Why Wodehouse?

Why Wodehouse?  It is not a bad question. Not quite a great one, but not bad though perhaps predictably inevitable.  Sometimes, I can see it lurking behind the eyes of some people when I tell them what I am doing.  Though a large part of the feeling can perhaps be attributed to my paranoia, it does linger in the air.  Occasionally, I can feel them almost ask why, and then they pull back, as though they are afraid that the answer will disturb them even more than the thought of me reading a twentieth century British humorist rather than something improving.

But it is improving, especially now.  I find myself in the odd position of being five months into motherhood and seven months into a divorce (yes, the math is correct; I had an unusually dramatic third trimester).  Extreme joy and despair have been my bedfellows throughout, and, frankly, it can be exhausting and tedious being me.  I am able to be a much better mother, daughter, colleague, etc. if I am able to check out every once in a while and roam along some idyllic English summertime that never existed.  Serious books would only have me empathize with the trauma and I would probably have to be scraped off the floor of the commuter rail every morning, wracked with woe.  

Additionally, there is a literary importance to humor that I think is under recognized.  I recently read The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.  The introduction by Terry Teachout makes an interesting observation that the British are better with the legacies of their comic authors.  He cites a Constant Lambert quotation that “seriousness is not the same as solemnity.”  There is almost a reverence that Wodehouse has when it comes to his stories.  Certainly, all of his plots have their Ludicrous turns; it is expected, he knows it and I, the reader, know it.  Although I know that everything will turn out all right in the end, I hang on, wanting to see what he does with language, the twists he will make getting from A to B.  It is the journey that is important, something that I keep reminding myself on a daily basis.

Besides, who else would I read with the same output?  Dickens?  Dear God no, talk about misery.  I would probably be in the nearest loony bin if I had to read about people stuck in the poorhouse or the death of some darling little child.  Agatha Christie?  Now, that one is interesting, but I read a lot of her when I was a teenager, and I wanted to come mostly new to an author.  Shakespeare?  Same as Dame Agatha, although I am meaning to read the plays that I have not gotten around to yet.  So here I am with Wodehouse, who adds a much-needed dash of light into my sometimes dark days.

The beginning, or, one third of the way there.

It was my addiction to cooking blogs that brought me to where I am now, one third of my way through the oeuvre of P.G. Wodehouse.  I follow three cooking blogs religiously, nine on a more casual basis, and a few more even less regularly.  The latter group is primarily made of what I call “completion blogs,” i.e. people working their way through one cookbook.  The grand doyenne of these blogs is, of course, Julie Powell, who cooked her way through Julia Child’s first book of French recipes (oddly, though, I never read her blog).  I did slog through one woman’s journey through the Gourmet Cookbook, though I had to part company when she embarked on some molecular gastronomy tome, primarily because I think that is more theatre than food.

The other culprit was the good old New Year’s resolution.  I have tried my fair share of them, from “be more positive” to “lower your expectations,” but somehow, they all felt a little empty.  After all, how can one measure being more positive?  Deeper smile lines on the face?  At the bottom of it all, I am a goal-driven person, and I began to realize that I needed to find a resolution that would a) be measurable in some context and b) be something I would enjoy so that it would indeed be accomplished.  Also, I’m half-Slavic, which means that I have pessimism coursing through my veins, so that one about being more positive was doomed to fail.

My answer came from a conversation I had with my Uncle Joe.  Joe is an amazing person.  He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of sixties music, and his insights into the Beatles are unparalleled in the Western hemisphere.  Additionally, he is also a major fan of P.G. Wodehouse and owns all of his books.  We were talking about what we were reading (a frequent conversational theme at Chez Emily) and he told me that he spent his summers reading P.G. Wodehouse, as he felt that the weather was conducive to the novels’ unique brand of frivolity.  A light bulb went off in my head.  I envisioned a marriage of a completion project and Wodehouse.  Here, at last, was a measurable project that would satisfy my goal-driven soul. 

This lead to me New Year’s resolution for 2009: read one P.G. Wodehouse book a month until I read all of them.  An addendum to that list was to collect the Overlook Press’s reissue of the books, mostly on aesthetic grounds.  You see, I knew that in the near future I would renovate my living room and my vision included having a line of the books on the shelves, looking important and uniform and adding color with their beautifully-designed jackets.  I blame the late, lamented magazine Domino for giving me the idea.  Normally, I laugh at the concept of having books merely for their decorative quality, but at least here I was getting pretty books and good reads all at the same time. 

So here I am, 33 books in.  I have dallied on the grounds of Blandings Castle, had drinks at the Drones Club, and heard the Oldest Member tell countless tales.  Now I want to share that journey with anyone who wants to join, or, at the very least, have a personal account of this goal, because, if there is anything I like more than achieving a goal, it is documenting it.