Wodehouse: Stephen Fry's sacred text

Last year I bought some PG Wodehouse to ease me into the habit of reading novels. I am, unfortunately, an irredeemable heathen. Wodehouse had me in stitches, but I had to drag myself through even his works, and I’ve scarcely thumbed a novel since.

There was another reason I picked up Wodehouse, though I had scarcely any more success there either. His prose is said to be some of the best in English and, wanting to improve mine, I tried to keep an eye on how he did it. I can’t have kept a very close eye, because all I can remember deducing was that I laughed whenever he compared people to fish, as in ‘what you demand from the outside public is approval and enthusiasm – not the curling lip, the twitching nostril, and the kind of supercilious look which you see in the eye of a dead mackerel.’

As I was conducting my halfhearted analysis, I was affronted by an odd injunction placed dead in the middle of the back cover, quoted from Stephen Fry and condemning my studies. The quotation, it turns out, is blazoned on the back of every book in Arrow’s popular republishing of Wodehouse’s works. Here it is:

It says, 'You don't analyse such sunlit perfection,
you just bask in its warmth and splendor.' You're welcome.

I couldn't understand this strange commandment. Why would Fry warn readers against analysis? He does so, I think, because of his over-the-top view of Wodehouse. I propose, hesitantly, that for him Wodehouse’s books are sacred, semi-religious texts, texts whose depths we could never plumb, whose stories we must not read incorrectly, and in which we may find enlightenment and salvation.

Psychoanalysing Stephen

The line in question originates from Fry’s introduction to What Ho!: The Best of Wodehouse, where he overviews Wodehouse’s writings and explains why he was the ‘finest and funniest writer the past century ever knew’. To explain why Wodehouse was so superb, he quotes a few nugget and offers a little analysis of Wodehouse’s techniques:

Particular to Wodehouse are the transferred epithets: ‘I lit a rather pleased cigarette’ or ‘I pronged a moody forkful of eggs and b.’ Characteristic too are the sublimely hyperbolic similes: ‘Roderick Spode. Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’ or ‘The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.’

Yet he finishes the section by dismissing analysis, saying,

You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone and analysis, ultimately, is useless.

So, one should never trade basking in Wodehouse’s splendor for analysing it; and besides, analysis is fruitless anyway. Fry probably doesn’t think things are really that absolute, given that Fry he’s just analysed Wodehouse a bit himself. But he does put his case very strongly, and it’s jolly peculiar.

To me, it seems unlikely that Wodehouse’s writing is so clever that we will never understand what he did or how he did it. For starters, Fry analyses Wodehouse pretty successfully himself. Sure, he doesn’t completely inventory Wodehouse’s techniques, but then he doesn’t give himself much space to do so. I don’t see any reason why clever people with lots of time couldn't—fairly satisfyingly—explain the ingredients of Wodehouse’s writing. It’s been done with writers from Virgil to Shakespeare to Stephen King. Of course, such analyses are never complete, but their remaining mysteries are often down to the complexities of communication, rather than those of the writer. So why does Fry think that Wodehouse is beyond analysis, that he ‘stands alone’ from, say, Tolstoy or Vonnegut?

It’s peculiar too that Fry ordains the correct way to read Wodehouse. Predominantly, he says, we should be basking, an activity which is unrelated to and unaided by analysis. I say ‘predominantly’ because, as we saw earlier, Fry analyses Wodehouse himself, so analysis isn’t wholly off the cards. But surely it’s my prerogative, not his, whether I read Wodehouse to bask, to understand mid-20th c. gender roles, to be morally improved, to exercise my English or whatever else. To extend Fry’s sun metaphor: it’s good to bask in the warmth of sunlit splendour, but that doesn’t make it bad to study sunlight. Most people aren’t very interested in optical science, just as most people would not relish analysing Wodehouse. But no one can objectively prescribe that you mustn’t analyse a novel. Fry would probably never dream of telling us how to read Jack Reacher novels, so why decree how we should read Wodehouse?

A late-night Jeeves and Wooster reading club

So here’s my wild theory to account for the special way that Fry treats Wodehouse: Wodehouse’s works are Fry’s religious texts. Like many sacred texts, they’re immeasurable, beyond analysis. As a young Christian I balked at the idea of the Bible being studied critically and in depth, for fear that it should prove to be shallow. For the Bible to be Truth it had to be immeasurable, and the idea that people might measure it worried me. For Fry, the immeasurability of Wodehouse lies partly in his linguistic wizardry, so analysing his techniques is, ultimately, useless.

As for him dictating the correct way to read Wodehouse, that too is a feature of religious texts. Muslims are, on the whole, unsympathetic to those who read their texts in a manner that has not been authorised—too critically, without enough reverence, or without acting on what they read. And now Fry, albeit amiably, is describing which reading habits are unorthodox.

My thesis feels like a stretch, even to me, but it makes good sense of the odd uniqueness that Fry accords to Woodhouse. And crucially, it corresponds with this striking paragraph from his introduction, where he describes what he found in Wodehouse’s oeuvre in essentially religious terms:

Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be. In my teenage years the writings of P. G. Wodehouse awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind. He mocked himself sometimes because he knew that a great proportion of his readers came from prisons and hospitals. At the risk of being sententious, isn't it true that we are all of us, for a great part of our lives, sick or imprisoned, all of us in need of this remarkable healing spirit, this balm of hurt minds?

‘[A]woke me … taught me … healing’ sound remarkably like conversion, enlightenment and salvation. Those elements, above all, are what distinguish sacred texts. I think they’re the crucial reason that Fry decries analysis and why he needs Wodehouse’s writings to be depthless. Wodehouse offers salvation and truth, but those things may not be certain if his texts are so shallow that they can be analysed; and they may not be obtained if the texts are read wrongly.

Shoot straighter

So we’ve seen that Fry’s statement from the back of Arrow’s books doesn’t make much sense. Rather, it and others from his introduction seem to be religious statements about a holy text. Arrow’s choice of the quotation now looks really odd—they’ve picked a quotation which is rooted in extremely idiosyncratic views, views which they probably don’t hold themselves. Granted, it is possible that Fry was being hyperbolic in his elevation of Wodehouse. But then Fry didn’t give any hint that he’s being hyperbolic. And even if he had, that context was lost when the quotation was stuck on the back Arrow’s books.

Often people say odd things simply because they’re mistaken. But sometimes, as in this case, their unusual comments are part of an unusual system. Because we can’t always tell what’s motivated an odd comment, we naturally give people the benefit of the doubt. However, if you’re going to stick the comment on the back of thousands of books, you should probe a little deeper. Things aren’t always what they seem.