P.G. Wodehouse

 

The feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves were the creations of the infinitely well-meaning and later on much-misunderstood humorist named P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse’s life at this time was not going well when he joined the London branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He was unsuited for it and found the work baffling and difficult, but he would come every day eager to write for magazines. But between 1908 and 1915, he created unforgettable characters that made him famous. Psmith was a strikingly original character based on hotelier and impresario Rupert D’Oyly Carte, whose monocle, studied suavity and stateliness of speech Wodehouse cleverly adopted for his character. “Something New” became his first farcical novel and also best-seller and although some of his later stories were gentler and lightly sentimental, it was as a farceur that he became known. Later in the same year, "Extricating Young Gussie” about Bertie and Jeeves was published. He wrote about them for the rest of his life.

His unwise broadcasts from German radio to the US, during the Second World War caused great controversy even though they were comic and apolitical. A front-page article in The Daily Mirror stated that Wodehouse "lived luxuriously because Britain laughed with him, but when the laughter was out of his country's heart, ... [he] was not ready to share her suffering. He hadn't the guts ... even to stick it out in the internment camp." Several libraries removed Wodehouse novels from their shelves. Wodehouse never returned to England.

Wodehouse received great praise from many of his contemporaries, including Max Beerbohm, Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman and Evelyn Waugh—the last of whom opines, "One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page. However not everyone agreed. The writer Alan Bennet thinks that "inspired though his language is, I can never take more than ten pages of the novels at a time, their relentless flippancy wearing and tedious”. Another literary critic Q.D. Leavis writes that Wodehouse had a "stereotyped humour ... of ingenious variations on a laugh in one place". Sean O’Casey, a successful playwright of the 1920’s called Wodehouse “English literature’s performing flea”. Another critic wrote “It is now abundantly clear that Wodehouse is one of the funniest and most productive men who ever wrote in English. He is far from being a mere jokesmith: he is an authentic craftsman, a wit and humorist of the first water, the inventor of a prose style which is a kind of comic poetry."