Fading Memories

P.G. Wodehouse's writing career spans the greater part of the twentieth century (and a few years of the nineteenth, but those are only of interest to the real afficionados, like me, who also like books about English boy's boarding schools). Like the twentieth century, his career can thus be divided in pre-WW-I, interbellum and post-WW-II. His first phase, acted out before he went to the United States to get rich with the serialisation of Piccadilly Jim (if I remember correctly) and with the production of books and lyrics for many well-received musicals, was one where he produced more serious stuff. Stories and novels that were sometimes not even very funny, just moving, like The man with two left feet, or Psmith Journalist, which is very funny, but which is also a strongly-worded j'accuse addressed at the corrupt elite of pre-WW-I New York. The interbellum is his golden period: wonderful books, wonderful language, wonderful humour — a beaker overflowing with happiness. After the second world war, his work began to show signs of becoming over-formulaic, and, despite his protestations that he would always write of Edwardian England, he allowed the deplorable spirit of the fifties to enter the world he depicted in his books. (Where he didn't his books became so detached from the world, that they might as well have been filled with helium instead of ink.) French Leave is a post-WW-II book. But a very refreshing one.

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By all accounts, Dennis Wheatley was a very unpleasant man. Mysogynist, tippler, wastrel, spiritist, racist, national-socialist, jingoist. But a very famous writer, very popular in his native England until the seventies. Which telles us something about that country in its years of decline.

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Everyman is rumoured -- I have never seen any physical evidence -- of being in the process of republishing the entire Wodehouse canon in hardcover editions (minus Performing Flea, the musicals and the articles, I fear), but before those excellent people started on their ambitious project, Penguin was the publisher to go to if you wanted to get a new Wodehouse to complete your collection of second-hand Herbert Jenkins First Editions. Penguin, in their wisdom, have published Wodehouse in three formats -- viz., and in chronological order from hoary to contemporary, orange-spined with Ionicus covers, orange-spined with Chris Riddell covers and, in a smaller format, variecoloured with David Hitch covers. Both Ionicus and Chris can be relied upon to produce a nice sketch if called upon. David cannot draw. Worse, far worse, was the decision to set the text with a ragged right edge. Unjustified and unjustifiable. You see, Wodehouse mixes a lot of dialogue with his exposition. And one of the visual clues a reader uses to recognize dialogue is that the right margin is rather more ragged than the right margin of the more narrative sections. Ragging every paragraph means that it is deuced hard to distinguish between dialogue and narrative. And that is what made me reluctant to read and finish my copy of Pigs Have Wings.

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Still catching up on the reading from before the holidays... I had bought this book to take to Greece, but both Irina and I had finished it before we departed. Wee Free Men is the second (if you don't count _Eric_) children's novel Terry Pratchett has set in the Discworld. It tells the tale of how young Tiffany Aching becomes a witch, the successor of ther grandmother in the fight against the queen of elfland, with a little advice from a more experienced witch and the very useful help of a clan of small, blue persons.

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In one of his forewords in the Penguin edition of his works (the editions with the Ionicus or Riddel covers have them &mdash makes those editions the most desirable ones), Wodehouse remarks on that saga habit of his. You write one book with an interesting set of characters, you find yourself writing another of them — saves yourself a bit of work &mdash and then the public wants a third. And suddenly you are an author who, when he writes a book outside any series, is introduced with 'author of the JEEVES series' on the cover. Company for Henry, a clear post-WW-II book, is not in any series. And I think that's something of a pity, because there are people in there that I've grown very fond of over the span of several re-readings. I am thinking especially of Aunt Kelly.

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The web is full of reviews of this book; indeed the world seems to be filled to its edges with copies of this hefty tome. No doubt if you were to stack them, they would reach to the moon and back. Not that I suppose it can be done, but still. And the astonishing thing is that the book's popularity is not the result of careful marketing, product-placement, audience-targeting, hype-spinning or media-doctoring. The Harry Potter phenomenon is a grass-roots phenomenon, to use the old-fashioned term. People read part one, and told their friends to do likewise. And then they hungered for part two, thirsted for part three and were nearly famished and dehydrated waiting for part four. And now we're five.

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