The Uses of Laughter

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FEW POPULAR WRITERS can have received quite as much critical praise in their own lifetimes as PG Wodehouse. Yet not long ago, the critic Philip Hensher could remark that “apart from England … the only country in the world which truly loves and understands Wodehouse is India.” This affinity is supposedly embodied in Indian English, said to be based (rather like Wodehouse’s prose) on “English grammar at its most formal” and “the vivid and racy idiom in un-English contexts.” This might be persuasive if it weren’t for the difficulty of proving that Indian English actually exists. English takes different forms in different parts of the country, but none ever possessed sufficient consistency and verve to develop into a recognised dialect. There was a time when fluent speakers favoured the Received Standard—the educated dialect of southwestern England—but American English has outstripped it in popularity and even the range of accents is now flattening out.

What Hensher calls Indian English is largely a literary invention. In Kim, Kipling uses Hurree Babu as a comic foil, to make fun of educated Indians, by having him jumble different registers in a way that might be expected of someone who learns English from books in school instead of speaking it at home. At the same time, he takes care to make him a sharply delineated figure in his own right. Other writers were to adapt this patois with varying degrees of success: Wodehouse uses it in The Luck Stone, an early adventure serial rediscovered and published in 1997. But I doubt if this tells us anything useful about his own prose.

Back in 1945, George Orwell argued that non-English readers of Wodehouse were apt to be led astray in judging his intentions. As example, he quoted an Indian nationalist of his acquaintance who believed that Wodehouse was a satirist of the English upper classes. Fortunately, times have changed: no contemporary reader would need to be told that Wodehouse shows no political awareness at all, or that the world of his novels had come to an end by the First World War (if, indeed, it ever existed).

Hensher’s article is a sustained defence of Wodehouse’s literary qualities: “one of the greats … [t]he insistent trivia of his concerns should not detract from the untiring mastery of his style, the extravagance of his English.” He draws attention to Wodehouse’s linguistic register, exemplified in a rare gift for dialogue. To Christopher Hitchens, another of his champions, “simile and metaphor provide … much of the energy of Wodehouse’s narration.”

But there’s also a cult of Wodehouse—a tiresome one, as Hitchens pointed out. The unstinting praise of his admirers tends, if anything, to obscure his actual qualities. He has been described as the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century, but no one has made any attempt, as far as I know, to place his achievement within a comic tradition that stretches long before (and after) him. The effect of doing this is to cast fresh light upon Wodehouse the writer.

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 was educated at public school: his alma mater was Dulwich College, in a leafy London suburb.