Damp at Blandings by Pete Ashton
The greatest comic writer ever?
“Sublime comic genius”, was how Ben Elton neatly summed up P.G. Wodehouse’s canon of work. Indeed, when anyone does ask for an opinion on the celebrated author, humourist and lyricist there seems to be quite a queue of luminaries that are happy enough to heap praise on him by the spoonful. Douglas Adams was another who went a little further than Elton, dubbing him the “greatest comic writer ever”.
Curiously enough, for this most English of writers, Wodehouse died an American citizen in 1975 in New Jersey, having spent hardly any time at all in the country of his birth since the outbreak of the Second World War. However, the characters and cultural quirks that accounted for the majority of the plot for most of his works were drawn heavily from the “jolly hockey sticks” era of the British upper classes. The idle rich, that sauntered around the lazy gentlemen’s clubs of West London during the early twentieth century, were beautifully encapsulated in literary form by a number of Wodehouse’s characters: perhaps none better than Bertie Wooster.
A mangled stereotype of the young Edwardian aristocrat, Bertie Wooster’s long list of adventures along with his personal valet Jeeves, form the backbone of Wodehouse’s work. Educated at Oxford and Eton and with no immediate family to speak of, Wooster’s life is dictated by a recurring series of unfortunate events that are often dictated by his habit of mistakenly becoming engaged to the wrong woman, or being forced to act under the strict instruction of one of his formidable aunts. One of these, Aunt Agatha, was summed up by Wodehouse like this:
“To people who don’t know my Aunt Agatha I find it extraordinarily difficult to explain why it is that she has put the wind up me to such a frightful extent, I mean, I’m not dependent on her financially or anything like that… You see, all through my childhood and when I was a kid at school she was always able to turn me inside out with a single glance, and I haven’t come out from under the ‘fluence yet. We run to height a bit in our family, and there’s about five-foot nine of Aunt Agatha, topped off with a beaky nose, an eagle eye, and a lot of grey hair, and the general effect is pretty formidable… If she said I must go to Roville, it was all over except buying the tickets”.
Other similarly impressive comic creations flick continually in and out of the pages of Wodehouse’s Abooks. Often they come to cause untold anguish in the personal life of Bertie Wooster as his attempts to live a care-free existence usually come up short. In his rather formulaic plots, Jeeves his quick witted and resourceful valet, often comes up with an ingenious solution as his stories flow toward their inevitable happy ending. As Bertie remarks of Jeeves,
“It beats me why someone of his genius is satisfied to hang around pressing my clothes and what not. If I had Jeeves’ brain, I should have a stab at being Prime Minister or something”.
If you want to read more of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, then the perfect place to start is with the recent publication of The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology, which includes a host of his most famous works and serves as a perfect introduction to his inimitable writing style.
Filed under: Books | Tagged: bertie, blandings, Jeeves, wodehouse, wooster
