Oh my goodness, what an absurd and cool question! I can’t say I know why you’re asking it, but sit down on yonder settee and I will tell you the painful story of my literary obsession.
P.G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse, or “Plum” to his friends, was a British chap who started writing at right about the turn of the century and didn’t stop until his death in the mid-1970s, which is pretty good, I should think. He was a very prolific writer who shot stuff off to magazines on both sides of the ocean to put food on the table and who sometimes (often) shamelessly cannibalized his own writing, but I am hesitant to call him a hack. If he was a hack, he was indisputably the most joyous, brilliant and good-hearted hack that ever eked out a living by nabbing a chapter from one of his old manuscripts and changing all the names, and I don’t fault him a bit for it.
Because, somewhere along the line, while he was pounding out these millions and millions of words, he learned how to create sentences like this:
I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s
Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad—who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.
That’s Bertie Wooster, narrator of his Jeeves and Wooster series, and THAT is the sentence that let me know in no uncertain terms that I was a goner. Because how do you leave an author alone who tosses off things like that like it’s nothing? You can’t. Or at any rate, I couldn’t. And here I am. Running a blog that I’m trying desperately to keep from being devoted entirely to him and frankly kind of failing. He was, well, I can’t describe him. You just kind of have to read his books.
Wodehouse is known for creating (among other things that I’m sure I missed):
- the Jeeves and Wooster series
- the Psmith series (too short, alas)
- the Blandings Castle series
- a bunch of short stories about golf narrated by the Oldest Member who’s seemingly some sort of golf god (or at least a high priest)
- a bunch of short stories about a guy named Mr. Mulliner who tells increasingly absurd tales about his extended family to the hapless chaps in his pub
- countless stand-alone rom-com novels.
And if you looked closely, all these characters lived in an immensely complicated expanded universe that crossed over in a million subtle ways. They went to each other’s clubs. They knew each other’s friends. They tried to impress girls and inadvertently ended up at Blandings Castle. You never really know who you’re going to run into when reading a Wodehouse book, which is a delightful experience.
Wodehouse had adventures in his real life, too! He escaped at around age 20 from the clutches of a bank that had seized him alive after his father lost all his money (which you can read about in Psmith in the City because from what I gather it was pretty much exactly like that only hopefully with less monocle-wearing friends of his turning up and blackmailing people) and he wrote for theater and worked in Hollywood and one time he got interned by Nazis, which wasn’t fun, and did some completely harmless radio broadcasts for them, letting his fans in America know he was all right and making fun of his captors, and then England completely misunderstood the thing and decided he was a traitor and they wanted nothing to do with him and he lived out the rest of his natural life on Long Island. So he had some dark periods in his life, too. But they knighted him anyway! At just about the last minute. I mean, he slid through the pearly gates Indiana Jones-style, seizing his knighthood after him. Metaphorically.
And he died on Valentine’s Day, which I think is heartwrenchingly beautiful, because honestly, P.G. Wodehouse was one of the most sincerely nice people ever to write books. He loved his characters. He loved his audience. He loved…pretty much everyone. (Except for A.A. Milne. Creator of Winnie the Pooh. Whom he earnestly hoped would trip over a bootlace and break his neck.)
This is a painfully inadequate tribute (I’ll do better when I’m asked to write the introduction to the bicentennial editions, promise) so I’ll try to leave you with a taste of what he was. Here is his Paris Review interview. And here are all those books of his that are not under copyright, available for free on Project Gutenberg. Get them on your ereader, if you’ve got one. I recommend starting with My Man Jeeves (though I warn you, things get a little confusing because there half the stories in it are about a chap named Reggie Pepper who was sort of the prototype for Bertie Wooster, so you may feel discombobulated). After that, you can sort of read any of them.
Goodbye. Good luck. Oh, and—do turn up at my askbox again if the addiction seizes you and you need someone to shout at. It happens to the best of us.