Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Wild Card Classic. I’ve only read a couple of Wodehouse’s novels, when I taught English in Saudi Arabia and needed all the chuckles, chortles, and snickers I could get. I seem to remember concluding that a little Wodehouse goes a long way. Flash forward 35 years to a recent used book sale where I got the book reviewed below. I figure if a wild card is a person or thing whose qualities are uncertain, then a non-fiction book by a writer who is most famous for fiction must be a wild card.

America, I Like You – P.G. Wodehouse

Widely hailed as the finest comic writer of the twentieth century, Wodehouse looks back at his own life with the keen sense of humor that defined his famous writings about Blandings Castle and the Jeeves-Wooster ménage. After the chapters originally appeared as pieces in the humor magazine Punch, they were collected and published in 1956 under the title above and reprinted as Over Seventy in 2015.

Wodehouse ties the chapters together with a slender thread – he is responding to preliminary questions from a potential interviewer.  In mock-autobiographical fashion, he recounts his beginnings as a writer in the early 1900s and his visits to the United States when such visits were rare for young journalists. But he goes off on various funny tangents full of absurdities and various ridiculous observations.

I laughed out loud throughout reading this book and when I wasn’t laughing I was somehow with a smile on my face, wondering what mad simile or metaphor he was going to pull out of his hat next. Wodehouse has an effortless ability to uncork punch lines. Such incredible timing, such simple vocabulary arrayed in perfect sentences. Wodehouse had a uncommon feeling for language, able to take everyday words, hyperbole, inversion. garbled quotations, etc. and build amazing phrases and sentences. Wodehouse must have read widely in English literature and especially Shakespeare, since his parodies are brilliant. 

Sure, the sense that the writing feels formulaic will creep up awares so just don’t read much in one sitting lest the formula pale. I read only a chapter a day for about three weeks. I had a great time, even if the mood sometimes did not last long, overtaken by the chance intake of news like “As we merrily doff our masks, in what is surely an undercount because our leaders and their minions have lost the ability to count anymore, as many as 1500 souls passed away yesterday from omicron, when at least 1,000 people have been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months.” 

In days like these we need all the chuckles, chortles, and snickers we can get from writers like Wodehouse. If I see any Wodehouse novels at used book sales, I’ll snap them up, cautioning myself that wolfing down too many “musical comedies without music” will feel like eating one too many homemade chocolate chip cookies.