Wodehouse

I've always been vaguely disgusted by Bertie's worldview and way of being, though the language of the books can be fun and Wodehouse can set Bertie up for funny situations. The point is to laugh, but you have to enter into it a bit to find the effort to find the laughter. The language can be quite poetic and subtle at times.

Sometimes I get into a reading funk and don't know how to get out. I read a few pages of the 10 books I'm stalled on reading. Can't get anything going. I read a post on Reddit asking how to get out of it. I wrote: My pop says Wodehouse but I’m afraid I’ll add this book to my pile of ten books I’m half heartedly reading. I’m more inclined to Slaughterhouse Five, The Hobbit, The Sun Also Rises or Raymond Carver.

So I'm trying Jeeves in the Morning. It occured to me that there's something Quixotic about Jeeves. There's a faint hint of nobility and chivalry but he's really out to just protect himself. I googled Wodehouse and Cervantes, and found a few articles to confirm a connection. Well, maybe. Not really. Weird powerpoint shows. I searched Cervantes in his wikipedia entry and got nothing. 

I didn't know he moved to France to avoid taxes, and then it was occupied. He made broadcasts for Germany, and was seen as a traitor, and never returned to England. He went to America and lived in Long Island. He also wrote musicals with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and other kinds of writing. 

His entry says some find his work flippant, and I guess that's my objection to it, but I'm looking for laugh. I suppose the form of humor is pretty prevalent in sitcoms in America, the uncovering of narcissism and vapidness is seen to be funny. That's Archer, Arrested Development. I really find it difficult to find funny sometimes. I wonder if there's humor with people of virtue. I suppose you have to take a superficial view of life to find humor everywhere, and not get too caught in meaning. He wrote for 72 years, and got 90 books. His grave is a 65 mile drive out onto Long Island.

"Richard Usborne argues that "only a writer who was himself a scholar and had had his face ground into Latin and Greek (especially Thucydides) as a boy" could sustain the complex sequences of subordinate clauses sometimes found in Wodehouse's comic prose." (Wikipedia) His 6 years at Dulwich College were the best of his life.

There's an element of expressing how drama is created by social misreadings. I bet he thinks he was unfairly misread by his compatriots by having 6 radio shows with the occupying German government in France. He moved to America. That to me feels like the pivotal moment in his life. This seeming fop is really with integrity and misunderstood. Sometimes.

He's often trying to get people married, but not himself, so there is an element of Jane Austen from the male perspective. It's the Adele fixation on love lost, and the hopes of love.

He uses the adjective dickens but he doesn't really portray the social element, except the relationship between a man and his butler. Humor might need things to be lighter if you're not a dramatist who also includes humor to help the drama.