It was with great relief that I read the publishers of the late PG Wodehouse have summoned up the courage to reprint his tales of Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, odd-ball uncles, fierce and ditzy aunts, and an assortment of other characters. They bumbled their inept way through life, and yet someone how managed to come out all right. Books are just plain fun to read, which is why the news that they might be allowed to slide into obscurity was discomforting. Over the past year there had been serious discussions about not republishing the books because a handful of people thought they were politically and culturally incorrect, and insufficiently Woke. Others demanded that the existing copies be taken off the shelves and destroyed.
Wodehouse’s detractors have a lengthy inventory of reasons why his novels should be permanently banned, and that he deserved a long stretch in the Tower of London
I don’t believe any minority group is ever mentioned in his books. As for human sexuality, it doesn’t get much further than two people falling in love and never move much beyond it. Most of his characters contribute next to nothing to society, and only a few stand up to protest something or the other, and never anything of relevance. In short, Bertie Wooster and his ilk are thoroughly useless individuals except to provide a good laugh for the reader. When it came to humor, Wodehouse was an equal opportunity offender. The only sensible fellow was the stuffy, erudite, upper-class Jeeves.
So many old light classics have been pulled off the shelves or taken out of print because someone doesn’t like them. For those who are humor-impaired, there is a lot not to like about any of them, so the hue and cry is to do away with them. This time – Score one victory for the freedom of speech and the press.
During his seventy-five or more years of writing, more than most modern authors, he knew how to consistently craft a perfect sentence. My favorite has always been, “Although he was not disgruntled, he certainly was not very gruntled.” It takes a genius to come up with something like that. Genius like that, however, is built on the foundation of the perseverance to rewrite the same sentence ten or more times to get it just right.
Another example, “The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.” That seems inoffensive, but not to the hyper-sensitive brigade who are aware that Chesterton liked to eat – often and heartily. To write that he was rotund is an understatement, for he was the very sort of sometimes absent-minded gentleman known to fall because he had not seen his feet in decades. The haters break out the red pencils at passages like that one. For them, one such sentence is enough to taint the whole book, and there are many such sentences per page.
Wodehouse was a wonderful comedic writer, and like all good comedians, it was his job to poke fun at pretentiousness. Everyone was a potential target, but only so long as they were well-to-do, had solid relationships with others, or so self-important that they deserved to be taken down a peg. As his Canadian colleague Stephen Leacock noted, “Humor is seeing a self-important banker slip on a banana peel; tragedy is an elderly woman slipping on it.” Wodehouse’s favorite targets were befuddled young men of the upper middle class. He didn’t make fun of the fellows cleaning out the barn or the harried women who ran a corner shop. Today, or so it seems, poking fun, even at upper class white males, is unacceptable to the Woke Brigade. Instead, they want to banish them, and the people who write about them.
His characters were stereotypes, whether it was the muddled Earl who could devote hours leaning on the fence looking at his beloved pig, a shrill and demanding older aunt, a love-struck young man, or even the stiff and formal valet, Jeeves. Any clergyman who wanders into his books was always so heavenly minded they were of no earthly use. Today, stereotypes will simply not do.
Another problem the Woke Brigade have with him is that he wrote during some very trying times. His popularity soared in the 1920s and continued to rise until the end of the next decade. Remember, this was in the midst of the Agricultural Depression of the early 1920s, the rise of the dictators around the world, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. How dare, his critics screeched, can we justify the continued literary existence of a man who could write cheerful prose when the world was suffering? Where is the requisite amount of soul-searching and angst of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath?
That is exactly what helped make the books so popular. There was already sufficient misery in the world, starting with the harsh realities of The Great War, followed almost immediately by the devastation of the Spanish Flu, economic problems, political problems, and a lot more. There is only so much of that misery we can absorb, and we want something new, different, and fun. It is said that during the depths of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, found relief and cleared his mind with the latest Wodehouse novel. An hour or so of reading and he got back to work, his head clear and his creativity working on all eight cylinders. So important to his well-being that Mrs. Roosevelt had the latest novel shipped from London in diplomatic pouches.
This year, the publishing company thought long and hard about risking the wrath of the Woke Brigade, knowing it would be controversial to bring back Wodehouse. The mob had done their best to cancel some of the best known and wealthiest writers in the world; other writers had capitulated to their demands by self-censoring.
The publishers elected to make a compromise by letting their readers know that the stories depict stereotypes and actions that are from a by-gone era. I am not so certain it was a compromise, but more of a tongue-in-cheek reminder. People who read Wodehouse’s books have been known to go on a holiday in the United Kingdom thinking country is just like his descriptions, or that England hasn’t changed since the 1920s. It has, but then, perhaps a century ago, England was never like his depictions. Wodehouse was having fun; and so were we.
We need the visual and performing arts for many reasons, including the plain old-fashioned idea of experiencing them for pleasure and fun.