Fun with Wodehouse

I have read all of P.G. Wodehouse several times, and I am always rereading him—usually more than one book at a time. This seems more necessary now than ever to maintain one’s sanity. As Evelyn Waugh predicted, “Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.” Thank heavens Wodehouse wrote nearly 100 novels and collections of short stories. Due to the condition of my memory, they always maintain an element of freshness and surprise. Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Mr. Mulliner, Lord Emsworth, his prize pig the Empress of Blandings, Psmith, and Gussie Fink-Nottle are my constant companions.

An autobiographical note: my great uncle, playwright William Anthony McGuire, worked with Wodehouse on Broadway. My uncle wrote the scripts and Wodehouse wrote the lyrics to some hit musicals produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, including The Three Musketeers and Rosalie. As a starving actor in New York City, I was often fed by my Great Aunt Lou, who really had some stories to tell. I forever regret that I didn’t ask her to arrange for me to go out to Long Island to meet Wodehouse.

Here are some samples of his genius. I have been rereading, probably for the fifth time, Uncle Dynamite, a lesser known but nonetheless equally delectable feast of sublime silliness in the Wodehouse oeuvre. In its opening pages, this dialogue takes place:

“How is Lady Ickenham?”
“Fine…she is taking a trip to the West Indies.”
“Jamaica?”
“No, she went of her own free will.”

One can only feel joy at such a sentence as this from Carry on, Jeeves: “He has an enormous bald head, all the hair which ought to be on it seeming to have run into his eyebrows…”

In “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest,” Wodehouse introduces twenty-five-year-old Motty by saying: “He had the same yellow hair as his mother, but he wore it plastered down and parted in the middle. His eyes bulged, too, but they weren’t bright. They were a dull grey with pink rims. His chin gave up the struggle about half-way down, and he didn’t appear to have any eyelashes.” In four sentences, you have the man standing before you.

From Bill the Conqueror: 

“The arrival of his Cousin Evelyn deepened Bill’s gloom. Even at the best of times she was hard to bear. A stout and voluminous woman in the early forties with eyes like blue poached eggs, she had never had the sense to discard the baby-talk which had so entertained the young men in her debutante days.”

“A warm breeze blew languidly from the west and the sun shone royally on a grateful world; so that even Wimbledon Common, though still retaining something of that brooding air which never completely leaves large spaces of public ground on which the proletariat may at any moment scatter paper bags, achieved quite a cheerful aspect…”

“It was the sort of garden from which snails, wandering in with a carefree nonchalance, withdrew abashed, blushing and walking backwards, realizing that they were on holy ground.”

In saving an upset Bertie Wooster from a disastrous engagement to the brainy Florence Craye, Jeeves explained why in Carry On, Jeeves: 

“…it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

From Full Moon: 

“Tipton removed his gaze from the cow. As a matter of fact, he had seen about as much of it as he wanted to see. A fine animal, but, as is so often the case with cows, not much happening.”

From Piccadilly Jim: 

“Men with new religions drank tea with women with new hats. Apostles of free love expounded their doctrines to persons who had been practicing them for years without realizing it.”

“Her face was not only shrewd and determined, it was menacing. She had thick eyebrows, from beneath which small glittering eyes look out like dangerous beasts in the undergrowth. And the impressive effect of these was accentuated by the fact, that while the left eye looked straight out at its object the right eye had a sort of roving commission and was now, while its colleague fixed Mrs. Pett with a gimlet stare, examining the ceiling.”

From The Luck of the Bodkins: 

“Mr. Llewellyn took the bulky envelope from her and opened it. As he perused its contents by the light of the library window, his lower jaw drifted slowly from its moorings, so that by the time he had finished his second chin had become wedged into the one beneath it.”

“Mr. Llewellyn’s physique was such as to make it impossible for him, whatever the provocation, to turn like a flash, but he turned as much like a flash as was in the power of a man whose waistline had disappeared in the year 1912.”

From Bertie Wooster Sees It Through: 

“He eyed me speculatively, heaving gently like a saucepan of porridge about to reach the height of its fever.”

“She was looking at me in an odd kind of way, as if at some child for whom, while conceding that it had water on the brain, she felt a fondness.”

“It was the last contingency I had been anticipating, and it caused my heart to leap like a salmon in the spawning season and become entangled with my front teeth.”

“Florence clapped a hand to her throat, a thing I didn’t know anybody ever did off the stage.”

“‘Well!’ she said, choking on the words like a Pekinese on a chump chop too large for its frail strength. After which, speech failing her, she merely stood and gargled.”

From Sunset at Blandings:

“She was an angular woman, and her bearing was so erect that one wondered why she did not fall over backwards. She had not actually swallowed some rigid object such as a poker, but she gave the impression of having done so…”

From The Heart of a Goof: 

“‘Alf Todd,’ said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, ‘has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat’s left ear with a red-hot needle.’”

From the short story, “Extricating Young Gussie,” in The Inimitable Jeeves:

“Aunt Julia is like a stage duchess. She always seems to me to be in a perpetual state of being about to desire the butler to instruct the head footman to serve lunch in the blue-room overlooking the west terrace. She exudes dignity.”

From Mike and Psmith:

“Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, ‘So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?’”

From Laughing Gas:

“She gave a sort of despairing gesture, like a vicar’s daughter who has discovered Erastianism in the village.”

“‘The fact of the whole matter is,’ said George, ‘Fred’s never been the same man since he was an extra in Lepers of Broadway.’”

From The Girl in Blue:

“His aspect was grave. He looked, as always, as if he had been carved from some durable form of wood by someone who was taking a correspondence course in sculpture and had just reached his third lesson.”

 From Pigs Have Wings:

“She choked, and a tear stole down her cheek. Jerry, seeing it, writhed with remorse. He realized how a good-hearted executioner at an Oriental court must feel after strangling an odalisque with a bowstring.”

“His [the butler’s] moon-like face was twisted with mental agony, his gooseberry eyes bulging from their sockets. Even such a man so faint, so spiritless, so dead, so dull in look, so woebegone, drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night and would have told him half his Troy was burned—or so it seemed to Penny, and she squeaked in amazement. Hers had been a sheltered life, and she’d never before seen a butler with the heebie-jeebies.”

From The Cat-nappers:

“He was a redheaded chap, and my experience of the redheaded is that you can always expect high blood pressure from them in times of stress. The first Queen Elizabeth had red hair, and look what she did to Mary Queen of Scots.”

“She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mudhole in a Burmese teak forest.”

“It was a little difficult to know what to say. I had never talked things over with a Communist before, and it came as something of a shock to find that he wasn’t so fond of the hard-up proletariat as I had supposed. I thought of advising him not to let the boys at the Kremlin hear him expressing such views, but I decided it was none of my business.”

From Joy in the Morning:

“Honoria Glossop was hearty, yes. Her laugh was like a steam-riveting machine, and from a child she had been a confirmed back-slapper. Madeleine Bassett was soppy, true. She had large, melting eyes and thought the stars were God’s daisy chain. These are great defects, but to do this revolting duo justice neither had tried to mold me, and that was what Florence Craye had done from the start, seeming to look on Bertram Wooster as a mere chunk of plasticine in the hands of the sculptor.”

From Summer Moonshine:

“He recalled now that Miss Gwenda Gray, star author on his list, was sailing for America today to add one more to the long role of English lecturers who have done so much to keep the depression going in that unfortunate country.”

From Bertie Wooster Sees It Through:

“Stilton, who was now a pretty vermilion, came partially out of the ether, uttering odd, strangled noises like a man with no roof to his mouth trying to recite ‘Gunga Din.’”

From Blandings Castle: 

“Presently, the cow’s audience-appeal began to wane. It was a fine cow, as cows go, but, like so many cows, it lacked sustained dramatic interest.”

“Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.”

There are also these delectable lines from the autobiographical Over Seventy, in which Wodehouse speaks of his butler:

“I was telling him what hell it was to get stuck half-way through a novel, and he was telling me of former employers of his and how the thing that sours butlers is having to stand behind their employer’s chair at dinner night after weary night and listen to the funny noise he makes when drinking soup. You serve the soup and stand back and clench your hands. ‘Now comes the funny noise,’ you say to yourself. Night after night after night. This explains what in my youth had always puzzled me, the universal gloom of butlers.”

Of his experiences in World War II, Wodehouse wrote: 

“Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me ‘How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there until the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.”

Not surprisingly, Wodehouse excelled at repartee. Told that Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays, he replied, “awfully decent of him.” My favorite Wodehouse quote was a consequence of a woman telling him that she preferred his work to Shakespeare’s. Wodehouse responded: “Shakespeare’s stuff is different from mine, which is not to say it is necessarily inferior.”

I close with a salute from a German friend to whom I introduced Wodehouse’s works with the result that he became addicted: 

“Wodehouse is the soufflé of the English language, a lightly whipped concoction of handcrafted perfection. P.G. Wodehouse is sunshine manifest in words; he shines directly on your soul and lifts it up. He is the Johann Strauss II of storytelling. He can’t be touched. He wrote only bangers.”