WODEHOUSIANA

Noticing the resemblance some Wodehousean characters bore to each other, a critic once ventured to comment that most of Plum's characters are the same people disguised under different names in different novels. Rather indiscreetly, I should add.

How do you think the irrepressible humorist would have reacted?

This was his response: "A certain critic - for, such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

That was typical of Wodehouse: comical and light-hearted humour, sparkling wit and humourous levity most of his books are suffused with.

His novels frequently featured the dandified and somewhat woolly-headed Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves who could be banked upon for sound advice, as well as an enormous pig named the Empress of Blandings. His comic prose was carefully styled with puns, similes and metaphors. They were eloquent novels with literary allusions and epic laugh-out-loud moments.

Here are some of his quotes from his books which will leave you chuckling.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

To find a man's true character, play golf with him.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”

I always advise people never to give advice.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

I always advise people never to give advice.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

The least thing upset him on the (golf) links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Golf, like measles, should be caught young.

Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact.

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.

THE PLUM-CAKE

People living on this planet can be divided into two: those who swear by Wodehouse and those who do not care much for his writing. I am an unabashed fan of his and have read probably more than two dozen of his books of fiction. Having said that, I must confess that it is just a sampling of the Wodehouse smorgasbord: the prolific story-teller had authored nearly a hundred novels while pursuing his buzzing career as playwright and lyricist on Broadway and penning innumerable poems.

Rather than pick up new titles, I would‌ prefer to go back to old favorites of mine. I am fond of Mulliner, the boozy old bore who refuses to shut up, Rupert Psmith (The 'P' is silent, 'as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan') and the unforgettable, but forgetful, Lord Elmsworth. But it is the timeless tales of Bertie and his valet, Jeeves that I regularly return to. Blame it on the resistance to try something new, though you know that Wodehouse just cannot let you down.

It was in short stories that Bertie and Jeeves made their debut. Soon, like Laurel and Hardy or Holmes and Watson or Dennis and Joey or Tintin and Snowy, they became indissolubly and lastingly linked in the public imagination. The two characters coalesced and the pair became touchstones and reference points.

In addition to their appearance in over thirty short stories, there are nearly a dozen full-length Bertie and Jeeves novels. Whether one takes the first of the novels (Thank You, Jeeves - 1934) or the last (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen - 1974) or any in between, one can perceive a striking consistency of tone and outlook, a reassuring immutability. They are full of appealing redundancies and there are far too many expedient repeats, too many hand-me-down plot devices and overlong one-liners. Like, we are reminded over and over again about the sole professional accomplishment of Bertie ('When Aunt Dahlia was running that ‘Milady’s Boudoir’ paper of hers, I contributed to it an article, or piece as we writers call it, on What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing.')

Did I say immutability? Yes, I did! I hasten to correct myself. In 'Right Ho, Jeeves', Bertie was once bold enough to declare that Jeeves had 'lost his form' and wanted his 'plugs decarbonised'. Over time, their relationship becomes subtler: the quiet Jeeves becomes more imposing and Bertie more reverent towards him. And then Jeeves is able to wield overarching influence even over the questionable sartorial preferences of his master, having disapproved of 'purple socks, pink silk ties, white dinner jacket, yellow shirt, green trousers and straw hat'.

In the Bertie-and-Jeeves stories, we are caught up in an inexhaustible cycle: Bertie (Bertram Wilberforce Wooster) 'lands in the soup', which is just another way of saying that this rich, insouciant bachelor feels that he is being railroaded into marriage or forced to do something that she feels will enhance the prestige of the family. It is a gag that never spoils.

Though Bertie is not financially dependent on Aunt Agatha, he feels compelled, particularly in the early stories, to obey her wishes, as he has been intimidated by her since he was young. She has never liked Jeeves, whom she calls Bertie's keeper, for she thinks that Bertie is too dependent on him. She disapproves of Bertie talking to Jeeves about private matters. On one occasion when she hears Bertie ask Jeeves for advice, she tells Jeeves to leave and then scolds Bertie, making remarks to him about 'what she thought of a Wooster who could lower the prestige of the clan by allowing menials to get above themselves.'

It is the impeccable Jeeves - in fact, he barely has a first name (revealed after more than 50 years to be Reginald) - who rescues his feckless master, all without tearing, or even crumpling, leave alone tearing, the social fabric. The brain of the 'gentleman's gentleman' is so massive that it bulges the back of his head. He is so discreet that he 'moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly-fish'. He is unflappable and the totem of imperturbability ('I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.')

The idle Bertie is fond of a post-lunch cocktail. And a pre-lunch cocktail. Eye-openers and nightcaps, pick-me-ups and settle-me-downs - he quaffs them all. He spends his evenings in the Drones Club sipping b-and-s with friends with nicknames like Pongo and Oofy and Catsmeat. Their world is, by and large, insulated and the outside hardly impinges. Political, social and economic upheavals like the Great Depression and the World War hardly penetrate the walls of their world though some unwelcome global news item does at time creep into the narrative.

Wodehouse served up a remarkably smooth verbal stew of rather lumpy elements: English slang, American slang, literary allusions, needless abbreviations, mixed metaphors and fussily precise details about trivialities. But much of his appeal lies in the outlandish similes, particularly those drawn from the natural world: 'She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression'; 'Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow'; 'She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest'.

'This insidious but good-humoured subversion of the language, conducted with straight-faced aplomb,' Shashi Tharoor says, 'appeals most of all to a people who have acquired English, but rebel against its heritage.' One could not agree with him more.

The tongue-in-cheek digs of Wodehouse at the British nobility with double-barrelled surnames like Fotheringay-Phipps (pronounced 'Funghy Fipps') and Fink-Nottle, and nicknames like Chuffy and Tuppy are so delectable. How dull life would have been without Plum!

BLONDIE, PEANTS, ASTERIX AND OTHERS

A few years back I had written about Ramu Salivati, my roommate in the YMCA Hostel on Chowrighree Road, Calcutta in the early 1970s. It was his copy of The Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker that I borrowed and read with abiding interest. Till I read it, the only words I knew about the grammar of cartoons was balloons – the bubble in which the words spoken by a character are written. A slender volume – just about 100 pages, give or take ten – with several cartoons occupying a major part of many pages, it familiarized me with terms like plewds, sphericasia, grawlixes and squeans. 

The other day I chanced upon a pdf version of the charming little book. It brought all those words back – and many more that I had forgotten.

The author is no mean person: he is the creator of popular comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. In this book, he attempts taxonomy of cartoons and the symbols used in comic strips around the world. I would not say that these are sophisticated examples of evolved cartoons. But after reading The Lexicon, one tends to appreciate his comic strips more.

For a lay reader like me, The Lexicon of Comicana‘s principal charm is that it lays out a series of cartooning phenomena that you’ve probably never thought too hard about, gives them funny, onomatopoeic names, and then lays out examples of how your favorite comic strip might use them.

For example, take emanata. These are symbols that emanate outwards from cartoon characters to show their internal state. Then there are plewds, the drops of sweat that spray outwards from a cartoon character under emotional distress. Squeans are what you see above the heads of inebriated characters. If that squean is accompanied by a spurl, it means he has drunk himself silly.

When Sarge punches Beetle Bailey, it is made up of three elements: briffit (the little cloud of dust to show where the punch started), swalloop (the arc of the fist as it smashes across Beetle’s jaw) and whitope (the point where the fist lands). Briffits are most often accompanied by hites: horizontal lines representing speed. There are also uphites and downhites, which come out of a character when he is jumping or falling. Agitrons indicate the movement caused by shaking something hard. The general term for all these lines drawn to show movement is a sphericasia.

There is also the indotherm, a squiggly line that might drift out of a cup of coffee to show that it is hot. And the waftatron, the wisp of stream that comes from a lip-smacking pie to show that it smells good.

Going back to balloons, Walker refers to them as fumetti (which is Italian for “balloon”). Soliloquies and thoughts are represented cumulus fumetti while conversation from the other end of a phone are called “AT&T fumetti“ suggesting that the voice is being relayed electronically. For yelling, you use the ‘Boom!’ fumetti, where the contours of the balloon are drawn in spikes.

When a character has this irrepressible urge to say cusswords, he is expected to self-censor and use the bizarre iconography of maladicta. It is made up of jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes. Quimps are  astrological symbols, jarns are different types of spirals, nittles are bursting stars, and grawlixes are squiggly lines that represent ostensibly obliterated epithets. The cartoonist often mixes them to reflect the level of profanity he wants.

This is all a lot of fun, of course, and at the end of the day, the grammar, taxonomy, and classification of cartoon symbols with which The Lexicon of Comicana concerns itself might seem like a bunch of tongue-in-cheek silliness. That’s because it really is!