News that P. G. Wodehouse will at last get a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey in London will warm the hearts of Wodehouse fans. For some years after the Second World War, the British government treated the writer with disdain, owing to the mistaken belief that Wodehouse had willingly propagandized for the Nazis while in an internment camp in France. That is all behind us now, and Wodehouse assumes the greatness he deserves.
We are not of the opinion that memorials signify literary worth; often they do not. But with only a few exceptions (it seems wrong to afford D. H. Lawrence a memorial in what is, after all, a church, does it not?), the roughly 130 headstones and memorials in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner are a pretty good survey of Anglophone literary immortality.
In light of the aforementioned item on PEN America, moreover, we thought perhaps we would pass along one of our favorite Wodehousean passages, this one from Right Ho, Jeeves, his second full-length Jeeves and Wooster novel, published in 1934. “I don’t want to wrong anybody,” writes Bertie Wooster of Madeline Bassett, “so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”
