At the end of Tales from St. Austin’s
there are four essays by Wodehouse written on various topics. Reading them felt like trying to keep pace
with an overactive puppy. I have fallen
into the lull of well-constructed Wodehouse plots. It was a jolt trying to grapple with the
Wodehouseian essay format. Although I
have never head him speak in a pre-recorded interview, I can imagine that the
thought process would be remarkably similar.
Massive leaps were made, leaving me wondering if he was talking in
another language. Not helping was the fact
that one of the essays consisted of him waxing lyrical about the glories of
cricket. I have a tenuous grasp at best
on the rules governing that game, but the musings of this fanatic made me wish
that I had paid more attention to those kind souls who tried to impress upon me
the evils of an LBW
I think it was the second essay (it
might have been the first, but my mind is still a little blurry after grappling
with googlies) that made me pause for a moment.
That essay basically rips apart the notion of footnotes and academic
musings. The thesis gave me pause. I am, at heart, an unrepentant nerd. In popular culture, my forbearers are more
Frasier Crane and Cliff Craven than the bumbling Bertie whose only claim to
academic fame was winning a prize in school for his Biblical knowledge. I write this blog in my spare time, I adore
adding footnotes wherever possible,[1] and
I do read non-fiction in my spare time.
In short, I have the feeling that Sir Pelham would look askance at my
existence, despite the fact that he is one of my favorite authors, so surely
there must be something redeemable about me.
Now I could become all meta about
this conflict (although I can hear a weak chorus of “too late” in the
background) and prosaically wring my hands about the very nature of this
blog. What’s the point? It is not as if the ghost of P.G. Wodehouse
is going to confront me as I write (which would be interesting, considering I
write on the train ride to work) and forbid me from carrying on. One of my favorite quotations is “Proceed
until apprehended,” which was given to the world, among other things, by the
inimitable Florence Nightingale. Proceed
I shall, until either I finish all of Wodehouse or I am compelled by his spirit
to stop (who knows, it is, after all, October, that month when wraiths walk the
earth, or perhaps those people proclaiming gloom and doom are merely
politicians running for office. So
difficult to tell these days.).
[1] Something that I wanted to write about but did
not quite merit its own blog entry was the fact that in these essays, I ran
across the word “slacker.” I am a child
of the 90’s, when this phrase was popularized especially by the movie of the
same title, so was shocked to find it being bandied about by Wodehouse. There was nothing for it but to take out my
magnifying glass and consult my compact Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, I was informed that slacker came
into the English language as a way to describe a wastrel in 1898, and that its
use became more popular during WW I.
There is a great book about Wodehouse by Kristin Thompson called “Wooster
Proposes, Jeeves Disposes” (I have probably mentioned this before), which looks
into any number of facets about the author’s oeuvre. One of the things she asserts is that
Wodehouse adored using slang. Since
Tales from St. Austin was published in, this is yet another instance of him
being on top of verbal fashions. I would
love to have heard a conversation between him and Richard Linklater.
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