Dirda returns

There are a couple of books I am eagerly anticipating, although publication dates are uncertain. One is Alan Jacobs' biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. His Narnian, about C.S. Lewis, is my favorite book on CSL. The other is Michael Dirda's "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain." Dirda's "semi-retirement" was my biggest regret about subscribing to the Washington Post. Today, he returned as a guest columnist. He has been reading a lot, avoiding politics, and working on that book.

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors referenced in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025

When the world looks dark

Michael Dirda is just about the only reason I subscribed to The Washington Post and now he has retired. I do, however, have access to an archive of his columns and reviews. This was from just after the 2024 election:

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.

More personally — it was my birthday after all — I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to ....

The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.

The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. ....

Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March, John Williams’s Augustus, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian....

Michael Dirda, "Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2024.

Anglophilia

I've been enjoying reading Michael Dirda's old essays at The American Scholar, mainly because I enjoy so many of the books he likes. I just came across his "Anglophilia." If you were to visit my apartment, you would probably note that the posters and pictures on my walls are largely related to England, with some reference to other parts of the UK. So, also the books on my shelves. I am a bit of an Anglophile, although perhaps not of England as it actually exists now, or perhaps ever did. I enjoyed this:

.... I certainly spend enough time daydreaming about wax cotton jackets from Barbour, Harrods picnic hampers, box seats at the Grand National and the Henley Regatta, and pub lunches of shepherd’s pie and bitters, not to overlook pheasant hunting near Balmoral with my trusty Purdey shotgun, rainy Saturday afternoons at the Tate studying the Turners, cold evenings spent sipping single-malt Scotch whiskey, long autumn tramps through the Lake District or along the fells, and, of course, riotous weekends at Oxford or Chatsworth with Evelyn, Cyril, Paddy, and all the Mitford sisters (even Jessica). To me at least, it really does seem a crying shame that I never attended university at Cambridge or Edinburgh. As P.G. Wodehouse once said of Lord Ickenham, even now I retain the bright enthusiasms and the fresh, unspoiled mental outlook of a slightly inebriated undergraduate.

For the most part, though, my actual Anglophilia is restricted to a couple of Harris Tweed sport coats, some Turnbull & Asser dress shirts, and a Burberry raincoat—all of them acquired at Amvets Value Village. Sometimes I do watch aging VHS tapes of British television’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, less to guess the identity of the murderer than to look at the wonderful clothes and the idyllic Cotswoldian village of St. Mary Mead. My wife tells me I should check out Downton Abbey, but I gather that series might be almost too intense for my temperate nature.

In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy. ....

Michael Dirda, "Anglophilia," The American Scholar, June 1, 2012.

All part of a plan

On "The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse":

What runs through Wodehouse’s books like a seam of gold is the idea that everything will come right in the end. His stories are defined by an inexhaustible optimism that is not only comforting, but intelligent and thoughtful. Beneath the japes, scrapes, pig-stealing, and aunt-dodging, there’s a genuine attention to the texture of human existence.

The Jeeves stories, for instance, contemplate serious philosophical questions around human agency, fate, and the existence of free will. The joy of these stories is their predictability, and this is deliberate. No matter how difficult a fix Bertie gets into, the reader knows that the hidden hand of Jeeves will always be there, quietly directing events towards a satisfactory conclusion.

Bertie meanwhile remains oblivious, labouring under the delusion that he is free to decide the course of his life. This inevitably backfires. It’s often only at the end of each story that Bertie understands that his attempts at independent action have actually been part of a far grander plan envisioned by Jeeves. In this sense, the Jeeves stories are an allegory for real life: we go along believing we are masters of our own fate, but we do so unaware of the hidden forces directing our path. ....

It’d be obtuse to argue that P.G. Wodehouse should be remembered as a philosopher. He’d have no doubt thought that preposterous. But his reputation as a master of the English comic novel – though apt – obscures the brilliance of his writing. It should be remembered that although his books were comical, they were far from frivolous. They contain a resilient optimism that will comfort, cheer and entertain readers for generations. .... (more)

William Fear, "The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse," Engelsberg Ideas, July 22, 2024.

"I had assumed that what I was reading was what the authors had written"

More on "updated versions":

...[I]t simply didn’t cross my mind, as a normal book buyer, that publishers might in fact regard their authors’ texts as so much raw material, to amend at will. In my desperate sunny optimism, I had assumed that what I was reading was what the authors had written. I suppose we’ll have to abandon that premise now.

But it turns out that the expurgation is more pervasive than we thought: Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie have been amended to take account of current sensitivities too. As for John Buchan, the only chance he has of being left well alone is that Penguin simply hasn’t got round to reading his stuff. There’s a reference to, I think, ‘a dirty Jew’ in one of the Richard Hannay novels; as for Prester John, let’s just hope that Penguin doesn’t realise it’s one of theirs and still in print. In fact, by the time you’d removed all the offensive stuff in it, there wouldn’t be much left.

It’s come to something that, whenever you read older authors, you worry in case they fall into the wrong hands. GK Chesterton’s novels are littered with throwaway references to minstrels and blackface, which were – written as they were 100 years ago or so – intended without malice, but which would get short shrift in a modern edition. Yet that’s the thing about novels; they are of their time. And it’s precisely because they’re of their time that they’re interesting (emphasis added).

It was always one of the problems with Kindle that its texts were potentially amendable. But printed books had seemed a safer bet. Not now. ....

...[N]ow that we know that authors may be amended at will by publishers, especially those whose estates do not put up enough of a fight, there’s only one way to go: second hand. If you want to know that you’re actually reading what an author wrote, eschew modern editions, and seek out used copies of the work – I’d go back a decade or so. The books themselves will probably look nicer and be much cheaper. But the great thing is that you’ll be reading what the author intended, not what the publisher thinks you should be reading. There’s a difference. And if it means that the publishers concerned are that tiny bit less profitable, well, we can live with that too.

Melanie McDonagh, "The trouble with censoring Jeeves and Wooster," The Spectator, April 17, 2023.

"Outdated"

If you enjoy Wodehouse keep your hard copies. The "sensitivity readers" have been busy. From The Telegraph (UK):

Jeeves and Wooster books have been rewritten to remove prose by PG Wodehouse deemed “unacceptable” by publishers, the Telegraph can reveal.

Original passages in the comic novels have been purged or reworked for new editions issued by Penguin Random House.

Trigger warnings have also been added to revised editions telling would-be Wodehouse readers that his themes and characters may be “outdated”.

One warning states that the writer’s prose has been altered because it was judged to be “unacceptable” by Penguin, a publishing house which enlists the services of sensitivity readers.

The disclaimer printed on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank you, Jeeves states: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated.

“In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.” ....

The Telegraph can reveal that edits have also been made to the 2022 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves, which carries the same disclaimer warning the reader of outdated content, and stating that changes have been made to Wodehouse’s original text. ....

In Thank You, Jeeves, whose plot hinges on the performance of a minstrel troupe, numerous racial terms have been removed or altered, both in dialogue spoken by the characters in the book, and from first-person narration in the voice of Bertie. ....

It is understood that trustees of the writer's literary estate control the bulk of the copyrights for Wodehouse, who lived from 1881 to 1975, and became noted as a prolific author of more than 90 books, a body of work which is often hailed as the funniest in the English language.

More, from The Spectator: "The trouble with censoring Jeeves and Wooster"

Craig Simpson, "Jeeves and Wooster stories censored to avoid offending modern readers," The Telegraph, April 15, 2023.

A reprobate hero

George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series is surely one of the most entertaining ways to learn 19^th century history. This essay explains why, but also why it may be difficult to find the books on library shelves these days.

.... Flashman was born to Lady Alicia Paget and Henry Buckley Flashman MP. After he was expelled from Rugby School at the age of 17, he joined the 11th Hussars under James Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan, and was sent to Afghanistan, where he became one of the few Britons to make it back from Kabul during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42). He subsequently saw action in the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46), the Crimean War (1853–56), the Indian Rebellion (1857), the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the American Civil War (1861–65), the Second Franco-Mexican War (1861–67), and the Anglo-Zulu War (1879).

He knew or met nearly all the eminent Victorians, including Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, Chinese Gordon, Lord Palmerston, the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, and Queen Victoria herself. His romantic conquests were no less illustrious. Lola Montez, Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, and Daisy Greville, Edward VII’s mistress, all, at one time or another, shared Flashman’s bed (or he theirs). He was the only man to survive both the charge of the Light Brigade and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and he was (probably) the only man to sleep with both Lillie Langtry, the actress, and Yehonala, the last empress of China.

If you think that all sounds too extraordinary to be true, you’re right. ....

...[George MacDonald] Fraser insisted that he was merely the editor of Flashman’s memoirs, found in a tea chest during a country-house auction, and he provided footnotes and appendices to prove it. .... Fraser evoked the Victorian era so deftly that many reviewers of the first Flashman novel fell for the ruse, taking the character for a real man. One critic even declared that the pages were the greatest find since the discovery of James Boswell’s diaries.

It was a fitting mistake, for Flashman is a brilliant con artist, capable of pulling the wool over almost anyone’s eyes. ....

Flashman’s list of admirers is nearly as impressive as his list of lovers. Kingsley Amis, Christopher Hitchens, David Mamet, and Charlie Chaplin all confessed to being Flashy fans. P.G. Wodehouse rarely praised other novelists, but when Fraser’s name came up he gushed: “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman [novel].” The character’s appeal derives, in part, from his candor. Though Flashman lies to everyone around him, he never lies to his readers. ....

Fraser was just as good at portraiture. Flashman was his crown jewel, but there are plenty of other gems in the series: the hero’s airheaded wife Elspeth; his cantankerous father-in-law, John Morrison; and John Charity Spring, the half-mad classicist who shanghaies Flashman aboard the Balliol College. Some of the most vivid people we meet are actual historical figures like Lord Cardigan, of Light Brigade fame, and John Brown, the abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry helped precipitate the American Civil War. The most delightful of all is almost certainly the congressman from Illinois, whom Flashman first encounters at a Washington soirée in 1848: “I liked Abe Lincoln from the moment I first noticed him, leaning back in his chair with that hidden smile at the back of his eyes, gently cracking his knuckles.” .... (much more)

I've posted about the Flashman books before, here and here. If you wish to follow Flashman's career chronologically, there is a helpful chart at the foot of this post.

Graham Daseler, "A Jolly Good Scoundrel," Quillette, March 17, 2023.

"Had circumstances been different..."

Selected quotations from Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit:

• 
  As I presented myself, she gave the moustache a swift glance, but apart from starting like a nymph surprised while bathing and muttering something about ‘Was this the face that stopped a thousand clocks?’ made no comment.
• He gave me a long, reproachful look, similar in its essentials to that which a black beetle gives a cook when the latter is sprinkling insect powder on it.
• ‘Then I’m all for it,’ said Aunt Dahlia, making for the door. Her face was grim and set. She might have been a marquise about to hop into the tumbril at the time when there was all that unpleasantness over in France.
• I spread the hands in a dignified gesture, upsetting the coffee pot, which was fortunately empty.
• It is at moments like this that you catch Bertram Wooster at his superb best, his ice-cold brain working like a machine.
• ‘Oh, Bertie, if I ever called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some good lunatic asylum, I take back the words.’ I thanked her briefly.
• Had circumstances been different from what they were – not, of course, that they ever are…
• [Bertie] ‘If I am to stave off the Cheesewright challenge, I shall have need of a weapon. His strength is as the strength of ten, and unarmed I should be corn before his sickle.’ [Jeeves] ‘Extremely well put, sir, if I may say so, and your diagnosis of the situation is perfectly accurate. Mr Cheesewright’s robustness would enable him to crush you like a fly.’ [Bertie] ‘Exactly.’ [Jeeves] ‘He would obliterate you with a single blow. He would break you in two with his bare hands. He would tear you limb from limb.’ I frowned slightly. I was glad to see that he appreciated the gravity of the situation, but these crude physical details seemed to me uncalled for.

Leigh Turner, "Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: 20 delicious quotations," May 12, 2018.

Nice!

From The Spectator:

.... Nice, as in “a nice cup of tea,” was a word loathed by my schoolmistresses, like got. Their cue may have been Jane Austen. “This is a very nice day,” remarked Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, “and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! — it does for everything.” Yet the oddest thing about nice was its change of meaning from “ignorant, foolish” to a bundle of senses bigger than Jane Austen suggested. For nice in English came from the classical Latin nescius, which spawned words in Romance language such as necio in Spanish meaning “blockhead.”

More surprising than nice in the sense of “pleasant” being applicable to days, walks or ladies, were its concurrent quite contrasting meanings. “It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” said the Duke of Wellington to Thomas Creevey about the Battle of Waterloo. ....

It could mean “punctilious in conduct,” too, as it still did when P.G. Wodehouse’s hero declared: “Bertram Wooster in his dealings with the opposite sex invariably shows himself a man of the nicest chivalry.” ....

In that year of 1598, John Florio in his English-Italian dictionary A Worlde of Wordes exemplified nice in the phrase “an effeminate, nice, milkesop, puling fellow.” Robert Cawdrey in his English dictionary A Table Alphabeticall (1604) listed nice as “slow, laysie.” In marshaling such different meanings simultaneously, English speakers exercised a nice judgment.

Dot Wordsworth "The not-so-sweet roots of ‘nice’," The Spectator, August, 2022.

A person of no account

Alan Jacobs has been reading Right Ho, Jeeves. At Snakes & Ladders today he quotes W.H. Auden on Bertie Wooster:

If [Bertie] has no vices it is because his desires are too vague and too fleeting for him to settle down to one. Hardly a week passes without Bertie Wooster thinking he has at last met The Girl; for a week he imagines he is her Tristan, but the next week he has forgotten her as completely as Don Giovanni forgets; besides, nothing ever happens. It is nowhere suggested that he owned a watch or that, if he did, he could tell the time by it. By any worldly moral standard he is a footler whose existence is of no importance to anybody. Yet it is Bertie Wooster who has the incomparable Jeeves for his servant. Jeeves could any day find a richer master or a place with less arduous duties, yet it is Bertie Wooster whom he chooses to serve. […]

The Quest Hero often encounters an old beggar or an animal who offers him advice: if, too proud to imagine that such an apparently inferior creature could have anything to tell him, he ignores the advice, it has fatal consequences; if he is humble enough to listen and obey, then, thanks to their help, he achieves his goal. But, however humble he may be, he still has the dream of becoming a hero; he may be humble enough to take advice from what seem to be his inferiors, but he is convinced that, potentially, he is a superior person, a prince-to-be. Bertie Wooster, on the other hand, not only knows that he is a person of no account, but also never expects to become anything else; till his dying day he will remain, he knows, a footler who requires a nanny; yet, at the same time, he is totally without envy of others who are or may become of some account. He has, in fact, that rarest of virtues, humility, and so he is blessed: it is he and no other who has for his servant the godlike Jeeves.

— All the other great men of the age are simply in the crowd, watching you go by.
— Thank you very much, sir. I endeavor to give satisfaction.

So speaks comically – and in what other mode than the comic could it on earth truthfully speak? – the voice of Agape, of Holy Love.

Alan Jacobs, "Getting Back to Business," Snakes & Ladders, May 23, 2022.

Delightful and restorative

The "Fans of P.G. Wodehouse" site on Facebook quotes from an interview with Alan Jacobs:

Whenever I get to the end of a semester where I’ve been teaching a lot of heavy stuff, I can’t wait to sit down and read something that’s light-hearted and that doesn’t make the same kind of demands on me. The first thing I do at the end of a semester is read a P.G. Wodehouse novel because I know that it’s going to be absolutely delightful and restorative.

The Tranquility and Wisdom of Old Books: Alan Jacobs talks with Plough’s Joy Clarkson about his book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind.

"The only real and abiding pleasure..."

A quotation from Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse:

Among the compensations of advancing age is a wholesome pessimism, which, though it takes the fine edge off of whatever triumphs may come to us, has the admirable effect of preventing Fate from working off on us any of those gold bricks, coins with strings attached, and unhatched chickens, at which ardent youth snatches with such enthusiasm, to its subsequent disappointment. As we emerge from the twenties we grow into a habit of mind that looks askance at Fate bearing gifts. We miss, perhaps, the occasional prize, but we also avoid leaping light-heartedly into traps.

As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.

Gussie Fink-Nottle

The Spectator (UK) provides "Books to cheer you up," among which Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse:

Any list like this simply has to have a novel by the great comic writer PG Wodehouse. Of the dozens that could be included, I think that Right Ho, Jeeves makes the cut simply because of Wodehouse’s greatest-ever comic set-piece, when Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle is called upon to present the prizes at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Unfortunately, Gussie – a lifelong teetotaller and newt-fancier – has become extremely drunk. Over the next pages, Wodehouse depicts a farcical situation with marvellous economy and wit, where every single line and sentence brings some new and unexpected joy, and Bertie’s narration becomes increasingly panicked. It must be read, and savoured, with great attention, but sometimes it’s hard to concentrate when the tears of laughter are rolling down your face.

The television adaptation of that particular scene: https://youtu.be/DoNBVEj3650

The Spectator, "Books to Cheer You Up"

Lists

This is the time of year when various publications ask their contributors to list the best books they've read in the past twelve months. I enjoyed reading the contributions here, among which, a few of the books I know and like:

Much Obliged, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse. Never was such beautiful English prose expended on such seemingly inconsequential stories as in the works of P.G. Wodehouse. And yet the reader of depth and sensitivity will discover that there are treasures to be discovered in the bromidic adventures of Bertie Wooster: joy, the interplay of order and disorder, the last vestiges of a truly Christian culture, and self-sacrificial loyalty to one’s family and friends. Much Obliged, Jeeves is not my favorite Jeeves novel, but it was still a delight to read.

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis. This defense of objective truth, particularly in the form of Natural Law and universal human values, showcases Lewis’ gift for condensing a tremendous amount of learning and philosophical insight into succinct and accessible prose. Much of this brief volume defends the notion of reality as received rather than something man shapes by means of science, technology, or social convention.

The Hornblower Series – CS Forester. Never could I have believed that I could get so obsessed with a story about a young seafarer’s adventures on the high seas, but I have got completely hooked on this series, which tells the tale of a young midshipman who joins the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and rises through the ranks, facing adventure, love, companionship and peril at every turn. Compulsive reading and perfect escapism during this most trying of years.

The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries, by Dorothy Sayers. I read Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, Strong Poison, Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase, Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon. For complex plots, delightful prose, and charming leads, Sayers is hard to beat.

Out of a Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis. I started these novels in order to think about what an unfallen race might look like, especially what unfallen sex might look like. Out of a Silent Planet is rather profound, and Augustinian, on this question. The stories are alternatively riveting and theologically satisfying.

Books in a time of plague

About books that can help reduce stress:

...[Re]-reading our old favourite books can be comforting when life feels uncertain: “When you’re looking for something easy and digestible, reading a book you have already read can help because you know the scenarios – you don’t have to invest in learning new characters, or situations. This sense of nostalgia makes us feel safe.” While book genres are entirely a matter of personal preference, Chambers says that thrillers and adventure stories are good options to tuck into during the pandemic, because they "take the reader on a journey" outside of the one they are already living through. ....

“Reading lowers our cortisol levels, blood pressure and heart rate, by anchoring us in the present. Some books are so melodic that they trigger the flow state, which is where we are completely engaged in a mindful activity to the point where we start to lose sensation of time,” says Chambers. ....

...[W]hen an adult reads to a child, or (vice versa) there's usually physical contact and cuddling happening: “Biologically, this causes a flooding of oxytocin (the bonding hormone), which makes us feel good, and its presence in the bloodstream has been linked to lower rates of depression, anxiety and stress. In a world where both children and adults are more anxious than ever, this is crucial for mental wellbeing.” ....

One of their recommendations for reducing stress was P.G. Wodehouse. That's a fine suggestion. I might choose Manning Coles or John Buchan for re-reading.

The science of a good bedtime read – and the books that will help you sleep more soundly

Wodehouse again

Another appreciation of Wodehouse:

Some authors may want to expose the world’s injustices, or elevate us with their psychological insights. Wodehouse, in his words, preferred to spread “sweetness and light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a flutter on the choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk us far away from our worries. Writing about being a humourist in his autobiography Over Seventy, Wodehouse quoted two people in the Talmud who had earnt their place in Heaven: “We are merrymakers. When we see a person who is downhearted, we cheer him up.” ....

“What Wodehouse writes is pure word music,” said Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. “It matters not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme of pig kidnappings, lofty butlers, and ludicrous impostures. He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.” ....

Whatever was going on in his life, Wodehouse stayed buoyant; and whatever is going on in the reader’s life, he keeps us buoyant, too. “I was clinically depressed for most of 1999,” said Jay McInerney, the author of Bright Lights, Big City in a 2016 interview “and I would turn to Wodehouse, possibly the funniest writer in the English language. It seemed to be more effective at warding off despair than the antidepressants that I was taking.” .... (more)

The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written - BBC Culture

"The book made me laugh out loud"

In my library

From "Laugh Out Loud with P.G. Wodehouse":

What is it about Wodehouse that makes so many lifelong enthusiasts of his readers? The world described in his novels and stories—at English country houses, in the clubs of London, on New York’s Broadway—seems to come to us from an early 1920s time capsule, even though the majority of his books were written later than that. His tales always bring the reader to a kind of happy ending, and along the way display no malice whatsoever, even for characters who might deserve to be despised (such as the fascist Roderick Spode). There are no murders, no situations truly fraught with tragedy or grave danger. ....

Perhaps it is Wodehouse’s attention to meticulous plotting. We know in advance, for instance, that the very appealing young man and woman will be together at the end, but the author can still surprise you with unexpected—and hilarious—situations before we get there. When it comes to his many love stories, Wodehouse is the twentieth century’s Jane Austen—girl meets boy, initial disregard turns to something else, wedding bells are finally heard—but armed with a squirting bouttonière.

Or perhaps it is Wodehouse’s perfect mastery of English prose. None of his sentences ever goes awry, though they can be as long and intricate as those in the epistles of St. Paul. Wodehouse’s English is always formally correct, yet it is sprinkled liberally with slang, odd idiomatic expressions, effortless literary allusions, and sudden punch lines that hit you between the eyes.

And then there are his characters. The inimitable Psmith (“the P is silent”), the roguish Ukridge, the indefatigable storyteller Mr. Mulliner, the puttering old pig farmer the Earl of Emsworth. And of course the perfectly amiable twit Bertie Wooster, his priceless brace of aunts (Dahlia, good, and Agatha, bad, but both formidable), his would-be fiancée, the fearsome Honoria Glossop, and his omniscient gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves. Most Wodehouse fans find their way in via the first-person tales of Bertie. I recommend The Code of the Woosters (1938), which begins with the best description ever written of the experience of a hangover, or Joy in the Morning (1946), published in the U.S. as Jeeves in the Morning. ....

One learns after a while that when one begins a Wodehouse story, satisfaction is guaranteed. Like a fresh whisky and soda, his work promises an easing of the tensions of daily life, an invitation to merriment, and a quiet contentment that in the end all will be well. (more)

Isolation Bookshelf: Laugh Out Loud with P.G. Wodehouse - Public Discourse

Personal libraries

"National Review asked some writers and collectors to describe their personal libraries." Excerpts from some of the responses:

Some of my books

Joseph Epstein: On two separate occasions I radically cut back my personal library, lest it take over my apartment. Each time, like the detached tail of the iguana, it grew back. No matter my efforts at literary population control, my books seemed relentlessly to multiply. ....

Micah Mattix: I can’t remember when I first started keeping books. I was not an insatiable reader growing up, but I held on to my Narnia and Hardy Boys for a while — I can see them now on the inset shelf in my childhood bedroom — until I either gave them away or lost them. Of Mice and Men was an early favorite, but my original copy of that is gone, too.

I suppose I first started consciously collecting books my first or second year in college, when I decided not to sell back my course texts at the end of the semester. ....

Otto Penzler: .... I quickly concede that the books I chose to collect are relatively frivolous, but mystery fiction has produced extraordinarily poetic prose while turning a spotlight on the world as it was when the works were published. ....

I started to collect right after college, so it adds up to 55 years of what soon became obsessive behavior. I’d read virtually no detective stories as a youngster but at 20 started with The Complete Sherlock Holmes (which should be required reading in every high school in America), and then moved on to the puzzles designed by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and their devious compatriots. When introduced to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, I realized that there were crime writers who deserved to be taken seriously as literary figures. ....

Terry Teachout: Because I keep books that I find rereadable, I usually own several books per author. One shelf is devoted to M.F.K. Fisher, John P. Marquand, and Anthony Powell, while another bulges with Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm. My literary taste is moderately Anglophilic: Kingsley Amis, Somerset Maugham, Barbara Pym, and P.G. Wodehouse all take up plenty of space on the shelves.... (more, possibly behind a paywall)

National Review's Personal Libraries

Wodehouse in the Poets' Corner

From the London Times, October 13, 2018, "Wodehouse at Westminster Abbey":

“About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.”

Bertie Wooster’s first impressions (in The Code of the Woosters, 1937) of Roderick Spode, founder of the fascist Black Shorts movement, remain a matchless send-up of the vaulting ambition and attenuated intellectual powers of would-be dictators. Yet PG Wodehouse, creator of Bertie and his brilliant manservant Jeeves, was later inadvertently caught up in a wartime controversy that sullied his public reputation and drove him to voluntary exile in the United States. It was unfair, but the blow to Wodehouse is now at last being partially redressed. This peerless comic writer is to be justly immortalised close to his heroes in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Wodehouse, then aged 58 and living in France, was incarcerated by the Nazis as an “enemy alien” in 1940. Politically naive and out of touch with British public opinion, he agreed to do a humorous broadcast on German radio in 1941 about this experience.

It was a crass and stupid decision, but it was not, contrary to allegations that dogged Wodehouse till his death in 1975, an act of treachery. As George Orwell bravely wrote in 1945: “I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse – just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age – became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed.”

Officially, at last, it is. Wodehouse is a great figure of English letters and eminently deserves his place near Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley. Rehab was never sweeter.

Kevin DeYoung on Wodehouse, and Joseph Epstein on the same.

Wodehouse at Westminster Abbey

Heist

At CrimeReads a list of ten novels about elaborate criminal plots. A few of those I've read (the films were really good, too):

Elmore Leonard, Out of Sight

...[I]mperturbably cool bank robber Jack Foley escapes from prison, but ends up locked in a trunk with Federal Marshal Karen Sisco. Leonard’s great ear for dialogue and deep sense of place and time give his books a unique feeling: the character-driven caper novel, in which, much like life, all our plans and plots confound and complicate each other in seemingly random ways. But like a pool hustler pulling off a sweet trick, all the balls ricochet off of each other and fall, elegantly, into perfect place.

Jim Thompson, The Getaway

Here the heist novel becomes a journey to the heart of noir darkness, as the classic pulp artist spins the tale of ace bank robber Doc McCoy and his wife Carol. Their path, from jail to job to a run for the border, is littered with double-crosses and betrayals, and ends in a symbolic hell where, inevitably, those who live by crime and deceit are doomed to devour each other. Also made into the awesome Steve McQueen/Ali McGraw movie by the equally great and grim Sam Peckinpah.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

A bit of a curveball, I know, or better yet a screwball, but farce shares a lot with the heist story: a plan is concocted to achieve some goal and immediately goes wrong, necessitating a new plan and so on, into glorious delirium. Bertie and his gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves are constantly conspiring to steal or retrieve treasured objects—in this case a coveted silver cow creamer—and their schemes involve all manner of disguises, impersonations, and climbing over walls and into windows while evading the cops, though the stakes, and the body count, are admittedly quite a bit lower. Read this as a refreshing break between the others, and meet the Maestro. There is no one better.

Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed

I decided to end with this because it is both an interesting take on the form and exactly the kind of thrilling, suspenseful, high-spirited adventure that drew me to the caper book in the first place. Set during WWII, it concerns a German plot to, get this, kidnap Winston Churchill. The outlandishness of that scheme is only the beginning, but the intricate plan, the twists, crises, and daring solutions are expertly woven into real history—just the thing to capture the imagination of the fourteen-year-old in us all.

The Art of the Heist | CrimeReads