Sebastian Faulks to introduce PG Wodehouse to a new generation

 

There never was a more self-deprecating natural-born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse Photo: Getty Images

By Matthew Norman

8:06PM GMT 08 Mar 2013

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Were there such a medal as the Literary Victoria Cross, awarded to writers who show valour far beyond the call of duty in the face of the enemy, Sebastian Faulks would be nipping to Moss Bros this morning for the tails and topper preparatory to an appointment at the Palace.

Faulks has taken the single most courageous decision the world of letters has ever known, and the enemy is on the march. Dissident writers in the Soviet Union who risked their freedom and lives clearly deserve the admiration of history. Compared with the brutality that awaits the author of Birdsong for agreeing to write a Jeeves and Wooster novel at the behest of the PG Wodehouse estate, however, 17 years on the cabbage and maggot soup diet in Siberia’s least well-appointed salt mine shrinks into the equivalent of a minor train delay on a branch line near Truro.

One literary critic has already described Faulks as hubristic, and an avalanche of outrage awaits as countless Wodehouse addicts metaphorically flash him one of those Aunt Agatha glares that can open an oyster at a dozen paces. If not today, the space above this column may before long host one or two angry thoughts on the matter, and any of you whose missives appear on this page should take satisfaction from that. “Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers,” as Plum himself once observed. “Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

There never was a more self-deprecating natural born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, whose appreciation of his own oeuvre lay in direct inverse proportion to the rapture enjoyed by its readers. He would probably be flattered that so gifted a novelist is to publish Jeeves and The Wedding Bells in November, though if he was peeved he would be infinitely too polite to let on.

Others will be less constrained by courtesy over what, given the godly status accorded him by right-thinking people, will strike them as outright sacrilege. There might be less resistance if Faulks, thinking better of the project, decided instead to pastiche the King James Bible in the style of Irvine Welsh. 

One understands the distress. It was one thing for Faulks to write a James Bond novel. No one ever described Ian Fleming, for all his story-telling gifts, as the most influential novelist in the language, as Auberon Waugh and others said of Wodehouse. Faulks himself refers to him as “inimitable”, though that barely hints at the peerlessness of Wodehouse’s limitless capacity for intricate plotting, vibrant characterisation and, above all, producing vast quantities of the most elegant, exquisite and consistently hilarious English prose.

One understands why many will be less than gruntled at the news. On reading it, to thieve from the master again, I examined my mind. It boggled. But on reflection I think that this is a good thing.

Back in the Seventies, when my early adolescent self fell insanely in love with Psmith, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member, Blandings Castle and especially Jeeves and Wooster, his Edwardian phraseology, sensibilities and the distant world he romanticises were faintly familiar from contact with elderly relatives, and even from Brian Johnston wittering wonderfully away on Test Match Special like a superannuated Wooster.

Today, Wodehouse is literally a closed book to the young. Book sales are heart-rendingly minute, presumably because his magically self-contained universe is 

off-puttingly remote to those who cannot imagine this country in the hands of a bunch of public schoolboys whose idea of ultimate merriment is throwing bread rolls at one another in a private dining club.

Once anyone of taste so much as dips into a novel, they will instantly be hooked. The difficult bit is getting them to open a book in the first place, and if as popular and well regarded a contemporary writer as Faulks can break that ice for those to whom Wodehouse’s escapist innocence seems irrelevant in the comedic era of Frankie Boyle, perhaps the flame will be reignited.

Reinterpreting wildly adored fictional characters is a colossal challenge, but it can be done. Admittedly on telly rather than in print, Steven Moffat has managed it astoundingly well with Sherlock Holmes, transplanting him into the Baker Street of today while cleaving absolutely to the spirit of Conan Doyle and the core of the character. Whether Faulks can come close to replicating that miraculous reinvention we will learn in the autumn, but he should be congratulated for having the guts to have a crack.

The influence of Wodehouse on our popular culture cannot be exaggerated. At the more recognisable end of the Wodehousian spectrum, you hear echoes in the plummy tones of Stephen Fry. “Without Wodehouse, I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be,” wrote the definitive television Jeeves. But he is equally audible in the Deptford brogue of the glorious Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live football shows. “It changed my life finding Wodehouse,” as Baker put it, “and gave me the language and a licence to be ludicrous. Someone who was the smartest man around and chose to write the dumbest books around – that was the key that unlocked the door.”

“Dumbest” is hardly a superlative to please every Wodehouse fan, yet the point is sound. Everybody deserves access to arguably the greatest, and surely the most joyous, English prose stylist of all time. If Sebastian Faulks is the locksmith who opens that door to a new generation, regardless of his own efforts, he will have earned more than that Literary VC.

To grasp the genius of PG Wodehouse, read him

The great writer’s gifts do not translate to the screen, so 'Blandings’ was bound to fail

Auberon Waugh called PG Wodehouse, pictured, 'the most influential novelist of our age' and a master of 'the Great English Joke' Photo: ALAMY

By Harry Mount

8:19PM GMT 14 Jan 2013

Blandings, the BBC’s new PG Wodehouse adaptation, will not win many converts to one of the great comic writers of the 20th century. It makes for perfectly harmless family viewing, and Wodehouse enthusiasts will back it out of loyalty. But Wodehouse’s sublime story of Lord Emsworth, and his devotion to his prize pig, was reduced to a banal, knockabout tale of toffs acting stupidly, decorated with a series of jaunty Twenties props.

All the posh Jazz Age signifiers were there – the plinkety-plonk Charleston banging away in the background, the thin-fat font on the opening credits. Timothy Spall, a gifted comedian, played Lord Emsworth straight out of the Central Casting school of Silly Earls. He never stood a chance. TV and film versions of Wodehouse are always bound to fail: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, both extremely witty Wodehouse fans, also reduced Jeeves and Wooster to dull, mirthless caricature.

Wodehouse’s exceptional talent was as a supreme prose writer – his work must be read, not performed. He may have written successful musicals; his dialogue may be perfectly timed, his plot lines beautifully crafted, as a glance at his densely worked manuscripts shows. But his real comic power depends on him being read – for the variety of literary references; for the bathetic pay-off at the end of a high-flown piece of writing; for the originality of his similes. These things don’t work when they’re put in the mouth of an actor – they sound too elaborate and forced.

Take this line in The Inimitable Jeeves: “When Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.” It incorporates several Wodehouse devices: the contrary thought of elderly aunts being the most terrifying of creatures; the Boris Johnson-esque tendency to drop in obscure Latinate words; the metaphor that becomes a simile.

All this takes skill, knowledge and wit which combine in the mind to produce the comic effect; on film, that line would fall flat. Without the brilliant prose, the BBC’s Blandings became just bland; a silly story about posh twits making a pig fat.

  It’s perverse that the bad telly adaptations go on being made, while the books aren’t read much nowadays. In the month before Christmas, the top five Wodehouse titles sold fewer than 100 copies. None of the Blandings books sold more than 30 copies. Other 20th-century British comic writers are doing much better. Over the past 14 years, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh – a devoted Wodehousian – has sold 142,000 copies; Leave it to Jeeves has sold 32,000 copies over the same period. Why has Wodehouse’s readership fallen off a cliff?

It’s not as if people aren’t interested in the subject matter – just look at Downton Abbey. Funny, posh people are in vogue, too: witness Miranda Hart, riding high in the Christmas TV viewing figures and the non-fiction bestseller charts.

Part of the reason is Wodehouse’s references. However lightly delivered, they depend on at least a passing understanding of classics, English literature and the Bible; Wodehouse won a senior classical scholarship to Dulwich College in 1897. He never shows off how clever he is, but he does assume a certain level of knowledge in order for the reader to laugh at, say, Bertie Wooster in Right Ho, Jeeves: “I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.”

In order to get that, you don’t have to know who the Nervii were; but you do have to know who Caesar was. There has also been a coarsening shift in English humour over the last generation that has left Wodehouse marooned on an island with his ageing band of fans.

In the 1973 anthology, Homage to PG Wodehouse, Auberon Waugh called him “the most influential novelist of our age” and a master of “the Great English Joke”. By that, Waugh meant the teasing of all people who take themselves too seriously – whether it’s the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury or your self-important next-door neighbour.

That teasing still goes on, of course. But modern comedy is either a race to the bottom – be as rude as you can be about the Queen – or it’s ultra-gentle, observational Michael McIntyre stuff.

The BBC has wrongly placed Wodehouse in the ultra-gentle category – thus the Sunday teatime slot. He doesn’t belong there. Wodehouse is caught between the two poles of the modern age – mischievous but not vulgar, inoffensive but not anodyne. His gifts cannot be captured by the screen, the ultimate medium of the modern age, either. That’s not to say he’s outdated. His genius has been obscured, not promoted, by television exposure. Read him; don’t watch him. He is still timelessly funny.