PG (Sir Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse (1881–1975) was an English author who was one of the most widely read humourists of the 20th century. A prolific writer throughout his life, Wodehouse published more than ninety books and would often have two or more books on the go at any one time. His prose style and subject matter was light and breezy and, in his own words, he wanted to spread “sweetness and light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every gently innocent character, and every farcical tussle, all set in an idealised world of the 1920s and 30s, Wodehouse whisks us far away from our worries.
He had many fans among the great and the good, including former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh; I seem to remember reading that Lemmy of Motorhead used to read him on his tour bus, post-gig! Although Wodehouse wrote several series of books about various characters such as the Blandings Castle set, the unrufflable monocle-wearing Old Etonian Psmith (with a silent P), and the tall-tale-telling Mr Mulliner, most people will know him for the comic creations, Jeeves and Wooster.
Bertie Wooster is the moneyed young toff who cares little about anything other than fashionable socks, frippery, and tophole societal high jinks, whilst Jeeves is the sagacious valet who clearly has the brains that Bertie lacks and who steers his master through many a social storm. The Jeeves canon consists of 35 short stories and 11 novels, and a wonderful starting point is 1925’s collection of ten short stories, Carry On, Jeeves.
My own introduction to Wodehouse, like many people, was the 1990s TV series Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. Jeeves and Wooster was a weekly escape into a jazz-age wonderland of art-deco apartments, panelled gentlemen’s clubs, “tissue-restoring” cocktails and buffet breakfasts, all serving as a backdrop to a series of predicaments for Bertie from which he would invariably be extricated by Jeeves. The drama was always held together by fizzing dialogue, peppered with bons mots and not a few neologisms from Wodehouse’s pen.
As befitting a man whose characters and situations had such lightness of being, Wodehouse didn’t take himself too seriously either, as this rejoinder to a critic below shows:
“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 will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled 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.”
Here’s a typical scene from the TV series wherein Bertie finds himself embroiled in a secret love triangle in high danger of imminent exposure and it’s down to Jeeves to pull off a suitably clever rescue.
