Plum: A Peach!
Even the facts about P. G. Wodehouse are fascinating. Well, not fascinating so much as really, really well known. He went to English schools, worked for a bank, sold a story, and soon found himself doing better as a writer than as a clerk.
The "school stories" of the time mostly dealt with earnest and moral boys learning one lesson: You can't grow up happy and prosperous unless you obey those who have been placed over you. Wodehouse subverted the genre by writing about smart-mouth boys who cowed their teachers and gifted athletes who got shafted when their fathers lost their money.
His vast success proved that a market existed for less-reverent fiction about schoolboys and also suggested young Wodehouse could look forward to a good living as a comic novelist. By the time of his death at the age of 93 he had produced upwards of 80 novels, uncounted stories, musical lyrics and books, and The Play's the Thing. (I directed a community theater production of Thing in 2001; what you are viewing now is part of an illustrated series of pages about the show.)
Wodehouse (whose given name Pelham led to his nickname of Plum) built an alternate universe that any science fiction writer would envy. It has no wars but constant lovers' misunderstandings, few parents but platoons of aunts, cravens and topers galore but no characters with issues. It features an upside-down social order where the servants run the aristocrats' lives and junior clergymen score off their bishops. The people speak a sort of English, but a sort never heard on any English-speaking street. There's no history, because it's hard to notice that any time passes.
And he invented sterling characters like Mr. Mulliner, the untoppable storyteller; the Earl of Ickenham, whose way of spreading sweetness and light gives his nephew Pongo the horrors; Empress of Blandings, that supreme pig, thrice gold medalist at the Shropshire Agricultural Fair, and her adoring owner Lord Emsworth; Bertie Wooster, good-hearted, weak-headed, and beset by aunts, and his manservant Jeeves, who eats plenty of fish, causing his head to bulge out at the back.
You may find Wodehouse addicting, though. Take your pick of his works: The novel Joy in the Morning (also titled Jeeves in the Morning) drops you neatly into the middle of the Jeeves and Wooster saga; the short story "The Truth about George" includes a pop-pop-pop-paralyzingly funny scene in a train; another novel, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin, takes you into the frightful world of Hollywood between the wars. But you won't stop at just the one. . . .
Don't bother to visit my "Best Wodehouse Book" page. It's highly anticlimactic.
As you can imagine, Wodehouse fans have established themselves on the Web. Visit the P. G. Wodehouse Appreciation Page to check all those well-known facts (the site leads to, yes, there is a Wodehouse Webring). Our poster artist, Aussie, will turn up in some odd corners of the Web too. Enjoy finding out more about one of the twentieth century's finest writers, then come to see his work at Town & Gown.
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