I’m fond of Rupert Psmith (“The p is silent, as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan”) and fonder still of Mr. I tend, at this point, to go back to old favorites rather than pick up new ones. I’ve read probably twenty of Wodehouse’s books of fiction-a number large enough to swallow the œuvre of most writers, but nothing more than a taster’s sampling of the Wodehouse smorgasbord. If in public he adopted an antic smiling-clown face, it masked only the settled grin of a man who relished the deep daily joys of exercise, his pet dogs, semirural landscapes, and an evening cocktail. In its five-hundred-plus pages, it’s hard to find more than a couple of occasions when he indulged in anything like self-pity. Ratcliffe has collected and extensively annotated correspondence that begins in 1899, when Wodehouse was a schoolboy in London, and ends in 1975, when he died, of a heart attack, while living on Long Island. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters” makes clear, Plum (as he was known to his friends) was preternaturally buoyant. He came honestly by the lightness of his books. He’s a tonic for those suffering from bearable but burdensome loads of boredom, from jadedness of outlook and dinginess of soul. Waugh’s artful “irksome” goes to the nub.
#Sip and strokes pelham free#
He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Waugh wasn’t promising what so many blurbists promise for other novelists: life-changing visions, staggering epiphanies, insights to free you from the nightmare of your existence. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. His characters did not live in the real world? Would they have fared better in a realer one? You might as well point out that the beribboned Pekingese at the national dog show would founder if set loose in the jungle.Įvelyn Waugh’s praise of Wodehouse, offered for a BBC broadcast, in 1961, got the matter exactly right: “Mr.
He was repetitive? It’s called variations on a theme. He wrote too many books? Hardly-why, he published only ninety-six in his long lifetime. Wodehouse, and I’m one, don’t respond well when he’s criticized.
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