[Sca-cooks] [Sca-cooks]OT-The One True Tigger

[Philip & Susan Troy]

HICKS, MELISSA wrote:
> Master A,
>
> Being a young'un, I was unaware of any of this.  Is there a good book that
> details these goings on?  Or do you have a favourite biography of Wodehouse?
>
> Thanks
> Mel.

You might hunt up David A Jasen's "P.G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a
Master," which is among the best, but there are several out there.
Wodehouse is also, BTW, the creator of the modern musical comedy. Up
until 1914 or so, there had been "musical revues", with a story
performed by actors, some songs which might or might not have anything
to do with the plot, and a stand-up comic who would step forward and
perform while the sets were being changed. The comic might double as a
cast member, but nothing much in the way of comic dialogue or anything.
Wodehouse, harking back to Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote many of the first
musical comedies as we know them, with a play (usually a romance of
sorts) which included comic songs that actually were integrated into the
story, and was immeasurably helpful in the early careers of Guy Bolton,
Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, and Cole Porter, to name but a few.

Which probably explains why a lot of Wodehouse's fiction reads just a
bit like a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. On the other hand, he
is responsible for some unforgettable imagery, such as the Great Sermon
Handicap, in which the local bored aristocrats are all betting on which
local clergyman will preach the longest sermon, complete with attempts
by villains to nobble the favorite, a la various nineteenth-century
horseracing fiction, and the various attempts to kidnap Lord Emsworth's
prize pig, the Empress of Blandings. Every one of his stories is
brilliant, but never cruel, satire. Now that I think about it, the only
real person he has ever really poked fun at in his stories was Milne,
when he referred to various people being forced by domineering aunts
(Wodehouse was raised as a fosterling by a bevy of elderly Aunts; his
parents were missionaries in the Far East) to recite poems about
Christopher Robin going hippity-hop at the local village talent show,
and the accompanying loss of status that would be bound to accompany
such an act.
There's also a good, but highly fictionalized account of the radio
broadcast incident in Anthony Burgess's novel "Earthly Powers", which is
about basically every major English author of the 20th century, most of
them rolled into one character, who ends up suspiciously resembling W.
Somerset Maugham. But, like Wodehouse, this character makes an innocent
but damaging broadcast and becomes an exile as a result.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98