“'Nothing will induce me to pretend to be a secret drinker.’ “'Yes I told hint I sometimes walk in my sleep.’ “'Suppose, for instance, that he could be made to believe that you were … a dypsomaniac.’ And their conversation had a wild, non seqiluitur quality, as the following example from “The Clicking of Cuthbert” indicates: In their Wodehouse world, the laws of Cause and effect were suspended the absurd was the real the fanciful the factual. Blandings Castle was their habitat.Īnd there were minor characters galore: Psmith, Gussie Fink‐Nottle, Sir Roderick Glossop, Puffy Benger, Galahad Threepwood, Hermione Brimtile, Lord Blicester, Boko Bickerton and Stiffy Byng. Lord Emsworth raised prize pigs and pumpkins Lord Marshmoreton, who squirted whale oil on insects, was always at work on a family history and Lord Ickenham, a 60‐year‐old gaffer, constantly cavorted as a schoolboy.

Three other major comic perSbnalities flowed from Wodehouse's clever brain-Lords Emsworth, Marshmoreton and Ickenham (also known as Uncle Fred). Wodehouse's fecundity was such that he managed to keep the Wooster‐Jeeves escapades fresh for half a century.

“We must think, sir,” Jeeves says in one of the novels. In the score of novels dealing with Wooster, his family and friends, all of whom are touched with zaniness, it is Jeeves who leads his seigneur and employer out of his scrapes. In these two characters Wodehouse discovered the perfect expression of his comic talents,” according to Richard J. Two characters among the hundreds developed by Wodehouse are indelibly associated with his name-Bertie Wooster of the Drones Club and Jeeves. “He satisfies the most sophisticated taste and the simplest.” Wodehouse's art is its universality,” Evelyn Waugh once observed. Moreover, although his books suffered io translation, he had readers in virtually every major language. His parodies of life among the British aristocracy and the well‐to‐do, set vaguely in the early years of the reign of King George V, verged on social satire and earned him an American audience that rivaled his British one. These abilities, along with a genius for antic dialogue lifted him into the ranks of the great lumorists.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse had a cultivated aptitude for devising hilarious incidents of controlled incongruity as well as a talent for creating memorable comic characters. Over the years he turned out close to 100 novels, perhaps 500 articles and essays, some 16 plays, as well as screenplays and lyrics for musical comedies. “After I lived in New York we moved out here, and I became a citizen in 1956 over in Riverhead.” “I never did return to England, you know,” Sir Pelham said a few weeks ago, commenting on the knighthood. There were explanations later, and there was even a formal exoneration by the British For eign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in the House of Commons in 1944, but the issue refused to die.

Leave it to wodehouse