Plum in the dock

"In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen, I am not so sure.... The only consession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return, I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week."

-- Extract from P G Wodehouse's broadcasts on German Radio

Sometimes you find an eminent person back in the news for all the wrong reasons. It's now the turn of that great humourist P G Wodehouse. Earlier this year, the Public Record Office of the UK released some official files pertaining to Wodehouse's broadcasts for German Radio during World War II, after he was transferred from prison to a swank hotel by his German captives, which paint him as a "vain and silly" man. The broadcasts were innocuous enouth as they contained light-hearted accounts of his time in a German prison. However, what was damming was the informationin the secret files of the MI5, which stated that Wodehouse was actually paid by the Germans for the broadcasts! Maybe the money came handy for settling the bills of the swank hotel, as even the sale of his wife's jewellery left him as impecunious as some of the aristocratic characters in his books. So was he really a traitor?

To me, the 'crime' was piffling compared to the laughter the man raised across the globe. I was still in school when I came out of the facinating children's world of Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton and careened right into Plum. My first reaction to the work of this large English gentleman was, "What ho !" Thereafter P G Wodehouse became inspiration. I took special pleasure in toting around the large bound volumes of his collected works that graced the lower shelves of my principal's office. Fellow students, who didn't know how entertaining the master was, assumed that the tomes contained heavy scholastic stuff and looked on me as a prodigious scholar and left me to my 'studies.' And so I met Mulliner and his multifaceted relatives. Mr Mulliner, in his customary chair in the bar-palour of the Anglers' Rest, delights in narrating episodes from the lives of his scores of relatives. "I am a fisherman myself, and I have never told a lie in my life," he declares, and then continues telling the tallest of stories.

I went newt hunting with Gussy Fink-Nottle (who even looked like a fish). I suppressed near uncontrollable laughter in public places as the Empress of Blandings took wings while her distraught owner, Clarence, the ninth earl of Emsworth, blamed all and sundry for her disappearence. I followed the doings of Frederick Threepwood who happily said, "I always strive, when I can, to spread sweetness and light. There have been several complains about it." And then, of course, there was that incomparable pair, the butler and his man: Jeeves and Bertram (Bertie) Wooster.

Bertie had his aunts.The one who ate nails was Agatha and the one with the french cook, Anatole, was Dahlia. Whether it was minding their nephews who ran amok in New York, or judging bonny baby contests, Bertie kept up a rather full life with these two elders. Then he had the Drones club where eggs, beans and crumpets lolled, languidly smoking cigarettes.

Psmith ("'P' silent as in school") grew on me right from the time he was a school boy. Indeed, Psmith was the first of Wodehouse's famous comic characters. The sauve, smooth, monocled dandiacal Old Etonian, who affects left-wing views and addresses everyone as 'comrade' has an entire saga to himself and once even turns up at Blandings Castle in Leave it to Psmith.

A remarkable character at Blandings is the younger brother of Lord Emsworth, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, "a man disapproved of by his numerous sisters but considered in the Servants' Hall to shed lustre on Blandings Castle." The low life in London "would have been puzzled to know whom you were referring to if you had spoken of Einstein, but they were all familiar with Gally."

The servants quarters at Blandings was presided over by Beach the butler who "was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht." These are the kinds of metaphors and similes that have made Wodehouse a singular genius of the comic genre. (More examples in the box.)
But where did the master get the inspiration for his characters, situations and locales? N T P Murphy in his book In Search of Blandings (1987, Penguin) attempts a 'dekko' at the backdrop of Wodehouse's oeuvre. Murphy worked on the asumption that Wodehouse took the advice of Bob Davis, the editor of a New York magazine to which Wodehouse contributed stories in 1913/14. Davis had exhorted him to "write about things you know." Murphy goes on to demonstrate that Wodehouse did just that. The whimsical characters, stately buildings and incredible situations of the Wodehouse world all had their roots in the reality he knew.

The Drones Club, for example, had its origin in the Pelican Club which spawned the same type of gentlemen -- public school, idiosyncratic, impecunious -- that peopled the books that Plum penned over seventy years. Some of the outrageous actions of the Pelicans are sampled in this book and it is very evident that the antics of a Wooster, Bingo Little or Ukridge were not snatched out of the air by Wodehouse, but were inspired by real happenings. What Wodehouse did was disguise his sources, twist the situations to fit his plots and put everything down in his own inimitable fine prose, lush with the adjectives, metaphors and les mots juste which elevated him to being one of the funniest writers in the English language.

Perhaps, he is the most inspiring humorist of this century, for in the writings of all who came after him, the benign influence of the patriarch can hardly be disguised.

A sprinkling of Wodehouse gems

Jeeves coughed one soft, low, gentle cough like a sheep with a blade of grass stuck in its throat. -- The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

Like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag. -- Summer Moonshine (1938)

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg. -- Eggs, Beans and Crumpets (1940)

He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jellyfish. -- My Man Jeeves (1919)

If I had had to choose between him and a cockroach as a companion for a walking-tour, the cockroach would have had it by a short head. -- Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

Sir Roderick Glossop ... is always called a nerve specialist, because it sounds better, but everybody knows that he's really a sort of janitor to the looney-bin. -- The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

The policeman was a long, stringy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots. -- Gallahad at blandings

He [Lord Emsworth] was sitting in the lounge... his long lean body draped like a wet sock on a chair. -- Gallahad at blandings (1965)

I'd always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn't even put her in the oven. -- Jeeves in the Offing (1960)

...as so often happened with him when in the presence of the opposite sex, he could get no further than a sort of sizzling sound like a cockroach calling to its young. -- Meet Mr. Mulliner (1927)

And once again the invalid presented himself, looking like a full page illustration from a medical treatise on bubonic plague. -- Nothing Serious (1950)