September 13, 2007
Wodehousiana Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:30 PM EST The admirable website Arts and Letters Daily, which sometimes links to AmericanHeritage.com, comprises columns of links. The extreme right column contains links to “Essays and Opinion”; to that column’s left are links to reviews (“New Books”); one more column to the left are links to “Articles of Note”; and on the extreme left are a series of columns, one atop another. Many of them are links to the front pages of newspapers, magazines or blogs, but near the top there is also a column titled “Note Bene,” which usually links to more whimsical pieces. The top of the “Note Bene” column is now occupied by a piece described as “Wodehouse Types”, and if you follow the link you arrive at a meditation on a recent Daily Telegraph obituary of Lord Michael Pratt, a gentleman described by the Telegraph as “one of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London’s clubland,” with the assertion that “he will also be remembered as an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale.” The piece goes on to note that “The epithet ‘Wodehousian’ is raising eyebrows, in this online newsgroup and perhaps in the more literary corners of clubland itself.” The eyebrows are raised because some seem to think that Lord Michael Pratt was too unpleasant a character to make his way into a Wodehouse novel. Anthony Gottlieb, author of the piece, demurs, pointing out that Wodehouse managed, among sketches of other fairly nasty characters, a pretty effective parody of the British fascist Oswald Mosley (Wodehouse’s Mosley figure is named Roderick Spode). P. G. Wodehouse, who lived 93 years and published 96 books, is probably best remembered for creating the character (and brilliant first-person narrative voice) of Bertie Wooster, the quintessential British upper-class twit, who is repeatedly saved from comic disasters—often marriage to a beautiful but maddening girl—by his butler Jeeves. Bertie and Jeeves probably descend from Plautus, where the upper-class twit and the clever slave were perfected although not invented. The two seem peculiarly English, but they are in fact immensely popular other places—for example, Wodehouse sells amazingly well in India, was once loved in Hungary, and, among other places in America, in Brooklyn, where my mother first ran across him. I was in my early teens when she commended him to me—we were both poking around a public library in Westchester—and more than 40 years later I now teach him; he makes a nice companion to Plautus. Wodehouse raises the question of the presence of British literary culture in America, and in a special way. America began as a set of British colonies; British literature has always been part of our literature, bids fair to remain so for the foreseeable future, and is a component of the literature Americans read in a way other world literature is not—for one thing, we read it without translation. The parity with American literature (maybe the near-primacy) of British literature in America is not simply a function of the coercive powers of schoolteachers; many Americans still find British popular and canonical literature all on their own. When I was a kid, a lot of people still ran into The Prisoner of Zenda, and many of my students have still found Jane Austen. Wodehouse seems to me to be a special case, in two senses a peculiarly hybrid author. First of all, he died an American citizen, and for that matter spent most of his long life living in either American or France. He spent some time in Hollywood and for the last part of his life lived on Long Island. A lot of American popular culture would not have existed without him. He collaborated with Cole Porter on Anything Goes, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern (he wrote the lyrics to Show Boat’s “Bill”) and Guy Bolton, and a lot of his writing was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. But Wodehouse seems to me to be a hybrid author in another sense, which is that from early on he wrote with an American audience in mind. He was popular here from near the beginning of his career, and he set some novels and stories in Hollywood that were consumed by British as well as American popular audiences. He worked with comic types from both cultures, and displayed them for the pleasure of vast audiences on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as at least one shore of the Indian Ocean). It would be absurd to deny Wodehouse’s Englishness, but it would be foolish to forget that Salman Rushdie admired him as much as Eveyln Waugh did—or that my mother, who was a resident of Crown Heights when she discovered Wodehouse, was one of tens of millions of Americans who have loved him as much as either of those two ever did. There are literary inventions from the purely popular as well as the high literature of other nations who are also part of our mental worlds—some characters of Dumas, certainly, and Cyrano—but the field is mostly British. American popular creations have been exported in mass quantities, of course, so the traffic is two-way. And in some cases, like Wodehouse’s, the two-way traffic is conducted by (and within) a single writer.
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