The Best PG Wodehouse Books – Five Books Expert Recommendations

before we look at the books you’ve chosen, can you give us a thumbnail sketch of p g wodehouse?

pelham grenville, known to his friends as “plum”, was born in victorian times and became one of the great comic writers of the 20th century. he is still widely read and much loved. he produced a phenomenal number of novels, short stories, and plays. he also wrote for musicals, which some people may not realize. Biographically, it is very interesting. he desperately wanted to live a quiet life and continue writing, but for complicated reasons he found himself embroiled in some of the most dramatic events of the century.

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What made you take an interest in him?

I first read wodehouse when I was 14 years old. I was always climbing through my parents’ bookshelves and looking for something interesting or something forbidden, and I found a little orange penguin named the inimitable jeeves. I took it outside and thought I had discovered the most magical world. I felt that it was entirely my discovery. I walked in and asked my mother, “what is this book?” she said, “oh, it was your father’s.” my father had died the year before, so reading wodehouse became, I suppose, a kind of connection with him. later, wodehouse estate was looking for someone to edit his letters, and i was able to get to know him even better by doing so.

What kinds of things did that collection of his letters show you about him as a person?

Some of the letters that moved me the most were the ones he wrote when he was a kid at school. in those you can really see his joking ambition. he writes that his sudden realization of shakespeare’s death “plunged me into deep sadness. but I thought too much that he was alive, so all was well for the literature of the world”. they are full of burning desire and intrigue and try to impress. in his letters he is always assuming different roles to try to entertain people according to the correspondent. but he is also quite insecure. He was friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, but not as close as he would like to be, so the letters from him to Doyle are especially carefully crafted, with a bit of arrogance about it.

“one of the reasons wodehouse was so motivated is because he couldn’t go to oxford because his father didn’t have enough money.”

The letters show how incredibly hard he worked, often working on a novel, a series of short stories, and a musical, all at the same time: “traveling” back and forth between London and New York on an ocean liner. they show his blindness to political events and his obsession with sports, especially school sports. he devotedly followed his old-school rugby matches. “I still think bedford [school] coincides with the most important thing in the world,” she writes. the cards also show his concern about earning money, his concerns about it, and his generosity. He was extremely generous and immensely kind, but rather nonchalant, a bit like his favorite character, the pig-loving Lord Emsworth, the 9th Earl of Blandings.

tell us more about the inimitable jeeves, the book that introduced him to you.

It’s about a young man named Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. This is kind of a novel, but it was originally written as separate short stories that were published in magazines in the early 1920s. I chose it not only because it’s the first Wodehouse book I’ve read, but also because it’s wonderful. I was thinking in particular of the hilarious first story, about Bertie’s bingo friend who falls desperately in love with a waitress named Mabel. The story centers on how Bingo will get her uncle’s permission to marry Mabel, and Jeeves devises an ingenious plan to make it happen. there is a wonderful scene where bertie and bingo in love end up in mabel’s tea room. we get bingo by studying the menu “devotedly”, as if it were a sacred text. that “devotee” tells us a lot about the feelings of bingo. wodehouse has a great gift with language. the placement of the word “macaroon” in this story is magnificent.

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what about jeeves relationship with bertie?

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jeeves always does things absolutely right. He is in charge of everything from Bertie’s choice of socks to his love life. as bertie says, he is “so competent in every aspect”. and there is a great deal of affection between the couple, much of which is left unsaid at all.

he seems much smarter than bertie.

yes, although bertie would love to be considered smart. he often tries to capture things through quotes, which he gets wrong and jeeves kindly corrects him. In fact, Jeeves once refers to Bertie as “mentally insignificant”, which causes some friction. But Jeeves isn’t all brains. there’s a moment at the end of the second story where we find out that jeeves has a love life, that he’s courting someone. That’s what made me smile the most. when a novel is so much about the surface, and then you find this moment of interiority, it’s extraordinary. dickens does the same with mr. pickwick. I’ve also always wondered: if jeeves is so perfect, what would he be like on a date?

your next wodehouse book, summer lightning, has a poor chorus girl as its heroine.

Summer Lightning is a crime story mixed with a romantic farce. It is set in Blandings Castle, Wodehouse’s famous fictional rural idyll. many things are happening. We’ve got a couple of star-crossed lovers, a kidnapped pig, a scandalous memory, and a slimy private eye named Pilbeam. our heroine is sue brown, a showgirl. When people think of Wodehouse characters, most of us will think of Bertie, Jeeves, or Psmith. But especially in his early writing, like Jill the Reckless or The Adventures of Sally, Wodehouse had a lot of brilliant female characters.

these women are supposed to have been inspired by unrequited love from when he was younger.

he fell in love with someone named alice dovey, who was not a chorus girl but a famous actress with a beautiful voice. after her death, she wrote in a letter to her family that all of her heroines were more or less inspired by her. but she was also based on ella’s wife ethel de ella, who was originally an actress, and ella’s stepdaughter leonora whom she adored. Such resilient, brave and funny women run through much of her fiction.

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There is also the theme, throughout his work, of having to do what is asked because you don’t have a lot of money. which goes through summer lightning and is incredibly important to wodehouse. i think one of the reasons wodehouse was so motivated is because he couldn’t go to oxford because his father didn’t have enough money. many of his characters need money to be free to do what they want to do, or to marry the person they want to marry.

despite the fact that many of them come from the British upper middle class, so they would be assumed to have money.

yes, he was interested in what he called the “knut”, an Edwardian slang term for a rather idiotic man from the city who didn’t have much to do. but he also writes about what happens if the knut runs out of money, if the “family stocking” falls a bit short. In addition, many of his characters are not from the upper class, but writers, secretaries or actresses in distress.

your next option is the castle of blandings and other places.

this is a collection of short stories, including the great story “lord emsworth and the bride”. Kipling said it was “the most perfect story ever written.” but i really chose this book because it contains his stories about hollywood. When talking pictures started, Wodehouse went to LA and was paid a great deal of money for what he felt he did very little. he wrote something, then someone else rewrote it, then it was rewritten, and then they decided not to do it after all. There is a wonderful story in this book called “Monkey Business” where it captures Hollywood as a strange wonderland where no one is really what they seem. the story is about a gorilla impersonator. There was a craze for gorilla movies in the 1930s. It’s wonderfully full of cultural detail, in the same way you might find in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One.

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Hollywood is also featured in its next pick, wodehouse at wodehouse.

this is a collection of three non-fiction books by wodehouse. One of them, Bring On The Girls, describes Wodehouse’s time as a lyricist, and in Hollywood when he worked with [music producers] Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern. it also contains his own autobiography, in his seventies, in which he describes his Victorian childhood. he used to visit big houses but was incredibly shy. he took refuge in the servants’ room, full of “amiable footmen and lively maidens”. Part Three, Performance Flea, is a series of letters from Wodehouse to his friend Bill Townend, mostly about the craft of being a writer. the title is a joke. A journalist during the war referred to Wodehouse as “the flea of ​​English literature.”

We can’t talk about Wodehouse without talking about what happened to him and his reputation during World War II.

This is all quite complicated, and is best described in Robert McCrum’s brilliant biography, Wodehouse: A Life. Wodehouse lived in occupied France during World War II and was interned by the Nazis. he was interned in three places over the course of 18 months: he spent most of his time in upper silesia, now poland. he was released and had to remain under supervision in berlin before moving to occupied paris. Right after he was released, the Nazis suggested that he broadcast some comedy talks he had written, to keep in touch with his fans in America. Wodehouse did not realize that the medium was the message: that by broadcasting on German radio, they were framing him to make him look like a Nazi sympathizer. he was, he said, “an appalling mistake”, and though he was acquitted of any collaboration charges, it cast a shadow over his reputation. In the letters of this period it is very interesting, and harrowing, to see this through Wodehouse’s eyes, in the context of the war in Berlin and Paris.

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finally, you have chosen the dyer’s hand by wh auden.

This is a collection of critical essays written in the 1950s. two of them talk about wodehouse, very briefly, but beautifully. I’ll probably be accused of being like Wodehouse’s Florence Craye for including it: “Filled to the gills with serious purpose.” But it’s worth including because it’s one of the few attempts to write about why humor like Wodehouse’s matters. a critic once said that these are “serious essays against high seriousness”.

One of those two stories, “balaam and his donkey,” is about the comical master-servant relationship and why there is beauty in it. the other, “dingley dell and the fleet” speaks of wodehouse as an “expert in eden”. auden describes why characters can live beyond and outside of his novels, and why innocence is important, which I find quite fascinating and important, if we are to think about why wodehouse has appealed to such a wide range of people, Wittgenstein included. , salman rushdie and the late queen mother.

why do you think that is?

as auden says, characters like this seem to endure. Red-faced Aunt Dahlia, who is “based on the lines of Mae West” and sends epic telegrams to Bertie. Aunt Agatha, the “nephew crusher” who “chews through broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.” the “kind and stupid” lord emsworth, “dropped like a wet sock”. the “immaculate” blacksmith, resting in the drone club. the list goes on.

It’s the quality of his style and his jokes. for example, “she came bounding up to me like lady macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest room.” or, “[he] pressed her against her chest, using the interlocking grip.” or, “He looked like a tomato struggling to express itself.” but even by quoting you miss something. you need them within the structure and rhythm of the stories themselves. she worked and worked on her plots. the details came easy to him, and that was the kind of writing he enjoyed, but the plot was more difficult. he was always asking his friends for ideas on how to plot. but the work was worth it. he also writes very good love stories. so I think it’s the exceptional style of his and the sheer joy of stories that deliver a world where things work out. They give us a small glimpse of Eden.

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