{"id":28110,"date":"2020-06-07T15:37:36","date_gmt":"2020-06-07T05:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=28110"},"modified":"2024-07-17T07:49:24","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T21:49:24","slug":"the-man-who-wrote-the-most-perfect-sentences-ever-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=28110","title":{"rendered":"The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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By Nicholas Barber 2nd June 2020<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

(Tom: Brilliant! Loved it. Brought back fond memories of a youth spent more reading such (and Biggles) than doing homework.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In our latest essay in which a critic reflects on a cultural work that brings them joy, Nicholas Barber pays tribute to the blissfully escapist comic novels of PG Wodehouse.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If we\u2019re talking about culture that makes people happy, we have to start with the works of\u00a0PG\u00a0Wodehouse. There are two reasons why. One reason is that making people happy was\u00a0Wodehouse\u2019s overriding ambition. The other reason is that he was better at it than any other writer in history.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Some authors may want to expose the world\u2019s injustices, or elevate us with their psychological insights.\u00a0Wodehouse, in his words, preferred to spread \u201csweetness and light\u201d. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal\u2019s stately home or a flutter on the choir boys\u2019 hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk us far away from our worries. Writing about being a humourist in his autobiography Over Seventy,\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0quoted two people in the Talmud who had earnt their place in Heaven: \u201cWe are merrymakers. When we see a person who is downhearted, we cheer him up.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As P G Wodehouse himself said, his primary aim was to spread \u201csweetness and light\u201d (Credit: Alamy)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

My own introduction to this supreme merrymaker came via Jeeves and Wooster, the television series adapted from some of his most beloved stories about a young toff and his unflappable manservant. Hugh Laurie starred as Bertie Wooster, the moneyed bachelor who seemed to care about nothing except food, drink and fashionable socks, but who always came to the aid of the numerous old schoolmates who were even more stupid than he was. Stephen Fry co-starred as Jeeves, who had the brains that his young master lacked. As an undernourished, overworked student, stressed by essays and exams, I was always relieved when I could nip down to the college\u2019s TV room (yes, it was a long time ago) for my weekly escape into a jazz-age wonderland of art-deco flats and panelled gentlemen\u2019s clubs, \u201ctissue-restoring\u201d cocktails and buffet breakfasts served on silver platters.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

A crafter of perfect sentences
Nearly three decades on, I\u2019m currently rewatching the DVDs with my daughter, and Jeeves and Wooster is still pretty much flawless. When I interviewed Laurie in 2000, I gushed about the series, and he cited what was, at the time, his favourite\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0line:\u00a0\u201cThe drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like GK Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There are so many other lines he could have gone for. How about this one?
\u201cIt is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Or this?
\u201cIt isn\u2019t often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Or this?
\u201cLike so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The one that has me chuckling to myself on a regular basis is this Bertie Wooster gem from the novel Right Ho, Jeeves:\u00a0\u201c\u2018Very good,\u201d I said coldly. \u2018In that case,\u00a0tinkerty tonk.\u2019 And I\u00a0meant it to sting.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We could keep listing zingers like that all day: there were 96\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0books published in his lifetime, and he was drafting another when he died in 1975 at the age of 93. What these excerpts prove is that, however much we may cherish the bumbling aristocratic characters and their convoluted escapades, what really makes\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0so addictive is the\u00a0prose: the phrases which appear to float along so effortlessly, but which came about because\u00a0he would, he said, \u201cwrite every sentence 10 times\u201d. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day \u2013 Douglas Adams<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

To read any of those sentences is to marvel at the elaborate but elegant route it takes to a perfect punchline; to delight in how it glides between Shakespeare and race-track slang, between understatement and exaggeration, between gentle humour and stinging wit. \u201cWhat\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0writes is pure word music,\u201d said Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers\u2019 Guide to the Galaxy. \u201cIt matters not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme of pig kidnappings, lofty butlers, and ludicrous impostures. He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He could certainly have written darker, more soul-searching books if he hadn\u2019t been so naturally jovial: he had plenty of raw material to draw on. Pelham Grenville\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0was born in 1881. (Perhaps he was thinking of his own names when he had Bertie commenting that \u201cthere\u2019s some raw work pulled at the font from time to time\u201d.) His Victorian colonial parents were rarely in the same country as he was, according to his biographer, Robert McCrum. \u201cIn total,\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15, which is by any standards a shattering emotional deprivation,\u201d he noted in 2005\u2019s Wodehouse: A Life. Nonetheless, \u201cPlum\u201d relished his Dulwich College schooldays, and was looking forward to his university years when the next blow fell: his father announced that he had to go straight to a job in a bank instead.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There were 96 Wodehouse books published in his lifetime, with his Jeeves and Wooster novels remaining his most celebrated legacy (Credit: Alamy)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The disappointment didn\u2019t stop him. He always knew that he wanted to be a writer, and so he sold short stories at a superhuman rate until he could make a living from them. Soon he graduated to anthologies and novels, some featuring Jeeves and Wooster (who debuted in 1915), others featuring the canny Psmith or the garrulous Mr Mulliner, some set at mossy Blandings Castle, others set at Marvis Bay Golf and Country Club. Beyond these, there were Broadway musicals and Hollywood screenplays, and a long and harmonious marriage. (He made the money and his wife spent it, an arrangement which suited them both.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But while his professional and personal lives were blessed, they included episodes which could have been turned into sombre literature. During World War Two, his adored stepdaughter Leonora died unexpectedly, aged 40, after a minor operation, and\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0himself was arrested in northern France, where he was living at the time, and sent to a German internment camp for almost a year. Even there, he kept writing, and polished off a novel in captivity, the appropriately titled Money in the Bank. He was then moved to a hotel in Berlin, where he was invited by German radio to broadcast a series of comic accounts of his internment. Naively, he agreed, keen as he was to assure his fans that he was in good health and good spirits. What he didn\u2019t realise was that he was playing into the hands of the Nazi government, which could claim to be treating its illustrious guest well. In Britain, he was accused of colluding with the enemy, and his reputation never quite recovered, but there was hardly a trace of anger or self-recrimination in his work. He stuck to prelapsarian yarns in which everyone was essentially comfortable and fortunate \u2013 except, of course, when they found themselves briefly engaged to a woman who believed in healthy eating and gainful employment.
Whatever was going on in his life,\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0stayed buoyant; and whatever is going on in the reader\u2019s life, he keeps us buoyant, too.\u00a0\u201cI was clinically depressed for most of 1999,\u201d said Jay McInerney, the author of Bright Lights, Big City in a 2016 interview \u201cand I would turn to\u00a0Wodehouse, possibly the funniest writer in the English language. It seemed to be more effective at warding off despair than the antidepressants that I was taking.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Despite his gaiety, Wodehouse endured a number of dark chapters, including the unexpected death of his much-loved stepdaughter Leonora aged 40 (Credit: Alamy)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Maybe you can spot some deeper themes in his books if you look hard enough. At times I can persuade myself that there is something subversive in Bertie\u2019s lack of interest in the conventional status markers of a career and a marriage, and something instructive in his insistence on helping his lovestruck friends, however ungrateful they may be. I can even argue that\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0was revolutionary because his characters didn\u2019t defeat villains in fist fights or shootouts (although they sometimes stole policemen\u2019s helmets on Boat Race night). Perhaps he was teaching us that we can\u2019t all be high achievers, let alone rugged action heroes, but that we can all be kind and generous. In other words, we can live according to the code of the Woosters. But I admit that this is a stretch. As Stephen Fry put it,\u00a0\u201cYou don\u2019t analyse such\u00a0sunlit perfection: you just bask in its warmth and splendour.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Evelyn Waugh might have agreed. \u201cMr.\u00a0Wodehouse\u2019s idyllic world can never stale,\u201d he said in 1961. \u201cHe will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.\u201d Captivity doesn\u2019t get much more irksome than the one we\u2019re enduring now, but\u00a0Wodehouse\u00a0can still release us from it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/culture\/article\/20200602-the-man-who-wrote-the-most-perfect-sentences-ever-written<\/a><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nicholas Barber 2nd June 2020 (Tom: Brilliant! Loved it. Brought back fond memories of a youth spent more reading such (and Biggles) than doing homework.) In our latest essay in which a critic reflects on a cultural work that brings them joy, Nicholas Barber pays tribute to the blissfully escapist comic novels of PG … <\/p>\n

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