A Favorite Wodehouse?

"...write about Wodehouse and you tread on hallowed ground. He's a writer people mind about intensely, a writer who, without strong feelings himself, encourages the most vehement reactions." - Robert McCrum

An acquaintance of mine who was then recently introduced to Wodehouse, when I was trying to encourage him to embark on the journey of devouring the whole canon, asked me a question that is often put to Plum(Wodehouse was called Plum by those who loved him - he still is) devotees, "What is your favorite Wodehouse?" Now, that is what I call a very difficult question to answer. Take the case of someone visiting the Tulip Gardens of Holland being asked about the single flower he liked most among the breathtaking sight of all the flower beds symmetrically laid; wouldn’t that someone be baffled to no end? Or like Shakespeare’s Othello, be perplex’d in the extreme? I feel very similar when I am faced with the question. Smiles. I love all of the master’s works like "how the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all". The books have never failed to put a smile on my face in many a dull moment of life caused by the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

I think the best way to go about reading Wodehouse - the way I employed to wade through the whole Canon of 100 odd books - is to start at the Jeeves and Wooster series featuring the adventures of the kind hearted blundering upper class British man about town Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and his omniscient, omnipotent, Spinoza reading Gentleman’s personal Gentleman, Reginald Jeeves and after that pounce on the Blandings Castle series featuring the absent-minded Peer, Clarence, the 9th Earl of Emsworth at the helm of affairs and his paraphernalia complete with his hat trick medal winning Berkshire sow, the Empress of Blandings. There are fourteen of Jeeves and Wooster Novels and an almost equal number of Blandings castle novels. After fraternizing with the above mentioned sterling creations of the master, one should not miss the escapades of Psmith (the P is psilent as in Pterodactyl), Uncle Fred and a lot more of other interesting creations. Before I proceed further, there is more to be said about Uncle Fred. He is a peer mostly confined to the country side and on the occasions he is unleashed on London, those being the occasions when his better four-fifths is away visiting friends or on some other errand that keeps the redoubtable Uncle Fred away from her temporarily, he tends to, to quote from the books, step high, wide and plentiful. When at liberty, "excesses" are what Uncle Fred invariably commits.

Steering back to the res, I wonder where else one would come across characters with elaborate names like Hildebrand Spencer Poynt de Burgh John Hannasyde Coombe-Crombie or say, Reginald Alexander Montacute James Bramfylde Tregemis Shipton-Bellinger. Douglas Adams may be, yes! But with all the credit that he is due, Mr. Adams is still not Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. (Hazarding the possibility of getting didactical, I have to mention that the name is pronounced Wood-house as opposed to the popular notion Woad-house, for I every once in a while chance upon people referring the master as Woad-house) And those of the readers who start out on reading Wodehouse find themselves in a similar enviable posish of a sailing master pleased as a punch upon discovering a great chunk of land. In other('s) words, they would feel like how Columbus would have felt when he first set foot on America.

The plot in the books generally is very intricate and enters into sub-plots and sub-sub-plots like the nested parenthesis in a complex algebraic expression and finally ends with almost none of the characters disappointed; but for me, the plot itself is incidental. It is like a rope that holds the pearls and diamonds of the master’s free flowing lyrical prose replete with hilarious adjectives to describe characters and situations, Gilbertian metaphors, allusions to Shakespeare, the holy scriptures, references to the Greek and Roman Myths, the Arthurian Legend, the poems of yore and all this is done in a humorous manner that leaves you guffawing to no end. It is these things that have sent me back to the master again and again and yet again. Here I have to add a note of caution. It is not advisable to read Wodehouse in public places lest you would be considered leaky in the top floor by your suspicious and shifty-eyed onlookers.

I highly recommend PG Wodehouse to anyone who loves the English language. I myself call the favorite pastime of reading his books, ‘Gorging on Plums’. Not for nothing, I guess, does a friend of mine call me a ‘Wodehouse Crusader’.

Comments

[The Princess]

What!! no comments on such a wonderful piece of writing, either everyone is too dumbfounded to comment or this piece has not bin publicized enuf!

U do have a gift- the gift of writing.

[Vacha]

It is my circuit professor who introduced me to Master. There was not even single class where he didn't mentioned any funny incident of his series... Wodehouse is a legend in English, especially British
literature.

This article made a good read... You have a good command over English..

[Arvind]

Princess: Thank you for the generous compliment. I don't think i have a gift or anything like that but i do wish i had it. Smiles.

Vacha: Nice of you to leave a comment. I am sure you are glad that your circuit(Munnabhai's sidekick??) professor introduced you to something really worthwhile.

[praveen]

I havent read Wodehouse much but what you have written here has sparked some interest and maybe I will start reading him again. Well written!

[Kiran Ashtekar]

Wodehouse is the champagne of literature. One is left wordless at his legacy of uplifting literature in the true practical sense. I have no stint of praise for him. This will start a treatise or something. So I will stop. Amen to Wodehouse.

[Kiran Ashtekar]

A rather lengthy quote from Wodehouse : It is almost as if its a conversation between Wodehouse and Ayn Rand !

It's from 'Uneasy Money', a telling title, surely.

Claire is trying to get her to-be to earn more money.

'That old American you met at Marvis Bay,' said Claire, her memory flitting back to the remark which she had interrupted; 'well, there's another case. You could easily have got him to do something for you.'

'Claire, really!' said his goaded lordship, protestingly. 'How on earth? I only met the man on the links.'

'But you were very nice to him. You told me yourself that you spent hours helping him to get rid of his slice, whatever that is.'

'We happened to be the only two down there at the time, so I was as civil as I could manage. If you're marooned at a Cornish seaside resort out of the season with a man, you can't spend your time dodging him. And this man had a slice that fascinated me. I felt at the time that it was my mission in life to cure him, so I had a dash at it. But I don't see how on the strength of that I could expert the old boy to adopt me. He probably forgot my existence after I had left.'

'You said you met him in London a month or two afterwards, and he hadn't forgotten you.'

'Well, yes, that's true. He was walking up the Haymarket and I was walking down. I caught his eye, and he nodded and passed on. I don't see how I could construe that into an invitation to go and sit on his lap and help myself out of his pockets.'

'You couldn't expect him to go out of his way to help you; but probably if you had gone to him he would have done something.'

'You haven't the pleasure of Mr Ira Nutcombe's acquaintance, Claire, or you wouldn't talk like that. He wasn't the sort of man you could get things out of. He didn't even tip the caddie. Besides, can't you see what I mean? I couldn't trade on a chance acquaintance of the golf links to--'

'That is just what I complain of in you. You're too diffident.'

'It isn't diffidence exactly. Talking of old Nutcombe, I was speaking to Gates again the other night. He was telling me about America. There's a lot of money to be made over there, you know, and the committee owes me a holiday. They would give me a few weeks off any time I liked.

'What do you say? Shall I pop over and have a look round? I might happen to drop into something. Gates was telling me about fellows he knew who had dropped into things in New York.'

'What's the good of putting yourself to all the trouble and expense of going to America? You can easily make all you want in London if you will only try. It isn't as if you had no chances. You have more chances than almost any man in town. With your title you could get all the directorships in the City that you wanted.'

'Well, the fact is, this business of taking directorships has never quite appealed to me. I don't know anything about the game, and I should probably run up against some wildcat company. I can't say I like the directorship wheeze much. It's the idea of knowing that one's name would be being used as a bait. Every time I saw it on a prospectus I should feel like a trout fly.'

Claire bit her lip.

'It's so exasperating!' she broke out.

'When I first told my friends that I was engaged to Lord Dawlish they were tremendously impressed. They took it for granted that you must have lots of money. Now I have to keep explaining to them that the reason we don't get married is that we can't afford to. I'm almost as badly off as poor Polly Davis who was in the Heavenly Waltz Company with me when she married that man, Lord Wetherby. A man with a title has no right not to have money. It makes the whole thing farcical.

'If I were in your place I should have tried a hundred things by now, but you always have some silly objection. Why couldn't you, for instance, have taken on the agency of that what-d'you-call-it car?'

'What I called it would have been nothing to what the poor devils who bought it would have called it.'

'You could have sold hundreds of them, and the company would have given you any commission you asked. You know just the sort of people they wanted to get in touch with.'

'But, darling, how could I? Planting Breitstein on the club would have been nothing compared with sowing these horrors about London. I couldn't go about the place sticking my pals with a car which, I give you my honest word, was stuck together with chewing-gum and tied up with string.'

'Why not? It would be their fault if they bought a car that wasn't any good. Why should you have to worry once you had it sold?'
It was not Lord Dawlish's lucky afternoon. All through lunch he had been saying the wrong thing, and now he put the coping-stone on his misdeeds. Of all the ways in which he could have answered Claire's question he chose the worst.

'Er--well,' he said, 'noblesse oblige, don't you know, what?'

For a moment Claire did not speak.

Then she looked at her watch and got up.

'I must be going,' she said, coldly.

Wow !

[Arvind]

Praveen: always happy to make another convert.
Kiran: That was an interesting bit of conversation. I ought to et hold of the said book. i still don't have it.

[Lola]

This atilrce keeps it real, no doubt.