Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. P.G. Wodehouse. Plum. However you say his name he figures high on my personal list of heroes. He died in 1975 at the ripe old age of 93. Right up to the end he wrote nearly every day.
His first piece of prose was published in 1900 when he was a schoolboy at Dulwich College in south London. By the end of his life there were 96 books and hundreds of short stories, translated into many languages and sold in the tens of millions. Much of his work is still in print. He also wrote or collaborated on 16 stage plays, created some or all of the lyrics for 28 musical comedies and, for a time, wrote regular contributions for Punch magazine. And he worked on six Hollywood film scripts.
To say that his output is incredible might, for once, be a correct application of that hideously abused word. It really is barely credible. And, of course, the output is consistently funny.
How did he do it? In papers made available to the author of a 1992 biography of Wodehouse1, the headmaster of a British public school (a British public school is, of course, a private school. Got it?) opined that:
Wodehouse was the end of the line. Never again would any writer have the solid grounding in the classics that Wodehouse had, unmarred by radio and television. He felt that the combination of the classics background, the printed word as the only medium of communication and Wodehouse’s own temperament and omnivorous reading produced an almost Shakespearean range of language that we shall never see again.
Well, maybe, maybe not. But do you think Gen AI might eventually be able to get it’s headless brain around around something like this …
Introduced to his child in the nursing home, he recoiled with a startled ‘Oi!’ and as the days went by the feeling that he had run up against something red-hot in no way diminished. The only thing that prevented a father’s love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg.2
If you have not yet ventured into the world of Plum, I suggest a good place to start is with Right Ho, Jeeves. In it, Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at the Grammar School, Market Snodbury. Bertie Wooster relates the story:
The Grammar School at Market Snodbury had, I understood, been built somewhere in the year 1416, and, as with so many of these ancient foundations, there still seemed to brood over its Great Hall, where the afternoon’s festivities were to take place, not a little of the fug of the centuries. It was the hottest day of the summer, and though someone had opened a tentative window or two, the atmosphere remained distinctive and individual.
In this hall the youth of Market Snodbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and langorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and boiled beef and carrots.3
Then, before getting on to Gussie’s hilarious speech, Bertie mentions that Aunt Dahlia is in the hall. Wodehouse is wonderful on aunts:
Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.4
There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative, and Aunt Dahlia whizzed in.5
Aunt Agatha’s demeanour now was rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.6
The sort of house you take a look at and say to yourself, ‘Somebody’s aunt lives there.’7
When the insanity of the world gets you down, reach for a Wodehouse. His insanity is an assured cure.
Thanks for reading.
Image at the top: Shutterstock
Phelps, Barry. P.G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth (1992)
Wodehouse, P.G. Eggs, Bacon and Crumpets (1940)
Wodehouse, P.G. Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)
Wodehouse, P.G. The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)
Wodehouse, P.G. Ibid.
Wodehouse, P.G. Ibid.
Wodehouse, P.G. Carry on, Jeeves (1925)