`So Dashed Competent in Every Respect'

“Miserable as our century is, we can still boast that for seventy-five years of it we had P.G. Wodehouse, the Meander of our time…”

I thought of Guy Davenport’s generous assessment on Tuesday when a reader confessed he was unable to read Wodehouse, finding him alien, off-putting and, most slanderously, not funny. I’ve not read Wodehouse lately. One reads him medicinally and I’ve felt rather well of late. I remember a difficult spell in 1995 when I was able to read only two writers – Wodehouse and Samuel Beckett. An unlikely pair, perhaps, but with at least two qualities in common: perfect ears for English prose and a reliable gift for making readers laugh.

On my shelf is a plump orange volume published in 1932 by the Garden City Publishing Company: Nothing But Wodehouse, edited by Ogden Nash. It collects bits of six earlier titles, including samples from Bertie and Jeeves, the Ukridge and Mulliner stories, and the novel Leave It to Psmith. I found it years ago in a now-defunct used book store on Central Avenue in Albany, N.Y. Someone using a fountain pen wrote “Lots of laughter! – Cassy” inside the front cover. The first story in the book, “Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum,” begins like this:

“`Morning, Jeeves,’ I said.

“`Good morning, sir,’ said Jeeves.

“He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table by my bed, and I took a refreshing sip. Just right, as usual. Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, not too much milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer. A most amazing cove, Jeeves. So dashed competent in every respect.”

Old Wodehouse hands have already settled in for the duration. For a different sort of early morning, here’s a bit from Beckett’s Molloy:

“The sky was that horrible colour which heralds dawn. Things steal back into position for the day, take their stand, sham dead. I sat down cautiously, and I must say with a certain curiosity, on the ground. Anyone else would have tried to sit down as usual, offhandedly. Not I.”

Old Beckett hands etc., etc. There’s a comfort in familiar humor, even when one knows the joke. The rhythms of both passages are so distinctive, unlikely to be mistaken for any other writer’s. The earnest fellows in the academy have tried to wring all the fun out of Beckett and turn his books into a colony of French philosophy, though they’ve mostly left Wodehouse and his 96 titles alone.

Here’s the remainder of the Davenport paragraph I started with, taken from his introduction to the Selected Stories of O. Henry (Penguin, 1993) and collected in The Hunter Gracchus:

“…and for ten years O. Henry. There have been many others, of course, but none, with the possible exception of the exotic and manic S.J. Perelman and the gentle, whimsical James Thurber, whose whole art was cast in the masterfully styled puppetry of New Comedy.”