The Hindu Business Line : The performing flea of the English language

FOR ONE section at least St. Valentine's Day may hold no fascination even as the Love God sweats away doing his stuff. This strange section would be the fans of the comic genius P. G. Wodehouse, who handed in his dinner pail this day in 1975. For the writer himself it was ironical, as he, more than anybody, espoused the cause of love, uniting by hook or by crook many a sundered heart.

Wodehouse's began pounding on the typewriter on the turn of the last century and continued hammering away for seven decades, creating such immortal cast of characters as Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, Psmith, Lord Emsworth, Mr Mulliner, Uncle Fred and a surging multitude of aunts and golfers of curious hues and sundry other flotsam and jetsam.

It, as Wooster might say, leaves you stumped that this purveyor of comedy should be able to cast a spell across the Anglophile world, even if most readers are at sixes and sevens with the characters. Possibly because Wodehouse's characters portray the common human foibles and comedy of errors.

But what was this phenomenon in real life like? "Our finest humorous writer projected the image of an amiable, unworldly recluse with just enough intelligence to open his mouth when he was hungry," wrote a Wodehouse biographer Barry Phelps. But Wodehouse was in fact a highly complex man who met and was friendly with many of the most talented, famous and wealthy people of his time — from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to William Randolph Hearst and fellow writer Evelyn Waugh — he said in his book P. G. Wodehouse — Man and Myth.

"Wodehouse was acutely intelligent, a shrewd observer of people and events and was bullied by his wife just to the extent he wished and no more," writes Phelps.

He was (unlike Psmith) obsessed with money from the day his father announced that the family finances would not allow him to go to Oxford (like Psmith) to the day he died a multi-millionaire.

Hillaire Belloc, the master prose writer and contemporary of Wodehouse, described him as the "best writer of our time, the best living writer of English and the head of my profession." Frances Donaldson, who wrote Wodehouse's authorised biography, writes that PG has been compared to Swift, to Rabelais, to the restoration dramatists, even to Shakespeare, and among his contemporaries, to Max Beerbohm.

According to Donaldson, Wodehouse had the most flexible, fresh and imaginative style. Wodehouse was adept at the throwaway line, the joke inserted so casually, that its impact is felt a second late, writes Donaldson, quoting an instance from Blandings Castle.

Freddie Threepwood's future father-in-law is telling Lord Emsworth that he is a millionaire, the owner of Donaldson's Dogjoy biscuits and that he proposes to offer Freddie a steady and lucrative job in his firm.

"Lord Emsworth could conceive of no way in which Freddie could be of value to a dog-biscuit firm, except possibly as a taster."

Little wonder that his contemporary and friend Evelyn Waugh wrote: "Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He'll continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He's made a world for us to live in and delight in."

"What can one say about Wodehouse? He exhausts superlatives," according to Stephen Fry.

Born on October 15, 1881, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse traces his ancestry to Sir Betram Wodehouse who fought for Edward II against the Scots between 1277 and 1283.

Leaving for America before the First World War, Wodehouse became a US citizen in 1955. Wodehouse was made a knight of the British Empire in the New Year's honours list in 1975, shortly before his death.

Although his reputation suffered cruelly after his wartime broadcasts from Germany, Wodehouse was later exonerated with even Sir Winston Churchill intervening on his behalf.

(The author, a former Deputy Editor of PTI, is a New Delhi-based freelance journalist.)

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