Man and boy, I have been making my living by writing ever since 1945.
Somewhere along the way I became obsessed with trying to write everything as
clearly as possible, so that everyone could understand what I was trying to
say. I think I even remember the occasion when this first became a priority
with me: it bore on an instrument called an oscilloscope. I had no idea what an
oscilloscope was, and still do not. I had scant regard for science in those days,
and I remember making fun around the word, as if diminishing its importance
would somehow help in understanding what it was.
Nowadays I can easily discover, with a mere reference to Wikipedia, that
it is an instrument on which can be displayed the waveform of the heartbeat, in
a now common examination called an ECG, or electrocardiogram exam. I often
wondered what ECG meant.
You may well wonder what I am driving
at with all this indirection: what I am intending to write about has nothing to
do with science, but rather with the difficulty in explaining some things. I have
recently been re-reading some books by one of my favourite authors P.G. Wodehouse,
and it has always been my experience that explaining the attraction of this particular
author’s work is virtually impossible. (I should add here that with 27 books
either by him or about him, he far outstrips any other author in my now rather
limited library.)
For one thing, he began writing
novels in 1902, and was still at it in 1975 when he died at the age of 93, half
of a new novel written beside the chair in which he died. It would hardly be
exaggerating to say that he wrote the same book over and over, a novel always
rooted unashamedly in its own world of unreality. “I believe there are two ways
of writing successful novels,” he opined at one stage in his long life. “One is
mine, making the thing frankly a fairy story and ignoring real life altogether;
the other is going right deep down into life, and not caring a damn.”
His two most famous, and enduring
characters are the man about town, Bertie Wooster, and his man-servant Jeeves,
a man of incredible talent at dreaming up schemes to extricate the young master
from the various terrible scrapes in which he, willy-nilly, always involves
himself. According to Bertie, Jeeves is at his most efficient after eating a
good meal of fish, which makes his head bulge at the back even more than usual,
and virtually guarantees that he will come up with a solution to whatever
ludicrous problem confronts Bertie.
Bertie is notable for having an exaggerated
regard for his own talents, which usually lands him in such deep trouble that
he has no option but to call in Jeeves for a solution. Bertie’s world is also
populated with his two aunts, one Aunt Dahlia, the soul of goodness and
understanding, while the other, Aunt Agatha, is “the one who chews broken
bottles and kills rats with her teeth.”
To many critics, Wodehouse’s style is
too flippant to require serious analysis, but there are many others who regard
him as a master of the language, and I have always allied myself with them.
Although I am far from being a literary critic, nevertheless I regard the
opening paragraph of his novel The Mating
Season, as a superb example of written English, and one that I cannot imagine
anyone else writing:
“While I
would not go so far, perhaps, as to describe the heart as actually leaden, I
must confess that on the eve of starting to do my
bit of time
at Deverill Hall, I was definitely short on chirpiness. I shrank from the
prospect of being decanted into a household on chummy terms with a thug like my
Aunt Agatha, weakened as I already was by having had her son Thomas, one of our
most prominent fiends in human shape, on my hands for three days. I mentioned
this to Jeeves and he agreed that the set-up could have been juicier.”
This
is such an irresistible mixture of slightly outworn slang and straight-forward
English, all bound together with such expressions as “chirpiness, “a fiend in
human shape,” to describe a child, and “the set-up could have been juicier”, as to be almost beyond analysis. It perhaps
helps to explain how, many years ago, I loaned a copy of a Wodehouse novel, one
of my favorites, to a friend of mine whose first language was Polish, but who
had a perfect understanding (or so I thought) of English. She simply was aghast
that I could have seen anything worthwhile in this ridiculous story about these
absurd people. A little lacking in the nuances of the language, I would say.
Wodehouse himself was, as several full-length
biographies (the best, I am sure, is Wodehouse
by Robert McCrum) have revealed rather an odd character, a man who never lost
his interest in the result of the Rugby team of his old school, Dulwich College,
but who nevertheless, although always writing about this imaginary strata of English
life, the effete aristocracy, lived most
of his life abroad. Much of that was
more or less forced on him by the extraordinary things he did during the war.
His biographer McCrum describes the key event in the opening page of his
542-word biography:
“In the clear blue days of May 1940, a
middle-aged Englishman and his wife, living in the French seaside resort of Le
Touquet-Paris Plage with their Pekinese and pet parrot, found themselves faced
with the threat of the invading Nazi army. Nothing could have prepared them for
this moment. They were rich upper-middle-class expatriates accustomed to
leisurely breakfasts, walks on the beach, afternoon golf, a preprandial martini
or two and evenings with the wireless listening to the BBC, before a good
night’s sleep.”
So
they just sat there, waited and were eventually captured. In another account I
have read of this, they sat and waited because their dog had been ill, and they
didn’t want to upset it by forcing it to travel. The Germans soon realized they had in their hands one of the
best-known English writers, so they transferred them to a fairly comfortable internment,
which after some weeks they suggested might be enlivened if the man would care
to write for their radio an account of
their confinement, to be broadcast to the United States. Wodehouse, thinking the assignment called for
his usual light touch, was happy to agree.
“It is just possible
that my listeners may seem to detect in
this little talk of mine a slight goofiness….If so the matter, as Bertie
Wooster would say, is susceptible of
ready explanation. I have just emerged into the outer world after
forty-nine weeks of civil internment in a German internment camp…and I have not
yet quite recovered that perfect mental balance for which in the past I was so
admired by one and all.……There is a good deal to be said for internment. It
keeps you out of the saloons, and gives you time to catch up with your reading.
You also get a lot of sleep. The chief drawback is that it means your being
away from home a good deal.”
Wodehouse, no doubt, thought he was
being amusing. But when once the news reached the popular columnists in London,
headed by the famous William Connor, known as Cassandra, on the Daily Mirror, it marked the end of
the road for Wodehouse and England. Connor
set out to destroy his reputation, and largely succeeded. Oddly enough, later
in life, these two men became friends, lost in mutual admiration.
He stopped such an onslaught of
vilification as a traitor that he never set foot in England again, retiring to live
permanently in the United States after the war. It was not for a good twenty
years that Evelyn Waugh came to Wodehouse’s rescue with extravagant praise, and
managed to pull his reputation back to the point that he eventually was once
again acknowledged to be a master. Just before he died he was elevated by a
British honour of a knighthood.
Undaunted, it seemed, after the war he
took up the Wooster and Jeeves stories where he had left them off; in fact, if
you want my opinion, those that were published immediately after the war--- I
have in mind here Joy in the Morning,
1947, and The Mating Season 1949
---and that apparently were at least started during the war, were even funnier,
the prose more inventive than ever before, and the general loopiness of the
plots even more bizarre.
Fully
engaged in these stories were many of the favourite characters, in
addition to the infamous Aunt Agatha, such friends and fellow members of the
Drones club, where, as the wine took effect members began to throw pieces of
bread at each other, just as a matter of every day behaviour, men such as
Stilton Cheesewright, Boko Fittleworth, Catsmeat Potters Pirbright, and Gussie
Fink-Nottle, normally a fancier of newts, who raised his eyes just long enough
to get engaged to one of the ghastly girls who had previously been engaged to
Bertie, Florence Craye, daughter of the
well-known loony doctor. Bertie’s relationship with these young women was
unique: he regarded himself as a sitting duck for any of them who had the
notion to become affianced to him, himself helpless to resist. Wherefrom, only
an appeal to the genius of Jeeves with his exceptional brain power could rescue
the poor blighter.
“Honoria,
you see, is one of those robust dynamic girls with the muscles of a
welterweight, and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin
bridge. A beastly thing to encounter over breakfast. Brainy, moreover.”
No
wonder poor Bertie, caught by direct fire from Honoria’s dynamism, saw no object
but to surrender unconditionally (except for the reserve brainwork of Jeeves,
always a reliable ally).
One of my favourite passages from
Wodehouse, illustrating the lunacy of his method, occurred when Bertie greets one of his pals,
Motty:
“What ho,” I said.
“What ho!” replied Motty
“What ho!” replied Motty
“What ho! What ho.”
“What ho!”
“What ho,” I said, rather clinching
the thing.”
The famous actor Hugh Laurie, who,
before becoming a fixture on American television as the infamous, addicted Dr
House was a comedian who played Bertie in a TV series against Stephen Fry’s
Jeeves, gives another example of the Wodehouse eccentricity with language.
Bertie leaving in a huff: “Tinkerty
tonk,” I said, and I meant it to sting.”
How the devil could any actor do justice to such a line, asked Laurie.
“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts,”
says Bertie, elsewhere, “but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s
always just when a fellow feels braced with things in general that Fate sneaks
up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”
Okay, enough of this. If I haven’t
persuaded you yet, I never will. But, as Bertie might have said, “Wot the hell!
Wot the hell, toujours gai, toujours gai.”
* * *
“Extinction Rebellion is the last hope for this dying planet. That is
why we are involved, because we know that science and facts did not save the
Great Barrier Reef, nor the majority of our rivers here in New Zealand. Only a
huge number of people willing to hold their governments, corporations and media
accountable can create the system change we so desperately need. This is why I
am a ‘rebel for life’ and this is what I want Extinction Rebellion to achieve:
a new eco-socialist way of life where all people and other species have the
same right to live peacefully, to have clean water, land and air, and where the
short-term greed of the few does not dictate the survival of all.”
Dr Sea, 43, environmental scientist, Wellington, New Zealand
Dr Sea, 43, environmental scientist, Wellington, New Zealand
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