P G Wodehouse

[rangan_08]

Hope that some of you must have already accessed the below link.

For those who have not, I think you will like it.


http://wodehouse.thefreelibrary.com/...-Other-Stories

[rangan_08]

Read " The Man with two left feet " & " Sir Agravaine : A Tale of King Arthur's Round Table ".

What a relief from this monotonous, dreadful & chaotic life.

Wodehouse, the saviour !

[P_R]

Rangan and Plum, you guys may like this : http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article848326.ece

A review in the Times Literary Supplement of a recent book of PGW's collected letters

In another letter in this collection, written in 1932, Wodehouse tried to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “Aren’t these stories of the future a bore. The whole point of Huxley is that he can write better about modern life than anybody else, so of course he goes and writes about the future.”

The review covers his infamous period in Nazi France. They build up to how complete refusal to understand and engage with reality, or atleast attempt to tune his works to reality, has always been a fundamental characteristic of his.

Wodehouse was not a friend of Christie, but he kept an eye on her, read her work regularly, and could see that they were comparable figures. Worried by the possibility that post-war Britain might not be able to enjoy his country-house farces, he was reassured to read Christie’s The Hollow. “The people in it simply gorge roast duck and soufflés and caramel cream and so on, besides having a butler, several parlourmaids, a kitchen maid and a cook. I must say it encouraged me to read The Hollow and to see that Agatha Christie was ignoring present conditions in England.”

And on another occasion he makes a tactless, but funny, remark about his employment in Hollywood, which doesn't go down well with his employers

How does one define this? Tactlessness on a monumental scale? Innocent tactlessness? A breezy unconsciousness of the way the world works, or the way his words and actions would appear to that world? However you define the quality, you can see that it is the dark side of the coin which made him such a successful writer – that is, his capacity to see the world entirely on his own infantile terms, without realizing how those terms would impact on grown-ups.

Many people consider that it is a writer’s duty to engage with “reality”. All through the 1930s, many of Wodehouse’s fellow writers were lining up with the Left and “identifying” with the Spanish Republic or with Stalin’s Soviet Union. A smaller number were aligning themselves with Ezra Pound, Henry Williamson, Céline and others in their open avowal of fascism. But the central appeal of Wodehouse, a supreme master of language, is in his capacity to live in phrases and paragraphs, and not to deliver himself of bigger views. These letters reveal that it was no accident that he would one day come a cropper with the literal-minded and violent twentieth century. Indeed, far from being a silly ass who made a chump of himself, Wodehouse was a sort of martyr to art.

Exceedingly well put

This is a sane man, writing in a lunatic world.
.........
He wrote to his old school chum Bill Townend . . . . "It’s odd but I don’t find world cataclysms and my own personal troubles make any difference to my feelings about Dulwich. To win the Bedford match seems just as important to me as it ever did”. As for the ending of the war, “The horrible senselessness of it all oppresses me. I can’t see how any kind of a world can be left after it is over. How can England pay the bill?”

Strangely enough, the world still divides between those who would condemn such remarks and those who see them as the decent reactions of a civilized human being. But they are also the remarks of an artist who thought it was his job to get on with his craft, not to usurp the role of the politicos.