The blissfully escapist comic novels of PG Wodehouse
bbc.com
bbc.com
The heavily adapted BBC TV series Blandings is also hilarious.
Excellent for long trips driving a car.
It does help that it is immensely clear that you are supposed to see Bertie as an idiot, but...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wartime-for-wo...
I never picked Wodehouse for a prisoner of war. But I guess he handled it with characteristic aplomb.
That article inspired me to search for the Fry and Laurie series. It's not being streamed on any of the popular platforms but I did find some decent quality uploads on Youtube. My wife and I have enjoyed it immensely. I think I discovered why it hasn't been picked up by any of the online platforms when we got to the blackface episode in season 2.
A different era, in two respects I suppose, and all that. Unfortunate nevertheless. Anyone know where I could find the BBC radio episodes online?
How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make.
Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an English reader can see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking the social hierarchy.
It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all.
Orwell obviously knows Wodehouse inside-out, right back to obscure early books, which must mean that he was a fan. Why read them otherwise?
Your excerpts go to the heart of the argument. If Orwell thinks it's nonsense to call Wodehouse a fascist, it's not because Wodehouse was necessarily above fascism. It's because he was too silly and stupid ("the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity") to even perceive it, a literal schoolboy:
As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins.
I don't know that this was fair to Wodehouse. The New Yorker article seems to take a more charitable view:
His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was.
My dad and I were struggling to explain the phrase "damn with faint praise" to a young relative a while back. This essay wouldn't have helped our cause because, well, it's loaded. But it is a master class in the concept.
This article might have been as much of a defence as it was politically possible for Orwell to produce in 1945. Even his famous independence from sectarianism must have had its limits. I also think one can put one's finger on why Orwell was so sympathetic to Wodehouse and so willing to judge him softly: they were both profoundly and essentially English. People have often pointed this out about Orwell, saying for example that his deep Englishness was the wellspring of his immunity to ideology. I think that same quality is probably what resonated with Orwell about Wodehouse - he was sympathetic in the literal sense (having similar feelings). There are moments in this article where it's as if he's reading Wodehouse from within.
Specifically, Mond tells us (ch 16):
"One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."
The comic doesn't address the ways to leave the system, however. Brave New World, as mentioned above, has its islands, and (not having read anything of 1984 beyond the Goldstein chapters: is there anything I don't already have from pop culture in the rest of the book, or are those chapters just the "fast-forward"?) it seems that Oceanic refuseniks who didn't wish to toe the party line could be ignored by joining the proletariat (which might imply material and intellectual poverty, but freedom's just another word...)
That is one of those "Cleopatra lived closer to the building of Pizza Hut than the pyramids" facts.
I just looked it up. Wodehouse even outlived the Beatles!
I heard an interview with an Orwell biographer recently and he made a similar argument about Orwell and Twain - which is a little different than the impression one might get from a casual reading of The Licensed Jester
--Evelyn Waugh
There's something you notice if you read a whole lot of Wodehouse in quick succession: I'd estimate that there are about 20 plots among the ones I've read -- that is to say, the same situations, characters and plot devices are reused often, and if you removed the redundancy, you'd end up with about 20 novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I have 15-20, my favourite is an unusual one, I think: French Leave.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=wodehouse
while the Jeeves and Wooster novels are fantastic, I found the bean stories to be quite amusing as well.
The early seasons are fine (but not as good as the books).
In later seasons, however, they decided to "improve" the stories by adding over-the-top stuff that would never have appeared in the books. E.g., at the end of one episode, Bertie and Jeeves literally jump overboard from a cruise liner to escape Honoria Glossop et al.: they arrive back in England eight months later, sun-burnt and bearded.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse
[1] http://aerohaveno.blogspot.com/2018/05/he-gave-joy-visiting-...
Both were very amusing.
[0]. https://www.amazon.com/Jeeves-King-Clubs-Homage-Wodehouse/dp...
> “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”
(Roderick Spode is a parody or Oswald Mosley, the head of the then current British Union of Fascists)
When I read fiction I barely notice the words on the page and instead (sort of?) see what's happening in my head. It's not like characters even have a properly defined look, but I am visualising everything. However when the book is written in first-person, it plays havoc with my imagination and I really struggle to see the characters; it's just words on a page. It reads more like non-fiction, which for some reason doesn't trigger the same effect.
It might also have helped to read first person narratives where the narrator was more observer than actor (e.g., The Great Gatsby).
My first impression was: Oscar Wilde (who is captivating after a single page) for the masses.