Preventing Grace
Someone asked a very reasonable question some indeterminate time ago which I neglected to answer and felt very very bad about, so I’m devoting myself to answering it now.
The question was, essentially, If I’ve never read any PG Wodehouse, where should I start?
And of course I couldn’t just easily answer it because it’s such an Important Matter, and requires so much thought and consideration that I’ve been sitting on it for some time–such a long time, in fact, that I can’t find the original question, nor remember who asked it, and so it may be that I made it up in my own mind. Nevertheless, I will answer it now.
The answer, then, is,
It Depends.
I have assembled some diagnostic questions to help you navigate your way into the World of Wodehouse. My dream destiny thingy is that this idyllic world will engulf you and you will never read any other kind of book ever again. My nightmare is that you will pick up some Jeeves or Uncle Dynamite book or other, give it a fifteen second try, and go back to reading all the rubbish in the world, like Twilight or Harry Potter or Shakespeare (that’s a joke–if you haven’t read Shakespeare, or the Bible, you should immediately drop everything and do so so that you can better savor Wodehouse.)
So, there you are, standing in the library, looking at all the books, and the questions you want to ask yourself are, and I suppose these don’t need to be in any particular order,
1. Do you like pigs? Very very fat pigs?
2. Do you want to leap from the complexity of modern life into the complexity of a world where the most pressing concern is how to avail yourself of the enormous steak and kidney pie resting over night in the larder because your wretched fiancé, who thinks that fairies talk to bunny rabbits, won’t let you eat the flesh of animals slain in anger?
3. Do you have too many aunts? Aunts that bay like mastodons across the primeval swamp?
4. Do you prefer the very competent gentleman’s personal gentleman who won’t let you keep your ghastly mess jacket that you picked up in Cannes or the much larger soul soothing butler who can always be prevailed upon to ply you with port in his pantry when you’ve been shattered by the alarming knowledge that your neighbor is trying to steel your brother’s prize winning pig?
5. Do you love New York as it probably never existed but Should Have.
6. Do you wish you could pack it all in and take up bee keeping on Long Island?
7. Do you want to revel in a world where there could even be women whose hats where right and stockings were right and shoes were right?
8. Women who would sit down at a capacious tea table and tuck in while easily solving your problem of how to sell your crumbling hideously remodeled estate to an American millionaire who doesn’t know better?
9. Do you want to read lines so carefully crafted, so charming in cadence, so surprising in simile that you have to stop and read them aloud over and over, committing them to memory so that you say them back to yourself in moments of stress?
10. Do you wish that all your biblical knowledge had some practical use?
If the answer to any of these questions in a Resounding Yes, then you should pick up, hmmm, I would say, Summer Lightning and The Inimitable Jeeves. I would take them and sort of shuffle them around behind your back and then whichever your hand brought forward first, read that one, or maybe the other one. And then just keep reading, whatever it takes. Steeling copies off of other people’s shelves, forgetting to return hard cover anthologies to the library so that you just have to finally fork over cash to own them outright, ordering them from Amazon even. Whatever It Takes.
If the answer to all those questions was No, well, then, I don’t know what to do about you. May God have mercy on your soul is all I can say. I don’t know how you can possibly carry on putting one foot in front of the other through life.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go toast myself a crumpet.
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