shakespeare creates new English and bathes a listener in beautiful sounds, Wodehouse uses as much of English as he has been given and hits us with a water balloon. His prose explodes with wit that requires no wisdom. The stories may be the closest thing to pure amusement of anything I have read.

Don’t struggle with the “worldview” of the stories, just enjoy a world where a hapless member of the Drone Club, Bertie Wooster, is guided through his First World problems by his man Jeeves. This the original comedy about nothing, yet the language is so “just so,” many words, but no extra words, witty without tired irony, and clever without cruelty.

PG Wodehouse is not serious enough for a Victorian, but he is too optimistic, genial, and kind for our culture. He stands in a hallway between the world that two World Wars destroyed and the one in which we live. If you want the grim side of that time, read the insufferably serious Steinbeck, if you want a laugh, try Wodehouse. He may be the least relevant writer we would still find funny and so can serve as relief. Victorians like Dickens remind us the poor we have with us still and moderns can sound too much like our own internal monologue.

PG Wodehouse sounds like himself.

Wodehouse was lost in the cruel reality of World War II, captured by the Germans, and exploited by the Nazis on the radio. After the War, he came to America, but the world he had captured in prose was gone. He remained witty and wrote some amusing television, but the man who had captured a generation could not shake the sound of that generation. He was a relic before he was old, unfashionable before dead.

A modern dolt need not hire Jeeves, he has Siri to help him use Google because a modern Wooster finds Google taxing. Even the website askjeeves.com is now marketed as “ask.com” having lost all personality and reason for being in the process. Jeeves and Wooster appeared in a brilliant television program (sample here) and are in public domain for reading, but few of my students watch, read, or know the delightful pair. That is too bad.

If you want to know something about Interwar British leadership, read Wodehouse. If you wish to escape a hard day, read Wodehouse. If you like a thoughtful chuckle more than a LOL, then read Wodehouse.

Let us praise happy stories and the man who wrote them.

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