specimen paper isc accts 09

ISC-2009
SPECIMEN QUESTION PAPER
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This Paper consists of 6 printed pages.
1209-858SPM Turn over
© Copyright reserved.
ACCOUNTS
(Three hours)
(Candidates are allowed additional 15 minutes for only reading the paper.
They must NOT start writing during this time)
Answer Question 1 (compulsory) and Question 2 (compulsory) from Part I
and any other five questions from Part II.
The intended marks for questions or parts of questions are given in brackets [ ].
Transactions should be recorded in the answer book.
All calculations should be shown clearly.
All working, including rough work, should be done on the same sheet as, and adjacent to,
the rest of the answer.
PART I
Question 1 [10 × 2]
Answer each of the following questions briefly:
(i) Define Prime Cost.
(ii) Explain FIFO method of stock valuation.
(iii) What do you mean by the term non-recurring expenses in consignment?
(iv) What is the purpose of opening a joint bank account for joint venture?
(v) State two advantages of self-balancing system.
(vi) Why is a profit and loss appropriation account necessary in a partnership firm?
(vii) Why is there a need for revaluation of assets and liabilities of a firm if there is a
change in profit-sharing ratio of partners?
(viii) Explain ‘pro-rata allotment of shares’ by means of a suitable example.
(ix) State two differences between ‘net profit’ and ‘funds from operations’.
(x) Mention two uses of ratio analysis.
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Question 2 [10]
Winston was allotted 100 equity shares of Rs.100 each by Diplod Ltd. originally issued at a
discount of 6% per share. He failed to pay the final call at Rs.35. These shares were
forfeited and out of these, 50 shares were re-issued to Morgan at Rs.90 each as fully paid up.
Journalise the transactions in respect of forfeiture and re-issue of shares only.
PART II
Question 3 [14]
Trading and Profit and Loss Account of Myers Ltd. for the year ended 31st March 2007.
Particulars Rs. Particulars Rs.
To opening stock 15,250 By sales 1,00,100
To purchases 63,050 By closing stock 19,600
To carriage 400
To wages 1,000
To Profit and Loss A/c 40,000
1,19,700 1,19,700
To Administrative expenses 20,200 By Trading A/c 40,000
To salaries 2,400 By non operating income 1,200
To financial expenses 1,400
To Non-operating expenses 400
To Balance c/d 16,800
41,200 41,200
Balance Sheet of Myers Ltd. As at 31st March, 2007.
Liabilities Rs Assets Rs.
Share capital 70,000 Fixed assets 60,100
Reserves 1,200 Stock 19,000
Profit and Loss A/c 16,800 Debtors 9,000
Creditors 3,700 Bank 3,600
91,700 91,700
From the above, calculate the follow ratios:
(i) Gross Profit ratio (%)
(ii) Net Profit ratio (%)
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(iii) Stock turnover ratio.
(iv) Proprietary ratio
(v) Current ratio
(vi) Quick ratio.
(vii) Working capital turnover ratio.
Question 4 [14]
The following are the Balance Sheets of Jardine Ltd. as on 31st December 2006 and 2007:-
Liabilities 2006 2007 Assets 2006 2007
Share capital 5,10,000 5,50,000 Goodwill 25,000 20,000
Loan 2,50,000 1,50,000 Building 2,10,000 3,30,000
General reserve 1,00,000 1,00,000 Machinery 3,00,000 4,00,000
Profit and Loss A/c 55,000 95,000 Stock 1,25,000 1,05,000
Provision for taxation 20,000 55,000 Debtors 1,50,000 1,20,000
Creditors 25,000 20,000 Cash 1,50,000 12,000
Bills payable 10,000 15,000 Preliminary expenses 15,000 10,000
Provision for doubtful debts. 5,000 12,000
9,75,000 9,97,000 9,75,000 9,97,000
Additional information:-
(i) During the year, a part of the machinery costing Rs.2,500 was sold for Rs.1,500.
(ii) Dividend of Rs.50,000 was paid during the year.
(iii) Income tax of Rs.25,000 was paid during the year.
(iv) Depreciation provided during the year on Building Rs.5,000 and Machinery Rs.25,000.
From the above, you are required to prepare a cash flow statement as per Accounting Standard - 3.
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Question 5 [14]
The following is the trial balance of Martin Ltd. as on 31st March 2007:-
Debits Rs. Credits Rs.
Opening stock 75,000 Purchase returns 10,000
Purchases 2,45,000 Sales 3,40,000
Wages 30,000 Discount 3,000
Carriage 950 Profit and Loss A/c 15,000
Furniture 17,000 Share capital 1,00,000
Salaries 7,500 Creditors 17,500
Rent 4,000 General reserve 15,500
Trade expenses 7,050 Bills payable 7,000
Dividend paid 9,000
Debtors 27,500
Plant and Machinery 29,000
Cash at Bank 46,200
Patents 4,800
Bills receivable 5,000
5,08,000 5,08,000
Additional information:
(i) Stock as on 31.3.2007 – Rs.88,000
(ii) Depreciate plant and machinery at 15%, furniture at 10% and patents at 5%
(iii) The Board recommends payment of a dividend @ 15% p.a.
From the above information, you are required to prepare the Profit and Loss account for the
year ended 31.3.2007 and a Balance Sheet as on that date.
Question 6 [14]
Show by means of journal entries, how would you record the following issues in the books
of Charles Ltd. Also show how would they appear in their respective Balance Sheets:-
(i) A debenture issued at Rs.95 repayable at Rs.100.
(ii) A debenture issued at Rs.95 repayable at Rs.105.
[NOTE: Face value of each debenture is Rs.100]
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Question 7 [14]
Robert and Smith were partners sharing profits and losses in the ratio of 3 : 2 .
On the date of dissolution, their capitals were:
Robert – Rs.7,650 and Smith – Rs.4,300
The Creditors amounted to Rs.27,500. The balance of cash was Rs.760. The assets realised
Rs.25,430. The expenses on dissolution were Rs.1,540.
All the partners are solvent.
Close the books of the firm showing the realisation, capital and cash accounts.
Question 8 [14]
Johnson Ltd. kept bought and sales ledger on self-balancing principles. From the following
particulars, prepare the necessary adjustment accounts for the year 2007 in the two ledgers:-
Sundry Debtors (1.1.2007) 12,400
Sundry Creditors (1.1.2007) 5,000
Credit purchases 20,600
Credit sales 26,800
Cash received from debtors 15,600
Returns inward 600
Acceptances given 8,000
Returns outward 500
Debtors acceptances dishonoured 1,000
Discount allowed 200
Bad debts written off 400
Question 9 [14]
S, T and W having agreed to share profits and losses equally, entered into a joint venture to
construct a building at a price of Rs.10,00,000. A joint bank account was thus opened
where S paid Rs.4,00,000, T – Rs.2,00,000 and W – Rs.3,00,000.
Expenses incurred on behalf of the joint venture were as follows:
Materials – Rs.2,00,000; wages Rs.1,50,000 and expenses Rs.1,25,000.
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Materials supplied by S from his stock amounted to Rs.1,25,000.
Finally, the venture was closed by T taking the closing stock at a valuation of Rs.1,00,000.
From the above, you are required to prepare the joint venture account, co-ventures’ accounts
and the joint bank account.
Question 10 [14]
The following figures were extracted from the records of Alfred Engineering Company Ltd.
for the year ended 31.3.2007.
Opening stock of raw materials 40,000
Opening stock of work-in-progress 12,000
Opening stock of finished goods 30,000
Closing stock of raw materials 50,000
Closing stock of work-in-progress 30,000
Closing stock of finished goods 80,000
Raw materials purchased 4,00,000
Direct wages 2,00,000
Factory insurance 90,000
Carriage inwards 4,000
Dock charges 10,000
Cost of rectifying raw materials 20,000
Hire of special tools for manufacturing. 1,00,000
Cost of factory supervision 11,000
Wages paid to works gatemen 20,000
Sale of finished products 15,00,000
Selling and distribution overhead – 1% of sales.
From the above, you are required to prepare a cost sheet for the year ended 31st March 2007.

wodehouse

Wodehouse, P(elham) G(renville) 1881–
Popular English humorist, now living in America.

For many years up to 1940 there had been one living writer (in addition to several crime novelists) whose fiction pleased all classes. P. G. Wodehouse's humorous stories brought him a fortune and, from Oxford, an honorary doctorate; and though he lost favour with a large part of his public during the Second World War his post-war books were found hard to cold-shoulder, and his popularity, and the favour of the critics, had been recovered by 1960.

Although Wodehouse's stories are by no means lacking in literary merit, they belong to the low comedy tradition and their author is akin to a music-hall 'comic'. His kind is rare and no one has yet replaced him as a provider of fun. While it might be possible to concoct a thesis on the social content of Wodehouse's stories, any inclination towards satire is subordinated to the claims of happy nonsense.

A. C. Ward, in his Twentieth-Century English Literature 1901–1960, Methuen-University Paperbacks, 1964, p. 83.

In his way, [P. G.] Wodehouse is as daemonic a writer as Balzac or Dickens; at the behest of his daemon, he has devoted himself … to "the great cause of cheering us all up." (p. 7)

Wodehouse has only a few critics. Edmund Wilson once said that Dickens did not get the critical attention that he deserved in his own age because his very popularity caused him to be regarded not as a writer, but as an institution. Something of the same thing can probably be said of Wodehouse. (p. 8)

During a remarkably long and successful career, P. G. Wodehouse has spent a large part of his time making caricatures, hilarious but not unkind, of British institutions and national types. In the works of Wodehouse the London clubs and the stately homes of England, the publishing houses and the law courts, the universities and the Old Vic are populated by an outlandish lot whom he suitably describes as "eggs," "beans," "crumpets," "clothheads," "blisters," "pots of poison," and the like. One gets a hint of their absurdities and imbecilities in a recital of some of their names: Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Sir Roderick Glossop, Oofy Prosser, Pongo Twistleton. (p. 19)

In the last sixty years, Wodehouse has written so much comedy that thousands of readers must think of him as a comic writer only…. But Wodehouse was torn two ways for a long while. As late as 1940 Wodehouse's hero may be a romantic of the first water; it is only in the last twenty-five years that the Berties and the Pongos, the Bingos and the Tuppys have dominated Wodehouse's world. (p. 102)

Wodehouse is at his best as a writer of farce, by which I do not mean mere slapstick, though there is plenty of that in Wodehouse. If there is a vast deal of violence, there is no serious injury. Punches are thrown, but not so many as are threatened, and, generally speaking, the weapons used are the kind that make the most commotion and do the least harm…. Wodehouse's adaptation of certain devices of melodrama is of equal importance. The mechanics of melodrama—the sudden entrances and exits, disguises, secrets, discoveries, contretemps, coincidences—translate, in fact, very easily into farce. (pp. 119-20)

As a comic writer in the twentieth century, Wodehouse is remarkable for his innocence and purity. A recurrent figure in the novels is the old gentleman, respected, dignified, even eminent, who once was a black sheep, the principal in scandals unmentionable even in the family circle and fatal if published. The oats that such old men sowed were apparently of the wildest strain, the deeds that they did the most dark and sinister. And what did they actually do? They got drunk, made fools of themselves, and were thrown out of pubs, music halls, and other places of entertainment…. Wodehouse is sexually pure to the point of Victorianism. There is nothing in any of the novels to bring (as a character in one of them might say) the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty. (pp. 137-38)

Though Wodehouse's heroes are in their twenties and some of his character actors are in their sixties, they have a common state of mind which is that of the schoolboy. The splendors and miseries of school life fix the flavors and shapes of those of adult life. (p. 140)

In spite of Wodehouse's sound education and his wide reading, Wodehouse's world is, for several reasons, anti-intellectual. First, there is a long tradition behind him. Right in the middle of the Age of Reason, Lord Chesterfield said that English gentlemen should thank God that they had something better than their brains to depend upon. Second, Wodehouse is aware that many intellectuals regard him as a literary nobody, and that many have not even bothered to look into one of his books…. But more significant is the fact that for Wodehouse the intellectual view is equated with tragedy, pessimism, and negation. (pp. 142-43)

For all of his joking about American crudity, Wodehouse has always liked Americans. When other young Englishmen wanted to go to the Left Bank of Paris or to the Orient, he wanted to go to the United States, because to him it was the country of romance. In one of the novels, Wodehouse makes America not only more romantic than Europe, but also morally superior. (p. 151)

Wodehouse belongs spiritually to the world of Victoria and Edward VII, but he works in a tradition that goes back through more than three hundred years of English literature. Tracing the tradition, Lionel Stevenson points out that the themes and characters in Wodehouse have antecedents in English drama as early as Ben Jonson…. Wodehouse differs from his predecessors chiefly in that he is all amiability, whereas they have at least a strain of bitterness, viciousness, or cruelty. In consequence, he has effected a reformation of the gallant and the rake. With Psmith he removes most of the inhumanity from the type, and with Bertie he removes virtually all of it. In Wodehouse the hoax is still basic, but it is the kind of hoax in which no one is actually hurt, and the epigrams are witty, but not cynical. Young men consume cocktails by the trayful, but alcohol provokes them to nothing more dissolute than barley water would. If some of the young women are tough babies, there is no Millamant in Wodehouse, much less a Hoyden. (pp. 153-57)

If Wodehouse is a minor novelist, he has been an important influence on comic novelists of the twentieth century, some of whom are major figures beyond any question. Evelyn Waugh, for example, created a fictional world which, although differing vastly from Wodehouse's, still owes a great deal to it…. However different their attitudes and purposes, younger writers like Kingsley Amis and John Wain owe much to the techniques of farce which Wodehouse developed and with which he has operated for so many years. Indeed, Wodehouse has influenced English comic novelists who have just published their first or second book, and one such writer may well have the last word. Discussing his own work in a recent interview, Auberon Waugh said that he supposed he made jokes like those of his father and P. G. Wodehouse. Then he remarked that all English comic writers are so much influenced by Wodehouse that they must constantly try not to write Wodehouse's kind of comedy, in order that they may write their own. (pp. 180-82)

P. G. Wodehouse 1881–-1975
(Born Pelham Grenville Wodehouse) English-born American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, lyricist, screenwriter, playwright, and journalist.

INTRODUCTION
Wodehouse is widely recognized as one of the foremost humorists and prose stylists of the twentieth century. His elaborate, farcical stories and novels are set most often in an upper-class, pseudo-Edwardian world of clubmen and country estates and present the comic adventures of characters drawn from the stock-types of English and American musical comedy. In particular, his most beloved characters, Bertie Wooster and his resourceful valet, Jeeves, have been ranked with the outstanding comic duos in literature. Wodehouse's accomplishments have earned nearly universal admiration from critics, including such writers as George Orwell, Dorothy Parker, Hilaire Belloc, and Sinclair Lewis.

Biographical Information
Born in Guildford, Surrey on October 15, 1881, Wodehouse spent two years of his early childhood in Hong Kong, where his father served as a magistrate. He was then sent back to England with his two older brothers to pursue his education. Short, infrequent visits by his parents, coupled with all he suffered under the strictures of various temporary guardians and eccentric schoolmistresses, shaped Wodehouse's increasingly introverted and bookish nature, and he found an outlet for his energies and interests in sports and creative writing. In 1900 he began training in London for a career in banking. During the next two years, he published some eighty items in various boys' magazines. By 1902 he had become a full-time writer, having already begun serializing his first novel, The Pothunters, in Public School Magazine and contributing to an anonymous humor column in the London Globe. In 1904 Wodehouse traveled to the United States and began his career as a musical-comedy lyricist, which he conducted while continuing to produce fiction.

By 1914 Wodehouse had married and settled in New York where he began selling stories and serialized novels to major American magazines. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he published an astonishing number of stories and novels, while finding time to write musical-comedy lyrics and plays and to work as a Hollywood screenwriter, becoming a very wealthy man in the process. While in England in 1939, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Oxford University. The following year the Wodehouses were in Le Touquet, France, where they had taken a villa, when that nation was overrun by the advancing German army, and they were placed under arrest. Under German occupation, all the male residents of Touquet, Wodehouse included, were collected and transported to a series of internment camps. After eleven months, because of his age (he was almost sixty) and pressure applied for his release by readers in the then-neutral United States, Wodehouse was taken to Berlin, where he was joined by his wife. There they were assigned a hotel suite and, though kept under close observation by their captors, lived fairly comfortably. Soon afterward, several representatives from America convinced Wodehouse to deliver a series of radio broadcasts to the United States, to assure his audience there of his well-being and tell of his recent camp experiences. A series of five radio talks were taped, approved by government censors, and broadcast to the United States. Wodehouse's light-hearted but highly revealing portrait of life as an internee, subjected to his German captors' stupidity and inefficiency, was welcomed in America. Yet the talks were also heard in war-torn Britain, a nation undergoing daily privations and holding out under nightly bombing raids by the Nazi air force. In his native country Wodehouse was viewed as a traitor, for there the law deemed it a treasonous act for a British subject to broadcast over enemy facilities for any reason during wartime. Yet he was ably defended in print by a number of prominent people—notably, by George Orwell.

Wodehouse was eventually cleared by British intelligence authorities at the war's end. After his release by Allied investigators, he and his wife moved back to the United States, and he became a citizen in 1955. Wodehouse continued to write prodigiously, publishing an average of a novel every year for the rest of his life, not counting numerous short stories and autobiographical works. In America Wodehouse's popularity soared to its high prewar level, with British enthusiasm rising to match it by the 1960s. In recognition of the author's achievement, the Queen named him Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in January of 1975. Six weeks later, while in the hospital for treatment of a minor skin rash and while working on a novel (published posthumously in 1977 as Sunset at Blandings), Wodehouse died at age ninety-three.

Major Works
Wodehouse was a prolific writer who composed song lyrics, novels, and short fiction. While he is renowned for his high level of skill in all these genres, many critics consider him to be at his finest in his short stories; these concern the improbable activities of roughly seven major characters or groupings of characters. One of these is Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, a lazy, get-quick-rich artist. A few steps up the social scale stands another major Wodehouse character, Mr. Mulliner. A fisherman given to stretching the truth to a greater extent than most, he occupies the bar-parlor of the Angler's Rest, where he regales awed listeners with preposterous tales of derring-do performed by his innumerable relatives. Another sportsman, a retired golfer known as the Oldest Member, narrates Wodehouse's acclaimed golf stories. Of roughly the same age as the elderly Oldest Member is one of the Wodehouse's most beloved characters, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, the dithering lord of Blandings Castle. A man who wants only to be left in peace to potter about, tend his garden, and care for his prize-winning pig, Lord Emsworth is beset on all sides by domineering sisters, an overly efficient personal secretary, a volatile gardener, and a vapid son known to the world as a dog-biscuit tycoon. Another peer, Frederick Cornwallis Twistleton, Earl of Ickenham (better known as Uncle Fred), appears in several novels and in a story.

Wodehouse's best-known collection of characters comprise the Drone Club, a group of unmarried, upper-class young idlers who may be found typically at the racetrack, sponging loans off each other, spending rainy afternoons at the Club tossing playing cards into a top hat, or falling in love, always with comic results. Most the stories that feature members of the Drones are collected in the 1936 volume of short stories, Young Men in Spats. To many critics, one of the Drones stands above all the others as Wodehouse's greatest creation: Bertie Wooster. He narrates stories of the trials of his life in a hilariously slangy fashion, revealing, despite protestations to the contrary, his utter dependence upon his patient “gentleman's personal gentlemen,” Jeeves, to extricate him time and again from his troubles. Bertie and Jeeves have been compared with the most famous character-duos in literary history.

Critical Reception
The devices used by Wodehouse in his fiction have been explored and catalogued by several critics, notably linguist Robert A. Hall, Jr. in his The Comic Style of P. G. Wodehouse. Hall has identified and documented such workings as inventive word formations, transferred epithets, and comic misunderstandings among characters arising from lexicographic or syntactic confusion, among many others. Yet most critics and readers alike agree that critiquing Wodehouse's humor is, as Punch put it, like taking a spade to a soufflé. The majority of commentators have been content simply to applaud his accomplishment. A few commentators have posited the existence of satiric intent in Wodehouse's work while others have suggested the polar opposite: that he was simply an adoring chronicler of an outmoded and cruel class system. A few reviewers have found his comedy not at all humorous. Yet most critics and readers agree with Auberon Waugh, that Wodehouse created “a world of gentleness and simplicity where everything solemn or threatening is seen, in the last analysis, to be hopelessly funny.”

ALEXANDER COCKBURN
[The question of tone] is troubling for anyone writing about Wodehouse. High seriousness about him brings to mind poor Professor Scully. This professor's attempt, in 1902, to describe a smile scientifically was quoted by Richard Usborne in his fine book Wodehouse at Work. Scully doggedly dissected "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth, the curving of the naso-labial furrows …"

Wodehouse is peculiarly resistant to what we might term the naso-labial approach, which is possibly why critics have always had such a hard time with him. It is, of course, the work of a moment to knock together something about the master-servant relationship as displayed by Wooster and Jeeves, and the relevance of same to British social history. Such an approach is not actively harmful, but it suffers from naso-labialism—leaving the mystery of Wodehouse's genius intact.

Wodehouse wrote The Code of the Woosters just before the Second World War. He was living in Le Touquet and, at the age of sixty, was at the height of his powers. In the same period he wrote Uncle Fred in the Springtime and shortly thereafter … Joy in the Morning, regarded by many as preeminent in the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. (p. v)

The first thing [new arrivals in Wodehouse country] will want to discuss are the characters of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. The duo is as momentous in literary history as the other great tandems—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Of the two, Wooster is by far the more interesting. He is a character. Jeeves, to the end of his days, remains a type—the deus ex machina who saves the day when all seems lost, the great artificer who ties up the loose ends and who rescues Bertie from the consequences of his repeated follies. People have written about Jeeves the valet as a mother-surrogate for Bertie and, though a touch naso-labial, the imputation has some accuracy. Bertie never mentions his mother (or indeed his father) and reserves all his passions for his aunts: the terrible Aunt Agatha [and the jovial Aunt Dahlia]…. Bertie has no sex life and so indubitably Jeeves, in the mother role, is his closest confidant. But a mere foil to the Wooster magic is what he remains, a counterpoint for linguistic jokes.

"Very well, then," says Bertie to Jeeves, "you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?" "Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir." Wodehouse never tired of variations of this low/high joke about language where Jeeves' somewhat sanctimonious precision of speech is followed by the loose idiomatic torrent of Wooster's blather.

There's another fine example of Jeeves' reserve played off against Bertie's copious flow in the great scene in The Code of the Woosters in which both characters are trapped in Stiffy Byng's bedroom by the dog Bartholomew. It's unusual to find Jeeves in an undignified posture, but this is exactly the state the dog Bartholomew has reduced him to, perched on top of the cupboard. Bertie is crouched on the chest of drawers [outlining a risky escape plan to an unsympathetic Jeeves.] (pp. vi-vii)

The joke is in the folly of his rescue plan, and beyond that in the understated but clear designation of the relationship. Wooster is the master, Jeeves the servant. But Jeeves will not take orders inimical to his safety and Bertie would not dream of clinching a proposal with a command. The relationship is always nuanced, so much so that when Bertie, in another story, hears Jeeves describe him to a substitute valet as "mentally negligible" we feel an equivalent stab of distress at such plain speaking. Bertie knows he is mentally negligible and is ready to leave all serious thinking to Jeeves. But Jeeves' savage frankness on the subject of Bertie's mental equipment is altogether too blunt—a breach of etiquette.

But there is a mystery to Jeeves—the evident incongruity of this adroit and learned schemer working for an ass like Bertie. It's as though one suddenly found Bosola or another of those Jacobean adventurers dressed up as a butler and handing round cucumber sandwiches. Jeeves is a little like Iago, in benign retirement from villainy, redeeming himself with good-natured and stoic penance.

At all events he found the right master. Wooster is the greatest of all the Wodehouse characters—and the one in which Wodehouse achieved his most complex technical triumphs. Bertie, after all, is not only the narrator but also the central character. The reader laughs at Wooster as he thrashes around in the toils of circumstance, but he also laughs with Wooster because it is Wooster who is reporting on the aforementioned toils and how exactly he got enmeshed in them.

Above all it is Bertie who weaves the idiom of the stories; everything is cast in that unique language, a stew of half-remembered quotations, slang, repetitions, formulaic expressions. It is Bertie who dreams up the great similes and bleats out the dense word play. (pp. vii-viii)

Character … language … but also action. It's all very well to talk about Wodehouse's unfailing invention, but mere invocation of it is insufficient. Wodehouse was, after all, dealing with the most perilous of forms—farce. The slightest lapse in vigilance and not even Bertie's linguistic virtuosity could keep the reader's eyes on the page. (p. ix)

[As Wodehouse once] remarked, "In a Jeeves story every line has to have entertainment value," and the final, seemingly effortless concoction was produced with the toil and concentration that such a remark indicates. The Code of the Woosters is an excellent example of the structural complexity Wodehouse strove for.

Across the main plot line of Aunt Dahlia's lust for the cow-creamer come dashing the subplots: Gussie's problems with Madeleine Bassett; Stiffy Byng's hopes for marriage with Stinker the curate. There are the mechanisms that connect these threads in the narrative: the missing notebook, the cow-creamer itself, the monstrous Sir Watkyn's designs on Anatole, Aunt Dahlia's sublime chef. Study the conclusions of each chapter. Almost always the final line switches the plot, plunging the reader forward into some new portion of the labyrinth. Wodehouse never let his readers relax for a moment. Like Homer, he knew that relaxation meant inattention, sleep, or disconsolate grumblings that bards are not what they used to be in the old days.

Each Wooster-Jeeves novel has certain specific felicities. In The Code of the Woosters a prime point of attraction is indubitably the character of Sir Roderick Spode and his eventual neutralization through the agency of Jeeves. Spode was evidently modeled on Sir Oswald Mosley, 1930s leader of the British Union of Fascists. (pp. ix-x)

[The tongue-lashing Spode receives] may not be the fiercest piece of anti-Fascist prose ever composed, but for Wooster it was saeva indignatio at its most potent. We should remember Bertie's limitations and respect him all the more for his stand.

Other traditional characters in the Wooster-Jeeves saga are well displayed: Gussie Fink-Nottle, the lover of newts and seeker of the hand of Madeline Bassett:

"I broke the tank. The tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my newts in. I broke the glass tank in my bedroom, and the bath was the only place to lodge the newts. The basin wasn't large enough. Newts need elbow room. So I put them in the bath. Because I had broken the tank. The glass tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my—"

This is Gussie, reporting the newt mishap to Bertie. It's a high moment for the Wodehouse style; an epiphany, if you must, to be compared with King Lear's reflections on his own considerable reverses of fortune.

And there is Madeline Bassett, prime example of the soupy girl with whom Bertie was always trying to avoid a marriage enforced by circumstance. (p. xi)

[If the scene in which she likens the totally uncomprehending Bertie to Rudel] won't cause curvature of your naso-labials, nothing will. Wodehouse is not for you.

Wodehouse's status? It's been vouched for by every major English writer of the twentieth century with a spark of insight or talent. He stands as father of the style of Evelyn Waugh, too acute ever to get lost in the prejudices that marred the latter's delicacy of touch towards the end of his career. Wodehouse took a language forged out of second-rate fiction and narrative techniques from stage farce and created a world as timeless and as true as that of Homer or of Shakespeare. And despite his own self-deprecation, Wodehouse had his ambitions. Joy in the Morning, to be read immediately after The Code of the Woosters, deliberately invites comparison with Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Wodehouse popped in enough allusions and quotations to bend the reader toward such parallel. And he survives it. The Wooster-Jeeves cycle is the central achievement of English fiction in the twentieth century; an achievement impossible to imitate, because—as E. M. Forster remarked of the poet Cavafy—the cycle stands at a slight angle to the universe, unreachable by almost anything but laughter itself. (p. xii)

Alexander Cockburn, "Introduction" (copyright © 1975 by Random House, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the publisher), in The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse, Vintage Books, 1975, pp. v-xii.

"Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum"
Bertie Wooster awakens one spring morning in high spirits, and announces to Jeeves, his valet:
"In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnish'd dove."
"So I have been informed, sir."
He thereupon departs for the park, where he encounters Bingo Little, a friend from his school days, adorned with a hideous deep-red satin tie decorated with horseshoes.
"My God, man!" I gargled. "The cravat! The gent's neckwear! Why? For what reason?"
Bingo replies embarrasedly that he was given it. The pair stroll along and sit on chairs by the water, where Bingo enquires whether Bertie likes the name Mabel. He does not, and says so, but realizes immediately that Bingo has fallen in love, as he does perpetually, and most often in the springtime. Bingo suggests that Bertie meet Mabel for lunch "near the Ritz".
They end up in a tea-and-bun shop about fifty yards east of the Ritz Hotel, where Bertie wonders why Bingo, who is moderately wealthy, would have chosen such an eatery. Presently a waitress arrives, and Bingo bewilders Bertie by preparing to order without waiting for Mabel to arrive; but, upon seeing Bingo's lovestruck gaze, Bertie realizes that the waitress is Mabel. Bingo introduces her to Bertie, and points out to her that he is wearing the tie she had given him. She replies that it suits him nicely, at which Bertie is surprised:
Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex.
Bingo orders cocoa, cold veal and ham pie, a slice of fruitcake, and a macaroon; Bertie, having known Bingo "in happier days" to prefer sole frit au gourmet aux champignons, disgustedly orders rolls and butter. After Mabel leaves, Bingo reveals that he met her at a Subscription dance in Camberwell, at which he also saw Jeeves "swinging a dashed efficient shoe". After the food arrives, Bingo asks Bertie's advice on how to present the matter of his marrying a waitress to his wealthy and upper-class uncle, on whom he is financially dependent. When Bertie offers no help, Bingo proposes to ask Jeeves, which Bertie does after dinner.
Jeeves is acquainted with Mr. Mortimer Little, Bingo's uncle, who lives in Pounceby Gardens, because he has "an understanding" with Mr. Little's cook, a Miss Watson. Little, a gourmet, relies heavily on Miss Watson's services. Jeeves suggests that Bingo offer to read to his uncle, who is bedridden due to an attack of gout. He has an aunt who owns an almost-complete set of novels by Rosie M. Banks, in which "marriage with young persons of an inferior social status is held up as both feasible and admirable.
Here concludes "Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum"; the story continues into "No Wedding Bells for Bingo".
[edit] "No Wedding Bells for Bingo"
Bingo reports to Bertie three days later that the scheme appears to be working, as he has finished reading All for Love, A Red, Red Summer Rose, Madcap Myrtle, Only a Factory Girl, and half of The Courtship of Lord Strathmorick. Bingo reveals that he has a final idea which he is sure will clinch the matter, but will not reveal what it is.
The following week, Bingo returns, bringing the news that his uncle's gout has subsided, and that he wishes very much to dine with Bertie. Bertie, though baffled since Mr. Little has never heard of him, agrees to spring the news of his nephew's marriage and to request that Mr. Little double his allowance.
The next day, he arrives at No. 16 Pounceby Gardens, where the exceedingly corpulent Mr. Little expresses his delight and honour at meeting someone who has accomplished so much at such a young age. The maid informs Bertie, ever the more puzzled, that there is a phone call for him; it is Bingo, who tells him that has told his uncle that Rosie M. Banks is Bertie's pen name.
He returns to lunch with Mr. Little, who praises "his" work, while Bertie replies awkwardly, and realizes that Jeeves's scheme has worked exactly as intended. When Little quotes a passage from Only a Factory Girl – "Be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest lady on earth!" – and assures Bertie of his complete belief in it, Bertie tells him of his nephew's intention to marry a waitress, for which Mr. Little honours him. However, he refuses to raise his nephew's allowance, claiming that he will need the money in married life, and announces his engagement to Miss Watson, his cook.
Bertie returns home and reports to Jeeves the heavy news – that his fiancée has become engaged to Mr. Little. Jeeves is unsurprised: he had anticipated the event, and in fact has another "understanding" with another young lady whom he met at a Subscription dance in Camberwell - by coincidence, the same young lady whom Bingo loves. The story concludes as Jeeves places Bertie's cigarettes on a table and bids him good night.
Characters

Bertie Wooster — Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers.
Jeeves — Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks
Bingo Little — Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks.
Mabel — Waitress in a tea shop
Mortimer Little — Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment — "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet.
Jane Watson — Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long



Affairs of the heart run smoother for Jeeves's ministrations.

Bertie's friend Bingo falls in love with every other woman he meets, from Mabel, the waitress at the bun shop, to the Amazonian Honoria Glossop (whom Aunt Agatha has ear-marked for Bertie). Naturally there are obstacles to be overcome - the matter of allowances, class prejudices and a lack of revolutionary tendencies. Rely on Jeeves's superb brain-power to emancipate Bertie and Bingo from the tightest of corners.

In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse
George Orwell
When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." He was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the neighbourhood frequently "dropping in for a bath or a party."

Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a "non-political" nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the Saturday Evening Post an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.

The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's experiences in internment, but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:

"I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings."

"A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side."

"In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure. ... The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week."

The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase "whether Britain wins the war or not," and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment but to remark that "the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win." The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill treated and bore no malice.

These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremely violent Postscript by "Cassandra" of the Daily Mirror, accusing Wodehouse of "selling his country." This postscript made free use of such expressions as "Quisling" and "worshipping the Fмhrer." The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do German propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.

"Cassandra's" Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse's books from circulation. Here is a typical news item:

"Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the Daily Mirror columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra's broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer." (Daily Mirror.)

In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the air and was still doing so a couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there were demands in Parliament that Wodehouse should be put on trial as a traitor.

There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that Wodehouse's talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several letters to the press claimed that "Fascist tendencies" could be detected in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase "whether England wins or not" did get through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this action had any special significance. Flannery comments:

"By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human angle. ... Plack (Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his experiences; there would be no censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making that proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the English in all his stories and that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still living in the period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."

The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be merely Flannery's own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a much less definite kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse's main idea in making them was to keep in touch with his public and -- the comedian's ruling passion -- to get a laugh. Obviously they are not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or John Amery, nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be unwise to broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse (though in one broadcast he refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He had contemplated naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even used, to Flannery, the phrase, "We're not at war with Germany."

I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse's works. It names round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by admitting that there are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the total -- which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its peculiar mental atmosphere -- an atmosphere which has not, of course, remained completely unchanged, but shows little alteration since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery's book which I quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike any attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that Wodehouse "was still living in the period about which he wrote," and the other that the Nazi Propaganda Ministry made use of him because he "made fun of the English." The second statement is based on a misconception to which I will return presently. But Flannery's other comment is quite true and contains in it part of the clue to Wodehouse's behaviour.

A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse's novels is how long ago the better-known of them were written. We think of him as in some sense typifying the silliness of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and characters by which he is best remembered had all made their appearance before 1925. ... When one looks through the list of Wodehouse's books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three fairly well-marked periods. The first is the school-story period. ... The next is the American period. Wodehouse seems to have lived in the United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a while showed signs of becoming Americanised in idiom and outlook. ... The third period might fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social status of his characters moved upwards accordingly ... The typical setting is now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an expensive golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades out, cricket and football giving way to golf, and the element of farce and burlesque becomes more marked. ... Mike Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not a very startling metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is his lack of development. ... How much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can see from the fact that he continued to write stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years before his internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.

...

In Something Fresh Wodehouse had discovered the comic possibilities of the English aristocracy, and a succession of ridiculous but, save in a very few instances, not actually contemptible barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This had the rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded, outside England, as a penetrating satirist of English society. Hence Flannery's statement that Wodehouse "made fun of the English," which is the impression he would probably make on a German or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that Wodehouse had gone over to the enemy, which from his own point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find that he regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be very difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of the way in which books, especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience. For it is clear enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either. On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work. 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. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so much. Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code -- a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and Bertie Wooster's helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious: their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing everyone as "Comrade."

But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. ... A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his internment. His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naЇve, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. ... His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines. ... In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether "the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war," not realising that they were ghosts already. "He was still living in the period about which he wrote," says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.

If my analysis of Wodehouse's mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He may have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging to British interests. 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. But how could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse's complete lack -- so far as one can judge from his printed works -- of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of "Fascist tendencies" in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In The Heart of a Goof (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word "Fascism" or "Nazism." In left-wing circles, indeed in "enlightened" circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained an¦sthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia -- the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and "not our business." One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of "Fascism" as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.

The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be "reduced to degradation and poverty." By the middle of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.

But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.

There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant -- the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly -- and presumably they expected to do so -- the Americans might never intervene. The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was -- or so the Germans calculated -- popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.

But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and "Cassandra's" articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse -- as "Cassandra" vigorously pointed out in his broadcast -- was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches £350,000 a year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a fortune -- usually a very temporary fortune -- like the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to "expose" a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

The extract is taken from "The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose. A Conducted Tour by Frank Muir". Oxford, 1990
P.G. Wodehouse had countless legions of readers including Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, a committed Wodehouse reader for many years (legend has it that when asked once whether there was something which she should really like to have instead of the usual formal presentation gift, the Queen Mother replied, "May I have the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse?" An excellent idea by any standards: complete sets are extremely rare).

Other distinguished self-confessed devotees included a former Prime Minister, the Rt. Herbert Asquith; the poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman; Hilaire Belloc (in the middle 1930s he broadcast a rather embarrassingly fulsome tribute to the modest Wodehouse with such phrases as "the best writer of our time - the best living writer of English - the head of my profession"); Arnold Bennett; Rudyard Kipling; the novelist and playwright Ian Hay; four generations of Waughs including Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon ("Wodehouse has been more read than any other English novelist by his fellow novelists"); Malcolm Muggeridge; Kingsley Amis; Bermard Levin (In "The Times" he likened the impact of the line "in my heliotrope pyjamas with the old gold stripe" to one of the great speeches of Macbeth); and so on.

Perhaps even more remarkable example of the diversity of Wodehouse's appeal occurs towards the end of Evelyn Waugh's biography of the eminent Catholic theologian and translator of the Bible, Father Ronald Knox, when Waugh noted: "For the remaining years of his life, Ronnie Knox applied himself to devotional reading and the works of P.G.Wodehouse."

But Wodehouse's stories were not meant to be either caviare to the general or incense to the priest but beans-on-toast to the troops, a bit of pleasure and fun for amusement only. He was a completely professional writer whoose only intent was to make as many people as possible laugh. In this he was phenomenally successful.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, known as "Plum", had his first piece of prose published during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1900, while he was still a schoolboy at Dulwich College. When he died in 1975, aged 93, still working (he had written almost every day of his life through five reigns), he had published ninety-six books and hundreds of short stories. His books and stories have been translated into fifteen languages and most of them are still in print in paperback. His total sales run into many tens of millions, and there are Wodehouse appreciation societies and clubs in various spots around the world - Denmark's Wodehouse Society meets in Copenhagen in the "Drones Club" and in Amsterdam there is a bar for Wodehousians called "Mr Mulliner's Wijn Lokaal".

Wodehouse also either wrote or collaborated in sixteen stage-plays, supplied all or part of the lyrics for 28 musical comedies, and for eighteen of these he worked on the libretto. For a time he contributed regularly to "Punch", wrote humorous verse for many magazines, and worked on six major film scripts in Hollywood.

The Times, 4 May 2000
The funniest writer ever to put words on paper
Lynne Truss

His most famous creations: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie appear as Jeeves
and Wooster in the television adaptation of Wodehouse's work

There was a time, not so long ago, when you had to look hard for P.G. Wodehouse in the bookshops. Heading for the end of the alphabet, you would locate the big reliable section on Woolf, scan back a bit, and when you found yourself knocking up against Winterson, you knew they didn't have any.

But times have changed. The first four volumes of a handsome collectable hardback edition of Wodehouse's novels and stories has just been launched by Everyman, to join the already established new Penguin paperback. And given the phenomenal number of titles in the oeuvre (Everyman intends an 80-volume uniform edition; Penguin has already reached its 60th), he already stretches for yards. Everyman is also launching an annual prize for the best comic writing of the year, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize, to be given each year at The Sunday Times Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature at the end of May. This years' judges are Jo Brand, Craig Brown and Stephen Fry.

Whether Wodehouse deserves the attention is not in doubt. As far as comic writing is concerned, he is the real tabasco. "Sublime comic genius," says Ben Elton on one of Penguin's covers. "The funniest writer ever to put words on paper," wrote Hugh Laurie. Kathy Lette joined in, and Arabella Weir. Clearly, if there were a collective noun for accolades, it would be a Plum.

And what are they all raving about? Well, this sort of thing: "The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin"; or, "'His name's not Lemuel?'

'I fear so, sir.'

'Couldn't use his second name?'

'His second name is Gengulphus.'

'Golly, Jeeves,' I said, thinking of Uncle Tom Portarlington, 'there's some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, is there not?'"

Wodehouse is rarely parodied; anyone who tries to write like him looks idiotic. So does he have a legacy? Ben Elton will have searched Luck of the Bodkins in vain for knob gags. Did Stiffy Byng's bum look big in anything? I don't think so.

No, what strikes with awe all other toilers in this field are the various aspects of the chap's craft. He never chooses a heavy word where a light one will do. His good humour is without limit. And above all, when you are least expecting it, G.K. Chesterton falls on to a sheet of tin.

Kate Jones, his Penguin editor, says his legacy is that he simply set the standard for comic writing. In the way he combined American slang with perfect English, he invented a vocabulary which is permanently fresh. Wodehouse absorbed the buzz of Broadway; and if he didn't invent it, he perfected the sort of retort-based comedy that has its descendants in shows like Frasier.

There is just one aspect of Wodehouse's legacy that troubles all comic writers, and probably worries his publishers, too. Wodehouse is so breezy and good-natured towards his public that the reader may feel uncompelled to pick him up somehow, except for an annual treat. One could add, if one dared, that Wodehouse trivialised comic writing; made it the inconsiderable froth on life's doo-dah; though hastily adding that this perception applies only among the ignorant.

The results of this perception, however, for comic fiction writers today, are dire. If you fancy being sneered at by people less intelligent than yourself, become a comic novelist. "People don't want to laugh," Howard Jacobson told me last week, when we jointly bemoaned the low status of comic writing. "They want to cry." And then there is the towering presence of Wodehouse himself to contend with. When comic writing of such a high order waits on the shelf making light chitchat with the abutting giants of literature, what hope is there for the rest of us?

So it's in everyone's interest that the Wodehouses come off those shelves as quickly as they go on. Reading one Wodehouse a year makes bad mathematical sense, in any case. Start the 80 volumes at the age of 28, and - well, you see where this is leading. But it has always been the way, unfortunately. And when Wodehouse confessed in his lighthearted essay My Gentle Readers that all his fan-letters came from invalids and chaps in jail, I doubt the grievance was ungrounded in fact. "Dear Sir," a typical missive would begin. "I have never read anything of yours before, as I have always enjoyed robust health from a boy."

"You see the dilemma this places me in?" wrote Wodehouse. "If you want to see a mind in a ferment of doubt and indecision, take a look at mine when the papers announce that another epidemic has broken out and hundreds are collapsing daily." Yes, it's a rotten fate, being a kind of notational Lucozade. Something must be done. Comic fiction must at last be read by people unweakened by disease or captivity. And one thing is for sure. You certainly can't argue any more that the books aren't in the shops.

The Times 27 October 2001
A fictional alliance that always landed the chump in a pickle
Tim Reid
P.G. Wodehouse would have heartily approved of the cross-Atlantic union: he married his wife, Ethel, in 1914, and the two were still going strong when the author died in 1975. Bertie Wooster was rather less keen on tying the knot.

Despite 19 engagements and many near misses Wodehouse's most eligible bachelor never married, thanks mainly to the genius of his redoubtable valet Jeeves. He extricated his master from many scrapes and took a very dim view of the prospect of a woman taking over Sir's affairs.

Bertie was basically allergic to marriage, but on one occasion at least was genuinely keen, when he popped the question to Pauline Stoker, an American. But poor Bertie was thwarted. Her father was warned by Sir Roderick Glossop that Bertie was "loony", and that was that.

Three other proposals were voluntary: to Cynthia Wickhammersley and Vanessa Cook (both rejected), and Aline Hemmingway, although that occurred in a magazine version of a story. Fifteen engagements were imposed on him, often owing to Bertie’s aim to play the preux chevalier. Sometimes asked to marry, he could never say no, landing himself in the most terrible pickle.

He was affianced to Madeline Bassett (four times), Stiffy Byng, Vanessa Cook (the same girl who rejected him previously), Florence Craye (four times, and she had many fiances: there was talk of setting up a club called the Old Florentians), Honoria Glossop (twice), Pauline Stoker (this time at her father's insistence, she having being found in Bertie's pyjamas and Bertie's bed. Bertie was of course as shocked as anyone to find her there), Trixie Waterbury and Bobbie Wickham.

Observing married friends was another reason why Bertie fought shy of the aisle. In Very Good Jeeves, he asks his manservant: "Are wives very often like that? Welcoming criticism of the lord and master, I mean?" "They are generally open to suggestions from the outside public with regard to the improvement of their husbands, sir." Bertie says: "That is why married men are wan, what?" Wodehouse recognised, however, that sometimes avoiding marriage was impossible.

In Ring for Jeeves, Jill Wyvern insists to her father that she is not going to marry Lord Rowcester. Wodehouse writes: "It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he set himself to jog her memory.

"Yes, you are," he reminded her. "It was in The Times."

The early genius of Wodehouse
Richard Lambert
For 70 years and more, critics have been outbidding each other in praise of P.G. Wodehouse. Hilaire Belloc called him "the best living writer of English". Evelyn Waugh described him as "a master". But conventional wisdom is that his early school stories were nothing special.

As Waugh famously wrote: "It is impossible to discern in them any promise of what was to come. Then in Chapter XXX1 of Mike...Psmith appears and the light is kindled which has burnt with growing brilliance for half a century."

But Waugh got it wrong. The reality is that the muse's wings are fluttering away almost from page one of the first school story, which appeared in book form exactly 100 years ago.

"On September 9, 1902, having to choose between The Globe and the bank, I chucked the latter and started out on my wild lone as a freelance. This month starts my journalistic career."

With с50 savings in his pocket and this note in his diary, Wodehouse not quite 21 -began his life as a full-time author. His first piece had been published in The Public School Magazine while he was still at school, and in his two dreary years as a clerk in the City at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, another 80 articles had appeared in a wide range of publications.

But September 1902 was the turning point in his life. A temporary berth on a London newspaper gave him the confidence to quit the bank. And his employers, who must already have come to the conclusion that this gangly youth was not cut out to be a prince of their banking empire in the East, were happy to see him go.

On September 17 his first article appeared in Punch, then unchallenged as the nation's premier humorous magazine. And the following day A&C Black published his first novel, a ripping schoolboy yarn called The Pothunters. For the next 72 years, he was to be perhaps the most prolific and certainly the funniest writer in English literature.

Right from the start, the gifts of a natural storyteller are obvious. In The White Feather, for instance, you know that the hopeless Sheen is bound to win the lightweight medal at the public school boxing championships, but you long to know just how. And it is not simply that the plot lines are somehow familiar: the mysterious disappearance of silverware, odd noises in the shrubbery, escape routes being blocked by unseen hands.

More than this, many of the half dozen school stories published before Psmith's debut show the style, the unexpected images, the perfect similes, the throwaway lines that make Wodehouse what he is.

The cat Captain Kettle, the Tabby Terror of St. Austin's, made his appearance a full six years before Psmith:

'He (Captain Kettle) had been left alone that evening in the drawing room, while the House was at church, and his eye, roaming restlessly about in search of evil to perform, had lighted upon a cage. In that cage was a special sort of canary, in its own line as accomplished an artiste as Captain Kettle himself. It sang with taste and feeling, and made itself generally agreeable in a number of little ways. But to Captain Kettle, it was merely a bird. One of the poets sings of an acquaintance of his who was so constituted that "a primrose by the river's brim a simple primrose was to him, and it was nothing more". Just so with Captain Kettle. He was not the cat to make nice distinctions between birds. Like the cat in another poem, he only knew that they made him light and salutary meals. So, with the exercise of considerable ingenuity, he extracted that canary from its cage and ate it. He was now in disgrace.' (Tales of St Austin's, 1903)

There are the first hints of powerful aunts:

'He was tall and dark and thin, and had a pensive eye, which encouraged the more soulful of his female relatives to entertain hopes that he would some day take orders.' (The Gold Bat, 1904)

We meet Miss Florence Beezley of Girton College, a direct forerunner of Honoria Glossop and all those other bluestockings who were to give Bertie Wooster such hell in years to come:

'She was intensely learned herself, and seemed to take a morbid delight in dissecting his ignorance, and showing everybody the pieces. Also, she persisted in calling him Mr MacArthur in a way that somehow seemed to point out and emphasise his youthfulness. She added it to her remarks as a sort of after-thought or echo.

"Do you read Browning, Mr MacArthur?" she would say suddenly, having apparently waited carefully until she saw that his mouth was full.

The Babe would swallow convulsively, choke, blush, and finally say - "No, not much."

"Ah!" This in a tone of pity not untinged with scorn.

"When you say 'not much', Mr MacArthur, what exactly do you mean? Have you read any of his poems?"' (Tales of St Austin's, 1903)

There's the masterful use of the cliche:

'Kill my father and burn my ancestral home, and I will look on and smile. But touch these notes and you rouse the British Lion.' (The Pothunters, 1902)

Youthful similes:

'The Head paced the room, something after the fashion of the tiger at the Zoo, whose clock strikes lunch.' (The Pothunters, 1902)

And early attempts at what was to become one of Wodehouse's classiest tricks: the bathetic use of Shakespeare. This pre-Psmith example concerns a form master whose entire class has gone on strike:

'He reminds me of MacDuff. Macbeth, Act IV, somewhere near the end. "What, all my pretty chickens, at one fell swoop?" That's what Shields is saying to himself.' (Mike, 1909)

The Bible is plundered too:

'There would have been serious trouble between David and Jonathan if either had persisted in dropping catches off the other's bowling.' (Mike, 1909)

There are butlers:

'The first thing he noticed on reaching the School House was the strange demeanour of the butler. Whenever Fenn had had occasion to call on the headmaster hitherto, Watson had admitted him with the air of a high priest leading a devotee to a shrine of which he was the sole managing director. This evening he seemed restless, excited ...

'With an eager, springy step, distantly reminiscent of a shopwalker heading a procession of customers, with a touch of the style of the winner in a walking race to Brighton, the once slow- moving butler led the way to the headmaster's study.' (The Head of Kay's, 1905)

And absurd images: 'By murdering in cold blood a large and respected family, and afterwards depositing their bodies in a reservoir, one may gain, we are told, much unpopularity in the neighbourhood of one's crime; while robbing a church will get one cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But, to be really an outcast, to feel that one has no friend in the world, one must break an important public-school commitment.' (The White Feather, 1907)

Only Wodehouse could have come up with this perfect opening paragraph:

'The one o'clock down express was just on the point of starting. The engine driver, with his hand on the lever, whiled away the moments, like the watchman in the Agamemnon, by whistling. The guard endeavoured to talk to three people at once. Porters flitted to and fro, cleaving a path for themselves with trucks of luggage. The Usual Old Lady was asking if she was right for some place nobody had ever heard of.' (Tales of St Austin's, 1903)

One noteworthy feature of The Pothunters is the dedication, to Joan, Effie, and Ernestine Bowes-Lyon. They were granddaughters of the 12th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and first cousins of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Wodehouse was a friend of the family, which tells you something about his social life in these early days. Although he was already writing in every spare minute, he was not the bashful, almost antisocial, figure of his later years. His writing paper carried his name across the top in bold red type, together with long lists of his published work.

One hundred years later, Wodehouse is still the author with the greatest number of titles in print with Penguin, apart from Roald Dahl: 48 individual titles, plus seven omnibuses. And there is still brisk demand for the classics. The 1999 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves has so far sold more than 12,000 copies, compared with 115,000 for the edition sold from 1953 to 1999.

Of course none of the early school stories approaches the genius of Wodehouse's finest work, The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938. But it is plain that Waugh was talking through his hat. They are full of early promise, or what you might call Joy in the Morning.

macbeth witches

The witches set the tone for the entire play as dark and supernatural. This also somewhat removes the culpability from Macbeth's hands, while tying the supernatural evil to the other main woman in the play, Lady Macbeth.

They advance the play by informing Macbeth that he is destined to be King. If he had not been told this, he could not have told his wife, and she could not have taken it as a sign to kill Duncan.

However, the witches acted without permission from Hecate, the witch queen, and as punishment must act again later in the play to sabotage the king they have made.

It is noteworthy that many modern Macbeth productions actually remove the three witches altogether, preferring to leave at least some of the responsibility at Macbeth's feet, as well as remove the supernatural aspect which they feel conflicts with the rest of the play's more visceral themes.
In the beginning of Macbeth, the reader is welcomed by the three witches. These witches foreshadow what is to come later on in the play. They ask: “When shall we three meet again?/ In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” (Shakespeare Ii 1-2). As a response the witches say, “That will be ere the set of sun” (Shakespeare Ii 5).

During Shakespeare’s time, the king is related to the sun, and the sunset is symbolizes the kings death or removal from power (Rackin 108). This foretells Duncan’s murder and his overthrow in the story. Later in this act, the witches speak with Macbeth and tell him his three prophesies. The first witch tells him he is Thane of Glamis; however, the second witch continues to say he will be the Thane of Cawdor. The third witch proceeds to tell Macbeth, “That shalt be king hereafter!” (Shakespeare Iiii 53).

The witches serve a number of purposes. In general, Shakespeare is setting up a good vs. evil type of scenario. He wants us to recognize this is a different type of world where the powers of evil definately have some control. But it is also important to recognize in some of the foreshadowing, that man always has the ultimate choice; evil has no power unless it is allowed to. Beyond that, the original scene also adds to the tone and mood of the play. You get a feeling from the very beginning of the dark nature of the play.

walk by ....

A Walk by Moonlight
Written by: hurr.i.cane.87
A WALK BY MOONLIGHT
BY H. L. V. DEROZIO
Poetry is the awakening of our conscience. In ‘A Walk by Moonlight’ Derozio illustrates how, on a casual walk, he is “allied to all the bliss, which other worlds we’re told afford”. The walk and observation makes him question life and introspect as well.
The poem starts with pleasant memories of the previous night. Derozio feels blessed with a gift. In the future, when his mind is in turmoil and anxiety, he can ponder and contemplate upon this moment and find a “happy spot” in his memories to rest. He says that there are some memories in our past which we keep looking to, “soft hours” which are far away and “vague” but they never “burn out” and disappear. And when some of these memories were thrown across his path the previous night his heart was so uplifted, he thought “it could have flown”.
Derozio had been to meet a friend and saw other friends there too. All were people who thought in the same manner; they shared a common bond.
“Like minds to like mind ever tend—
An universal law”.
When he asked them for a walk, three at once joined him. They were his cherished friends — two were people with intellectual minds and in age were his equals, the other was young but “endeared” by all.
The beauty of the night transforms their thinking and revives their hearts, which had become numb and feelingless. The poet is deeply touched by small movements of nature and uses them metaphorically to bring out the joy and enlightenment that he receives.
The moon looked powerful and majestic in the sky, and benignly looked down upon the earth. The clouds “divided” and broke apart “in homage to her worth” by not trying to obscure her. The leaves swayed slightly due to the breeze but Derozio feels that they are actually dancing and “rejoicing” for the “influence of the moon”. The moon in turn seems to throw light on the leaves and make them silver robes. For the one hour, when the moon is on its zenith, the leaves look “mystic” and magical.
The winds too seem to be singing and “hymning” in praise of the strength of the moon. The winds take on the role of minstrels, whose songs provoke Derozio’s soul. He feels that there is something magical in the night that “bind” them together in its spell and enchants them with its beauty. They are moved to such a great extent that they not only saw but also “felt the moonlight” around them.
Amidst such a splendid scenario, the poet turns philosophical and becomes sensitive to the objects of nature. He first speaks of the “mysterious” relationship between man and nature, which though “vague”, “bind us to our earth”. The natural world fills our hearts with their “tones of holly mirth” and divine joy.
Derozio then talks of the “lovely” old memories which help us in getting a better insight of ourselves. Due to this awareness we are able to connect with our spiritual selves. And when this happens, man stands “proud”; this is the uniqueness of man — to be touched and be enriched by nature.
To understand the universe, we must first understand ourselves. In times we are living, our senses have become numb. We have lost the opportunity to be stirred by beauty, but Derozio feels immense joy and pleasure as his senses are awakened at once. All his memories clear up and he is enthused by the beauty of Nature. All Nature is God’s creation and He saw sadness in man. It is only when man is able to release his soul will he survive and as Derozio glimpses the celestial hand of Nature, he too becomes divine.
Now enlightened, Derozio realizes that our bodies are mortal. He finds out that,
“This earthliness goes by,
And we behold the spiritualness
Of all that cannot die”.
The earth and all its beauty is given to us as a gift. When we understand this, we understand our spirituality and we are better human beings.
This self-realization is sudden and rare. It is then that we recognize the voices that this “night-wind sings”. The rustling of the trees, the winds, leaves...everything—it is then that we apprehend that the “mystic melody” of Nature carries a message. These voices make the forest look like a musical instrument. We too begin speaking the “silken language of the stars”. Only then do we realize that it is sympathy that “pales the young moon’s cheek”.
Our inner eye opens up and we can see the real possibilities that are within us. These glorious things may appear to others on the “sleeper’s couch” but we no more see them as dreams. They are not unreachable rainbows.
It is said that such “bliss” is received only in “other worlds” (death). Derozio thanks God and Nature for receiving this illumination in this life itself. His heart fills with happiness and is “bettered” when he feels that he is a part of Nature and Nature is a part of him. They are “gently bound”.
However lifeless and separated the flowers the stars and the sky seem, which ordinary minds may not understand, they too have their objectives. Nature has the purpose to “stir our sympathy” and move our hearts. Derozio concludes by saying that he cannot even stamp the grass as he walks.
“The grass has then a voice
Its heart — I hear it beat.”

A Walk By Moonlight By H.l.v.derozio
Poetry is the awakening of our conscience. In ‘A Walk by Moonlight’ Derozio illustrates how, on a casual walk, he is “allied to all the bliss, which other worlds we’re told afford”. The walk and observation makes him question life and introspect as well.

The poem starts with pleasant memories of the previous night. Derozio feels blessed with a gift. In the future, when his mind is in turmoil and anxiety, he can ponder and contemplate upon this moment and find a “happy spot” in his memories to rest. He says that there are some memories in our past which we keep looking to, “soft hours” which are far away and “vague” but they never “burn out” and disappear. And when some of these memories were thrown across his path the previous night his heart was so uplifted, he thought “it could have flown”.

Derozio had been to meet a friend and saw other friends there too. All were people who thought in the same manner; they shared a common bond.

Wodehouse, P(elham) G(renville) 1881–
Popular English humorist, now living in America.

For many years up to 1940 there had been one living writer (in addition to several crime novelists) whose fiction pleased all classes. P. G. Wodehouse's humorous stories brought him a fortune and, from Oxford, an honorary doctorate; and though he lost favour with a large part of his public during the Second World War his post-war books were found hard to cold-shoulder, and his popularity, and the favour of the critics, had been recovered by 1960.

Although Wodehouse's stories are by no means lacking in literary merit, they belong to the low comedy tradition and their author is akin to a music-hall 'comic'. His kind is rare and no one has yet replaced him as a provider of fun. While it might be possible to concoct a thesis on the social content of Wodehouse's stories, any inclination towards satire is subordinated to the claims of happy nonsense.

A. C. Ward, in his Twentieth-Century English Literature 1901–1960, Methuen-University Paperbacks, 1964, p. 83.

In his way, [P. G.] Wodehouse is as daemonic a writer as Balzac or Dickens; at the behest of his daemon, he has devoted himself … to "the great cause of cheering us all up." (p. 7)

Wodehouse has only a few critics. Edmund Wilson once said that Dickens did not get the critical attention that he deserved in his own age because his very popularity caused him to be regarded not as a writer, but as an institution. Something of the same thing can probably be said of Wodehouse. (p. 8)

During a remarkably long and successful career, P. G. Wodehouse has spent a large part of his time making caricatures, hilarious but not unkind, of British institutions and national types. In the works of Wodehouse the London clubs and the stately homes of England, the publishing houses and the law courts, the universities and the Old Vic are populated by an outlandish lot whom he suitably describes as "eggs," "beans," "crumpets," "clothheads," "blisters," "pots of poison," and the like. One gets a hint of their absurdities and imbecilities in a recital of some of their names: Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Sir Roderick Glossop, Oofy Prosser, Pongo Twistleton. (p. 19)

In the last sixty years, Wodehouse has written so much comedy that thousands of readers must think of him as a comic writer only…. But Wodehouse was torn two ways for a long while. As late as 1940 Wodehouse's hero may be a romantic of the first water; it is only in the last twenty-five years that the Berties and the Pongos, the Bingos and the Tuppys have dominated Wodehouse's world. (p. 102)

Wodehouse is at his best as a writer of farce, by which I do not mean mere slapstick, though there is plenty of that in Wodehouse. If there is a vast deal of violence, there is no serious injury. Punches are thrown, but not so many as are threatened, and, generally speaking, the weapons used are the kind that make the most commotion and do the least harm…. Wodehouse's adaptation of certain devices of melodrama is of equal importance. The mechanics of melodrama—the sudden entrances and exits, disguises, secrets, discoveries, contretemps, coincidences—translate, in fact, very easily into farce. (pp. 119-20)

As a comic writer in the twentieth century, Wodehouse is remarkable for his innocence and purity. A recurrent figure in the novels is the old gentleman, respected, dignified, even eminent, who once was a black sheep, the principal in scandals unmentionable even in the family circle and fatal if published. The oats that such old men sowed were apparently of the wildest strain, the deeds that they did the most dark and sinister. And what did they actually do? They got drunk, made fools of themselves, and were thrown out of pubs, music halls, and other places of entertainment…. Wodehouse is sexually pure to the point of Victorianism. There is nothing in any of the novels to bring (as a character in one of them might say) the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty. (pp. 137-38)

Though Wodehouse's heroes are in their twenties and some of his character actors are in their sixties, they have a common state of mind which is that of the schoolboy. The splendors and miseries of school life fix the flavors and shapes of those of adult life. (p. 140)

In spite of Wodehouse's sound education and his wide reading, Wodehouse's world is, for several reasons, anti-intellectual. First, there is a long tradition behind him. Right in the middle of the Age of Reason, Lord Chesterfield said that English gentlemen should thank God that they had something better than their brains to depend upon. Second, Wodehouse is aware that many intellectuals regard him as a literary nobody, and that many have not even bothered to look into one of his books…. But more significant is the fact that for Wodehouse the intellectual view is equated with tragedy, pessimism, and negation. (pp. 142-43)

For all of his joking about American crudity, Wodehouse has always liked Americans. When other young Englishmen wanted to go to the Left Bank of Paris or to the Orient, he wanted to go to the United States, because to him it was the country of romance. In one of the novels, Wodehouse makes America not only more romantic than Europe, but also morally superior. (p. 151)

Wodehouse belongs spiritually to the world of Victoria and Edward VII, but he works in a tradition that goes back through more than three hundred years of English literature. Tracing the tradition, Lionel Stevenson points out that the themes and characters in Wodehouse have antecedents in English drama as early as Ben Jonson…. Wodehouse differs from his predecessors chiefly in that he is all amiability, whereas they have at least a strain of bitterness, viciousness, or cruelty. In consequence, he has effected a reformation of the gallant and the rake. With Psmith he removes most of the inhumanity from the type, and with Bertie he removes virtually all of it. In Wodehouse the hoax is still basic, but it is the kind of hoax in which no one is actually hurt, and the epigrams are witty, but not cynical. Young men consume cocktails by the trayful, but alcohol provokes them to nothing more dissolute than barley water would. If some of the young women are tough babies, there is no Millamant in Wodehouse, much less a Hoyden. (pp. 153-57)

If Wodehouse is a minor novelist, he has been an important influence on comic novelists of the twentieth century, some of whom are major figures beyond any question. Evelyn Waugh, for example, created a fictional world which, although differing vastly from Wodehouse's, still owes a great deal to it…. However different their attitudes and purposes, younger writers like Kingsley Amis and John Wain owe much to the techniques of farce which Wodehouse developed and with which he has operated for so many years. Indeed, Wodehouse has influenced English comic novelists who have just published their first or second book, and one such writer may well have the last word. Discussing his own work in a recent interview, Auberon Waugh said that he supposed he made jokes like those of his father and P. G. Wodehouse. Then he remarked that all English comic writers are so much influenced by Wodehouse that they must constantly try not to write Wodehouse's kind of comedy, in order that they may write their own. (pp. 180-82)

P. G. Wodehouse 1881–-1975
(Born Pelham Grenville Wodehouse) English-born American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, lyricist, screenwriter, playwright, and journalist.

INTRODUCTION
Wodehouse is widely recognized as one of the foremost humorists and prose stylists of the twentieth century. His elaborate, farcical stories and novels are set most often in an upper-class, pseudo-Edwardian world of clubmen and country estates and present the comic adventures of characters drawn from the stock-types of English and American musical comedy. In particular, his most beloved characters, Bertie Wooster and his resourceful valet, Jeeves, have been ranked with the outstanding comic duos in literature. Wodehouse's accomplishments have earned nearly universal admiration from critics, including such writers as George Orwell, Dorothy Parker, Hilaire Belloc, and Sinclair Lewis.

Biographical Information
Born in Guildford, Surrey on October 15, 1881, Wodehouse spent two years of his early childhood in Hong Kong, where his father served as a magistrate. He was then sent back to England with his two older brothers to pursue his education. Short, infrequent visits by his parents, coupled with all he suffered under the strictures of various temporary guardians and eccentric schoolmistresses, shaped Wodehouse's increasingly introverted and bookish nature, and he found an outlet for his energies and interests in sports and creative writing. In 1900 he began training in London for a career in banking. During the next two years, he published some eighty items in various boys' magazines. By 1902 he had become a full-time writer, having already begun serializing his first novel, The Pothunters, in Public School Magazine and contributing to an anonymous humor column in the London Globe. In 1904 Wodehouse traveled to the United States and began his career as a musical-comedy lyricist, which he conducted while continuing to produce fiction.

By 1914 Wodehouse had married and settled in New York where he began selling stories and serialized novels to major American magazines. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he published an astonishing number of stories and novels, while finding time to write musical-comedy lyrics and plays and to work as a Hollywood screenwriter, becoming a very wealthy man in the process. While in England in 1939, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Oxford University. The following year the Wodehouses were in Le Touquet, France, where they had taken a villa, when that nation was overrun by the advancing German army, and they were placed under arrest. Under German occupation, all the male residents of Touquet, Wodehouse included, were collected and transported to a series of internment camps. After eleven months, because of his age (he was almost sixty) and pressure applied for his release by readers in the then-neutral United States, Wodehouse was taken to Berlin, where he was joined by his wife. There they were assigned a hotel suite and, though kept under close observation by their captors, lived fairly comfortably. Soon afterward, several representatives from America convinced Wodehouse to deliver a series of radio broadcasts to the United States, to assure his audience there of his well-being and tell of his recent camp experiences. A series of five radio talks were taped, approved by government censors, and broadcast to the United States. Wodehouse's light-hearted but highly revealing portrait of life as an internee, subjected to his German captors' stupidity and inefficiency, was welcomed in America. Yet the talks were also heard in war-torn Britain, a nation undergoing daily privations and holding out under nightly bombing raids by the Nazi air force. In his native country Wodehouse was viewed as a traitor, for there the law deemed it a treasonous act for a British subject to broadcast over enemy facilities for any reason during wartime. Yet he was ably defended in print by a number of prominent people—notably, by George Orwell.

Wodehouse was eventually cleared by British intelligence authorities at the war's end. After his release by Allied investigators, he and his wife moved back to the United States, and he became a citizen in 1955. Wodehouse continued to write prodigiously, publishing an average of a novel every year for the rest of his life, not counting numerous short stories and autobiographical works. In America Wodehouse's popularity soared to its high prewar level, with British enthusiasm rising to match it by the 1960s. In recognition of the author's achievement, the Queen named him Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in January of 1975. Six weeks later, while in the hospital for treatment of a minor skin rash and while working on a novel (published posthumously in 1977 as Sunset at Blandings), Wodehouse died at age ninety-three.

Major Works
Wodehouse was a prolific writer who composed song lyrics, novels, and short fiction. While he is renowned for his high level of skill in all these genres, many critics consider him to be at his finest in his short stories; these concern the improbable activities of roughly seven major characters or groupings of characters. One of these is Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, a lazy, get-quick-rich artist. A few steps up the social scale stands another major Wodehouse character, Mr. Mulliner. A fisherman given to stretching the truth to a greater extent than most, he occupies the bar-parlor of the Angler's Rest, where he regales awed listeners with preposterous tales of derring-do performed by his innumerable relatives. Another sportsman, a retired golfer known as the Oldest Member, narrates Wodehouse's acclaimed golf stories. Of roughly the same age as the elderly Oldest Member is one of the Wodehouse's most beloved characters, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, the dithering lord of Blandings Castle. A man who wants only to be left in peace to potter about, tend his garden, and care for his prize-winning pig, Lord Emsworth is beset on all sides by domineering sisters, an overly efficient personal secretary, a volatile gardener, and a vapid son known to the world as a dog-biscuit tycoon. Another peer, Frederick Cornwallis Twistleton, Earl of Ickenham (better known as Uncle Fred), appears in several novels and in a story.

Wodehouse's best-known collection of characters comprise the Drone Club, a group of unmarried, upper-class young idlers who may be found typically at the racetrack, sponging loans off each other, spending rainy afternoons at the Club tossing playing cards into a top hat, or falling in love, always with comic results. Most the stories that feature members of the Drones are collected in the 1936 volume of short stories, Young Men in Spats. To many critics, one of the Drones stands above all the others as Wodehouse's greatest creation: Bertie Wooster. He narrates stories of the trials of his life in a hilariously slangy fashion, revealing, despite protestations to the contrary, his utter dependence upon his patient “gentleman's personal gentlemen,” Jeeves, to extricate him time and again from his troubles. Bertie and Jeeves have been compared with the most famous character-duos in literary history.

Critical Reception
The devices used by Wodehouse in his fiction have been explored and catalogued by several critics, notably linguist Robert A. Hall, Jr. in his The Comic Style of P. G. Wodehouse. Hall has identified and documented such workings as inventive word formations, transferred epithets, and comic misunderstandings among characters arising from lexicographic or syntactic confusion, among many others. Yet most critics and readers alike agree that critiquing Wodehouse's humor is, as Punch put it, like taking a spade to a soufflé. The majority of commentators have been content simply to applaud his accomplishment. A few commentators have posited the existence of satiric intent in Wodehouse's work while others have suggested the polar opposite: that he was simply an adoring chronicler of an outmoded and cruel class system. A few reviewers have found his comedy not at all humorous. Yet most critics and readers agree with Auberon Waugh, that Wodehouse created “a world of gentleness and simplicity where everything solemn or threatening is seen, in the last analysis, to be hopelessly funny.”

ALEXANDER COCKBURN
[The question of tone] is troubling for anyone writing about Wodehouse. High seriousness about him brings to mind poor Professor Scully. This professor's attempt, in 1902, to describe a smile scientifically was quoted by Richard Usborne in his fine book Wodehouse at Work. Scully doggedly dissected "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth, the curving of the naso-labial furrows …"

Wodehouse is peculiarly resistant to what we might term the naso-labial approach, which is possibly why critics have always had such a hard time with him. It is, of course, the work of a moment to knock together something about the master-servant relationship as displayed by Wooster and Jeeves, and the relevance of same to British social history. Such an approach is not actively harmful, but it suffers from naso-labialism—leaving the mystery of Wodehouse's genius intact.

Wodehouse wrote The Code of the Woosters just before the Second World War. He was living in Le Touquet and, at the age of sixty, was at the height of his powers. In the same period he wrote Uncle Fred in the Springtime and shortly thereafter … Joy in the Morning, regarded by many as preeminent in the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. (p. v)

The first thing [new arrivals in Wodehouse country] will want to discuss are the characters of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. The duo is as momentous in literary history as the other great tandems—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Of the two, Wooster is by far the more interesting. He is a character. Jeeves, to the end of his days, remains a type—the deus ex machina who saves the day when all seems lost, the great artificer who ties up the loose ends and who rescues Bertie from the consequences of his repeated follies. People have written about Jeeves the valet as a mother-surrogate for Bertie and, though a touch naso-labial, the imputation has some accuracy. Bertie never mentions his mother (or indeed his father) and reserves all his passions for his aunts: the terrible Aunt Agatha [and the jovial Aunt Dahlia]…. Bertie has no sex life and so indubitably Jeeves, in the mother role, is his closest confidant. But a mere foil to the Wooster magic is what he remains, a counterpoint for linguistic jokes.

"Very well, then," says Bertie to Jeeves, "you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?" "Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir." Wodehouse never tired of variations of this low/high joke about language where Jeeves' somewhat sanctimonious precision of speech is followed by the loose idiomatic torrent of Wooster's blather.

There's another fine example of Jeeves' reserve played off against Bertie's copious flow in the great scene in The Code of the Woosters in which both characters are trapped in Stiffy Byng's bedroom by the dog Bartholomew. It's unusual to find Jeeves in an undignified posture, but this is exactly the state the dog Bartholomew has reduced him to, perched on top of the cupboard. Bertie is crouched on the chest of drawers [outlining a risky escape plan to an unsympathetic Jeeves.] (pp. vi-vii)

The joke is in the folly of his rescue plan, and beyond that in the understated but clear designation of the relationship. Wooster is the master, Jeeves the servant. But Jeeves will not take orders inimical to his safety and Bertie would not dream of clinching a proposal with a command. The relationship is always nuanced, so much so that when Bertie, in another story, hears Jeeves describe him to a substitute valet as "mentally negligible" we feel an equivalent stab of distress at such plain speaking. Bertie knows he is mentally negligible and is ready to leave all serious thinking to Jeeves. But Jeeves' savage frankness on the subject of Bertie's mental equipment is altogether too blunt—a breach of etiquette.

But there is a mystery to Jeeves—the evident incongruity of this adroit and learned schemer working for an ass like Bertie. It's as though one suddenly found Bosola or another of those Jacobean adventurers dressed up as a butler and handing round cucumber sandwiches. Jeeves is a little like Iago, in benign retirement from villainy, redeeming himself with good-natured and stoic penance.

At all events he found the right master. Wooster is the greatest of all the Wodehouse characters—and the one in which Wodehouse achieved his most complex technical triumphs. Bertie, after all, is not only the narrator but also the central character. The reader laughs at Wooster as he thrashes around in the toils of circumstance, but he also laughs with Wooster because it is Wooster who is reporting on the aforementioned toils and how exactly he got enmeshed in them.

Above all it is Bertie who weaves the idiom of the stories; everything is cast in that unique language, a stew of half-remembered quotations, slang, repetitions, formulaic expressions. It is Bertie who dreams up the great similes and bleats out the dense word play. (pp. vii-viii)

Character … language … but also action. It's all very well to talk about Wodehouse's unfailing invention, but mere invocation of it is insufficient. Wodehouse was, after all, dealing with the most perilous of forms—farce. The slightest lapse in vigilance and not even Bertie's linguistic virtuosity could keep the reader's eyes on the page. (p. ix)

[As Wodehouse once] remarked, "In a Jeeves story every line has to have entertainment value," and the final, seemingly effortless concoction was produced with the toil and concentration that such a remark indicates. The Code of the Woosters is an excellent example of the structural complexity Wodehouse strove for.

Across the main plot line of Aunt Dahlia's lust for the cow-creamer come dashing the subplots: Gussie's problems with Madeleine Bassett; Stiffy Byng's hopes for marriage with Stinker the curate. There are the mechanisms that connect these threads in the narrative: the missing notebook, the cow-creamer itself, the monstrous Sir Watkyn's designs on Anatole, Aunt Dahlia's sublime chef. Study the conclusions of each chapter. Almost always the final line switches the plot, plunging the reader forward into some new portion of the labyrinth. Wodehouse never let his readers relax for a moment. Like Homer, he knew that relaxation meant inattention, sleep, or disconsolate grumblings that bards are not what they used to be in the old days.

Each Wooster-Jeeves novel has certain specific felicities. In The Code of the Woosters a prime point of attraction is indubitably the character of Sir Roderick Spode and his eventual neutralization through the agency of Jeeves. Spode was evidently modeled on Sir Oswald Mosley, 1930s leader of the British Union of Fascists. (pp. ix-x)

[The tongue-lashing Spode receives] may not be the fiercest piece of anti-Fascist prose ever composed, but for Wooster it was saeva indignatio at its most potent. We should remember Bertie's limitations and respect him all the more for his stand.

Other traditional characters in the Wooster-Jeeves saga are well displayed: Gussie Fink-Nottle, the lover of newts and seeker of the hand of Madeline Bassett:

"I broke the tank. The tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my newts in. I broke the glass tank in my bedroom, and the bath was the only place to lodge the newts. The basin wasn't large enough. Newts need elbow room. So I put them in the bath. Because I had broken the tank. The glass tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my—"

This is Gussie, reporting the newt mishap to Bertie. It's a high moment for the Wodehouse style; an epiphany, if you must, to be compared with King Lear's reflections on his own considerable reverses of fortune.

And there is Madeline Bassett, prime example of the soupy girl with whom Bertie was always trying to avoid a marriage enforced by circumstance. (p. xi)

[If the scene in which she likens the totally uncomprehending Bertie to Rudel] won't cause curvature of your naso-labials, nothing will. Wodehouse is not for you.

Wodehouse's status? It's been vouched for by every major English writer of the twentieth century with a spark of insight or talent. He stands as father of the style of Evelyn Waugh, too acute ever to get lost in the prejudices that marred the latter's delicacy of touch towards the end of his career. Wodehouse took a language forged out of second-rate fiction and narrative techniques from stage farce and created a world as timeless and as true as that of Homer or of Shakespeare. And despite his own self-deprecation, Wodehouse had his ambitions. Joy in the Morning, to be read immediately after The Code of the Woosters, deliberately invites comparison with Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Wodehouse popped in enough allusions and quotations to bend the reader toward such parallel. And he survives it. The Wooster-Jeeves cycle is the central achievement of English fiction in the twentieth century; an achievement impossible to imitate, because—as E. M. Forster remarked of the poet Cavafy—the cycle stands at a slight angle to the universe, unreachable by almost anything but laughter itself. (p. xii)

Alexander Cockburn, "Introduction" (copyright © 1975 by Random House, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the publisher), in The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse, Vintage Books, 1975, pp. v-xii.

"Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum"
Bertie Wooster awakens one spring morning in high spirits, and announces to Jeeves, his valet:
"In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnish'd dove."
"So I have been informed, sir."
He thereupon departs for the park, where he encounters Bingo Little, a friend from his school days, adorned with a hideous deep-red satin tie decorated with horseshoes.
"My God, man!" I gargled. "The cravat! The gent's neckwear! Why? For what reason?"
Bingo replies embarrasedly that he was given it. The pair stroll along and sit on chairs by the water, where Bingo enquires whether Bertie likes the name Mabel. He does not, and says so, but realizes immediately that Bingo has fallen in love, as he does perpetually, and most often in the springtime. Bingo suggests that Bertie meet Mabel for lunch "near the Ritz".
They end up in a tea-and-bun shop about fifty yards east of the Ritz Hotel, where Bertie wonders why Bingo, who is moderately wealthy, would have chosen such an eatery. Presently a waitress arrives, and Bingo bewilders Bertie by preparing to order without waiting for Mabel to arrive; but, upon seeing Bingo's lovestruck gaze, Bertie realizes that the waitress is Mabel. Bingo introduces her to Bertie, and points out to her that he is wearing the tie she had given him. She replies that it suits him nicely, at which Bertie is surprised:
Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex.
Bingo orders cocoa, cold veal and ham pie, a slice of fruitcake, and a macaroon; Bertie, having known Bingo "in happier days" to prefer sole frit au gourmet aux champignons, disgustedly orders rolls and butter. After Mabel leaves, Bingo reveals that he met her at a Subscription dance in Camberwell, at which he also saw Jeeves "swinging a dashed efficient shoe". After the food arrives, Bingo asks Bertie's advice on how to present the matter of his marrying a waitress to his wealthy and upper-class uncle, on whom he is financially dependent. When Bertie offers no help, Bingo proposes to ask Jeeves, which Bertie does after dinner.
Jeeves is acquainted with Mr. Mortimer Little, Bingo's uncle, who lives in Pounceby Gardens, because he has "an understanding" with Mr. Little's cook, a Miss Watson. Little, a gourmet, relies heavily on Miss Watson's services. Jeeves suggests that Bingo offer to read to his uncle, who is bedridden due to an attack of gout. He has an aunt who owns an almost-complete set of novels by Rosie M. Banks, in which "marriage with young persons of an inferior social status is held up as both feasible and admirable.
Here concludes "Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum"; the story continues into "No Wedding Bells for Bingo".
[edit] "No Wedding Bells for Bingo"
Bingo reports to Bertie three days later that the scheme appears to be working, as he has finished reading All for Love, A Red, Red Summer Rose, Madcap Myrtle, Only a Factory Girl, and half of The Courtship of Lord Strathmorick. Bingo reveals that he has a final idea which he is sure will clinch the matter, but will not reveal what it is.
The following week, Bingo returns, bringing the news that his uncle's gout has subsided, and that he wishes very much to dine with Bertie. Bertie, though baffled since Mr. Little has never heard of him, agrees to spring the news of his nephew's marriage and to request that Mr. Little double his allowance.
The next day, he arrives at No. 16 Pounceby Gardens, where the exceedingly corpulent Mr. Little expresses his delight and honour at meeting someone who has accomplished so much at such a young age. The maid informs Bertie, ever the more puzzled, that there is a phone call for him; it is Bingo, who tells him that has told his uncle that Rosie M. Banks is Bertie's pen name.
He returns to lunch with Mr. Little, who praises "his" work, while Bertie replies awkwardly, and realizes that Jeeves's scheme has worked exactly as intended. When Little quotes a passage from Only a Factory Girl – "Be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest lady on earth!" – and assures Bertie of his complete belief in it, Bertie tells him of his nephew's intention to marry a waitress, for which Mr. Little honours him. However, he refuses to raise his nephew's allowance, claiming that he will need the money in married life, and announces his engagement to Miss Watson, his cook.
Bertie returns home and reports to Jeeves the heavy news – that his fiancée has become engaged to Mr. Little. Jeeves is unsurprised: he had anticipated the event, and in fact has another "understanding" with another young lady whom he met at a Subscription dance in Camberwell - by coincidence, the same young lady whom Bingo loves. The story concludes as Jeeves places Bertie's cigarettes on a table and bids him good night.
Characters

Bertie Wooster — Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers.
Jeeves — Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks
Bingo Little — Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks.
Mabel — Waitress in a tea shop
Mortimer Little — Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment — "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet.
Jane Watson — Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long



Affairs of the heart run smoother for Jeeves's ministrations.

Bertie's friend Bingo falls in love with every other woman he meets, from Mabel, the waitress at the bun shop, to the Amazonian Honoria Glossop (whom Aunt Agatha has ear-marked for Bertie). Naturally there are obstacles to be overcome - the matter of allowances, class prejudices and a lack of revolutionary tendencies. Rely on Jeeves's superb brain-power to emancipate Bertie and Bingo from the tightest of corners.

In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse
George Orwell
When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." He was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the neighbourhood frequently "dropping in for a bath or a party."

Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a "non-political" nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the Saturday Evening Post an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.

The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's experiences in internment, but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:

"I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings."

"A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side."

"In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure. ... The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week."

The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase "whether Britain wins the war or not," and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment but to remark that "the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win." The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill treated and bore no malice.

These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremely violent Postscript by "Cassandra" of the Daily Mirror, accusing Wodehouse of "selling his country." This postscript made free use of such expressions as "Quisling" and "worshipping the Fмhrer." The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do German propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.

"Cassandra's" Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse's books from circulation. Here is a typical news item:

"Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the Daily Mirror columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra's broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer." (Daily Mirror.)

In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the air and was still doing so a couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there were demands in Parliament that Wodehouse should be put on trial as a traitor.

There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that Wodehouse's talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several letters to the press claimed that "Fascist tendencies" could be detected in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase "whether England wins or not" did get through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this action had any special significance. Flannery comments:

"By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human angle. ... Plack (Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his experiences; there would be no censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making that proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the English in all his stories and that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still living in the period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."

The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be merely Flannery's own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a much less definite kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse's main idea in making them was to keep in touch with his public and -- the comedian's ruling passion -- to get a laugh. Obviously they are not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or John Amery, nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be unwise to broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse (though in one broadcast he refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He had contemplated naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even used, to Flannery, the phrase, "We're not at war with Germany."

I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse's works. It names round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by admitting that there are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the total -- which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its peculiar mental atmosphere -- an atmosphere which has not, of course, remained completely unchanged, but shows little alteration since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery's book which I quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike any attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that Wodehouse "was still living in the period about which he wrote," and the other that the Nazi Propaganda Ministry made use of him because he "made fun of the English." The second statement is based on a misconception to which I will return presently. But Flannery's other comment is quite true and contains in it part of the clue to Wodehouse's behaviour.

A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse's novels is how long ago the better-known of them were written. We think of him as in some sense typifying the silliness of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and characters by which he is best remembered had all made their appearance before 1925. ... When one looks through the list of Wodehouse's books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three fairly well-marked periods. The first is the school-story period. ... The next is the American period. Wodehouse seems to have lived in the United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a while showed signs of becoming Americanised in idiom and outlook. ... The third period might fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social status of his characters moved upwards accordingly ... The typical setting is now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an expensive golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades out, cricket and football giving way to golf, and the element of farce and burlesque becomes more marked. ... Mike Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not a very startling metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is his lack of development. ... How much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can see from the fact that he continued to write stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years before his internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.

...

In Something Fresh Wodehouse had discovered the comic possibilities of the English aristocracy, and a succession of ridiculous but, save in a very few instances, not actually contemptible barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This had the rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded, outside England, as a penetrating satirist of English society. Hence Flannery's statement that Wodehouse "made fun of the English," which is the impression he would probably make on a German or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that Wodehouse had gone over to the enemy, which from his own point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find that he regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be very difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of the way in which books, especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience. For it is clear enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either. On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work. 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. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so much. Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code -- a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and Bertie Wooster's helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious: their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing everyone as "Comrade."

But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. ... A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his internment. His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naЇve, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. ... His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines. ... In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether "the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war," not realising that they were ghosts already. "He was still living in the period about which he wrote," says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.

If my analysis of Wodehouse's mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He may have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging to British interests. 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. But how could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse's complete lack -- so far as one can judge from his printed works -- of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of "Fascist tendencies" in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In The Heart of a Goof (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word "Fascism" or "Nazism." In left-wing circles, indeed in "enlightened" circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained an¦sthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia -- the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and "not our business." One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of "Fascism" as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.

The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be "reduced to degradation and poverty." By the middle of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.

But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.

There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant -- the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly -- and presumably they expected to do so -- the Americans might never intervene. The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was -- or so the Germans calculated -- popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.

But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and "Cassandra's" articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse -- as "Cassandra" vigorously pointed out in his broadcast -- was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches £350,000 a year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a fortune -- usually a very temporary fortune -- like the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to "expose" a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

The extract is taken from "The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose. A Conducted Tour by Frank Muir". Oxford, 1990
P.G. Wodehouse had countless legions of readers including Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, a committed Wodehouse reader for many years (legend has it that when asked once whether there was something which she should really like to have instead of the usual formal presentation gift, the Queen Mother replied, "May I have the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse?" An excellent idea by any standards: complete sets are extremely rare).

Other distinguished self-confessed devotees included a former Prime Minister, the Rt. Herbert Asquith; the poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman; Hilaire Belloc (in the middle 1930s he broadcast a rather embarrassingly fulsome tribute to the modest Wodehouse with such phrases as "the best writer of our time - the best living writer of English - the head of my profession"); Arnold Bennett; Rudyard Kipling; the novelist and playwright Ian Hay; four generations of Waughs including Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon ("Wodehouse has been more read than any other English novelist by his fellow novelists"); Malcolm Muggeridge; Kingsley Amis; Bermard Levin (In "The Times" he likened the impact of the line "in my heliotrope pyjamas with the old gold stripe" to one of the great speeches of Macbeth); and so on.

Perhaps even more remarkable example of the diversity of Wodehouse's appeal occurs towards the end of Evelyn Waugh's biography of the eminent Catholic theologian and translator of the Bible, Father Ronald Knox, when Waugh noted: "For the remaining years of his life, Ronnie Knox applied himself to devotional reading and the works of P.G.Wodehouse."

But Wodehouse's stories were not meant to be either caviare to the general or incense to the priest but beans-on-toast to the troops, a bit of pleasure and fun for amusement only. He was a completely professional writer whoose only intent was to make as many people as possible laugh. In this he was phenomenally successful.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, known as "Plum", had his first piece of prose published during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1900, while he was still a schoolboy at Dulwich College. When he died in 1975, aged 93, still working (he had written almost every day of his life through five reigns), he had published ninety-six books and hundreds of short stories. His books and stories have been translated into fifteen languages and most of them are still in print in paperback. His total sales run into many tens of millions, and there are Wodehouse appreciation societies and clubs in various spots around the world - Denmark's Wodehouse Society meets in Copenhagen in the "Drones Club" and in Amsterdam there is a bar for Wodehousians called "Mr Mulliner's Wijn Lokaal".

Wodehouse also either wrote or collaborated in sixteen stage-plays, supplied all or part of the lyrics for 28 musical comedies, and for eighteen of these he worked on the libretto. For a time he contributed regularly to "Punch", wrote humorous verse for many magazines, and worked on six major film scripts in Hollywood.

The Times, 4 May 2000
The funniest writer ever to put words on paper
Lynne Truss

His most famous creations: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie appear as Jeeves
and Wooster in the television adaptation of Wodehouse's work

There was a time, not so long ago, when you had to look hard for P.G. Wodehouse in the bookshops. Heading for the end of the alphabet, you would locate the big reliable section on Woolf, scan back a bit, and when you found yourself knocking up against Winterson, you knew they didn't have any.

But times have changed. The first four volumes of a handsome collectable hardback edition of Wodehouse's novels and stories has just been launched by Everyman, to join the already established new Penguin paperback. And given the phenomenal number of titles in the oeuvre (Everyman intends an 80-volume uniform edition; Penguin has already reached its 60th), he already stretches for yards. Everyman is also launching an annual prize for the best comic writing of the year, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize, to be given each year at The Sunday Times Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature at the end of May. This years' judges are Jo Brand, Craig Brown and Stephen Fry.

Whether Wodehouse deserves the attention is not in doubt. As far as comic writing is concerned, he is the real tabasco. "Sublime comic genius," says Ben Elton on one of Penguin's covers. "The funniest writer ever to put words on paper," wrote Hugh Laurie. Kathy Lette joined in, and Arabella Weir. Clearly, if there were a collective noun for accolades, it would be a Plum.

And what are they all raving about? Well, this sort of thing: "The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin"; or, "'His name's not Lemuel?'

'I fear so, sir.'

'Couldn't use his second name?'

'His second name is Gengulphus.'

'Golly, Jeeves,' I said, thinking of Uncle Tom Portarlington, 'there's some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, is there not?'"

Wodehouse is rarely parodied; anyone who tries to write like him looks idiotic. So does he have a legacy? Ben Elton will have searched Luck of the Bodkins in vain for knob gags. Did Stiffy Byng's bum look big in anything? I don't think so.

No, what strikes with awe all other toilers in this field are the various aspects of the chap's craft. He never chooses a heavy word where a light one will do. His good humour is without limit. And above all, when you are least expecting it, G.K. Chesterton falls on to a sheet of tin.

Kate Jones, his Penguin editor, says his legacy is that he simply set the standard for comic writing. In the way he combined American slang with perfect English, he invented a vocabulary which is permanently fresh. Wodehouse absorbed the buzz of Broadway; and if he didn't invent it, he perfected the sort of retort-based comedy that has its descendants in shows like Frasier.

There is just one aspect of Wodehouse's legacy that troubles all comic writers, and probably worries his publishers, too. Wodehouse is so breezy and good-natured towards his public that the reader may feel uncompelled to pick him up somehow, except for an annual treat. One could add, if one dared, that Wodehouse trivialised comic writing; made it the inconsiderable froth on life's doo-dah; though hastily adding that this perception applies only among the ignorant.

The results of this perception, however, for comic fiction writers today, are dire. If you fancy being sneered at by people less intelligent than yourself, become a comic novelist. "People don't want to laugh," Howard Jacobson told me last week, when we jointly bemoaned the low status of comic writing. "They want to cry." And then there is the towering presence of Wodehouse himself to contend with. When comic writing of such a high order waits on the shelf making light chitchat with the abutting giants of literature, what hope is there for the rest of us?

So it's in everyone's interest that the Wodehouses come off those shelves as quickly as they go on. Reading one Wodehouse a year makes bad mathematical sense, in any case. Start the 80 volumes at the age of 28, and - well, you see where this is leading. But it has always been the way, unfortunately. And when Wodehouse confessed in his lighthearted essay My Gentle Readers that all his fan-letters came from invalids and chaps in jail, I doubt the grievance was ungrounded in fact. "Dear Sir," a typical missive would begin. "I have never read anything of yours before, as I have always enjoyed robust health from a boy."

"You see the dilemma this places me in?" wrote Wodehouse. "If you want to see a mind in a ferment of doubt and indecision, take a look at mine when the papers announce that another epidemic has broken out and hundreds are collapsing daily." Yes, it's a rotten fate, being a kind of notational Lucozade. Something must be done. Comic fiction must at last be read by people unweakened by disease or captivity. And one thing is for sure. You certainly can't argue any more that the books aren't in the shops.

The Times 27 October 2001
A fictional alliance that always landed the chump in a pickle
Tim Reid
P.G. Wodehouse would have heartily approved of the cross-Atlantic union: he married his wife, Ethel, in 1914, and the two were still going strong when the author died in 1975. Bertie Wooster was rather less keen on tying the knot.

Despite 19 engagements and many near misses Wodehouse's most eligible bachelor never married, thanks mainly to the genius of his redoubtable valet Jeeves. He extricated his master from many scrapes and took a very dim view of the prospect of a woman taking over Sir's affairs.

Bertie was basically allergic to marriage, but on one occasion at least was genuinely keen, when he popped the question to Pauline Stoker, an American. But poor Bertie was thwarted. Her father was warned by Sir Roderick Glossop that Bertie was "loony", and that was that.

Three other proposals were voluntary: to Cynthia Wickhammersley and Vanessa Cook (both rejected), and Aline Hemmingway, although that occurred in a magazine version of a story. Fifteen engagements were imposed on him, often owing to Bertie’s aim to play the preux chevalier. Sometimes asked to marry, he could never say no, landing himself in the most terrible pickle.

He was affianced to Madeline Bassett (four times), Stiffy Byng, Vanessa Cook (the same girl who rejected him previously), Florence Craye (four times, and she had many fiances: there was talk of setting up a club called the Old Florentians), Honoria Glossop (twice), Pauline Stoker (this time at her father's insistence, she having being found in Bertie's pyjamas and Bertie's bed. Bertie was of course as shocked as anyone to find her there), Trixie Waterbury and Bobbie Wickham.

Observing married friends was another reason why Bertie fought shy of the aisle. In Very Good Jeeves, he asks his manservant: "Are wives very often like that? Welcoming criticism of the lord and master, I mean?" "They are generally open to suggestions from the outside public with regard to the improvement of their husbands, sir." Bertie says: "That is why married men are wan, what?" Wodehouse recognised, however, that sometimes avoiding marriage was impossible.

In Ring for Jeeves, Jill Wyvern insists to her father that she is not going to marry Lord Rowcester. Wodehouse writes: "It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he set himself to jog her memory.

"Yes, you are," he reminded her. "It was in The Times."

The early genius of Wodehouse
Richard Lambert
For 70 years and more, critics have been outbidding each other in praise of P.G. Wodehouse. Hilaire Belloc called him "the best living writer of English". Evelyn Waugh described him as "a master". But conventional wisdom is that his early school stories were nothing special.

As Waugh famously wrote: "It is impossible to discern in them any promise of what was to come. Then in Chapter XXX1 of Mike...Psmith appears and the light is kindled which has burnt with growing brilliance for half a century."

But Waugh got it wrong. The reality is that the muse's wings are fluttering away almost from page one of the first school story, which appeared in book form exactly 100 years ago.

"On September 9, 1902, having to choose between The Globe and the bank, I chucked the latter and started out on my wild lone as a freelance. This month starts my journalistic career."

With с50 savings in his pocket and this note in his diary, Wodehouse not quite 21 -began his life as a full-time author. His first piece had been published in The Public School Magazine while he was still at school, and in his two dreary years as a clerk in the City at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, another 80 articles had appeared in a wide range of publications.

But September 1902 was the turning point in his life. A temporary berth on a London newspaper gave him the confidence to quit the bank. And his employers, who must already have come to the conclusion that this gangly youth was not cut out to be a prince of their banking empire in the East, were happy to see him go.

On September 17 his first article appeared in Punch, then unchallenged as the nation's premier humorous magazine. And the following day A&C Black published his first novel, a ripping schoolboy yarn called The Pothunters. For the next 72 years, he was to be perhaps the most prolific and certainly the funniest writer in English literature.

Right from the start, the gifts of a natural storyteller are obvious. In The White Feather, for instance, you know that the hopeless Sheen is bound to win the lightweight medal at the public school boxing championships, but you long to know just how. And it is not simply that the plot lines are somehow familiar: the mysterious disappearance of silverware, odd noises in the shrubbery, escape routes being blocked by unseen hands.

More than this, many of the half dozen school stories published before Psmith's debut show the style, the unexpected images, the perfect similes, the throwaway lines that make Wodehouse what he is.

The cat Captain Kettle, the Tabby Terror of St. Austin's, made his appearance a full six years before Psmith:

'He (Captain Kettle) had been left alone that evening in the drawing room, while the House was at church, and his eye, roaming restlessly about in search of evil to perform, had lighted upon a cage. In that cage was a special sort of canary, in its own line as accomplished an artiste as Captain Kettle himself. It sang with taste and feeling, and made itself generally agreeable in a number of little ways. But to Captain Kettle, it was merely a bird. One of the poets sings of an acquaintance of his who was so constituted that "a primrose by the river's brim a simple primrose was to him, and it was nothing more". Just so with Captain Kettle. He was not the cat to make nice distinctions between birds. Like the cat in another poem, he only knew that they made him light and salutary meals. So, with the exercise of considerable ingenuity, he extracted that canary from its cage and ate it. He was now in disgrace.' (Tales of St Austin's, 1903)

There are the first hints of powerful aunts:

'He was tall and dark and thin, and had a pensive eye, which encouraged the more soulful of his female relatives to entertain hopes that he would some day take orders.' (The Gold Bat, 1904)

We meet Miss Florence Beezley of Girton College, a direct forerunner of Honoria Glossop and all those other bluestockings who were to give Bertie Wooster such hell in years to come:

'She was intensely learned herself, and seemed to take a morbid delight in dissecting his ignorance, and showing everybody the pieces. Also, she persisted in calling him Mr MacArthur in a way that somehow seemed to point out and emphasise his youthfulness. She added it to her remarks as a sort of after-thought or echo.

"Do you read Browning, Mr MacArthur?" she would say suddenly, having apparently waited carefully until she saw that his mouth was full.

The Babe would swallow convulsively, choke, blush, and finally say - "No, not much."

"Ah!" This in a tone of pity not untinged with scorn.

"When you say 'not much', Mr MacArthur, what exactly do you mean? Have you read any of his poems?"' (Tales of St Austin's, 1903)

There's the masterful use of the cliche:

'Kill my father and burn my ancestral home, and I will look on and smile. But touch these notes and you rouse the British Lion.' (The Pothunters, 1902)

Youthful similes:

'The Head paced the room, something after the fashion of the tiger at the Zoo, whose clock strikes lunch.' (The Pothunters, 1902)

And early attempts at what was to become one of Wodehouse's classiest tricks: the bathetic use of Shakespeare. This pre-Psmith example concerns a form master whose entire class has gone on strike:

'He reminds me of MacDuff. Macbeth, Act IV, somewhere near the end. "What, all my pretty chickens, at one fell swoop?" That's what Shields is saying to himself.' (Mike, 1909)

The Bible is plundered too:

'There would have been serious trouble between David and Jonathan if either had persisted in dropping catches off the other's bowling.' (Mike, 1909)

There are butlers:

'The first thing he noticed on reaching the School House was the strange demeanour of the butler. Whenever Fenn had had occasion to call on the headmaster hitherto, Watson had admitted him with the air of a high priest leading a devotee to a shrine of which he was the sole managing director. This evening he seemed restless, excited ...

'With an eager, springy step, distantly reminiscent of a shopwalker heading a procession of customers, with a touch of the style of the winner in a walking race to Brighton, the once slow- moving butler led the way to the headmaster's study.' (The Head of Kay's, 1905)

And absurd images: 'By murdering in cold blood a large and respected family, and afterwards depositing their bodies in a reservoir, one may gain, we are told, much unpopularity in the neighbourhood of one's crime; while robbing a church will get one cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But, to be really an outcast, to feel that one has no friend in the world, one must break an important public-school commitment.' (The White Feather, 1907)

Only Wodehouse could have come up with this perfect opening paragraph:

'The one o'clock down express was just on the point of starting. The engine driver, with his hand on the lever, whiled away the moments, like the watchman in the Agamemnon, by whistling. The guard endeavoured to talk to three people at once. Porters flitted to and fro, cleaving a path for themselves with trucks of luggage. The Usual Old Lady was asking if she was right for some place nobody had ever heard of.' (Tales of St Austin's, 1903)

One noteworthy feature of The Pothunters is the dedication, to Joan, Effie, and Ernestine Bowes-Lyon. They were granddaughters of the 12th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and first cousins of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Wodehouse was a friend of the family, which tells you something about his social life in these early days. Although he was already writing in every spare minute, he was not the bashful, almost antisocial, figure of his later years. His writing paper carried his name across the top in bold red type, together with long lists of his published work.

One hundred years later, Wodehouse is still the author with the greatest number of titles in print with Penguin, apart from Roald Dahl: 48 individual titles, plus seven omnibuses. And there is still brisk demand for the classics. The 1999 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves has so far sold more than 12,000 copies, compared with 115,000 for the edition sold from 1953 to 1999.

Of course none of the early school stories approaches the genius of Wodehouse's finest work, The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938. But it is plain that Waugh was talking through his hat. They are full of early promise, or what you might call Joy in the Morning.