Shashi Tharoor on The Master.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jul/20/classics.pgwodehouse
It was at the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature a few years ago that I
realised with horror how low the fortunes of PG Wodehouse had sunk in his
native land. I was on stage for a panel discussion on the works of the
Master when the moderator, a gifted and suave young literary impresario,
began the proceedings by asking innocently, "So how do you pronounce it -
is it Woad-house or Wood-house?"
Woadhouse? You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather,
except that Wodehouse himself would have disdained the cliche, instead
describing my expression as, perhaps, that of one who "had swallowed an
east wind" (Carry On, Jeeves, 1925). The fact was that a luminary at the
premier book event in the British Isles had no idea how to pronounce the
name of the man I regarded as the finest English writer since Shakespeare.
I spent the rest of the panel discussion looking (to echo a description of
Bertie Wooster's Uncle Tom) like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow.
My dismay had Indian roots. Like many of my compatriots, I had discovered
Wodehouse young and pursued my delight across the 95 volumes of the oeuvre,
savouring book after book as if the pleasure would never end. When All
India Radio announced, one sunny afternoon in February 1975, that Wodehouse
had died, I felt a cloud of darkness settle over me. The newly (and
belatedly) knighted Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and
of the prize pig the Empress of Blandings, was in his 94th year, but his
death still came as a shock. Every English-language newspaper in India
carried it on their front pages; the articles and letters that were
published in the following days about his life and work would have filled
volumes.
Three decades earlier, Wodehouse had reacted to the passing of his
stepdaughter, Leonora, with the numbed words: "I thought she was immortal."
I had thought Wodehouse was immortal too, and I felt like one who had
"drained the four-ale of life and found a dead mouse at the bottom of the
pewter" (Sam the Sudden, also from that vintage year of 1925).
For months before his death, I had procrastinated over a letter to
Wodehouse. It was a collegian's fan letter, made special by being written
on the letterhead (complete with curly-tailed pig) of the Wodehouse Society
of St Stephen's College, Delhi University. Ours was then the only Wodehouse
Society in the world, and I was its president, a distinction I prized over
all others in an active and eclectic extra-curricular life. The Wodehouse
Society ran mimicry and comic speech contests and organised the annual Lord
Ickenham Memorial Practical Joke Week, the bane of all at college who took
themselves too seriously. The society's underground rag, Spice, edited by a
wildly original classmate who was to go on to become a counsellor to the
prime minister of India, was by far the most popular newspaper on campus;
even its misprints were deliberate, and deliberately funny.
I had wanted to tell the Master all this, and to gladden his famously
indulgent heart with the tribute being paid to him at this incongruous
outpost of Wodehouseana, thousands of miles away from any place he had ever
written about. But I had never been satisfied by the prose of any of my
drafts of the letter. Writing to the man Evelyn Waugh had called "the
greatest living writer of the English language, the head of my profession",
was like offering a souffle to Bocuse. It had to be just right. Of course,
it never was, and now I would never be able to reach out and establish this
small connection to the writer who had given me more joy than anything else
in my life.
The loss was personal, but it was also widely shared: PG Wodehouse is by
far the most popular English-language writer in India, his readership
exceeding that of Agatha Christie or John Grisham. His erudite butlers,
absent-minded earls and silly-ass aristocrats, out to pinch policemen's
helmets on boat race night or perform convoluted acts of petty larceny at
the behest of tyrannical aunts, are familiar to, and beloved by, most
educated Indians. I cannot think of an Indian family I know that does not
have at least one Wodehouse book on its shelves, and most have several. In
a country where most people's earning capacity has not kept up with
inflation and book-borrowing is part of the culture, libraries stock
multiple copies of each Wodehouse title. At the British Council libraries
in the major Indian cities, demand for Wodehouse reputedly outstrips that
for any other author, so that each month's list of "new arrivals" includes
reissues of old Wodehouse favourites.
In the 27 years since his death, much has changed in India, but Wodehouse
still commands the heights. His works are sold on railway station platforms
and airport bookstalls alongside the latest bestsellers. In 1988, the
state-run television network Doordarshan broadcast a 10-part Hindi
adaptation of his 1923 classic Leave it to Psmith, with the Shropshire
castle of the Earl of Emsworth becoming the Rajasthani palace of an
indolent Maharaja. (The series was a disaster: Wodehousean purists were
appalled by the changes, and the TV audience discovered that English humour
does not translate too well into Hindi.) Quiz contests, a popular activity
in urban India, continue to feature questions about Wodehouse's books
("What is Jeeves's first name?" "Which of Bertie Wooster's fiancees
persisted in calling the stars, 'God's daisy chain'?") But, alas, reports
from St Stephen's College tell me that the Wodehouse Society is now
defunct, having fallen into disrepute when one of its practical joke weeks
went awry (it appears to have involved women's underwear flying at
half-mast from the flagpole).
Many are astonished at the extent of Wodehouse's popularity in India,
particularly when, elsewhere in the English-speaking world, he is no longer
much read. Americans know Wodehouse from re-runs of earlier TV versions of
his short stories on programmes with names such as Masterpiece Theatre, but
these have a limited audience, even though some of his funniest stories
were set in Hollywood and he lived the last three decades of his life in
Remsenberg, Long Island. The critic Michael Dirda noted in the Washington
Post some years ago that Wodehouse "seems to have lost his general audience
and become mainly a cult author savoured by connoisseurs for his prose
artistry".
That is increasingly true in England and the rest of the Commonwealth, but
not in India. While no English-language writer can truly be said to have a
"mass" following in India, where only 2% of the population reads English,
Wodehouse has maintained a general rather than a cult audience among this
Anglophone minority: unlike others who have enjoyed fleeting success, he
has never gone out of fashion. This bewilders those who think that nothing
could be further removed from Indian life, with its poverty and political
intensity, than the cheerfully silly escapades of Wodehouse's decadent
Edwardian Young Men in Spats. Indians enjoying Wodehouse, they suggest,
makes about as much sense as the cognoscenti of Chad lapping up Jay
McInerney.
At one level, India's fascination with Wodehouse is indeed one of those
enduring and endearing international mysteries, like why Pakistanis are
good at squash but none of their neighbours is, or why the Americans, who
can afford to do anything the right way, have never managed to understand
that tea is made with boiling water, not boiled water. And yet many have
convinced themselves that there is more to it than that. Some have seen in
Wodehouse's popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj, the British
Empire in India. Writing in 1988, the journalist Richard West thought
India's Wodehouse devotees were those who hankered after the England of 50
years before (ie the 1930s). That was the age when the English loved and
treasured their own language, when schoolchildren learned Shakespeare,
Wordsworth and even Rudyard Kipling... It was Malcolm Muggeridge who
remarked that the Indians are now the last Englishmen. That may be why they
love such a quintessentially English writer.
Those lines are, of course, somewhat more fatuous than anything Wodehouse
himself ever wrote. Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and
detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong
Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself, and the Raj is
largely absent from his books. (There is only one notable exception I can
recall, in a 1935 short story: "Why is there unrest in India? Because its
inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma
Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly
pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of
Civil Disobedience."
But Indians saw that the comment was meant to elicit laughter, not
agreement. If anything, Wodehouse is one British writer whom Indian
nationalists could admire without fear of political incorrectness. My
former mother-in-law, the daughter of a prominent Indian nationalist
politician, remembers introducing Britain's last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten,
to the works of Wodehouse in 1942; it was typical that the symbol of the
British Empire had not read the "quintessentially English" Wodehouse but
that the Indian freedom-fighter had.
Indeed, it is precisely the lack of politics in Wodehouse's writing, or
indeed of any other social or philosophic content, that made what Waugh
called his "idyllic world" so free of the trappings of Englishness,
quintessential or otherwise. Unlike almost any other writer, Wodehouse does
not require his readers to identify with any of his characters: they are
stock figures, almost theatrical archetypes whose carefully plotted exits
and entrances one follows because they are amusing, not because one is
actually meant to care about them. Whereas other English novelists burdened
their readers with the specificities of their characters' lives and
circumstances, Wodehouse's existed in a never-never land that was almost as
unreal to his English readers as to his Indian ones. Indian readers were
able to enjoy Wodehouse free of the anxiety of allegiance; for all its
droll particularities, the world he created, from London's Drones Club to
the village of Matcham Scratchings, was a world of the imagination, to
which Indians required no visa.
But they did need a passport, and that was the English language. English
was undoubtedly Britain's most valuable and abiding legacy to India, and
educated Indians, a famously polyglot people, rapidly learned and delighted
in it - both for itself, and as a means to various ends. These ends were
both political (for Indians turned the language of the imperialists into
the language of nationalism) and pleasureable (for the language granted
access to a wider world of ideas and entertainments). It was only natural
that Indians would enjoy a writer who used language as Wodehouse did -
playing with its rich storehouse of classical precedents, mockingly
subverting the very canons colonialism had taught Indians they were
supposed to venerate.
"He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture
dropping in for lunch." Or: "The butler was looking nervous, like Macbeth
interviewing Lady Macbeth after one of her visits to the spare room." And
best of all, in a country ruled for the better part of two centuries by the
dispensable siblings of the British nobility: "Unlike the male codfish
which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred
thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British
aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger
sons."
That sentence captures much of the Wodehouse magic - what PN Furbank called
his "comic pretence of verbal precision, an exhibition of lexicology."
Wodehouse's writing embodied erudition, literary allusion, jocular slang
and an uncanny sense of timing that owed much to the long-extinct art of
music-hall comedy: "She... [resembled] one of those engravings of the
mistresses of Bourbon kings which make one feel that the mon archs who
selected them must have been men of iron, impervious to fear, or else
short-sighted." Furbank thought Wodehouse's "whole style [was] a joke about
literacy". But it is a particularly literate joke. No authorial dedication
will ever match Wodehouse's oft-plagiarised classic, for his 1925
collection of golfing stories, The Heart of a Goof: "To my daughter
Leonora, without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book
would have been finished in half the time."
Part of Wodehouse's appeal to Indians certainly lies in the uniqueness of
his style, which inveigled us into a sort of conspiracy of universalism:
his humour was inclusive, for his mock-serious generalisations were, of
course, as absurd to those he was ostensibly writing about as to us. "Like
so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on
marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps
leaping from crag to crag." The terrifying Honoria Glossop has, "a laugh
like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge". Aunts, who always
loom large in Wodehouse's world, bellow to each other, "like mastodons
across the primeval swamp".
Jeeves, the gentleman's personal gentleman, coughs softly, like, "a very
old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top". Evelyn Waugh
worshipped Wodehouse's penchant for tossing off original similes: "a soul
as grey as a stevedore's undervest"; "her face was shining like the seat of
a bus driver's trousers"; "a slow, pleasant voice, like clotted cream made
audible"; "she looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression".
My own favourites stretch the possibilities of the language in unexpected
ways: "She had more curves than a scenic railway"; "I turned him down like
a bedspread"; and the much-quoted "if not actually disgruntled, he was far
from being gruntled".
This insidious but good-humoured subversion of the language, conducted with
straight-faced aplomb, appeals most of all to a people who have acquired
English, but rebel against its heritage. The colonial connection left
strange patterns on the minds of the connected. Wodehouse's is a world we
can share with the English on equal terms, because they are just as
surprised by its enchantments. As we near the 100th anniversary of the
publication of his first book, The Pothunters, in September 1902, perhaps
that is as good an argument as any for a long-overdue Wodehouse revival in
England.
--
Homer: Hey, what does this job pay?
Carl: Nuthin'.
Homer: D'oh!
Carl: Unless you're crooked.
Homer: Woo-hoo!
Sudhakar Chandra Slacker Without Borders
