Not coincidentally, many of the dashing urbanites I have in mind profess a sacred bond with Wodehouse. They are not the only ones. I myself recently discovered the master and immediately fell under his spell, following the example of many friends and betters. With the recent reissuing from Overlook Press of several Wodehouse classics, a couple of writers I admire took the occasion to do a plug for Plum, as the man was known to friends and family. The comedies, wrote Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard, "reach a kind of perfection. They offer almost everything a reader for pleasure could want." Roger Kimball, in the New Criterion, recalled the moment "that I first acquainted myself with the sublime work of Sir Pelham Grenville," describing the Wodehouse habit as a "beneficent addiction."
Perhaps the most ardent of this bunch is Scott Walter, an editor at Philanthropy magazine, who not long ago gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute for a new series of public events devoted to literary culture. It goes to show how dear Plum is to the conservative mind that when America's leading conservative think tank feels the impulse to celebrate fiction, the first really big writer they single out is him. Walter is a walking bibliography of Wodehouse phrases, anecdotes, and literary criticism. His favorite Wodehouse student, he says, is W.H. Auden, who argued that God's holy covenant with man is transmuted in the fools' talk of Bertie and Jeeves. Which may even be true.
The affection for Wodehouse is
non-ideological, but for ideological reasons, one can see how conservatives might find it easier to warm to a world full of servants and rich people and various stock characters, all cast in some idyllic time and place that is mostly of Wodehouse's giddy invention. If social realism has an opposite, this is clearly it. Yet, Wodehouse has his fans on the left, like Alexander Cockburn (and countless other English writers), who penned a lovely introductory essay for the paperback edition of The Code of the Woosters. And when the apolitical Wodehouse was accused of treason for doing a series of radio spots on Berlin radio under Nazi occupation (they turned out to be wholly innocuous), his defenders Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge represented many a political stripe.
If Wodehouse appeals more prominently to conservatives, here in America anyway, then it is to their little-mentioned eccentric side, their occasional embrace of a festive mood and farcical manner. The nattiness and pizzazz I've described are intentionally amusing. The Wodehouse conservative is unfailingly self-aware. Wodehouse's characters, too, seem to know what characters they are, only they never say so. Psmith, Jeeves, the Oldest Member of the golf comedies, each grins like the Cheshire cat. Nor do the Washington dandies ever lower themselves to letting on that their show is a wee something of a joke. Here again they follow in Wodehouse's steps. As Kimball puts it so well: "Wodehouse's real genius lay in his ability to endow patently absurd situations with momentary conviction."
Wodehouse is the conservative's Oscar Wilde--the key example of a most sweet frivolity, a landmark, a fixed point by which we navigate our way back and forth to the happy club where we join our friends for a drink and take in the pleasure of being alive.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard and editor of Doublethink, the magazine of the America's Future Foundation. This article appears in the winter 2004 issue of Doublethink.
|
