Last Saturday I read this letter in The Times, after a nudge from its author:
Appropriately it is lying on my 1940 edition of Weekend Wodehouse with an introduction by Hilaire Belloc.
He praises Plum, calling him “the head of my profession” and goes on to dissect, fillet and lay bare the literary devices used by PGW such as his use of parallelism, simplicity, exactitude and construction. Like me you probably just enjoy reading the books. We may come back to Hilaire but something in an Amazon wrapper has just kerr-clunked through the brass letter box (that needs a clean) onto the hall floor.
A Plum Assignment, Discourses on PG Wodehouse and His World, by Curtis Armstrong and Elliott Milstein, no less, and with a Foreword by eminent Wodehousian and Editor of Wooster Sauce, Elin Woodger Murphy. (Spell Check has supernatural properties; it changes Woodger to Wooster.)
Armstrong and Milstein do not compete with Black and Scholes who puzzled out how options are priced only to discover, much later, that they were wrong. They knew instinctively to avoid putting food in tins; Crosse and Blackwell had beaten them to it by about 250 years. They may admire Simon and Garfunkel but they stuck to a loftier ideal – a lifelong friendship formed by a mutual enjoyment of reading PG Wodehouse. The pleasure they take in Plum’s writing is conveyed so artfully in these discourses that it seems artless. They do not beat the reader around the head with literary analysis, a la Hilaire. They are a class act and I hope to be able to tell them so at The PG Wodehouse Society dinner in London in October.
Meanwhile, back in the dark days of 1940, Hilaire asks “will Mr Wodehouse’s work endure”? He answers his own question:
If in, say, 50 years Jeeves and any other of that great company – but in particular Jeeves – shall have faded, then what we have so long called England will no longer be.
Hilaire can rest easy; 78 years later it is hard to imagine Wodehouse’s spell over his readers being broken, his popularity waning or his work not cropping up on the Letters page of The Times. Today’s music is dedicated to the immortal Empress of Blandings.