I have just finished reading the prolific master’s comparatively little-known but quite wonderful comic novel, Money for Nothing (1928).
Someday I may have something intelligent to say about this wordsmith magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his fathomless hat,
but for now, the following observation must suffice:
He is both unfailingly wholesome, and (to a degree you do not fully appreciate till you have lived a while, and beheld the alternative, and seen how, decade after decade, he soldiered on through it all) deep-seatedly humane.
Usually he is jolly and joshing, by choice; but when he wishes, he can conjure up effects out of Wind in the Willows. As here, describing a pair of young lovers drifting the river:
The Skirme rippled about the boat, chuckling softly to itself. It was a kindly, thoughtful river, given to chuckling to itself like an old gentleman who likes seeing young people happy.
Many of his characters are -- designedly -- stock figures, recycled from story to story with slight variations. (Cf. the Commedia dell'arte -- there is no blame in this.) But Wodehouse can capture the mind’s movements exactly, when so inclined. A disappointed lover:
‘I hear you’re engaged to Hugo,’ he said, speaking carefully and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do.
(A simple-seeming sentence, yet with much art. A while after reading it, I tried to recall it from memory, but could not fetch up such perfect wording. All I could think of was “as they seemed inclined to do”, which is not nearly as good.)
Yet later, as she accepts his proposal and offer her hand, the pan-psychism of a benevolent world springs up anew, now with a touch, not of Willows, but of Mary Poppins:
The garden had learned that dance now. It was simple once you got the hang of it. All you had to do, if you were a tree, was to jump up and down, while, if you were a lawn, you just went round and round. So the trees jumped up and down and the lawn went round and round, and John stood still in the middle of it all, admiring it.
If
a Heaven there be, which I am bound to believe, then I likewise
confide, that old P.G. is up there, chuckling with contentment, and
playing golf atop the clouds.
[Update]
Pleased as Plum |
[Update]
When considering writers like Petrarch, a primary
consideration is his influence on later authors: he lives on abundantly, in the works of those unblushing
borrowers the Petrarchians.
For Wodehouse, the case is otherwise. He wrote in a century when, unlike in olden times, great
premium was set upon originality.
Furthermore, once he found his voice, he kept doing the same thing over
and over -- but so devilishly well, that he formed a sui-generis genre, which
none dare ape upon pain of being dismissed as derivative. So, there is no-one, certainly no
prominent writer, who can be called a “Wodehousian”, in anything like the sense
that whole passels of poets are Petrarchians.
The thing, then, for those who relish parallels, is to keep
an eye out for antedatings of the
Wodehousian manner. After all, he
must have derived his distinctive manner from somewhere, unless it were
dictated to him directly by Comus (in lieu of the Spiritus Sanctus). Thus, herewith some attestations from our own random
readings -- foreshadowings of the droll style on which Wodehouse later took out
a patent.
~
Travellers gathered in an inn:
“And was there anything remarkable
in her history?”
Never was question more
unlucky. The little Marquis
immediately threw himself into the attitude of a man about to tell a long
story. In fact, my uncle had
pulled upon himself the whole history of the civil war of the Fronde, in which
the beautiful Duchess had played so distinguished a part. …
[some time later]
“… I’ll tell you how it was. Her father, Henry de Bourbon …”
“But did the Duchess pass the night
in the chateau?” said my uncle rather abruptly, terrified at the idea of
getting involved in one of the Marquis’s genealogical discussions.
-- Washington Irving ,“The
Adventure of my Uncle”, in Tales of a Traveller (1824)
Compare Wodehouse’s recurring character, “The Oldest
Member”.
~
And, from the pen of an American:
A cook she certainly was, in the
very bone and centre of her soul.
Not a chicken, or turkey, or duck
in the barnyard, but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and
seemed to be reflecting on their latter end.
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (1852)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a serious book; it is said that Lincoln, upon meeting
Mrs Stowe, said, “So you’re the little lady that started a war!” But here we have a passage that might
have wafted over from Castle Blandings.
~
The first place you’d look, for PGW-parallels, might be
Dickens -- the early Dickens of The Pickwick Papers. Therefore, we shall not fish in
so shallow a pond. But the
masterpiece Our Mutual Friend is another mostly rather somber novel; yet
even there, one finds snippets that, did they follow the Wodehousian oeuvre,
rather than precede it, one might have deemed echos:
When R. Wilfer returned,
candlestick in hand, to the bosom of his family, he found the bosom agitated.
-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual
Friend (1864-5), ch. 4
Pure Wodehouse:
deniching a word from an idiom wherein it figures in a special
sense, to comic effect. Even the name, “R. Wilfer”, sounds
somehow Wodehousian.
“Inasmuch as every man … appears to
be under a fatal spell which
obliges him, sooner or later, to mention the Rocky Mountains in a tone of extreme familiarity to some other man, I hope you’ll excuse
my pressing you into the service of that gigantic range of geographical bores.”
-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual
Friend (1864-5), ch. 6
That passage is not so close to PGW as the other; moreover,
is at least as close to any number of other English humorists, some of them
from the Dickens era or earlier, others quite modern (Kingsley Amis, Aldous
Huxley). I cite it merely to
show how difficult it is
truly to unearth such correspondences.
We ourselves noted a possible (though problematic)
Dickens/Wodehouse parallel, in our notes to the previously unpublished
fragment:
There we remarked, in a footnote to the recovered text:
(2) boil his head: Connoisseurs of both authors will here
instantly recognize a favorite phrase of Mr P.G. Wodehouse, so strongly
influenced by Dickens in point of style.
Yet he cannot actually have read this particular passus, since, as mentioned previously, it was never published
before this very day. Consequently
a direct le-style-c’est-l’homme
influence of the earlier upon that later novelist, cannot in this
instance be established.
Whether the contavenient influence, of Wodehouse upon Dickens, might be
surmised in this case, mediated perhaps by signal-bearing tachyons traveling
backwards in time, we must leave to the physicists.
Scholars are divided as to the proper interpretation of this
suggested influence -- indeed, as to the status of the resurrected
fragment as a whole.
~
Earlier than Dickens, indeed:
“The good wine did its good office.” The frost of
etiquette … began to give way … and the formal appellatives with which the
dignitaries had hitherto addressed each other, were now familiarly abbreviated
in Tully, Bally, and Killie.
-- Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
(1814)
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