Facetiousness is a peculiarly English quality. Some languages do not even have a word for it. No surprise that these languages are spoken in lands that have dictatorships.
Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis liked playing a quiz game with new acquaintances. They’d ask them who was ‘the most effing Cambridge poet’ in the English language. Nul points for those who tried to talk about Milton, or Tennyson. The answer was Matthew Effing ARNOLD.
The point of the joke, to these men who thought of themselves as so intensely Oxford, was that Matthew and Arnold took Oxford ‘seriously’, and all that crap about home of lost causes and dreaming spires and Cardinal Effing Newman was the sort of precious thing a Cambridge person would write about their university. Sweetness and light? Pass the sickbag.
Yet, at heart, both Larkin and Amis were a bit serious. Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ says, ‘Someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious’.
And the themes of Amis’s novels, once the hilarity of Lucky Jim was behind him, were all dark ones – the impossibility of women and men ever getting on together, the inescapability of death etc.
Or, as a greater man than they might have put it, ‘I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping’ (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, 1916).
Any reasonable person should regard the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s demise, aged 93, on Valentine’s Day 1975, as an excuse to reread as many of his works as possible.
Wodehouse invented a language in which seriousness was impossible. Larkin and Amis are classic cases in point – young men who thought they took nothing seriously but were, au fond, as gloomy and serious as Jean-Paul Sartre.
For one thing, like almost all writers, they were unable to conceal their views, whereas Wodehouse had no views, in the popular sense of the word. Try listening to Radio 4’s dire Any Questions and then imagine what Gussie Fink-Nottle or Bertie would make of the earnest manglers of our language who virtue- signal on the show week after week.
Wodehouse was first and foremost a master craftsman, who knew better than anyone how to shape a sentence, a paragraph, a narrative. That pipe-smoky study on Long Island told the story, when he used to pin up, page by page, the development of his plots.
You and I might think we could make a story out of a group of silly young asses going down to the East End to entertain the working classes by singing ‘Sonny Boy’ at a church social. We would overdo it. Or we would be unable to notice that the disparity between the wealth of Bertie and Tuppy Glossop and the poverty of the roughs who do not enjoy their singing was NOT, as a matter of fact, very funny. Whereas – led by Jeeves – Bertie and pals’ each going on stage to an increasingly disgruntled crowd, to sing the same awful song over and over again, is one of the most sublime things outside Shakespeare.
Ditto The Code of the Woosters (1938), where Bertie is sent by Aunt Dahlia to sneer at a silver cow creamer in an antique shop to push down its value in the eyes of customers.
The Code of the Woosters is the best – introducing us to the immortal Madeline Basset (‘The stars are God’s daisy chain’) and Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts. It both is, and is not, England in the 1930s, the world threatened by the great dictators, hunger and unemployment.
Orwell was treading the road to Wigan Pier while the earnest young of left and right prepared to go to Spain to show which side they were on in the coming conflict.
You almost sympathise with those German secret agents at the beginning of the Second World War (apocryphal or not) who were arrested for wearing spats and eyeglasses. They had come dressed as silly asses at the Drones, assuming that such figures passed seamlessly into the English atmosphere, rather than being what they always had been – perfect literary constructs.
Evelyn Waugh saw Wodehouse’s world as prelapsarian, a place where the Fall had not happened, and there was a sort of truth in this.
But, as all the references to religion in the Wodehouse oeuvre show, Wodehouse had invented something that outsoared even the Pelagian heresy – ie that the Fall of Man had not happened.
The clergy in his stories – whether it is the terrifying bishop in the Mulliner stories, taking an overdose of Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo, or silly young curates yearning to sew orphreys on to their chasubles – are simply like all the other individuals pinned to Wodehouses’s spreadsheet of plots, ciphers in his scheme to avoid taking anything, anything at all, seriously.
If Charles Ryder in Brideshead had been invented by Wodehouse, there would be sighs of relief when he escapes the fate of marrying Julia Flyte, and the religious angle would be seen in purely comic terms.
Although each short story and novel by Wodehouse is a perfect artefact, each one is also a liberation of the spirit – from ‘views’, ‘heaviness’, self-importance and all the things that make the world not only boring, but dangerous.
