‘I don’t know if you know that sort of feeling you get on these days around the end of April and the beginning of May, when the sky’s a light blue, with cotton-wool clouds, and there’s a bit of a breeze blowing from the west? Kind of uplifted feeling. Romantic, if you know what I mean. I’m not much of a ladies’ man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something.’

Recently I finished listening to an audiobook version of The Inimitable Jeeves, published in 1923, hastily following it up with Carry On, Jeeves which was published two years later. After a few short days, I found myself burrowed deep in Right Ho, Jeeves! at which point I became conscious of a profound joy as I followed the bumbling Bertie Wooster along on his nine-mile bicycle ride in the middle of the night to retrieve the key to Brinkley Court. Over the past few, short weeks, traffic jams were no fuss for me if I was listening to a Wodehouse yarn. I was chuckling all the way, and, alternatively, on a few occasions, I thought I must have cleared out the carriage on the morning train.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, known as P.G. Wodehouse, or by his nickname ‘Plum’, published his first Jeeves and Wooster story more than a hundred years ago and kept on popping them out at an extraordinary rate. No doubt the chap was a writing machine, as he produced an enormous body of work and created a world from his typewriter which, for those who ring the front doorbell, indulges readers in the rich and ‘sunny uplands’ of Edwardian England. His books, whether read or narrated, seem to have a redemptive and even homeopathic quality, even after all these years. These stories, which stimulate the old diaphragm, follow our man about town, Bertie, the complete chinless idiot at the epicentre who, incidentally, also narrates them, and can’t get himself out of a pickle if not for the inimitable and impassive, classically educated, gentleman’s gentleman, his valet Jeeves. At the outset, we find it is a premise of endless and inexhaustible possibilities.

‘I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea…’ Well, perhaps not an idea, per se, but a thing to contemplate. It was this: What is it that makes Wodehouse still fresh a century on? The characters and events in his stories still exude the richness and thigh-slapping vigour he poured into them the day he put it down on paper. To this day, they show no signs of getting dusty; no less to a young reader like myself, who has only golfed on a few occasions, has a positive relationship with his two aunts, and has never employed a personal gentleman to bring him his morning omelette.

Firstly, let’s take the humour of Wodehouse. It hinges on the perennial fraternity between a master and his loyal servant, which has been the seedbed of drama and comedy alike for centuries. Heightened by the exuberant wealth and class of the characters – Bertie, the idle, rich gentleman and his high-brow butler Jeeves, along with an array of others of the same breed – the topsy-turvy tales satisfy that part of us that holds an inherent curiosity into the lives of high-fliers, while pleasing that other, voyeuristic part of us that finds it amusing to watch certain personages squirm. All this while at the same time fashioning a thirst for what happens next – just how does Jeeves save Bertie’s ham this time?

Part of the genius of Wodehouse is the bonhomous loveliness that gives beauty to his creations. There is no sense of malevolence or lasting spite in the world he fashioned for us. All the drama and events are enveloped in an air of harmless folly. That Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster (or ‘Attila’ as his Aunt Dahlia calls him) along with his manservant Jeeves, is the ‘most imperishable double act in fictional history’, as Christopher Hitchens said in his 1993 interview with Brian Lamb. ‘Of course, a joke is never a joke if it has to be explained. To those who haven’t found and discovered and immersed themselves in this, I can only say they should start today.’ For Hitchens to declare Wodehouse as his favourite author, even above George Orwell, which would have been my guess, is a mark of something supremely special. Hitchens famously dedicated his life to combatting theology and totalitarianism, two matters of which, in his eyes, weren’t mutually exclusive, but, despite this, in times of anguish which he certainly endured amid his battle with oesophageal cancer, one must think he turned to Wodehouse. Is this not a kind of faith?

To call Wodehouse an ‘English comic writer’ is only partly true. He was absolutely English, and absolutely a comic writer, but he lived in America for most of his life and is something more than just any old ‘comic writer’. He was heralded as the greatest English writer of his time. A distiller of jocularity and pure wit, his language exudes a wondrous nostalgia of those country houses between the rolling hills of rural England at the turn of the century one can only visit in dreams. If Wodehouse was a 20th Century comic writer, then Shakespeare was an old-timey poet. It simply does not do.

‘Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.’

Wodehouse adored America. He lived there for 50 years on Long Island, continuously writing of the ‘mythical golden past’ of the English country house, as Hitchens put it. Hitchens, in this regard, could sympathise with Wodehouse, for he was born in Portsmouth and died in Houston. In his essay for The Atlantic, titled The Honorable Schoolboy – one which old Bertram would delight in, while Wodehouse would wave away – Hitchens wrote: ‘Indeed, if anything could ever put one off being a Wodehouse fan, it would be the somewhat cultish element among his admirers and biographers. Such people have a tendency to allude to him as The Master.’ And though he is right, in a way, that a good thing is sometimes spoiled by its revellers, he himself had a tendency to make the same fallacy argument in other areas. One must refrain from reducing something’s worth based on those who see its value, even if their worship of the thing verges on the vexatious, rather, one should get to the heart of something and start there.

Interestingly, Hitchens noted the resemblance between the Wodehouse compendium and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in his masterful essay Breaking the Wooster code, pointing out the ‘pathetically simple’ theory that Wodehouse must have ‘sublimated’ the play. But this is beside the point. Everyone must look up to someone, then at some point take the reins. Wodehouse’s attention to language, his ‘near faultless ability to come up with names that are at once ludicrous and credible’, as well as the intricacy of his plot-lines, begs the question how he was so prolific and well-read at the same time. These two Hitchens essays on Wodehouse both end in a similar fashion, with the worthwhile announcement that Wodehouse pours his genius into his work, whereas Wilde quipped that he put all his genius into his life and only his talents into his work. Funnily, Hitchens’ atheist comrade Stephen Fry, who played both Jeeves in the BBC series Jeeves and Wooster and Oscar Wilde in Wilde said: ‘Wodehouse to me, and not just to me but to many, is the supreme example of the master craftsman, the master writer.’

The English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who many regard as far more serious and far more satirical, called Wodehouse the ‘master of our profession’. He also said the lovable buffoon Bertie Wooster and his perfectly adept valet Jeeves inhabited a ‘world as timeless as that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland’. This, to me, is perhaps the most precise reflection on the matter. The beauty of this comparison Waugh raises is that it is a non-scientific hypothesis that can’t quite be nailed down or fixed, only felt.

‘He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.’

In an interview with Alistair Cooke, P.G. Wodehouse reflected on his comic style. The interviewer put to him: ‘Probably you’re the only man who has ever combined this very formal and polished 19th Century style with contemporary English slang with American contemporary slang.’ Wodehouse nodded along. He was also asked if the reason his work seemed like Edwardian England frozen in amber was, perhaps, because he never returned to the bucolic green hills of Britain and therefore his youthful days, which he described as ‘unbroken bliss’, were recalled and augmented into his stories. To which he also agreed.

I cannot ignore the moment when novelist Tim Sharpe made the claim that a writer cannot approach the use of a simile in a comic novel without being aware that it has been done better. ‘In fact, you better keep clear of similes. Wodehouse more or less killed them. I mean, after – ‘she had a laugh like a troop of cavalry galloping across a tin bridge’ – every time I come to the word ‘like’ I keep away. I keep well away.’ Perhaps my personal favourite simile is from The Inimitable Jeeves on the topic of family rows: ‘On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.’ Such lethal moments of visual and often musical expressions make it easy for the reader to get drunk on Wodehouse. It simply never fails to lift the mood. His knack for such literary techniques for comic effect makes one laugh in a way only he can induce.

Here’s another: ‘The seriousness of the hangover was underlined when the cat stamped into the room.’

Lady Frances Donaldson, his biographer, said he used to, ‘…work in the morning, go for a walk in the afternoon, and work again in the evening. Then, in the evening, he had a cocktail and watched a soap opera. That means he spent two-thirds of the waking day in the company of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, and that’s where he belonged.’ It may also be worth mentioning here that part of the undercurrent of childlike innocence may be owing to the fact he had ‘no sex life’ worth recording, as Hitchens wrote, upholding Donaldson’s own perception that Wodehouse ‘may or may not have been inhibited sexually as well as emotionally and this inhibition may have been partial or complete’. They both point to the conspicuous absence of sex throughout his work which lends to the sense that his writings were of an uncorrupted ideal or landscape in which such acts are clandestine, or at least not seen as a necessary tool to propel the story or steal a chuckle. As Hitchens quite rightly said, it was a ‘great and noble defence’ of Wodehouse for Orwell to observe the complete omission of sex jokes in his work as an ‘astonishing sacrifice’ for a comic writer, but for Wodehouse it seems to have been ‘no sacrifice at all’.

Furthermore, Donaldson made the psychoanalytical theory that the ‘springs of love were frozen’ in him, partly due to his neglected upbringing. His father, Mr Wodehouse, was a magistrate in Hong Kong and at the age of two, his mother shipped him back to England to be brought up by Miss Roper, a ‘complete stranger’, it seems. Moreover, he was juggled between his aunts who we know inspired him in more ways than one. ‘Well, I can’t very well use a father or mother as a menace,’ Wodehouse revealed in an interview, leaning back in his chair, pipe in hand. ‘It’s rather unpleasant if a son doesn’t get on with his father and mother. But an aunt is something you can make fun of.’

In all his output, from the beginning of the 20th Century to the time he died in the 1970s with the manuscript of Sunset at Blandings on his lap, Wodehouse directly mentioned the war perhaps once. He was always reaching, grasping for something above the current purview, never stooping or allowing frightful circumstances to dissuade or distract him. In this way, Wodehouse came to his work like a priest to the altar. A testament to his first-rate approach to his vocation, even after being taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1940, was that he was always reading his Shakespeare. Barrie Pitt, who was alongside Wodehouse in the Tost internment camp, recounted when Wodehouse ‘…was quite disappointed when he found out I couldn’t read Greek, which he apparently could speak. Well, probably not as good as English.’ Wodehouse did not just read whodunits but read incredibly widely to a degree that would most likely put him at eye-level with handfuls of literary scholars.

‘Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, “How can I become an Internee?” Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.’

I think the last, but by no means the least important point to make, is that Wodehouse didn’t lump his depth of knowledge on the reader. Rather, he sprinkled it sparingly enough to flavour his stories with lofty references to the delight of all readers, no matter their education level. On top of this, Wodehouse deftly deploys such timeless references, invoking the reader to see things they were taught about in school in a new light. This kind of humour does not age, it carries us and keeps us afloat, atop a wave of light-hearted and liberating gladness.

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