Nothing is Simple in Wodehouse

“You would probably find that only Shakespeare has inspired an equal amount of critical annotation and scholarship to his equally extensive collected works. It would be difficult to assess which of Shakespeare and Wodehouse wrote the greater number of words in his lifetime – but it would come as no surprise if it turned out to be PGW.” (Nigel Rees in the foreword to Nothing is Simple in Wodehouse, by Tony Ring)

Readers of long-standing may recall the late Sir David Tang and I had a ding-dong or vigorous debate in the pages of The Financial Times about where the cocktails were mixed in Berkeley Mansions, W1. He thought at an Art Deco cocktail cabinet, I thought in the kitchen. In the Fry and Laurie TV series they were made in the Wooster sitting room; in the books they were always made in the kitchen. This sort of thing is grist to Tony Ring’s mill.

Some of his entries are pure laugh-out-loud. Edwin Craye appears first in 1912 in an obscure American magazine as an adult but four years later, in Jeeves Takes Charge, reappears as a bungling Boy Scout, Lord Worplesdon’s son. The list of Edwin’s “good deeds” appended to Tony’s scholarly entry will remind you of some of PGW’s finest novels. So many people have written so much about Wodehouse that I hesitate to distill his genius into a few words but I will try. Many authors write with style or write great plots – Plum does both. His best novels are stylish farces written by an author who taught himself to construct complex plots and unfold them hilariously.

So what can Tony Ring add to what you know? Well I’m glad I didn’t tangle with Tony over Bertie’s monocle. I can just remember Ian Carmichael as Bertie with Dennis Price as Jeeves in The World of Wooster on the BBC in the 1960s. For comic effect he, Carmichael/Wooster, wore a monocle. Tony unearths what’s going on in the Wooster monocle department in the novels. Bertie only wears a monocle once, in a short story, The Spot of Art, in Very Good Jeeves, and Ring concludes that he didn’t usually wear one. PGW got in a monocle muddle, as Tony points out, in Galahad at Blandings and A Pelican at Blandings. In the former The Hon Galahad Threepwood wears one in his right eye, in the latter his left.

Nigel Rees concludes his foreword thus: “Tony Ring makes clear, the only simple thing about Wodehouse is the undoubted pleasure he brings”.

If you would like to buy Tony’s book go to the website of The PG Wodehouse Society (UK).