He was friends with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote the foreward to a collection of his works. The Times (of London) reported earlier this year that folk in India love the British author and that he "is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him." Last month, Roger Kimball at the Wall Street Journal listed one of his novels as the best comic novel of all time. Acknowledged broadly as a fine stylist, Modern Drunkard Magazine earlier lavished praise on him and called him "arguably the 20th Century's finest writer of English prose." A prolific writer, he has spawned at least one literary society.
It's P.G. Wodehouse.
Given the endorsements Wodehouse has been racking up in my literary vault the past year or so, I decided to read him. I thought I would make him my summer companion, but then ran across a 3-in-1 collection of his Jeeves books while in Mississippi. I bought it, started it, and have scarcely put it down.
It's hard to describe the satisfaction of reading him and, indeed, I have speculated that I am wasting my time with the simple little stories about a butler and his vapid but likeable master. But I think I can identify three reasons for reading these stories: (1) I enjoy them, (2) Wodehouse is a master writer, and if just a little bit of his skill rubs off on me, that's jolly good, (3) Wodehouse is urbane and sophisticated but in a good (non-snobbish) way, and (again) if some of that rubs off, I'm edified.
I've ordered a handful of other Wodehouse books, which I plan to read this summer during beach and random moments that don't accommodate books like An Ong Reader. I hope to post excerpts here occasionally, but I fear much of the stuff doesn't lend itself to excerpting. We'll see.
