Divine Comedy

That’s one explanation, at any rate. Another has to do with the nature of humor in general and humorous writing in particular. It’s almost impossible to write funny about humor, and anyone who writes seriously about it is doomed to come off as a fuddy duddy. E. B. White, a funny writer himself, once said that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, in that the thing tends to die in the process and the results will be interesting only to the purely scientific mind.

As the most successful comic novelist in history, Wodehouse has occasionally been placed under the knife in this way, and the results are gruesome enough to have scared off other admirers who might feel moved to explain the source of their admiration. To get a sense of what can happen, here’s a sentence plucked from the first page of P. G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master by David A. Jasen: Wodehouse’s “humor depends mainly on the use of the literal interpretation of an idiomatic expression out of context for effect.” Har de har har.

One last explanation for the relative lack of Wodehousian lit crit is the difficulty anyone would have getting his arms around the Wodehouse corpus, by which I mean his body of work (I’m trying to avoid the word “oeuvre”), in order to deliver some definite pronouncement on it. Wodehouse’s first book was published in 1902, when he was twenty-one, and his last came out in 1974, when he was ninety-three; he was in the middle of drafting another one when he was finally carried off the following year.

Published bibliographies differ, so no one can say for certain, but in between he seems to have written ninety-four other books, at least six movies, sixteen plays, the lyrics or book or both for twenty-eight musical comedies, and more than three hundred short stories. (These estimates are Frances Donaldson’s.) A fellow who wanted to become a Wodehousian — at least, a Wodehousian who knew what he was talking about — would have time for little else.

All of which means that it is probably the wiser course for those who cherish Wodehouse’s work to just keep quiet and enjoy it, and not run the risk of chasing away the uninitiated with heavy breathing about why they will enjoy it too. I would take that advice myself, except for the publication, just in time for Christmas, of a new line of Wodehouse editions that look to me to be as handsome as any around. The publisher is Overlook Press, and the press release makes the books sound like dessert (appropriately enough): each volume “edited and reset and printed on Scottish cream-wove paper, sewn and bound in cloth.” They’re handsome books, hefty in the hand and easy on the eye, and at $ 15.95 per, the cost of a quality paperback, the price is right, too.

The editors have launched the line with three novels from what might fussily be called Wodehouse’s middle period. (A seventy-year career has a lot of middle period.) Right Ho, Jeeves and The Code of the Woosters are chronicles of the young gadabout Bertram Wooster and his manservant Jeeves, published in the 1930s, and Pigs Have Wings, continuing the saga of Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle and his prize pig the Empress of Blandings, came out not long after World War II. More volumes are planned, of course, but the Overlook editors have obviously chosen to introduce Wodehouse at the very top of his form, which is as good a place to begin as any. He never really gets much worse than this.

Wodehouse’s plots aren’t easy to summarize. He called his novels “musical comedies without the music,” and he did put them together like a musical comedy, with scene stacked upon scene, the narrative driven by dialogue rather than description. But while the story-line of a musical comedy might have two or three reversals before the happy resolution, a typical Wodehouse plot has two dozen or more zigs and zags, which, though dizzying to follow, take place according to an inviolable internal logic. Lots of novelists write outlines before writing their novels. Few are as fastidious as Wodehouse, whose outlines would commonly run to thirty thousand words or more — at least a third as long as the finished book.

The Code of the Woosters, for example, begins with Bertie hungover, as he often is, this time from a bachelor party thrown for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle. Jeeves, handing his master a morning bracer, suggests to Bertie that the two, Bertie and Jeeves, reserve passage on a round-the-world cruise for a much-needed vacation. Bertie dismisses the idea (“I refuse to be decanted into any blasted ocean-going liner and lugged off round the world”) and is then summoned to the London townhouse of his Aunt Dahlia, whose women’s weekly magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, is in financial straits and needs Pomona Grindle to serialize her new book in its pages if fortunes are to be reversed. To pay for Pomona, Aunt Dahlia hopes to squeeze her rich husband Tom, who will be less likely to come up with the money if he pays a large sum for an eighteenth-century cow creamer he hopes to buy from an antiques store that afternoon. Aunt Dahlia therefore dispatches Bertie to the store to impersonate an expert collector and disparage the cow creamer to the owner, so that Uncle Tom will get a better price. Arriving there, Bertie meets up with Gussie’s future father-in-law, Judge Basset, who once fined Bertie in his court for stealing a policeman’s helmet. Basset, too, hopes to buy the cow creamer. Within moments he is accusing Bertie of trying to steal it. . . .

We are now on page twenty-three — and I see from my little summary that I have forgotten to mention the subplot about Anatole, Aunt Dahlia’s gifted chef, and the sub-subplot about Roderick Spode, who quickly becomes essential to the action, which will improbably conclude, two hundred and fifty pages later, with these and several more loose strands tied together. You can see why those thirty thousand word outlines would come in handy. Wodehouse understood, as many funny novelists don’t, the preeminence of storytelling. Without a plot to push along, the jokes lose their force. “You must never offer the reader anything simply as funny and nothing more,” Kingsley Amis once said. “Make it acceptable as information, comment, narrative, et cetera, so that if the joke flops the reader has still got something.” Amis himself said he learned this from reading Wodehouse, who never wasted a joke merely for the sake of a laugh, or, for that matter, wasted a plot twist without making it the occasion for a joke.

And maybe “joke” is the wrong word for humor so embedded in story and character. Wodehouse is hard to quote. No one has ever been better at simile — one robust woman has a laugh “like cavalry over a tin bridge” — but he wasn’t really a gag writer or a crafter of epigrams. You will laugh out loud at least once a chapter, and probably more, but you’ll be hard pressed to tell a friend why. Most often the humor comes packaged like this, from Right Ho, Jeeves, as Bertie and his feckless chum Gussie, a scientist who specializes in the study of newts, discuss his nerve-wracking courtship of Madeline Basset.

“Color does make a difference. Look at newts. During the courting season the male newt is brilliantly colored. It helps him a lot.”

“But you aren’t a male newt.”

“I wish I were. Do you know how a male newt proposes, Bertie? He just stands in front of the female newts vibrating his tail and bending his body in a semicircle. I could do that on my head. No, you wouldn’t find me grousing if I were a male newt.”

“But if you were a male newt, Madeline Basset wouldn’t look at you. Not with the eye of love, I mean.”

“She would, if she were a female newt.”

“But she isn’t a female newt.”

“No, but suppose she was.”

“Well, if she was, you wouldn’t be in love with her.”

“Yes, I would, if I were a male newt.”

A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached the saturation point.

Wodehouse’s novels, a large number of them, reach a kind of perfection. They offer almost everything a reader-for-pleasure could want: indelible and sharply drawn characters, complicated and perfectly controlled stories, and the most exquisite prose style in the whole of the language.

What they lack is heft. Once in a while someone will try to correct this by claiming Wodehouse as a satirist. All but a small minority of the books are set in country houses in a vaguely prewar England, and they concern almost exclusively the doings of earls, lords, ladies, clubbable heirs, public school ne’er-do-wells, and other figures of the upper class — an impressive percentage of whom are imbeciles. For this reason uplifters, progressives, and other reformers occasionally pretend to see a slyly subversive critique of the class system running beneath the laughs.

But a satirist, it seems to me, is precisely, emphatically, what Wodehouse wasn’t. The son of a civil servant and himself the product of a second-rank public school, Wodehouse was English to the core. He spent most of his adult life abroad, first in France and then in the United States, but he was as sensitive to class distinctions as any writer who ever lived, and never showed the slightest resentment toward them. In fact, he has, with meticulous care, excluded from his books anything that could be at all relevant to the real world. One sign of this is the dispute, such as it is, about when the books take place. Orwell among others thought they were set in the Edwardian period, on the literal-minded grounds that spats-wearing dandies like Bertie had all been killed off in World War I. But Orwell, who was born in 1903, wasn’t up and about in the Edwardian period and had no firsthand adult knowledge of it, and perhaps for this reason he missed the obvious point that spats-wearing dandies like Bertie had never really existed at all. (His mistaken belief that they had is probably one of the things that made him a socialist.)

Wodehouse himself, late in life, said that the books were set “sometime between the wars.” Interestingly, though, Wodehouse didn’t set foot in England from about 1920 until after World War II. His England “between the wars” was as remote to him as the Edwardian period was to Orwell — to both of them a realm of fantasy and the imagination. Fantasy is the key word. Waugh put his finger on it, in a much-quoted tribute written for Wodehouse’s eightieth birthday. Wodehouse’s characters, Waugh said, are not

survivors of the Edwardian age. They are creations of pure fancy. . . . All, whatever the delinquencies attributed to them, exist in a world of pristine paradisal innocence. For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no “aboriginal calamity.” His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled.

This otherworldliness carried over into Wodehouse’s personal life. Money ceased to be a problem early on in his career; by the 1920s, the Saturday Evening Post was paying him $ 10,000 for a short story, $ 50,000 for a serial, and his books, once published, seldom went out of print. His devoted wife protected him from mundane demands (he was a loving father to her daughter from an earlier marriage, but they had no children together). For three-quarters of a century he just sat in his houseslippers and wrote — seven days a week, all morning and much of the afternoon, with breaks, in his later years, to watch The Edge of Night, the daytime soap opera that was his life’s second grand passion. He worked as diligently to exclude anything unpleasant and sinister from his own life as he did from his stories, with about equal success. Colleagues and friends spoke unfailingly of his kind heart.

That private equanimity and professional dedication, quite apart from his unimprovable technical skill, may be what accounts for his standing as the favorite writer of so many writers. He represents a kind of Platonic ideal of the trade, work and life alike absolutely unspotted from the world. Overlook Press does right by him, presenting his work so handsomely. For those who love them, and have encountered them only in one of the many paperback editions, it’s pleasing to have Bertie and Jeeves and Lord Emsworth and the Empress enshrined on the shelf between hard covers. For those who haven’t had a chance to explore the corpus, there is no time to begin like the p., and no better books to begin with than these. P. G. Wodehouse was a very great artist, but don’t let that put you off.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.