'Writers That Are Worth Anything Are Humorists'

Bertie Wooster has asked if he can purchase a gift for Jeeves while he is out, and the valet replies: “‘Well, sir, there has recently been published a new and authoritatively annotated edition of the works of the philosopher Spinoza. Since you are so generous, I would appreciate that very much.” This comes in the first chapter of Joy in the Morning, published by P.G. Wodehouse in 1947. I was reading it late the other night, alone in the front room, and I started giggling and my eyes watered. The dog looked concerned.

Ever since my nephew told me he had discovered Wodehouse and was going through his novels and stories like a guest at a party with an open bar, I’ve been reading Plum between more imposing volumes – including Spinoza, a thinker I discovered as a teenager thanks to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. (In another B&J confection, Carry On, Jeeves, Wodehouse has Jeeves say: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) A reader tells me in a comment on Tuesday’s post that he is reading Wodehouse’s Something Fresh (1915):

“Every silly yet perfectly crafted page," he writes, "was a declaration of allegiance to something more enduring than even the greatest historical catastrophe -- the unexpected pleasure potential of just being alive. God bless the man – it’s a reminder I needed right now.”

An amusing scene with a clerk in a bookshop follows Jeeves’ request. While there, Bertie runs into Florence Craye, an intellectual woman to whom he was once engaged. “‘Bertie!’ she says, ‘This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’”

Bertie, our narrator, thinks: “‘It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.” Bertie tells Florence:

“‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’”

Is there a moral component here, a lesson for all good readers? I suppose so. Don’t lie. Admit your shortcomings. But all of that is irrelevant. We laugh because all of us, at least on occasion, are tempted to put on airs so we appear smarter or better educated than we are. In effect, to lie.

I’m reminded of something Nabokov told an interviewer: “All writers that are worth anything are humorists.” This seems obvious to some of us. Much of the best humor implies a nuanced understanding of the world, the ability to see comedy in tragedy and vice versa – the essence of literary accomplishment. The humorless are earnest and dull and leave little room for a good laugh or an insight into human nature. “I’m not P.G. Wodehouse,” Nabokov continues. “I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. “

[Nabokov’s 1962 interview with Phyllis Meras for the Providence Sunday Journal is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019).]