SOME TWO OR three years ago I was asked in the United States to broadcast a few words on my own trade of writing—what I thought of it and why I disliked it.
I understand that this broadcast was heard by a very large number—some millions it seems. Now in the course of this broadcast I gave as the best writer of English now alive, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse.
It was not only a very sincere but a reasonable and well thought out pronouncement. Yet I got a vast number of communications asking me what I exactly meant. Not that those who had heard me doubted Mr. Wodehouse’s genius. They had given proof of their perception of that genius by according him the very wide circulation which he enjoys on that side of the Atlantic, as I am glad to say he does elsewhere. No; their puzzlement was why I should call the author who was supreme in that particular line of country the “best” writer of our time: the best living writer of English: why I should have called him, as I did call him, “the head of my profession”.
I cannot do better in such a brief introduction as this than take that episode as my text and explain why and how Mr. Wodehouse occupies this position.
Writing is a craft, like any other: playing the violin, skating, batting at cricket, billiards, wood-carving—anything you like; and mastership in any craft is attainment of the end to which that craft is devoted. A craftsman is excellent in his craft according to his degree of attainment towards its end, and his use of the means towards that end. Now the end of writing is the production in the reader’s mind of a certain image and a certain emotion. And the means towards that end are the use of words in any particular language; and the complete use of that medium is the choosing of the right words and the putting of them into the right order. It is this which Mr. Wodehouse does better, in the English language, than anyone else alive; or at any rate than anyone else whom I have read for many years past.
His object is comedy in the most modern sense of that word: that is, his object is to present the laughable, and he does this with such mastery and skill that he nearly always approaches, and often reaches, perfection.
It is a test of power in this craft of writing that its object shall be attained by some method which the reader cannot directly perceive. To write prose so that your search for effect appears on the surface is to write bad prose. To write prose so that you get your effects by unusual words, deliberately chosen for their oddity, is to write bad prose. To write prose so that the reader thinks more of the construction than of the image conveyed is to write bad prose. So to write is not necessarily to write the worst prose nor even very bad prose, but it is to miss perfection.
There are various ways in which you may test the truth of what I here say about this master in my own craft of writing. One is to attempt an imitation. You will find you cannot do it. In all the various departments of his skill Mr. Wodehouse is unique for simplicity and exactitude, which is as much as to say that he is unique for an avoidance of all frills. He gets the full effect, bang! One may say of him as the traveller in the story, hearing Shakespeare for the first time, said of Hamlet: “Doesn’t he pull it off?” Or again one may consider his inimitable use of parallelism. The use of parallelism is one of the special marks of leadership in English. For it has become one of the chief marks of English prose in its most sharp-edged form. Now in parallelism Mr. Wodehouse is again supreme. There is no one like him in this department. One may say of him what he might say of his own Jeeves, “There is none like you, none”. Whether one quotes a single phrase such as “quaking like a jelly in a high wind” (for the effect of an aunt upon a young nephew), or of the laugh of another lady and its effect upon another young man: “it was like cavalry clattering over a tin bridge”; or any one out of a hundred examples, it is always the same success. Mr. Wodehouse has done the trick. In every case the parallelism has enhanced to the utmost the value of the thing described. It appears not only in phrases, but in the use of one single metaphorical word, and especially in the use of passing vernacular slang.
Then you may consider the situations: the construction. Properly this does not concern the excellence of the writer as such. It is the art of the playwright more than of the prose-writer pure and simple. But observe how admirably it is used in these hands! The situation, the climax, general and particular, the interplay of character and circumstance are as exact as such arrangements can be. They produce the full effect and are always complete.
There is yet another perfection which I note in him. It is one which most moderns, I think, would not regard as a perfection at all. Well! I differ from them. It is the repeated use of one set of characters. The English country house and its setting, the aged absent-minded earl, the young ladies and gentlemen with too much leisure or too little, too much money, or (contrariwise) embarrassment—all these form one set of recurrent figures, one set of “property” scenes. Another is New York with its special characters and special situations—particularly the suddenly enriched and the vagaries of their young, more human than their mothers.
There is the club of the young, idle, and very-much-to-be-liked young Englishmen of the wealthier sort, the pageant of the Drones (and, by the way, talking of clubs, what more exact bullseye has ever been hit by any marksman than the casual remark about the man being shown all the sights of London, “ending up with Bucks”?). Then there are the immortal, vivid glimpses of suburban life, for example the glorious adventures of the uncle who breaks loose once a year and showers gold upon the young man who jellies eels and his devoted would-be spouse: a lovely pair of lovers, as vivid as a strong transparency concentrated on one small screen—yet not a dozen adjectives between them.
Everything this author has seen he has observed; everything he has observed he has engraved; but, what is more remarkable than observation (which is common to many), or even than the record of observation (which is, though rare in any excellent degree, yet fairly well known), is the presentation of the thing observed so that it rises almost violently before the eye to which it is presented. That is everywhere, in every style, in every manner of subject the very heart of prose; not only of imaginative prose but of all prose.
Those great masters of prose whom the foolish think dull possess that power, as may be proved by the way in which whatever they have written is retained in the memory of the reader. To quote an instance of which I am fond and which is little known: Newman’s chapters on “The Arians of the Fourth Century”.
Now my fellow-worshippers at this shrine which Mr. Wodehouse has raised to the glory of his country, that is, of English letters, may rightly complain that praise of a man’s craftsmanship is arid praise. When you say that Brou (which I suppose is the finest sculpture in Europe) leaves you breathless, you do not want to add any long technical discussion of how the figures were modelled or how the chisel worked upon that stone. Let me end therefore with something that is not a mere hymn of praise to Mr. Wodehouse’s style (which I repeat and still maintain to be the summit of his achievement); let me end with something about him which is intensely national—I mean the creation of one more figure in that long gallery of living figures which makes up the glory of English fiction.
For the English people, more than any other, have created in their literature living men and women rather than types—and Mr. Wodehouse has created Jeeves.
He has created others, but in his creation of Jeeves he has done something which may respectfully be compared to the work of the Almighty in Michelangelo’s painting. He has formed a man filled with the breath of life. It is probable that the race of butlers will die even sooner than other modern species. They rose to meet a need. They played a national role triumphantly. That role is now near extinction and they are ready to depart. You may say that Jeeves is not exactly a butler, but he is of the same rare divine metal from which butlers are made. He leads among those other butlers of Mr. Wodehouse’s invention and indeed he leads all the gentlemen’s gentlemen of the world. I should like the foreigner or posterity (much the same thing) to steep themselves in the living image of Jeeves and thus comprehend what the English character in action may achieve. Talk of efficiency!
I have just said that those of whom Jeeves is the prototype or the god are perhaps doomed, and this leads me to the last question which one always asks of all first-rate writing: will Mr. Wodehouse’s work endure?
Pray note that literary work does not necessarily endure through its excellence. What is called “immortality” (whereas nothing mortal is immortal) is conferred upon a man’s writing by external circumstances as much as by internal worth. I can show you whole societies of men for whom Keats would be meaningless and I know dozens of Englishmen well versed in the French language who find Racine merely dull. Whether the now famous P. G. Wodehouse will remain upon that level for as many generations as he deserves, depends, alas, upon what happens to England. For my part I would like to make it a test of that very thing—“What happens to England.”
If in, say, 50 years Jeeves and any other of that great company—but in particular Jeeves—shall have faded, then what we have so long called England will no longer be.
H. BELLOC.