Reply re Wodehouse...

After my post earlier this week about British humorist PG Wodehouse, a frighteningly well-informed friend, Dave Gibbons, wrote a really interesting reply. He's given me permission to blog it:



"Howdy, Mike,

Glad to see you're enjoying the show [the "Jeeves and Wooster" series]. Seeing them all at once, as it were, you'll get some weird shocks. For example, the brunette who plays spacey Madeline Bassett in the first few shows is re-cast as the bone-crunching Florence Craye in later shows. I think she handles the latter best.



You'll also see the wonderfully bizarre Barmy somethingorother playing in black-face, a potentially interesting nod to Wodehouse's original story ("Thank You, Jeeves"), in which he seeks to meet up with what he calls "nigger minstrels" to get banjo-playing tips. The term "nigger minstrel" was popular in the UK for about a hundred years (Maugham used it in "The Moon and Sixpence"), falling into disfavo(u)r only recently. In fact, in a mid-50s BBC censorship policy prohibited the word "nigger" but specifically excepted "nigger minstrels" as inoffensive. Their minstrels, like ours, were usually pink folks in black makeup, and they comprised respectable, light-hearted outdoor entertainment for holidaymakers. (All the references to "nigger minstrels" I find, including Wodehouse, use them as a shorthand for "stuff you'd find in a place where you're supposed to have fun whether you want to or not." On this side of the Atlantic we might use "sno-cone" in a similar fashion.) The style was trampled by other American imports mid-century (jazz, rock, and blues), on roughly the same arc as Americans' taste for Hawaiian music, which was flipping insatiable well into the 40s. Now, happily, both are forgotten except by pedants and research addicts comme moi.

 

All that said, "Thank You, Jeeves" is one of Wodehouse's best. For the uninitiated, I'd be a little more specific than "read some Wodehouse." Add "with the word 'Jeeves' in the title" and/or "between 1925 and 1950." A lot of Wodehouse's early stuff is available free online in respectable places like gutenberg.net, but you won't find much of the really good stuff until mid-career. "Psmith," Wodehouse's first popular character, is like a Stephen Fry character -- particularly the "mostly autobiographical" hero from Fry's novel "The Liar." Young, snobbish, rich, attractive, fey, and way too bright. You can read all of the Psmith books and not get a real sense of Wodehouse at all. It's excellent writing -- don't get me wrong -- but it's not standard-setting like the Wooster series. Psmith is afflicted with contrived interactions that are always plausible, and it doesn't quite work. Wooster, however, juggles monumentally contrived interactions that are nowhere near plausible, and it works.

 

Douglas Adams, in an intro to the unfinished "Sunset at Blandings" reprinted in "The Salmon of Doubt," gives some wonderful insights into the Great Master's writing style -- particularly his editing style, which seems a vast improvement over Dean Koontz's "22 passes per page" approach. But more important for the Wodehouse fan is Adams's encapsulation of the joy of reading Wodehouse. If you don't already have The Salmon of Doubt, run out and buy it -- or search it on Amazon and just read the Wodehouse piece (starting on page 63). :-)

 

Before I wrap this up and continue my own authorship odyssey, I'll put in a plug for a somewhat rare Wodehouse video. "The Wodehouse Playhouse," a British series from the early 70s, is out on DVD. Plum himself, then in his 90s, introduces each episode. It's worth getting the series just for the 30-second spots of a gleam-in-his-eye Wodehouse setting the stage, and the 30-minute plays show off Wodehouse at his farcical best.

 

Sometimes you must look at yourself in the shaving mirror and wonder, "What kind of life have I built for myself where friends and colleagues send me essays in personal notes?" I know I do."