Tribute
Right Ho, Plum!
RAJNISH WATTAS
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Remembering P.G. Wodehouse on the occasion of his 125th birth anniversary.
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Illustration: Mani
WHENEVER I get the blues, my usual "pick-me-up" is a P.G. Wodehouse favourite; chuckle away the clouds and rediscover the rainbows. Thank you, Plum.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, popularly known as "Plum", would have been 125 years old on October 15, had he lived on. As perhaps the greatest humorist for generations, he lives on eternally in the hearts of millions of his fans all over the world.
Prodigious output
During his lifetime he published 96 books, hundreds of short stories, 16 plays, lyrics for musical comedies and scripts for Hollywood movies. No wonder Wodehouse had a most distinguished and astonishing range of admirers ranging from Rudyard Kipling to Queen Elizabeth; not to forget the Queen Mother who once asked to be presented his full works. Fellow writers had the highest praise for him, especially Evelyn Waugh who called him the "Master".
Wodehouse was born in Guildford, England and educated at Dulwich College, and never lost his impish, schoolboy innocence the rest of his life. Most of his childhood, along with three brothers, was spent in boarding schools in England and with over-bearing though loving aunts during the vacations.
However, in spite of good all-round performance in school and college, he was unable to afford Oxford. As such, he began his career on a rather dull note by taking up a clerical job in a bank. But finance was the farthest thing from the literary calling of the dreamy other-worldly genius. He initially started making some money by writing comic stories for magazines and newspapers, but soon gained such a huge popularity in the Edwardian London that he took to full time writing.
In 1914 in New York he met Ethel Rowley, a boisterous young widow and married her. Marriage brought stability and love to his disorganised life, enabling him more time and energy for writing. An interesting India connection of Ethel was that she had spent about a year in India near Mysore, where her former husband had been working as a mining engineer.
However, 1915 could be labelled a milestone year in Wodehouse's writings, when he created his two most popular characters: Bertie Wooster a "chinless wonder, a well-off young man-about-town and his servant called Jeeves; a brainy, omnipotent who controls the master," says Stephen Fry. The relationship between the servant and the master became an inexhaustible source of humour.
Endearing stuff
Wodehouse had a range of many endearing, unforgettable characters, who would often get into messy, comic situations, to be generally bailed out by Jeeves, the "gentleman's personal gentleman" whose super wit and intellect combined with his secret "pick-me-ups" for the "mornings-after" hangovers retrieved many a messy situation. Another of his great comic creations is the absent-minded Lord Elmsworth, with his passion for and obsession with his pet pig, and generally harried by his sisters.
One of the best situational comedy is built up around Gussie Fink Nottle in Right Ho Jeeves, whose only interest in life is watching the antics of his pet newts in his country house. Caught in an irretrievable situation — asked to preside over the village Grammar School's annual function — he makes the most hilarious speech ever, braced by stiff doses of orange juice laced with gin.
Bertie Wooster's overbearing aunts and their descriptions are legendary in their own right. Here is a sampling: "There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative, and aunt Agatha whizzed in."
Currently my favourite re-readings of Wodehouse — a keen golfer himself — are his golfing stories such as The Heart of a Goof, as I can directly relate to the bumbling players with my own "not-so-swinging" goofiness with the irons and woods, of the whimsical but addictive game.
A blot
The only dark patch on the otherwise sunny life and career of Wodehouse was the ill-advised, innocent broadcasts he made during the Second World War from the German occupied France where he was interned, plunging him into an unsavoury controversy in Britain and compelling him to settle down permanently in America later on. He lived and worked from Long Island near New York for the rest of his life, ironically never ever to go back to England. He died there on Saint Valentine's Day in 1975 at 93.
However, the world of Wooster, Jeeves, Aunt Agatha, Lord Emsworth and many others is alive and kicking. Analysing and theorising on his genre and inimitable style would be like "Putting a spade to the soufflé." Right ho, Plum!
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