Jeeves and Wooster - has it aged well?

[Mushroomwithaview]

My 12 yr old wonders if she might enjoy reading PG Wodehouse. She's heard about Jeeves and Wooster. I'm happy to buy her a book, but it's been years since I read any of them, and I wonder how they've aged.

Any good for a 12 yr old? And if yes, which one?

I re-read them a couple of times a year. So they’ve aged well for me. I don’t know if a 12 year old would get as much. The audiobooks are generally good, it depends hugely on the narrator.

Ahh this thread has cheered me right up. Wonderful selection of Wodehouse snippets. I've been listening to the audiobooks recently - absolute poetry.

I hate the word genius. It is absurdly overused. But no other word is appropriate for the following passage. This is Bertie describing his three ex-girlfriends, Honoria Glossop, Madeline Bassett and Florence Craye:

"Honoria Glossop was hearty, yes. Her laugh was like a steam-riveting machine, and from a child she had been a confirmed back slapper. Madeleine Bassett was soppy, true. She had large, melting eyes and thought the stars were God's daisy chain. These are grave defects, but to do this revolting duo justice neither had tried to mould me, and that was what Florence Craye had done from the start, seeming to look on Bertrand Wooster as a mere chunk of plasticine in the hands of the sculptor."

I don't even know what to say about that. There's no point adding anything. Read it two or three times (and read it out loud). I would put that passage up against anything by Joyce, Nabokov or Woolf. It's simply poetry. He does things with language that would make even the great poets gasp. Even the name Honoria Glossop is poetry. And that's how to read him – as a poet. I think of him in the same way I think of Philip Larkin, Shelley or Tennyson.

Yes I was really thinking of the overall attitudes expressed by characters. They are of their time from both "good" and "bad" actors.

So much written about that era carefully superimposes the contemporary liberal establishment values on the good characters whilst letting the bad actors have the values which were entirely normal for the period. I find that deeply dishonest and an airbrushing of history.

In some ways he was ahead of his time. In the Jeeves and Wooster novels, for example, there are plenty of strong, independent young women, and in some cases they are Bertie’s friends (or “pals,” as he puts it). The idea of a young man and woman simply being pals, without any hint of romance, was a relatively new idea. It’s also striking the way Bertie remains friends with ex-lovers. Again, a pretty new idea I should think.

"Although not exactly disgruntled, he was very far from being gruntled."

They are paradise

There is a superb tribute to Wodehouse by Douglas Adams. It’s a really wonderful piece of writing.

Stephen Fry also wrote an exquisite article on him (even better than Adams). He says of Wodehouse’s prose that “you don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you merely bask in its splendour,” which is a sentence even Wodehouse would be proud of!

I just love the delicious twists of his language.
My favourite Wodehouse line is: '... as broke as the ten commandments ...'

Just to add my voice to the praise.

I love both Wodehouse and Douglas Adam’s and re-read every few years. I have a tendency to overthink everything in life and get caught up in things and both are good at pulling me back to earth and getting some perspective on things.

Also nice to post on a thread where someone may recognise my name!

DS read them at about 12 and loved them, much to my surprise. Despite their age, there is an underlying innocence to the stories, and I can't think of anything offensive in them.
They're great.

I’ve only just started getting into Douglas Adams and am enjoying him SO much. I think with any writer, you must love the voice behind the words. If not, you won’t really enjoy them. That’s the problem I have with Tolkien and Hemingway. I don’t like ‘the voice’. I instantly liked Adams’ though. And I think in part that’s down to Wodehouse. The influence of Wodehouse on Douglas Adams is really striking. He listed Wodehouse, Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut and Jane Austen as his big literary heroes, but I’d say Wodehouse and Vonnegut influenced him the most.

The influence Wodehouse has had on British, and especially English, culture has been enormous. Monty Python, Evelyn Waugh, Blackadder, Stephen Fry, etc, all named him as central to their work.

Try the Evelyn Waugh comedies, particularly Scoop. "Maternal rodents guiding their broods through the plashy fens", "up to a point Lord Copper"..... Wodehouse influence screams out!

I love Waugh. I actually bought one of the Sword of Honour novels just yesterday. The only downside is the vicious nastiness of the man. He's similar to Wodehouse (who was his favourite writer), but lacks his gentleness and innocence. Every now and then, the sadism peeps through, and it's unnerving. Frankly, I suspect Waugh was a borderline psychopath. Superb writer though – definitely in my top five or six, along with Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, P. G. Wodehouse, Anita Brookner and Dickens. I'm enjoying Douglas Adams so much that he's fast becoming one of my favourites too. Then again, I'm constantly telling people that the writer I've just discovered is the best ever. 😁

Try the Evelyn Waugh comedies, particularly Scoop. "Maternal rodents guiding their broods through the plashy fens", "up to a point Lord Copper"..... Wodehouse influence screams out!

'Aunt calling to aunt like mastodons in a swamp....' so many images and layers of meaning there.

Apparently Jeeves was called after Percy Jeeves, a young cricketer who was killed in 1916, and Wodehouse thought the name was just right for a butler

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-35976858

Wodehouse was educated at Dulwich College around the same time as another pupil, Raymond Chandler and coincidentally the employ the same turn of phrase: 'She was the kind of blonde who would make a bishop kick a foot through a plate-glass window', that kind of stuff. I tried to find the feature online that outlined this link in detail but failed to...

It may be heresy but I do recommend the continuation novel Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott, very funny indeed although Wooster himself is too intelligent to be the chump of the originals, as fans have pointed out. There was a follow up that wasn't quite as good.

Oh, what a lovely thread! The quotes remind me of many happy hours spent reading Wodehouse, ignoring the rest of the world. I particularly love Jeeves and Wooster and the Blandings series. Brilliant stuff.

“I eyed him narrowly. I didn't like his looks. Mark you, I don't say I ever had, much, because Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman.”

'like a cow contemplating a manglewurzle' is a phrase I remember from the Blandings books, cant remember which book though.

When I first read it as a 12 yo Londoner in the mid 80s I had to go to the library to find out what a manglewurzle was.

That's so typical of Wodehouse. Even the individual words are funny. Manglewurzle just makes you laugh. Go on, say manglewurzle three times with a straight face. Or think of the names of his characters, like Gussie Finknottle and Tuppy Glossop!

Someone once said that heaven would be a June afternoon at Blandings, in the gardens with someone about to do something silly.

When my son did AS level English Lit. I wished his class of boys could have studied a Blandings novel. So much language to discuss. And it's funny. He loved reading them at home. I'd hear him laughing aloud.

Wodehouse is still great.
His works are period pieces with ageless humour and lively language.
I read them when I was about twelve and coped with new words and unfamiliar slang.
To this day, I still ask my middle aged DS why doesn't he get his hair cut, he looks like a chrysanthemum.
In a similar vein, I still read Saki and the William books.