The music of the language

Wodehouse, all in all, is lasting astonishingly well. His world is dated, but then it was always dated; it is basically Edwardian, and went on, barely changed, into the 1960s and 1970s. But his appeal is not the period charm of a Diary of a Nobody or a Saki; it is much more alive than that. By now we should probably start suspecting that he will prove one of the great novelists.

Apart from England, I think the only country in the world which truly loves and understands Wodehouse is India. It seems bizarre, but there’s something illuminating in that. Indian English is passionately in love with English grammar at its most formal; in the commuter trains of Bombay, the subjunctive and the gerund still thrive in ordinary speech. It loves, too, the vivid and racy idiom in un-English contexts; a sober report of a murder case in the Indian press may suddenly swerve into the comment that the police hope soon to ‘nab the culprit’. Wodehouse’s world may seem very far from contemporary Indian life, but that sensitivity to idiom and to the music of grammar are exactly what is so wonderful about him. He is, apart from everything else, a grammarian of genius.

Oh, come on, you’re saying! A grammarian? But exactly that. What entrances him, and what he uses for his most unforgettable effects, is exactly that, grammar, and the unique, ambiguous potential of English grammar. Plenty of writers can pun. But take one of Wodehouse’s jokes, and this is something rather more subtle.

‘Oh, Bertie, you know your Shelley.’ ‘Am I?’

This is not exactly a pun, but a joke about grammar, about the way that the genitive can, with the help of hopeless ignorance, transform a complete sentence in English. I want to insist on this distinction between Wodehouse’s august play with grammar and the ordinary humorist’s punning, because Wodehouse, for me, attains a greatness exactly through his linguistic freedom, the sense that unlike most writers in a language he is the master of it and not its servant.