Stay Classy, Pt. 3

Last entry on my musings about class, I promise.  I wanted to add that being an American placed me on the periphery of the entire struggle.  Part of it was that I was from an alien culture, so all bets of having common experiences went out the window.  It was for the best that I was in an educational setting, as they tend to be more liberal in the mixing of the classes.  People are more free to try things out; for instance, a young man whose family owned most of Devon became very keen on woodworking while up at uni. 

It did help that I come from New England and that I did not take to yelling at people across the street.  People were more assured that I was not some wild yahoo from New York or California.  My accent was also less harsh and became more Anglicized the longer I was there.  Added to that, I attended a conservative women’s college, so there were rumblings of pedigree in my background.  Of course, if one scratched behind the surface, one would find out immediately that I am the daughter of an immigrant mother and working-class father.  I tended to confuse a lot of people who bothered to ask anything more about me than what I was studying.

Do we have classes on this side of the pond?  Of course we do.  I maintain that it is only natural, although I think that given the complex nature of the American population, and the sheer size of the country, there are more categories.  Certainly, there is old money and new money, but even within those groups are regional divides that even our internet age has not surmounted.  How was the money earned?  Real estate, hedge funds, Farmville?  East coast money or West coast?  The US’s population is about ten times as large as the UK’s and, I think, because of that we have more options for social groups.  One thing that is the same in both countries is that the rich are increasing their wealth and the rest of us, well, it’s a bit bleak.

Stay Classy, Pt. 2

An English friend of mine once defined the British class system to me early on during my extended stay in England.  She said that one needed to possess two out of the following three qualities: beauty, brains, and breeding.  An American will quickly notice that money does not feature.  Certainly, money can help, but it is not a defining factor.  The top example of this is the former Catherine Middleton.  Her family had the money to buy her the best education they could.  These schools exposed her to the right element, and she was able to learn about the upper classes by moving among them and used her natural intelligence to assimilate.  In fact, I think that at this stage of her marriage, she is unquestionably more savvy than her late mother-in-law.  She also has the right type of beauty, not too aggressive.  I don’t think anyone would argue that Kate Moss ought to worry about being supplanted.  She has the look that fits in with the class that she wanted to join. 


The one thing that Cathy Cambridge did not have was breeding.  As the daughter of an airline pilot and a flight attendant, she was teased mercilessly in the tabloid press.  Even some of Will’s own coterie thought her background was a detriment.  However, she persevered, and is now married to the second in line to the British throne.  For comparison’s sake, one can look at the daughter of the head of Formula One, Petra Ecclestone.  She certainly has money; she recently bought Candi Spelling’s mansion (the one with the fabled rooms devoted to gift-wrapping) and has an equally sumptuous pad in London.  Despite her wealth, and the impeccable grooming that her money gives her, she is not a member of the upper class.  She is simply too gauche, too showy, which might be why she has a residence on this side of the pond, as she will fit right in. 

I think that the class system is probably driven by the all too human need to feel connected to one’s compatriots.  During a trip to Normandy that was organized by my supervisor, I got a chance to see this play out.  On one of the interminable coach rides from a mysterious Romanesque church located in the middle of nowhere to the Bayeux Tapestry, I overheard a conservation.  It was between one young man from my college who was extremely well-connected.  He was talking with a young woman from another college, and I could hear them dancing around one another.  What caught my attention was that this was not one of those pre-shag chats, the stakes were much higher, although the urgency was somewhat diminished.  They were talking about the schools they had attended, the people they knew in common, and places around London that they had frequented.  The entire thing had the same feel as two dogs sniffing one another.  It struck me then that the class system, instead of merely being an elitist conspiracy, also had a practical element.  For the most part, people simply get on better with those from similar backgrounds.  This revelation is not a radical thing, but perhaps makes the class system less mysterious.

Stay Classy, pt. 1

Perhaps the one element of Wodehouse’s work that makes it feel unreal is that a majority of the stories involve the British (mostly English) upper classes.  Few readers, whether contemporaries to the publication dates or modern, are a part of that very small gentrified class.  The concept of not having to work because one’s life is supported by an enormous trust or family inheritance is alien to a greater part of the world.  Yet, it is something that I would argue that everyone has dreamed about at least once in their life, if not on a daily basis, especially, oh say, the day that the mortgage is due. 

By giving his main characters freedom from work, it opens up their time to other pursuits.  Even if they have no formal occupation, there is always the family land to maintain, or, in the case of one Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, the need to cut a dash about town and appease his tribe of aunts.  Not having formal occupations allows for some of the action of the most screwball plots, because who has time to plot the purloining of a silver cow-shaped creamer if your nine to five is spent pushing papers?

Of course, reflecting the concerns of the late twenties and early thirties (and our own times), a good many plots are involved with members of the upper classes losing their money and being forced into reduced circumstances, dreaming of retaining their faded glory.  This is a central plot point in Sam the Sudden, where our heroine becomes impoverished following the death of her parents.  In the end, she meets a man who is fabulously wealthy and all is right once more.  The feeling is that the upper classes ought to stay there, in a fixed orbit.  This holds true even for the gentry who have been improvised by the inheritance taxes that were introduced in the early part of the twentieth century.  While they might be forced to lease their grand estates, the notion that they ought to seek gainful employment simply does not occur to them.  They sit there, in moldering houses with closed wings, and the impression given is that this is what they should be doing.

This is not to say that the Wodehouse’s upper classes are sealed off from the rest of the country.  Part of the spark behind the action is the interplay between the working, or criminal, classes and the toffs.  One need only look at the dependence of Wooster on Jeeves to know that Wodehouse did not think that one’s birth automatically made one a superior human being.  Jeeves is most certainly from working-class origins, yet his brain is truly first-rate.  The class system well and truly exists in Wodehouse, but he most certainly does not worship it. 

More on the class system in part two.

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.