In case anyone is interested, these are some pasted/chopped up bits from a wonderful article by Stephen Fry on P G Wodehouse. It's a superb bit of writing. If you want to read the whole thing, you can soon find it online.
What ho! My hero, PG Wodehouse
Then there is a passage such as this, Lord Emsworth musing on his feckless younger son, Freddie Threepwood.
Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse's favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless.
Wherever lovers of Wodehouse cluster together, they fall into debate about whether it is the Jeeves stories or the Blandings stories that take the trophy as Wodehouse's greatest achievements. The group will, of course, dispel, muttering embarrassedly, for they know that such questions are as pointless as wondering whether God did a better job with the Alps or the Rockies. The question is bound to be asked, however, because each time you read another Blandings story, the sublime nature of that world is such as to make you gasp.
The cast of resident characters here is greater than that of the Wooster canon. There is Lord Emsworth himself, the amiable and dreamy peer, whose first love – pumpkins – is soon supplanted by the truest and greatest love of his life, the Empress of Blandings, that peerless Black Berkshire sow, thrice winner of the silver medal for the fattest pig in Shropshire; Emsworth's sister, Connie, who, when sorely tried, which was often, would retire upstairs to bathe her temples in eau-de-Cologne; the Efficient Baxter, Emsworth's secretary and a hound from hell; Emsworth's brother, Galahad, the last of the Pelicans (that breed of silk-hatted men about town who lived high and were forever getting thrown out of the Criterion bar in theEighties and Nineties); the younger son, Freddie, the bane of his father's life... The cast list goes on and is frequently supplemented by young men we will have met elsewhere, Ronnie Fish, Pongo Twistleton and even Psmith himself.
Blandings comes, in the Wodehouse canon, to stand for the absolute ideal in country houses. Its serenity and beauty are enough to calm the most turbulent breast. It is an entire world unto itself and, one senses, Wodehouse pours into it his deepest feelings for England. Once you have drunk from its healing spring, you will return again and again. Blandings is like that: it enters a man's soul.
The young men I mention as visiting Blandings are all members of Wodehouse's great fictional institution the Drones Club, in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. There are dozens of individual stories about members of the Drones, and two principal collections, Eggs Beans and Crumpets and Young Men in Spats. The title of the first derives from the Drones' habit of referring to each other as "old egg", "old bean", "my dear old crumpet" and so on. The Drones Club is a refuge for the idle young man about town. Such beings are for the most part entirely dependent on allowances from fat uncles. Indeed the name Drones is a reference to the drone bee, which toils not, neither does it spin, unlike its industrious cousin, the worker. An archetypal member would be Freddie Widgeon, intensely amiable, not very bright up top and always falling in love. The only Drone who is distinctly unlikeable is Oofy Prosser, the richest and meanest member. He sports pimples, Lobb shoes and the tightest wallet in London.
The second-richest member of the club is the most likeable. He is Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, descendant of the Sieur de Wooster who did his bit in the Crusades, and young Bertram retains the strict code of honour handed down from his ancestor, the code of the preux chevalier, the gentil parfit knight. Bertie Wooster is, of course, the employer of Jeeves, the supreme gentleman's personal gentleman.
While not intelligent within the meaning of the act, Bertie is desperate to learn, keen to assimilate the wisdom of his incomparable teacher. He may only half-know the quotations and allusions with which he peppers his speech, but proximity to the great brain has made him aware of the possibilities of exerting the cerebellum.
Wodehouse's genius in the Jeeves and Wooster canon lies in his complete realisation of Bertie as first-person narrator. Almost all the other stories depend upon standard, impersonal narration. The particular joy of a Jeeves story comes from the delicious feeling one derives from being completely in Bertie's hands. His apparently confused way of expressing him- self both reveals character and manages, somehow, to develop narrative with extraordinary economy and life. Since the Jeeves stories often lead one from the other, he will often need to repeat himself, which he manages to do with great ingenuity. He is called upon more than once, for example, to remind the reader about the dread daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop. The first example shows Bertie's way with Victorian poetry:
I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.
Another description of precisely the same characteristics in Honoria give us a very Woosteresque mixture of simile:
Honoria... is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging on a tin bridge.
Sometimes Bertie's speech moves towards a form of comic imagery so perfect that one could honestly call it poetic:
As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps... the clan has a tendency to ignore me.
The masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school is frequently included in collections of great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language. I would urge you, however, to head straight for a library or bookshop and get hold of the complete novel Right Ho, Jeeves, where you will encounter it fully in context and find that it leaps even more magnificently to life.
I think I should end on a personal note. I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.
He mocked himself sometimes because he knew that a great proportion of his readers came from prisons and hospitals. At the risk of being sententious, isn't it true that we are all of us, for a great part of our lives, sick or imprisoned, all of us in need of this remarkable healing spirit, this balm for hurt minds?