Thursday, August 11, 2005
Wodehouse
I suppose I've read Cocktail Time four or five times, now. When I was active on the Wodehouse newsgroup, I used the "nom de Plum" of Howard Saxby (many participants use the names of Wodehouse characters), the literary agent in this novel. I can't count how much of his other material I've read. In fact, I was (for about a year) his literary agent (although he was dead at the time).
While there is endless pleasure in reading Wodehouse, he doesn't get much attention in the academy. I have to admit that there isn't a lot of depth in most of his characters; not Uncle Fred (the Earl of Ickenham and central figure in the work at hand) nor Bertie Wooster nor any of the residents of Blandings Castle ever change much. Once we know them -- and we can know them pretty well in the first chapter or two in which they appear -- we know them forever. The plots are not based on serious human problems; Cocktail Time is based on the author of a best-selling trashy novel needing to keep his identity secret so he can still run as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, with Ickenham's godson's need for five hundred pounds, to buy off his old nanny so she will get married and leave his employ so he can marry his fiancee without her having to be bullied by the nanny, as a major subplot. These are not exactly universal themes.
Nor are they meant to be. But they limit how much there is to be said in the classroom about the motives of the characters and how this relates to our own lives and all that other stuff that
we teachers rely on to keep us going for a full period. Pleasure is just not sufficient for academic attention. (This doesn't mean that academics don't read Wodehouse. I was arriving on campus once and was accosted by the head of the writing program, who complimented me on my hat. I told him I had gotten it from James Lock, in London, which meant nothing to him until I explained that they were treated in Wodehouse as Bodmin's of Jermyn Street, and he knew exactly what I meant.)
But on this re-reading of my favorite Wodehouse novel (probably because it has to do with writing and publishing, as so few of his books do), and possibly because I was reading it aloud, I realized that there is, in fact, something to say about (and learn from) Wodehouse.
He really is a master of static characterization, which is not as useless a skill as you might think. Anyone writing a series, or a certain type of comedy, can make use of it. And his static characters can be thought of as moments in a changing character. Granted, he never gets very deeply into, for example, Lord Ickenham's need to interfere in the lives of those around him, but the collection of quirks and attitudes (and typical quotations) gives us a detailed picture of the surface. Each character has a voice, if we pay attention, and we can often tell who is speaking without tags (which is just as well, since Wodehouse doesn't use tags much; there are big chunks of text without any attribution at all, so that when you are reading aloud you must learn to do voices).
Plum was also a master of the construction of scenes. Each chapter of Cocktail Time is a coherent scene, much like a scene in a stage play (of which he wrote, after all, a great many). It does not always have unity of setting, but it always focuses on a single character's actions and thoughts. If the emphasis is transferred to another character, another scene (and another chapter) begins. With as many major characters as Wodehouse has (in this book we have Uncle Fred, Beefy Bastable, Beefy's sister Phoebe Wisdom, Phoebe's son Cosmo, Fred's godson Johnny Pearce, Beefy's butler Albert Peasemarch, and the American confidence trickster Oily Carlisle, all of whom are at least briefly viewpoint characters), this gives the book a reader-friendly organization. I haven't really analyzed the scene structure of the book, but I daresay it could be charted profitably.
Now, all this doesn't help us much in understanding the action and its deeper implications. Wodehouse seems to have lived in fear of deeper implications, and shunned them vigorously. But it does help us as writers in understanding how to handle complex plots (and even in his short stories, Wodehouse uses complex plots) with lots of important characters. Many of us don't really understand scenes, but he sure did.
So Wodehouse's place in academia is rather paradoxical: not of much interest for literature courses, but invaluable for creative writing courses. And I don't think he'd mind at all.
dmh
While there is endless pleasure in reading Wodehouse, he doesn't get much attention in the academy. I have to admit that there isn't a lot of depth in most of his characters; not Uncle Fred (the Earl of Ickenham and central figure in the work at hand) nor Bertie Wooster nor any of the residents of Blandings Castle ever change much. Once we know them -- and we can know them pretty well in the first chapter or two in which they appear -- we know them forever. The plots are not based on serious human problems; Cocktail Time is based on the author of a best-selling trashy novel needing to keep his identity secret so he can still run as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, with Ickenham's godson's need for five hundred pounds, to buy off his old nanny so she will get married and leave his employ so he can marry his fiancee without her having to be bullied by the nanny, as a major subplot. These are not exactly universal themes.
Nor are they meant to be. But they limit how much there is to be said in the classroom about the motives of the characters and how this relates to our own lives and all that other stuff that
we teachers rely on to keep us going for a full period. Pleasure is just not sufficient for academic attention. (This doesn't mean that academics don't read Wodehouse. I was arriving on campus once and was accosted by the head of the writing program, who complimented me on my hat. I told him I had gotten it from James Lock, in London, which meant nothing to him until I explained that they were treated in Wodehouse as Bodmin's of Jermyn Street, and he knew exactly what I meant.)
But on this re-reading of my favorite Wodehouse novel (probably because it has to do with writing and publishing, as so few of his books do), and possibly because I was reading it aloud, I realized that there is, in fact, something to say about (and learn from) Wodehouse.
He really is a master of static characterization, which is not as useless a skill as you might think. Anyone writing a series, or a certain type of comedy, can make use of it. And his static characters can be thought of as moments in a changing character. Granted, he never gets very deeply into, for example, Lord Ickenham's need to interfere in the lives of those around him, but the collection of quirks and attitudes (and typical quotations) gives us a detailed picture of the surface. Each character has a voice, if we pay attention, and we can often tell who is speaking without tags (which is just as well, since Wodehouse doesn't use tags much; there are big chunks of text without any attribution at all, so that when you are reading aloud you must learn to do voices).
Plum was also a master of the construction of scenes. Each chapter of Cocktail Time is a coherent scene, much like a scene in a stage play (of which he wrote, after all, a great many). It does not always have unity of setting, but it always focuses on a single character's actions and thoughts. If the emphasis is transferred to another character, another scene (and another chapter) begins. With as many major characters as Wodehouse has (in this book we have Uncle Fred, Beefy Bastable, Beefy's sister Phoebe Wisdom, Phoebe's son Cosmo, Fred's godson Johnny Pearce, Beefy's butler Albert Peasemarch, and the American confidence trickster Oily Carlisle, all of whom are at least briefly viewpoint characters), this gives the book a reader-friendly organization. I haven't really analyzed the scene structure of the book, but I daresay it could be charted profitably.
Now, all this doesn't help us much in understanding the action and its deeper implications. Wodehouse seems to have lived in fear of deeper implications, and shunned them vigorously. But it does help us as writers in understanding how to handle complex plots (and even in his short stories, Wodehouse uses complex plots) with lots of important characters. Many of us don't really understand scenes, but he sure did.
So Wodehouse's place in academia is rather paradoxical: not of much interest for literature courses, but invaluable for creative writing courses. And I don't think he'd mind at all.
dmh
