On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’
On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’
Even so, there is no harm in observing something of the master’s technique, which I contemplated as I enjoyed the book on an aeroplane. In ‘No Wedding Bells for Bingo’, Bertie goes to lunch with Bingo Little’s uncle, a very fat man. ‘The gong sounded, and the genial host came tumbling downstairs like the delivery of a ton of coals.’
That sentence exemplifies three Wodehousian tricks. Just as no one is a man but an egg, chappie, bird, fellow, cove or fish, so no one ever walks. The narrator (Bertie Wooster) makes them toddle, totter, trickle, tool, stagger, charge, pop or, in this case, tumble. The tendency is to exaggerate. If Bertie totters to his room with a headache, he also likes to totter round town with his pals.
The ‘genial host’ is an example of a well-known phrase or saying that is used, not as an unconscious cliché, but as a sort of Homeric epithet. Instead of wine-dark sea, we find more than one hollow, mirthless laugh and trackless desert. These humorously deployed stock phrases are sometimes expanded into quotations that are meant to be recognised. We find that all is ‘absolutely for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ (Voltaire); ‘a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove’ (Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, where the ‘iris changes on’; Wodehouse makes his misquotation scan by turning on into upon); ‘he cometh not’ (Tennyson again, Mariana). Bertie, indeed, is better read than most readers of Wodehouse.
It is simile for which Wodehouse is celebrated. The Inimitable Jeeves contains some of his fruitiest. Aunt Agatha is deflated like ‘one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back’. Jeeves handles some purple socks ‘as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of the salad’. As it happens, the sheep similes are too frequent in The Inimitable Jeeves, with Soapy Sid described as looking ‘like a sheep with a secret sorrow’ (which incorporates a quotation from Longfellow). But we also have similes of a sheep caught in the mist on a mountain top and another with a blade of grass caught in its throat. I suspect they are casualties of gumming several stories together to make a continuous narrative.
But, for easiness, immediacy and economy of style, Wodehouse, like Jeeves, stands alone.
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