Viva Lewes Issue #162 March 2020

COLUMN
David Jarman
My back pages
In December 1982, a modest publication appeared
entitled, If you could only take one: a desert
island book choice by members of the University of
Sussex and others. It derived from an exhibition
held in the University Library the previous
summer. Most participants kept to their brief;
others proved more ambitious in furnishing their
desert island libraries. Stephen Medcalf selected
no fewer than eight books and still lamented that
‘I haven’t yet included any Dickens’. The last of
his choices was PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the
Woosters, and it’s this book that provides the inspiration
for the Jeeves and Wooster play at Lewes
Little Theatre this month.
Was The Code of the Woosters Stephen Medcalf’s
favourite Wodehouse? Did he consider it to be
the author’s best? I don’t know. I once asked
Charles Kerry, erstwhile Glyndebourne Chorus
Manager and Wodehouse devotee, which titles
he would single out for praise. His response was
immediate: Full Moon and Laughing Gas. PG
Wodehouse’s own favourite was The Luck of the
Bodkins, a preference revealed in his reply to a letter
from Arthur Ransome. The author of Swallows
and Amazons had written to Wodehouse telling
him that his own boat was called ‘Lottie Blossom’,
after the red headed American film star, always
accompanied by a small alligator, in The Luck of
the Bodkins. She was Ransome’s ‘favourite female
character in fiction’.
When we tackled Wodehouse in my book group
the chosen novel was Joy in the Morning. It is,
according to Robert McCrum in his biography of
Wodehouse, ‘thought by a fervent minority to be
his masterpiece’. Alternatively, anyone new to the
author might prefer to test the water with a short
story. How about Honeysuckle Cottage? It was once
described by Ludwig Wittgenstein, of all people,
as ‘one of the funniest things he had ever read’.
I suppose one obstacle to a full enjoyment of Wodehouse
might be the richly allusive nature of his
writing. He very much assumes that his readers
share a body of common knowledge derived from
an established literary tradition. Joy in the Morning,
for example, has allusions to Longfellow,
Hemingway, Tennyson, Spinoza, Thomas Moore
and Lord Peter Wimsey, to name but a few. The
Bible, especially The Psalms, features prominently
(‘weeping may endure for a night, but
joy cometh in the morning’), but it’s definitely
Shakespeare who takes centre stage. I counted
25 references in Joy in the Morning, and I’m sure
there were many others I missed. Shakespeare is
constantly quoted, accurately and appositely by
Jeeves, fearfully mangled by Wooster.
All wonderfully inventive, but my favourite
Shakespeare mangling comes not in Wodehouse,
but in Martin Chuzzlewit when Montague
Tigg turns Hamlet’s ‘Let Hercules
himself do what he may, / the cat will
mew, and dog will have his day’
into ‘Hercules may lay
about him with his club in
every possible direction,
but he can’t prevent
the cats from making a
most intolerable row on
the roofs of the houses, or
the dogs from being shot
in the hot weather if they
run about the streets
unmuzzled’.
Illustration by Charlotte Gann
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