To The Charlock’s Shade thanks for reminding me that today is the 123rd birthday of P. G. Wodehouse. “Plum” is not as well known now as when his stories highlighted the Saturday Evening Post and his musical comedies ran on Broadway (five simultaneously in 1917, a record never equaled), but an amazing proportion of his hundred-plus books remain in print, and The Wodehouse Society flourishes.
Wodehouse continues to delight, which is remarkable when one contrasts the fate of other comic writers of the first half of the 20th Century. Jerome K. Jerome, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Will Cuppy and the others who once would have been listed as Wodehouse’s peers are not entirely forgotten, but they are fading. As time goes on, one more and more reads them the way we do Aristophanes or Plautus or, let us confess, the comedies of Shakespeare, aware that jokes are in the air but not quite moved to laugh at them. Wodehouse is not like that. He retains his sparkle notwithstanding the extinction of his milieu. Bertie Wooster, the incomparable Jeeves, Aunts Dahlia and Agatha, Lord Emsworth, Uncle Fred, Mr. Mulliner, the Oldest Member, Psmith, Ukridge and all the rest could never have lived in the “real world”, but they are alive in the better-than-real world that “Plum” created.
It is not, one must emphasize, a world of wish fulfillment, as in the poorer run of romance novels. Bertie Wooster is a rich young man with the cleverest of manservants, but he also scarcely gets through a book without being compelled, by the implacable and quixotic “Code of the Woosters”, to undertake an impossible task that carries a high risk of grievous bodily harm from blackguards or gangsters or irate swans. His chance of success always looks as dim as his wits, and failure will inevitably be attended by dire consequences. It is a rare Wodehouse story that does not skate on the edge of tragedy.
What makes the stories timeless is that the potential tragedy never arises from necessity or passion. Destitution is absent, and the Seven Deadly Sins show up only in attenuated caricatures of gluttony and sloth. All conflict flows, rather, from mild virtues and quotidian vices, from obsession with pigs or paperweights, from shame at making a living from cheap literature, from fear that a prize cook will be lured to another household or a pretty daughter into marriage with an unsuitable young man, from petty loans and ridiculous wagers. We see in Wodehouse humanity purified but not perfected. His humor grows out of the incongruities of the human heart. Until our hearts change beyond recognition, he will amuse us.
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