The year that is about to end also marks half a century of the demise of twentieth century’s greatest comic prose writer and master stylist Sir Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse. He had authored around a hundred books and plays – a good number of which I have had the occasion to read. My debt to Wodehouse is immense – he has not only given me unalloyed joy but also made me realise the magic that prose (not just poetry) can weave and its potential to create fathomless wit and humour in ways I have seldom come across in works of any other writer.
At the end of this short essay I will give a list of 45 Wodehouse works (novels and short-story collections) which I feel are among his very best creations.
I have seen that those who like Wodehouse adore him, even worship him. He has drawn a great and varied range of admirers – Jawaharlal Nehru, who as Prime Minister spent half an hour with a young civil servant (who he came to know was a Wodehouse fan) discussing the author or Satyajit Ray (who on Wodehouse’s demise remarked to his wife Bijoya, “There will not be another Wodehouse” (recorded in Bijoya Ray’s 600 page memoir on her husband ‘Manik and I’).
Shashi Tharoor worships him perhaps like none else. Hooked by the master at the age of eleven, Tharoor when once asked his favourite ten books named nine and said any one book by Wodehouse – this reminds me of the story of a cricket literature enthusiast asking a connoisseur of ten best cricket book recommendations and was given two names and the succinct suggestion of ‘any eight by Neville Cardus.’ Tharoor had penned a letter to Wodehouse which he never posted as he kept on polishing thinking that it should be perfect before sending to the master till one day in 1975 he heard on radio of the latter’s demise. When once asked whether he had attempted to write in Wodehousian style, he honestly admitted that he had but could not go beyond 200 words – ‘You can’t write like him’ was his studied conclusion.
The first naturalised Indian citizen, Verrier Elwin, who arrived in India armed with an Oxford degree, serving first as a Christian missionary and later after marrying a girl from the Baiga tribe, and making home in deep forests in the present-day Dindori district in Madhya Pradesh, still savoured his Wodehouse. There is an account when a cow or a buffalo entered his hut, disarranged his books, but perhaps having a special taste for Wodehouse – leaving everything else it – chose to have a quick bite at one of the master’s works.
There are two quite extraordinary persons which I wish to mention because in a way their life-views could be seen to be almost opposite. First is Christopher Hitchens, the stalwart of the New Atheist Movement, who along with his peers like Richard Dawkins, had made his mission to dismantle the idea of God and Religion and the other is the world’s finest present-day expounder of Vedanta philosophy – the Ramakrishna Order monk – Swami Sarvapriyananda. The Swami had been so fond of Wodehouse that even after taking up the life of a monk, he snatched some time from his rigorous schedule of studies in Vedanta texts (the elucidation of which have made him such a distinguished figure) to savour the world created by Wodehouse. I am almost certain that Swami Vivekananda who was naturally disposed to wit (and an adept practitioner of the same himself) would have been immensely fond of Wodehouse. The great Swami was known to have read Dickens’s first and perhaps wittiest work ‘The Pickwick Papers’ more than once and had it committed to his memory – he used to laugh aloud while reading or recalling some of its passages.
Wodehouse made his authorial debut in 1902, when he was 21, and kept writing for the next seven decades. In this long innings, he created not only multiple characters but also multiple worlds. Most Wodehouse-knowing people I have come across have read only Wooster-Jeeves series. But he wrote only 11 Jeeves novels (and out of that too in one, ‘Ring for Jeeves’, Bertie Wooster is absent.) He created an equally fascinating universe of the ‘Blandings Castle’ which too has eleven novels. The Castle is the universe for some remarkably well-chiselled characters like the charmingly absent-minded Lord Emsworth, his authoritative sister Lady Constance, their supremely maverick brother Galahad, and the Empress of Blandings (a pig that is centre of Lord Emsworth’s attention and adorations.)
Wodehouse also created other unforgettable characters like Uncle Fred who, much like that of Galahad of Blandings, would cause alarm and exasperation to many and at the same time served as an angel-like saviour to some, the suave Psmith who in addition to a few lesser works, appears in one of the most famous Wodehouse novels – ‘Leave it to Psmith’ – with Blandings Castle as the setting. Then there was the raconteur of outlandish plots, Mr. Mulliner, who was the narrator in several short stories, monopolising the conversation at his club, the Angler’s Rest, on almost any topic and not stopping till he had finished his tale. I have often thought that Satyajit Ray was inspired by the character of Mr. Mulliner when he created ‘Tarini Khuro’ (Uncle Tarini) who too regaled his audience constituting of young children with bizarre but spellbinding tales. Then there was an unnamed character, only referred to as the Oldest Member, who narrates many of Wodehouse’s golf stories. The Oldest Member had an endless stock of quirky stories with golf figuring prominently in them – he seemed to have spent his entire life at the golf club.
Besides, Wodehouse wrote other countless supremely fine works – many of which can match the best set in the world of Wooster-Jeeves or Blandings.
In most of his works, several Wodehousian characters often engage in unimaginably absurd actions (one would often find oneself laughing aloud at such instances which his works are full of) and hence in reading any Wodehouse work, the cardinal rule is what the poet-theorist Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the ‘Suspension of disbelief.’ Wodehouse, the master wordsmith, spins such humour sentence after sentence that if one comes across a rare plain sentence one would read it twice – thinking that something has been missed. It is much like the case of a batsman being beaten by a rare straight delivery on a pitch where every ball is turning square.
As I mentioned, the Wodehouse corpus goes much beyond Wooster Jeeves but one singular characteristic of that series is that in them Wodehouse, who otherwise in rest of his works is mostly the chronicler-narrator, here assumes a completely different narratorial voice in form of Bertie Wooster which has its own idiolect and signature style.
The name Jeeves of course has for long become synonymous with a valet and now is also included even in some dictionaries as a generic term, much like the term ‘malapropism’ derived from the character of Mrs. Malaprop in an eighteenth century play. That his master Bertie Wooster would turn to his brilliant valet Jeeves for every problem he got enmeshed in, knowing only Jeeves can save him, explains the name of once popular website AskJeeves from where, it is claimed, one gets answers to all their queries.
The works of Wodehouse has not even lent special traits to characters who appear but also to several locations. Who among Wodehouse fans does not remember the Drones Club, the Pelicans Club, or the Emsworth Arms!
In the world he creates, Wodehouse often mocks the idle rich in his own characteristic style. He mostly portrays them as frightfully dumb and signals how the old landed gentry of England are finding themselves at their wits’ end to come to terms with the changing times. But the Wodehousian social criticism is in no way caustic. He mocks them but not without empathy and tenderness. You seldom come across a Wodehouse character who is unpleasant or capable of causing any degree of loathing (in fact in the few works where this has happened Wodehouse has failed – say the 1920 novel ‘Coming of Bill’ or even the 1917 ‘Psmith – the Journalist’ despite Psmith as the protagonist.)
At the same time his working class characters are often portrayed as being much brighter than their masters / employers – Jeeves of course is the paragon, but one could also think of Rupert Baxter, the ‘efficient’ Secretary and Beach, the Butler, from the Blandings Castle. His working class female characters are even more remarkable and are often the chief protagonists of his novels. They are shown as highly self-respecting, enterprising and having a strong moral fibre. The heroine of the 1916 novel ‘Uneasy Money’ is perhaps the finest such example and the ending of this work shows Wodehouse as a master in exploring complex psychological and emotional nuances. Sally, the protagonist of the 1922 work ‘The Adventures of Sally’, is an adorable character – endowed with rich empathy, feminine grace, and spontaneous orientation towards helping others. These characters, often young females, display a spirit of being unvanquished, and at the end are able to hold their own in a world where odds are heavily stacked against them.
The readership of Wodehosue in the present generation, in India at any rate, and perhaps even in the Anglo-Saxon world has significantly declined. In my recent visit to a bookstore in Calcutta (which I regard as the finest in the country) I, after inquiry, found to my utter dismay less than half a dozen Wodehouse titles on their shelves. In any case this generation is reading far too lesser books (of fiction in any particular) than their counterparts in the twentieth century. I would earnestly urge youngsters (or any others for that matter) to try any single book out of the different categories in which I am listing my recommendations below and judge for themselves. I made one young boy, who is extremely well read but had never read a Wodehouse, read one, and his response after finishing it was “Surely not all his works can be as brilliant.” I can even assure that that reading Wodehouse will sharpen the ways they employ the English language – particularly using smart wit – never caustic and invariably pleasant. In this age, when we keep projecting our self-opinionated selves in loud, acerbic and belligerent ways, God knows we can do with a bit of sweet and agreeable humour to present our views.
I often think of Wodehouse’s position in the world of literature similar to that of Alfred Hitchcock in cinema. During his lifetime Hitchcock was acknowledged as the master of suspense, a craftsman par excellence, but there were misgivings about his stature as an artist. It was largely because he made film after film in the same genre which was not considered ‘serious enough’ in subject. Satyajit Ray, in his essay collection ‘Our Films, their Films’ questions whether Hitchcock could be taken as a serious artist not only because his oeuvre was restricted to one particularly genre but also because he was not found to be exploring great complexities of human condition and the world, in the way other great film auteurs had been doing. Admittedly, Wodehouse’s corpus of work too is largely limited to the genre of comical farces, but some of his works can match any other examples of great fiction.
Hitchcock had made ‘Vertigo’ in 1958 and had expected not just commercial success but even critical artistic acclaim for that work. The film was dismissed by the critics as another ‘Hitch-Cock and Bull’ film. Five decades later ‘Vertigo’ topped the ‘list of greatest films ever made’, in the highly reputed, once in a decade, survey by the British Film Institute journal ‘Sight and Sound’ – it ranks second in the latest 2022 survey. Perhaps some works of P.G. Wodehouse will also be seen in future as possessing much greater literary merit than noticed by the critics of the day.
Now on to my recommendations :
Blandings Castle Series
This series startes from 1915.
- Something Fresh.
- Leave it to Psmith.
- Summer Lightening.
- Full Moon.
- Pigs have wings.
- A Pelican at Blandings.
- Galahad at Blandings.
- Heavy Weather.
Uncle Fred
The first Uncle Fred novel appeared in 1936.
- Uncle Dynamite.
- Uncle Fred in Spring time. (Set at Blandings Castle)
- Service with a Smile (set at Blandings Castle)
- Cocktail Time.
Wooster and Jeeves
The first Jeeves novel appeared in 1934 though several short story collections had appeared before that.
- Thank You, Jeeves.
- Right Ho, Jeeves.
- The Code of the Woosters.
- Joy in the Morning.
- Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit.
- Jeeves in the Offing.
- Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.
- Much Obliged, Jeeves.
Other works
- Uneasy Money.
- Piccadilly Jim.
- A Damsel in distress.
- The Girl on the boat.
- Adventures of Sally.
- Sam the Sudden.
- Small Bachelor.
- Money for nothing.
- Big Money.
- Hot Water
- Luck of the Bodkins.
- Laughing Gas.
- Summer Moonshine.
Short Story Collections
- My Man Jeeves.
- The Inevitable Jeeves.
- Carry On, Jeeves.
- Very Good Jeeves.
- Meet Mr. Mulliner.
- Mr. Mulliner Speaks.
- Mulliner Nights
- The Clicking of Cuthbert.
- Blandings Castle and Elsewhere.
- Lord Emsworth and others.
Anthologies
- Wodehouse on Cricket.
- Wodehouse – The Golf Omnibus.
Vinayak Lohani
25th December, ’25.
Vinayaklohani.in