Need a balm for these troubled times? I recommend the works of P.G. Wodehouse

Los Angeles Times

18-04-2025

Seeking succor when the world seems to be closing in on you is a quintessentially human habit. Some people do it by gorging on comfort food like macaroni and cheese, others choose drink, or drugs, or gardening, or the warmth of a puppy.
I always know when I'm feeling blue, because I feel the gravitational pull of my long shelf of P.G. Wodehouse books.
If you've never read Wodehouse, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. I'm well past that point; some of his stories and novels I've read dozens, even hundreds of times, and they can still make me convulse in laughter. More so when the outside world provides little to laugh about.
Evelyn Waugh, who admitted to learning a hell of a lot from Wodehouse, may have put it best: 'Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale,' he wrote in a 1961 essay designed in part to defend Wodehouse over the one blot on his life story (more on that in a bit). 'He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.'
And what is that world? It's timeless, and yet dated. Orwell narrowed it down to the Edwardian era — 1901 to 1919 — long before the irruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression. Its inhabitants are those of 'there will always be an England' England: stern vicars, timid curates, lords and earls, penniless titled wastrels living on allowances from their uncles, imperious aunts, upper-crust twits.
They're all presented on the page by an inspired farceur whose exquisitely penned prose seems effortless, but belies the painstaking craftsmanship needed to make his split-second timing come off.
Some Wodehouse lines are like time bombs, detonating with a momentary delay. My favorite comes in an exchange with the soupy Madeline Bassett in 'The Code of the Woosters,' when Bertie comes up with a quote he heard from Jeeves, actually the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, to describe his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle as 'a sensitive plant.'
'Exactly,' Madeline replies. 'You know your Shelley, Bertie.'
'Oh, am I?'
Where to start with Wodehouse? He used several framing devices for his novels and short stories. The golf stories are narrated by the 'oldest member' of an upper-class golf club who buttonholes unwary younger members to regale them with his memories of golfers he has known.
The peak of this series, to me, is 'Farewell to Legs,' featuring a playboy who takes a house in a placid golfing community and discomposes its dour Scottish golfers with his high jinks: 'Angus became aware with a sinking heart that here, as he had already begun to suspect, was a life-and-soul-of-the-party man, a perfect scream, and an absolutely priceless fellow who simply makes you die with the things he says.'
Then there are the fish stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his local pub the Angler's Rest, involving his inexhaustible circle of relatives. To me, the glory of the Mulliner stories are a sequence of three stories — 'Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo,' 'The Bishop's Move' and 'Gala Night,' all related to his brother Wilfred's invention of a tonic meant to 'provide Indian Rajahs with a specific which would encourage their elephants to face a tiger of the jungle with a jaunty sang-froid,' and what happens when unsuspecting users swallow a tumblerful of something that should be taken by the teaspoon.
Some are set in New York and Hollywood, where Wodehouse spent some time writing lyrics for musicals with Jerome Kern and others. (His best-known song is probably 'Bill,' from 'Show Boat.')
But at the summit of Wodehouse's genius are the stories of Bertie Wooster and his 'gentleman's personal gentleman,' or valet, Jeeves. Of the short stories, all narrated by Bertie, to my mind the greatest are a trilogy beginning with 'The Great Sermon Handicap,' continuing with 'The Purity of the Turf,' and concluding with what may be the single funniest short story ever penned in English, 'The Metropolitan Touch.'
Bertie and Jeeves, as the British essayist Alexander Cockburn once asserted, are a pairing as momentous in literary history as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Wodehouse never exhausted the counterpoint between Bertie's slangy gibbering and half-remembered literary allusions with Jeeves' carefully modulated responses: 'Very well, Jeeves, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?' 'Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.'
Bertie is both a classic unreliable narrator and a stock comic character given life. Having inherited a fortune from parents who are almost never mentioned, he's rich enough for financial difficulties to never be a plot obstruction, though he's always willing to tide over a pal brought low by 'unfortunate speculations' at the racecourse. Jeeves is a deus ex machina; we learn almost nothing about him, except for imperturbability and skill at solving the crises that Bertie falls into through his pure cloth-headedness.
Bertie's romantic relations are entirely sexless, 20th-century echoes of courtly love, though throughout the oeuvre he gets engaged to at least six women by my count. Among them towers the frighteningly domineering Honoria Glossop. ('Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.')
Jeeves extricates Bertie from every one of these entanglements, and thankfully so, because every fiancée begins their relationship with the determination to toss Jeeves out on his ear.
Wodehouse aficionados wage a never-ending debate over which Jeeves and Wooster book is his masterpiece, with 'The Code of the Woosters' (1938) and 'Joy in the Morning' (1946) typically trading the top two spots.
I'm partial to the former, in part because it features the only overtly political character Wodehouse ever devised. He's Roderick Spode, a would-be British dictator plainly based on the real-life British fascist and Hitler partisan Oswald Mosley.
Spode is the leader of a gang of fascist toughs known as the Black Shorts. 'You mean 'shorts,' don't you?' Bertie says when he first hears about Spode. 'No,' he's told, 'by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.' 'Footer bags, you mean?' Bertie asks, a Britishism for football shorts. 'How perfectly foul.'
Spode throws his weight around Brinkley Court, the country estate where the story takes place, harrying Bertie endlessly for reasons we don't need to go into, until Jeeves provides Bertie with a magic word guaranteed to turn dictator Spode into a shrinking mouse. At the climax, Bertie presses his advantage, informing his nemesis:
'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?''
It's no spoiler to tell you that the magic word Jeeves provides to Bertie is 'Eulalie.' As for who or what Eulalie is, and why it reduces Spode to jelly, you'll have to read the book.
That brings us to that one blot on Wodehouse's life. When World War II broke out, he was living peaceably in the French resort of Le Touquet. When the Nazis came through in 1940 they interned Wodehouse and transported him to Berlin, from which the Germans persuaded him to make a handful of 'nonpolitical' radio broadcasts for his British compatriots.
There was an uproar at home. Newspaper columnists condemned Wodehouse as a 'Quisling,' libraries took his books off their shelves, there were condemnatory speeches in Parliament.
The truth is that the broadcasts were indeed nonpolitical; if the Germans thought they had scored a propaganda victory it was instantly evident that they were wrong, and they halted the broadcasts after only five. Wodehouse had displayed nothing worse than the stupidity of the innocent. He knew nothing of the political context, much less that his broadcasts came at a moment when the very future of Britain was in question.
But that fit precisely with Wodehouse's literary landscape. Farce, of course, depends on its characters' failure to recognize what is near at hand; Wodehouse in his splendid isolation in France and in a bygone fictional Eden was incapable of recognizing the crisis in Britain was so near at hand that his broadcasts would strike hard at his countrymen's diminishing morale.
Orwell's opinion of Wodehouse's attackers was withering. 'It was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did,' he wrote in 1946, 'but to go on denouncing him three or four years later — and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery — is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. ... In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practicing appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940.'
One could go on. The pleasures of Wodehouse are inexhaustible, so I'll stop here. With some news about Trump's tariffs threatening to disturb my peace today, and having just finished a rereading of 'The Code of the Woosters,' I will share the next few hours with G. Darcy ('Stilton') Cheesewright, Zenobia Hopwood, Edwin the Boy Scout, Boko Fittleworth and Percy, Lord Worplesdon, and their horseplay in and around Steeple Bumpleigh, Hampshire.
Looking back on the affair and its satisfying resolution, Bertie tells Jeeves, 'There's an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. ... Something about Joy doing something.'
'Joy cometh in the morning, sir?'
'That's the baby. Not one of your things, is it?'
'No, sir.'
'Well, it's dashed good.'