'Pick Up the Pen Wodehouse Let Fall'

“As [P.G.] Wodehouse grew ancient, he remained astonishingly clear of mind, firm of style, and chipper of heart; and it seems that at 93 he wrote with hardly less skill than he had commanded at 40.” 

There are times when I am convinced beyond rational argument that the supreme writer of fiction in the twentieth century was P.G. Wodehouse. When some newly enlightened grad student thinks he’s introducing me to William H. Gass, whom I first read fifty-four years ago and sized up pretty quickly, I reach for Nothing But Wodehouse, a fat anthology edited by Ogden Nash in 1935, and read in the first selection, “Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum” (1923): “A most amazing cove, Jeeves. So dashed competent in every respect. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.” It’s like homecoming. Language of Mozartian grace composed by a writer who respects his readers and wishes to please them. There are other ways to write well but seldom with such charm.

 

The passage at the top was written by X.J. Kennedy in his 1978 review of Wodehouse’s posthumously published final novel, Sunset at Blandings. Kennedy shares with Wodehouse a wish to induce laugher in readers commensurate with his ability to do so. Few spectacles are so bleak as the guy who longs to be a comedian but is blessed with the wit of Al Gore. John Simon once described Kennedy as “a curious cross between the boulevardier and the Metaphysical: he believes in the well-made, witty but significant poem, donning its top hat and its Donne.” Almost too clever, which is Simon’s style, but there’s something to it. Kennedy is raunchier than Wodehouse, more pointedly satirical, blacker-minded. Unlike Wodehouse, Kennedy can sting. Here is “At a Reading of Poems of a Poet’s Agonies,” on that cruel and unusual ritual, the poetry reading:

 

We sit and listen, writhing in our chairs,

Pierced by a pain far worse than what he shares.”

 

Kennedy concludes his Wodehouse review with these words: “[I]t seems unlikely that any other writer could pick up the pen Wodehouse let fall. Luckily, in his 65 years as a novelist, he produced enough musicals without music -- or caricatures without drawings -- to last the faithful almost forever.” As Kennedy notes in the passage at the top, Wodehouse worked until the end, until he was ninety-three. Kennedy will turn ninety-three on August 21. That’s an observance to remember, not a prediction.

 

[Robert Alter, reviewing The Tunnel for The New Republic in 1995, delivered the definitive dish on Gass: “The bloat is a consequence of sheer adipose verbosity and an unremitting condition of moral and intellectual flatulence.” Q.E.D.]