Reset my password after a long time lurking just to say: the BBC radio plays of Jeeves & Wooster, with Richard Briers playing the role of Bertie Wooster, are the best way to experience these stories. Fabulous acting. Far, far better than the Hugh & Laurie series from the 90s.
The heavily adapted BBC TV series Blandings is also hilarious.
It doesn’t really matter, I think the various Jeeves and Wooster stories are probably better than most of his other stories, but they’re all hilarious. If you insist on following the stories chronologically, I think the very first one was published under the title “Jeeves takes charge”
As others here have said, any is as good as the other. That said, the short story "Jeeves Takes Charge" in the collection "Carry On, Jeeves" is where it all begins with Bertie and Jeeves. If you're looking for a beginning, this would be it.
I have fond memories of reading his stories of rich imbeciles wittering about and having their asses repeatedly saved by their silently obedient and scarily smart butlers, but I am not sure I could read them now without the same uncanny change in how I view the "tinny/woody" Python sketch: all these total dumbfucks going on about the most inane thing possible -- while a whole set of servants stand behind them, waiting to serve whatever inane whim they may have.
It does help that it is immensely clear that you are supposed to see Bertie as an idiot, but...
The tinny/woody Python sketch was _always_ meant to be viewed that way. That's why I love Python so much - they used absurdist humour as a vessel for scathing social commentary which at the time pushed the boundaries of the acceptable.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that part of it just went right over my head when I was twelve and it was on the local PBS station just before/after Doctor Who. :)
I never picked Wodehouse for a prisoner of war. But I guess he handled it with characteristic aplomb.
That article inspired me to search for the Fry and Laurie series. It's not being streamed on any of the popular platforms but I did find some decent quality uploads on Youtube. My wife and I have enjoyed it immensely. I think I discovered why it hasn't been picked up by any of the online platforms when we got to the blackface episode in season 2.
A different era, in two respects I suppose, and all that. Unfortunate nevertheless. Anyone know where I could find the BBC radio episodes online?
As the New Yorker article explains, he also did propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis while there, and while this caused a scandal in Britain that persisted after the war, it surprisingly (by today's unforgiving standards) never ruined his reputation. It seems that most people who have looked into it concluded that he was genuinely trying to cheer people up and was naive about the consequences. Orwell, whose judgment seems to have been as sound as anyone's, defended Wodehouse: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel....
That Orwell article is brilliant from start to finish ("there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing"). We think of Orwell as a political and moral writer more than an arty one (and he famously wrote about how he sacrificed his art to politics), but this is among other things a fantastic piece of literary criticism. Examples:
How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make.
Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an English reader can see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking the social hierarchy.
It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all.
Orwell obviously knows Wodehouse inside-out, right back to obscure early books, which must mean that he was a fan. Why read them otherwise?
I guess you could call Orwell's essay an exoneration but it is, to my reading, no defense. It strikes me as sharply political and moral. And, I agree, scintillating literary criticism.
Your excerpts go to the heart of the argument. If Orwell thinks it's nonsense to call Wodehouse a fascist, it's not because Wodehouse was necessarily above fascism. It's because he was too silly and stupid ("the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity") to even perceive it, a literal schoolboy:
As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins.
I don't know that this was fair to Wodehouse. The New Yorker article seems to take a more charitable view:
His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was.
My dad and I were struggling to explain the phrase "damn with faint praise" to a young relative a while back. This essay wouldn't have helped our cause because, well, it's loaded. But it is a master class in the concept.
It's more like praising with faint damn, I think. Orwell was a man of the pretty-far left. The public-school class system must have been anathema to him (at the same time as he was a product of Eton—where, by the way, fellow future anti-utopian novelist Aldous Huxley was his French teacher) and yet he presents Wodehouse not as any kind of villain but just hapless and obsolete. So obsolete that you'd never guess that Wodehouse would outlive Orwell himself by 25 years.
This article might have been as much of a defence as it was politically possible for Orwell to produce in 1945. Even his famous independence from sectarianism must have had its limits. I also think one can put one's finger on why Orwell was so sympathetic to Wodehouse and so willing to judge him softly: they were both profoundly and essentially English. People have often pointed this out about Orwell, saying for example that his deep Englishness was the wellspring of his immunity to ideology. I think that same quality is probably what resonated with Orwell about Wodehouse - he was sympathetic in the literal sense (having similar feelings). There are moments in this article where it's as if he's reading Wodehouse from within.
There's a great old web comic about the differences between Orwell's and Huxley's anti-utopias and how Huxley predicted the future much better. I bet your question is related to that development.
"One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."
Thanks! It's reassuring to consider that "Amusing Ourselves to Death" was written in the 1980s.
The comic doesn't address the ways to leave the system, however. Brave New World, as mentioned above, has its islands, and (not having read anything of 1984 beyond the Goldstein chapters: is there anything I don't already have from pop culture in the rest of the book, or are those chapters just the "fast-forward"?) it seems that Oceanic refuseniks who didn't wish to toe the party line could be ignored by joining the proletariat (which might imply material and intellectual poverty, but freedom's just another word...)
William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), an American citizen was hanged by Britain for his "treason". Ezra Pound, poet and fascist sympathizer was interned briefly by the Americans. Wodehouse was probably had good reason to be anxious while his wartime behaviour was looked into by the authorities. I would speculate that he probably had enough connections with his school tie and the old boy network to "get things smoothed out".
It has been noted that he may have been naive, but he never returned to England after the war. As it may be, he truly seems to have simply been clueless. Unlike Pound, who was an open proponent of fascism and supporter of Nazi Germany. I wonder if they would have tolerated Pound if he hadn't been so enthusiastic for them, or if he would've been lumped with the so called degenerates.
I heard an interview with an Orwell biographer recently and he made a similar argument about Orwell and Twain - which is a little different than the impression one might get from a casual reading of The Licensed Jester
I'll add that the punchline to the brief tossaway scene with the banjolele ensemble at the beginning of that episode elicited a full-scale guffaw from both wife and me:
"Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."
IMO the audiobook versions narrated by Jonathan Cecil are the best of the lot: you get a voice that sounds like both Fry and Laurie, and the richness of the full text.
I've got about 50 of his 71 novels. For sure they're entertaining, well constructed and the use of language is delightful.
There's something you notice if you read a whole lot of Wodehouse in quick succession: I'd estimate that there are about 20 plots among the ones I've read -- that is to say, the same situations, characters and plot devices are reused often, and if you removed the redundancy, you'd end up with about 20 novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
There's also only one chapter order, which the great man used in every single book: 2 follows 1, 3 follows 2, etc. I can't remember even a flashback? I don't think his interests extended to that. He wrote sentences, paragraphs, not much more.
I have 15-20, my favourite is an unusual one, I think: French Leave.
Start with the Bertie Wooster series, read ALL of his books. Don't watch the fry & laurie series, im sure they're funny, but they cannot be better than the books
> Don't watch the fry & laurie series, im sure they're funny, but they cannot be better than the books
The early seasons are fine (but not as good as the books).
In later seasons, however, they decided to "improve" the stories by adding over-the-top stuff that would never have appeared in the books. E.g., at the end of one episode, Bertie and Jeeves literally jump overboard from a cruise liner to escape Honoria Glossop et al.: they arrive back in England eight months later, sun-burnt and bearded.
Apparently Wodehouse lived in the US from 1947 until his death in 1975 [0]. A few years ago I ran across a blog that detailed a visit to his grave. I was surprised to learn that he was buried in Long Island (Remsenburg, NY) [1]. Perhaps a trip worth making for those of his fans who live in the NYC/Long Island Area.
Also some stuff which addresses the worries of the modern world, of course.
> “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”
(Roderick Spode is a parody or Oswald Mosley, the head of the then current British Union of Fascists)
If you've exhausted the works of the Master you might want to try "Jeeves and the King of Clubs" by Ben Schott [0]. The book was authorized by the Wodehouse estate and continues the adventures of Jeeves and Wooster and some other familiar members of the Wodehouse canon.
I love the 90s TV series with Fry and Laurie (as in the article image), but I've sadly never managed to get into the books as I have an extreme dislike of books written in the first person. There are a lot of good books I've missed out on because of this. My desire to try and get into the Wodehouse books is pretty high, though, so perhaps another attempt is warranted.
Ah, but first person offers so many wonderful opportunities for wit and voice that are impossible in third, and Wodehouse takes great advantage of that, with Bertie Wooster as the narrator of most of the stories (I can't remember if it's a single story or a whole book that are narrated by Jeeves) and providing a wonderful example of unreliable narration. I wish I'd remembered that when I was looking for good unreliable narrators for a craft piece I wrote during my MFA.
Don't get me wrong; I totally get the reasons for doing it, but unfortunately I have some weird problem with reading books written that way :(
When I read fiction I barely notice the words on the page and instead (sort of?) see what's happening in my head. It's not like characters even have a properly defined look, but I am visualising everything. However when the book is written in first-person, it plays havoc with my imagination and I really struggle to see the characters; it's just words on a page. It reads more like non-fiction, which for some reason doesn't trigger the same effect.
The Jeeves and Wooster stories are all (or almost all) in the first person, but most of the his other novels are not. Look for some of the Blandings Castle books.
Good question! If I'm sat listening to someone in person spinning a yarn then I have no issues, although story-telling seems oddly different to a written story somehow. I don't really listen to audiobooks because I find it quite hard to concentrate on them, but I am curious as to whether it would work better there. Maybe it hits some sort of weird mid-point?
Could be worth a shot. I used to strongly dislike first person narrative, but it is less of an annoyance now, and some of my favorite books are from that perspective. I think it was partly reading and discussing some of my friends' favorite books (e.g., The Perks of Being a Wallflower), where their enthusiasm helped me appreciate it, and partly listening to good readers (e.g., Martin Jarvis reading Wodehouse or The Dresden Files read by James Marsters).
It might also have helped to read first person narratives where the narrator was more observer than actor (e.g., The Great Gatsby).
I just started reading excerpts on the web and did not find it captivating either. The ones I read would need to be pronounced with an exaggerated British accent to be remotely funny.
My first impression was: Oscar Wilde (who is captivating after a single page) for the masses.
The heavily adapted BBC TV series Blandings is also hilarious.