Comic genius

P.G. Wodehouse continues to hold sway over readers even 30 years after his death on Valentine’s Day in 1975. R.C. Rajamani on the phenomenon.

THE fans of P G Wodehouse can never forget Lord Emsworth of the Blandings Castle, nor Freddie Threepwodd, the happy-go-lucky uncle Fred. In Blandings Castle, Freddie Threepwood’s future father-in-law is telling Lord Emsworth that he is a millionaire, the owner of Donaldson’s dog biscuits and that he proposes to offer Freddie a steady and lucrative job in his firm.

"Lord Emsworth could conceive of no way in which Freddie could be of value to a dog-biscuit firm, except possibly as a taster," writes Wodehouse in his inimitable style.

PGspeak

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

Wodehouse is adept at the throwaway line, the joke inserted so casually, that its impact is felt a second late, writes Frances Donaldson, biographer of the comic genius, quoting the instance from Blandings Castle. According to Donaldson, Wodehouse had the most flexible, fresh and imaginative style.

Wodehouse fans abound the entire English-speaking world, be it Britain or Bharat, America or Australia, Canada or the Caribbean. According to them, there are only two types of people in the world. Those who read P. G. Wodehouse and others who don’t.

Wodehouse’s writing career spanned an incredible seven decades till his death at the age of 94 and his books still sell like hot cakes. Indicative of his popularity is the numerous reprints of his works being brought out in paperbacks by the Penguin.

He weaved magic with the creation of literary immortals such as Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, P. Smith, Lord Emsworth, Ukridge, Uncle Fred and an array of abominable aunts and goofy golfers. How Wodehouse is able to strike a chord in vast numbers in India, Central Africa and the Far-East who share no common culture and idiom with the characters in the books is really baffling. Possibly, it is because Wodehouse’s characters portray common human foibles and comedy of errors.

The list of Wodehouse fans is endless and what is amazing is that it continues to grow with each generation. What was the phenomenon in real life like?

"Our finest humorous writer projected the image of an amiable, unworldly recluse with just enough intelligence to open his mouth when he was hungry," writes Wodehouse biographer Barry Phelps.

However, in his book P. G. Wodehouse - Man and Myth, Phelps argues that Wodehouse was "acutely intelligent, a shrewd observer of people and events and was bullied by his wife just to the extent he wished and no more."

He was obsessed with money from the day his father announced that the family finances would not allow him to go to Oxford to the day he died a multi-millionaire.

Hilarie Belloc, the master prose writer and contemporary of Wodehouse, described Wodehouse as the "best writer of our time, the best living writer of English and the head of my profession."

Frances Donaldson, Wodehouse’s authorised biographer, writes that PG has been compared to Swift, to Rabelais, to the restoration dramatists, even to Shakespeare, and, among his contemporaries, to Max Beerbohm.

"Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He’ll continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.

He’s made a world for us to live in and delight in," wrote his contemporary and friend Evelyn Waugh. "What can one say about Wodehouse? He exhausts superlatives," according to Stephen Fry.

Born on October 15, 1881, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse traces his ancestry to Sir Betram Wodehouse, who fought for Edward II in his wars against the Scots between 1277 and 1283. Leaving for America before World War I, Wodehouse became a US Citizen in 1955. His enormous work has been translated into many languages.

Wodehouse was made a knight of the British Empire in the New Year’s honours list in 1975, shortly before his death. Although his reputation suffered cruelly after his wartime broadcasts from Germany, Wodehouse was later exonerated with even Sir Winston Churchill intervening on his behalf.

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