Serendipity.
Over the weekend, I wrote a post which began with an anecdote about the great British writer of humourous novels, PG Wodehouse. And on Tuesday, I note a piece in the Daily Telegraph in which we learn that Wodehouse’s collected works, notes and other papers are to be admitted to the British Library’s 20th Century archive, “alongside such titans as Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter and JG Ballard.”
You mean he wasn’t there already?
Let’s get this straight. This was a British author who was involved with some of the most successful musical comedies ever produced, wrote ninety-three novels (one for every year of his life), and attracted the admiration of such titans as Hilaire Belloc, George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling and Evelyn Waugh. Wouldn’t mind having that little lot in my fan club, even though dear old Ginny Woolf is consp. by her abs., as Bertie Wooster might have put it.
Wodehouse was the supreme stylist. Waugh said of him "One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page.".
He was an author whose every published work was meticulously planned, written, re-written and polished to such lustre that he is occasionally described, quite seriously, as a prose poet. And this in a day before word-processors! A writer in whose work not a word was out of place, not a scene or incident without its point or purpose. And a writer who was, of course, consistently, unrelentingly, wonderfully funny.
One might say that he was the ultimate expression of style over substance. His novels are froth: romantic (in an entirely sexless way), humourous fantasies, set in a world which had ceased to exist even while he was writing of it, and quite possibly never did in the first place.
Which, of course, is part of the appeal. Wodehouse himself said:
I believe there are two ways of writing comedy. One is mine, which is to… ignore real life altogether; the other is to go deep down into real life and not give a damn.
There is a kind of snobbery afoot here. There has always been – and remains even more so now – a view that ‘Literature’ should deal with the darker side of human nature: in fact, go deep down in to real life and not give a damn. To the point, nowadays, where it stops being real life at all and comes out the other side, into a dark, strange and unsettling place which is neither real, nor fantasy, and which is entirely alien to the experience of the vast majority of humanity. We do not recognise the worlds which modern literary fiction so often inhabits because, actually, they do not exist, any more than do Wodehouse’s country houses and gentlemen’s clubs . This rather deprives it of the quality which should be a part of any great art, which is universality; or, at any rate, and to use a hideous modern word, relatability.
The unremitting bleakness of the shortlists for the major literary prizes is a source of annual astonishment to me. The themes are unrelentingly dark, the tone invariably cynical at best and positively misanthropic at worst. It’s more or less mandatory for someone in every novel to have been abused as a child; for characters to be solitary, divorced from the world or brutally depressed; for the action to be unpleasant at every turn, with the human values that sustain most of us through what passes for a normal daily life corrupted or subverted whenever they arise at all.
And that’s just the comedies.
Who reads this stuff? More cogently, who writes it? Are all these authors really, as Beryl Bainbridge once suggested, ‘damaged people’?
Probably not; although most of them nowadays seem to hold some form of university qualification in Creative Writing, which may amount to more or less the same thing. The fact is that, like so many of us in this world, they’re just following fashion. The Imperial Personage is suffering from a critical wardrobe malfunction and, actually, it’s the critics who are to blame. If it’s funny, they reason, it can’t be serious. And if it isn’t serious, they further reason, it can’t be Literature.
As someone who is never likely to be accused of Literature, as Terry Pratchett once put it, I have the luxury of not having to care; and the even greater luxury of not having to read, or write, this kind of thing. I don’t shy away from the darker side of human nature in my own stuff – anyone who reads my next one, Jerusalem, will discover this. But it is leavened by light; and, of course, it is dealt with in the somewhat stylised way which characterises fantasy and adventure stories; which is, in effect, what I do.
And to return to the res, a lot of what I do I originally learned from PG Wodehouse. When I was a mere stripling, I read a lot of Wodehouse. And I also read his collected letters, (published as Performing Flea), and his last, incomplete novel, Sunset at Blandings. Both are a treasure trove for aspiring authors, particularly when it comes to the matter of plot construction, a craft at which Wodehouse excelled. If you want to know how to structure a novel, how to construct a hierarchy of characters, how to use ‘twists’, ‘reveals’, foreshadowing and the other dark arts which authors employ to engage and sustain the attention of the reader, then you’ll find out here. I still have the habit of writing in distinct ‘scenes’, something I picked up from reading Wodehouse, and reading about his methods.
Sunset is particularly fascinating by being unfinished. Instead of attempting to finish the book, Richard Usborne, who edited it, simply included Wodehouse’s plot notes as an appendix, making the volume both a work in progress and an authorial commentary on itself. Get that – you can, in effect, watch one of the greatest craftsmen in English letters actually at work. Priceless.
The only problem with an over-exposure to Wodehouse at an early age is that his plots are insanely complicated. Only a master could keep control of them; and his influence can be a little pernicious if you’re not a master. Even now, I occasionally have to fight a tendency to overcomplicate in plot (which may, again, become evident if you read Jerusalem). So be careful if you do read them.
In any event, thank goodness for the British Library. Now, in addition to all the literary “titans”, their archive will contain a little corner of eternal sunlight and joy. Wodehouse’s world may be insubstantial; but it is unfading.
And that’s something that should make your day just a tiny bit better.