P. G. WODEHOUSE: AN APPRECIATION

C. L. R. SASTRI

Everyone knows that Paul of Tarsus was smitten by a dazzling light on his way to Damascus. With a little (pardonable) exaggeration I may say that I was smitten by a no less brilliant illumination when, through a sheer stroke of good luck rather than through any conscious contrivance on my part, I purchased a second-hand copy of the Jeeves Omnibus from a roadside bookstall in Bombay. “P. G. Wodehouse” was a new name to me then. I am conservative to a degree in my literary tastes and, unless exceptional circumstances supervene, I much prefer re-reading some old and tried authors to reading new and unknown ones. I have never had occasion to regret this policy: certainly not in the matter of certain ultra-modern writers.

This explains why I came to the immortal “P. G. W.” (whom that Dean of British dramatic critics in his day, the late Mr. James Agate, had been pleased to place only next to William Shakes in the English literary hierarchy) so late in my life. But, having come to him at long last (by way of that roadside bookstall in Bombay aforementioned) I have not been slow to make up leeway. I have read a score or so of his books and am eagerly looking forward to finishing the whole corpus before the mushroom cloud threatens us all with complete oblivion. The Jeeves Omnibus was, as I have indicated, my first introduction to the Master. Afterwards I went through the remaining volumes that came into my hands like a devouring flame. I may be mistaken, but I believe that I have read all the novels and short stories in which the celebrated duo jeeves and Bertie, figure.

I must confess at the outset that Bertie’s inspired idiocies fascinate me even more than (and that is saying “an imperial quart”) Jeeves’s scintillating strategems. In his higher flights Bertie is something of a poet. The imaginative concreteness of his descriptions is extraordinarily impressive: as when, for instance, suffering prodigies of boredom from the prolonged visit of his cousins, Claude and Eustace, to his hospitable and luxurious flat, he expresses himself thus:

“The old nerves began to stick out of my body a foot long and curling at the ends.” (My italics)

Again, at another place, he tells his faithful factotum:

“Man and boy, Jeeves, I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one takes the mottled oyster.”

Bertie, that last of the Woosters, can hardly, it seems, opens his mouth without letting fall such gems of purest ray serene. The pithiness of his expression is, indeed, marvellous to behold. As Contey said of Pindar, it forms “a vast species alone.”

If Jeeves has a blemish (and, even to imagine that he has, is tantamount to uttering a blasphemy) it is that he is far too much addicted to what H. G. Wells’s Mr. Polly, imprisoned in the mean trade-terms of haberdashery, loved to call “sesquippledan verboojuice” and “eloquent rapsodooce”. His lofty utterance is only too apt to go over the heads of his Drones Club clientele whose highest form of sophistication, it may be recalled, consisted in throwing assorted bread-crumbs at one another during luncheon-time. It is both interesting and instructive then to watch Bertie take hold of the situation with his inimitable wizardry and condense that alarming mass of verbiage into half-a-dozen pellucidly clear and crisp words (of one syllable each) that can be easily understood by them.

His adroit manipulation of language is unforgettable: as when, to take just one example, his pal, “Catsmeet”, volunteering to deputise for Jeeves, is remiss in the performance of his valet’s functions as a result of more rewarding diversions elsewhere, Bertie consoles himself with the sage reflection:

“You can’t press your suit and another man’s trousers simultaneously.”

Bertie’s love-life (or, rather, the incredible absence of it) can be an intriguing theme for thesis-writers. It is not (horrid thought!) that he loved and lost. It is that the young and charming debutantes that fell for him so solidly loved and lost. And in that single and solitary instance when he himself, the much-sought-after boulvardier and man-about-town, loved and lost (Pauline Stoker, to wit, as svelte and debonair as Mother makes them), he contrived to reconcile himself to his disappointment without any noticeable arriere-pense.

Bertie, in fact, is one of Nature’s bachelors. The very mention of the phrase, “the holy state,” got in amongst him, to borrow a familiar Wodehousian locution. I have always felt a deep pang of sorrow for Honoria Glossop (whose laugh, we are told, was “like cavalry clattering over a tin-bridge”) and Florence Crage (whose profile was some profile and who being “an egghead” and steeped to the gills in serious purpose, was always maladroitly thrusting the frightening tome, Five Types of Ethical Theory, into the unwary hands of her admirers), both of whom had, at one time, aspired to his hand and heart.

But what is really most exhilarating is what I may call the Bertie Wooster–Madeline Bassett impasse or imbroglio. The Bassett, I need not remind my readers, could somehow never get out of her nut that Bertie was simply dying of love for her: whereas, of course, anyone with the least pretence to intelligence could see for himself, or herself, that he would have preferred dying in a ditch to walking up the aisle with her save and except under a powerful anaesthetic. I have never been able to make out why Jeeves was always telling people: “Mr. Wooster is, perhaps, mentally negligible, but he has a heart of gold.” That he was, emphatically, not “mentally negligible” is evident from the fact that he could see with half-an-eye, so to speak, that she (the Bassett) was not the mate Heaven had ordained for him: as how could she be who, in her mutton-headed way, believed that the “stars were God’s daisy-chain” and that “every time a fairy hicups a wee babe is born”?

What endears him most to his admirers is his mortal dread of his Aunt Agatha–an aunt in a million, to be sure–who “chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.” She was, by all accounts, some aunt, and, one gathers, the only fly in his ointment, the only caterpillar in his salad. Whenever, it will be recalled, she was after him “with her hatchet,” he made a beeline for America–and stayed more until the storm blew over and the “all-clear” was sounded.

Mr. Wodehouse has, unaccountably, stopped writing about Jeeves and Bertie: there is still a huge public for these hilarious contes. Moreover, let him remember that he himself had, in his preface to the Jeeves Omnibus, promised that a story containing Bertie’s settling of accounts with the redoubtable Tuppy Glossop (who had once caused his falling into the Drones Club swimming pool “in fun evening costume”) would see the light of day in due course. But what supremely matters is that he should be spared to us long enough for at least half-a-dozen more volumes from his inimitable pen.

Hilaire Belloc, himself a no mean exponent of English prose (Sir John Squire rated him as the best writer of English prose in his time) gave it as his considered opinion in a famous broadcast in the United States that Mr. Wodehouse’s English was unbeatable and that he was without question, the head of his profession. Giving reasons for his choice of Mr. Wodehouse as the writer, par excellence, of his generation, he writes, in his superb introduction to the Week-end Wodehouse:

“It is a test of power in this craft of writing (comedy, that is) that its object shall be attained by some method which the reader cannot directly perceive. To write prose so that your search for effect appears on the surface is to write bad prose. To write prose so that you get your effects by unusual words, deliberately chosen for their oddity, is to write bad prose. To write prose so that the reader thinks more of the construction than of the image conveyed is to write bad prose. So to write is not necessarily to write the worst prose, nor even very bad prose, but it is to lose perfection.” (My italics)

Belloc’s point is that Mr. Wodehouse’s prose does not miss perfection. Which is why, where he leads, others are content to follow.

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