Josh Frost has a terrific cartoon version of the first half of an early Bertie & Jeeves story here. For more Frost, check out the Adventures of Nathaniel Bright, here. If you want to know more about P.G. Wodehouse, the creator of B&J, go here.
Like many writers, I’m a P.G. Wodehouse addict, though a limited one. I read, and reread, all the stories involving Bertie Wooster and Jeeves until they imprinted on my brain. But as for the rest of the master’s mighty œuvre, well, no. I’d read the best, so I skipped the rest.
Virtually all the writers of the pre-war (pre-World War II) era, from T. S. Eliot to George Orwell, loudly announced their devotion to Wodehouse’s “musical comedies without the music.” His intricate, rhyming plots, musical themselves in their intertwining perfection, each piece guided into its proper place by the commanding mind of Jeeves, are a joy forever, or at least until you’ve read them all twenty times.
Despite all this high-brow praise, and despite Wodehouse’s preferred stamping grounds of manor houses, vicarages, and the like, P.G. wrote for the masses. He was one of the most popular authors of his day, publishing in the famously, and infinitely, low-brow Saturday Evening Post, once the most popular magazine in America, but now remembered, if at all, for its Norman Rockwell covers, paintings that, a thousand years from now, will be regarded as the definition and essence of kitsch.
Wodehouse had a painful blot on his record—when the Nazis conquered France, Wodehouse was captured and interred. Fatuously, he agreed to make broadcasts to England, telling the folks at home that life in a Nazi prison camp, well, really not so bad! This was thoroughly unattractive behavior on P.G.’s part, and he didn’t really deserve the defense given him here, by George Orwell. On the plus side, Orwell, who grew up reading Wodehouse, gives a nice overview of “Plum’s” career.
Afterwords
I wrote this post back in 2008. Unfortunately, Frost’s take on Bertie and Jeeves seems to have vanished from the web. The version of Orwell’s essay “In Defense of P G Wodehouse” that I originally linked to turns out to be a “condensed” version, and such things should never be read. I could only find one unabridged version of the essay, which unfortunately was put up in the early days of the web and has some strange fonts. But it’s the whole thing, and that’s what counts.
