In the hamlet of Remsenburg, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York lies a small cemetery behind the chapel of the Remsenburg Community Church. There one finds the modest final resting place of a great American, marked by a substantial rectangular headstone with a large open book sculpted on top, in which is inscribed from top to bottom:

Jeeves

Blanding’s Castle

Leave it to Psmith

Meet Mister Mulliner

Beneath this on the wide headstone you see the name of the great American:

Sir Pelham Grenville

WODEHOUSE

At the very bottom of the headstone are the words:

HE GAVE JOY TO COUNTLESS PEOPLE

Seldom have truer words been engraved in stone. Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (Plum to his friends; P.G. to his reading public) gave joy to countless millions of people with his books, about a hundred of them, written during the first 75 years of the 20th century. So long as people and books are to be found, he will continue to give joy—the joy of pure soul-refreshing laughter—by inviting his readers into the worlds of Jeeves, Blandings castle (not Blanding’s as on the headstone), Psmith (with a silent P as in ptarmigan), Mr. Mulliner, and other immortal comic characters and settings.

P.G. Wodehouse started out life in the early 1880s as an Englishman, so it is only natural that most of his great characters and settings are outwardly English. But as Wodehouse himself says of his novels, “they ignore real life altogether.” His art required him to give local habitations and names to his creations—and what names! Pongo Twistleton; Percy Frobisher Pilbeam; Cyril “Barmy” Fotheringay-Phipps; “Stilton” Cheesewright—but Wodehouse’s worlds are as purely out of this world as Socrates’ Beautiful City in Speech. They are even funnier than the kallipolis, too, and almost as instructive. They are worlds that cannot become dated because they exist eternally, like Platonic ideas—true and beautiful precisely because they are not encumbered with earthly reality.

If Wodehouse is new to you, I would say start in the order suggested by the list he had inscribed in stone, with a Jeeves story. There are many of them featuring Jeeves, the infallible and infinitely resourceful gentleman’s gentleman and his employer, the loveable and clueless young Bertie Wooster. Many Wodehousians think The Code of the Woosters is the best starter. If you get hooked, turn next to a Blandings story, of which there are, I think, 11, starring the fuzzy-minded Earl of Emsworth and his prize pig. If you’re even further hooked, you will love the Psmith and Mulliner stories, too. You will find yourself wanting to do a lot of re-reading; the delight is not in the novelty but in the perfection of the humor and the writing, which never gets old.

Few creations of human genius are more delightful than Wodehouse’s best sentences. Sometimes they entertain just by making you keenly interested in seeing how they are going to turn out—and they never fail. Hilaire Belloc was not alone, back in the mid-20th century, in thinking Wodehouse “the best writer of English now alive.”

A Crowd of Gags and Graces

Wodehouse acknowledged that his study of classical languages shaped his writing. His biographers say that as a boy he could write Greek and Latin sentences as rapidly as he could write sentences in English. His command of his native tongue earned him an honorary doctorate of literature (D. Litt) from Oxford University in 1939. According to Wodehouse’s recollections of the ceremony, his fellow honorands received “tepid applause” while he “had to stand for quite three minutes while thousands cheered.”

As was customary in the awards ceremony, the university’s Public Orator (PO) delivered a Latin salute to the honorands. In this case, the PO, Cyril Bailey, had never read Wodehouse, and was given some of his writings to prepare him for the salute. According to biographer Robert McCrum, Bailey saluted Wodehouse with a brilliant and witty celebration of Wodehouse’s gifts composed in faultless Latin hexameters after Horace. Having made ingenious reference to Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Mr. Mulliner, Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings, Psmith, and Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bailey concluded in prose that Wodehouse was “our Petronius, or should I say, our Terence?” (Petroniumne dicam an Terentium nostrum?) a tribute that provoked more wild applause.

As David Jasen tells the story, “Vice-Chancellor of the University, George Stuart Gordon, presented the degree to Plum with these words”:

Vir lepidissime, facetissime, venustissime, iocosissime, ribidundissime te cum turba tua Leporum, Facetinarum, Venustatum, Iocorum, Risuum, ego auctoritate mea et totius Universitatis admitto ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris honoris causa.

Which meant:

O Sir, of all men most polished, elegant, charming, whimsical and ribald, by my authority and that of the whole University I hereby admit you and your whole crowd of gags, graces, charms, jokes, and giggles to the degree of honorary Doctor of Letters.

At formal dinner for 400 at Christ Church afterwards, the undergraduates began “to bang the tables, chanting ‘We want Wode-house…we want Wode-house.’”

I was an English major in college but had never heard of P.G. Wodehouse until I came to Claremont in the early 1970s. Professor Harry V. Jaffa (HVJ) mentioned him after the Belloc fashion—as the best living writer of English sentences (Wodehouse was still alive and writing then). HVJ gave the gift of Wodehouse to many of his students. In a remarkable coincidence, Jaffa himself—an English major as an undergraduate at Yale—had never heard of Wodehouse until Leo Strauss introduced him to the great man, years after Jaffa had graduated from Yale.

HVJ told me the story more than once, and others have their own versions: Strauss was teaching at the University of Chicago. HVJ, a devoted student, who had followed Strauss to Chicago from the New School in New York, was traveling with Strauss on a train to an academic conference. Jaffa saw Strauss sitting by himself reading and thought (something to the effect of): “I have him to myself! We’re on this train for hours. Now I can ask him all those questions about Plato’s Republic I have been dying to ask him.” Jaffa sat down beside Strauss, got his attention, and began to ask his first question—I think it may have been about the character Thrasymachus. Strauss jumped like a startled fawn and cut Jaffa off immediately—announcing sharply, “I am not verking!” (HVJ pronounced the “v” and the exclamation point!).

Though taken aback, Jaffa had the presence of mind to check the author of the book Strauss was so intently not verking on: P.G. Wodehouse. He had never heard of him. He made a mental note to be sure to pick up something by him at the earliest opportunity. When he did, he was hooked for life. In his later years, I believe Jaffa made it a regular practice to read a little Wodehouse before going to bed every night. In some conversation with Strauss after the train episode, Jaffa said Strauss told him that two men got him through World War II: Churchill and Wodehouse (those with better memories or information can correct or complete these stories).

Wodehouse wrote so many wonderful and successful books that it is easy to forget his prolific career writing for the theater, including libretto and lyrics for nearly 40 musical comedies between 1905 and 1934. In the judgment of some, his collaborations with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern “inaugurated” the American musical. Wodehouse didn’t become an American citizen until 1955, but he lived most of his adult life in America and said of one of his autobiographical books that it was “the simple story of my love affair with the United States of America.”

As a beginning young writer in London at the turn of the 20th century, Wodehouse dreamed of sailing to America, to the New World. His dream came true in 1904 when, at the age of just 22, he got a second-class ticket on a passenger liner. Next thing he knew, he was in New York, about which he wrote:

To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven, without having to go to all the bother and expense of dying.

When he returned to London several weeks later, he found that he was regarded as an expert on America, and his writing on the subject of his new expertise was in great demand: “After that trip to New York,” he said, “I was a man who counted…. My income rose like a rocketing pheasant.”

With increasing experience and love of America, Wodehouse began to develop American characters and scenes as recognizable and entertaining as his English ones: tycoons of finance, Chicago gangsters, Greenwich Village artists, titans of industry, chorus girls, Hollywood producers and starlets, genuine cowboys from the Wild West, and juvenile delinquents.

Wodehouse was awarded a knighthood in 1975, just two months before he died (on Valentine’s Day). So he became Sir Pelham. But by then, he had already been an American citizen for 20 years and had been in love with America since that first visit to New York in 1904. American Wodehousians celebrate P.G. Wodehouse Day every December 16, the date on which he became a citizen in 1955. On the occasion, he wrote his friend William Townend: “Thank God for being an American (I don’t mean God is, I mean I am).”

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