Wodehouse and Lewis

I’ve never read a novel or even a story by P.G. Wodehouse, but his Wikipedia biography impressed me greatly. The sad turning-point in his life was, of course, the Second World War. Stranded in German-occupied France, he was (uncomfortably) interned in various places and eventually transported to (comfortable) accommodation in Berlin. There, in 1941, he delivered a series of humorous, very ill-considered radio broadcasts (How to Be an Internee without Previous Training). These outraged the British; after the war, he emigrated to the United States, where he lived out his days, never returning to his native land.

But first he was briefly detained by the French. Malcolm Muggeridge, then with MI6, visited him in Paris and became fond of him. Muggeridge wrote:

The broadcasts, in point of fact, are neither anti- nor pro-German, but just Wodehousian. He is a man singularly ill-fitted to live in a time of ideological conflict, having no feelings of hatred about anyone, and no very strong views about anything. … I never heard him speak bitterly about anyone – not even about old friends who turned against him in distress. Such temperament does not make for good citizenship in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Wodehouse had said in one of the broadcasts:

I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings.

Around the same time, C.S. Lewis was giving the broadcasts in England that would become Mere Christianity, in which this remarkable passage appears:

I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the First World War, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.

Lewis was rather more belligerent than Wodehouse, and not only because of his stated willingness to kill. But the same spirit of chuminess was in both men.

What also struck me about Wodehouse was his work ethic. He was prolific and meticulous:

Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that “It’s the plots that I find so hard to work out.” … He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions. For a novel the note-writing process could take up to two years, and he would usually have two or more novels in preparation simultaneously. After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop.

Wodehouse remarked:

When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, “But he did take trouble.”

Some Catholic (and some non-Catholic) writers

It used to be, whenever I’d learn of a book I didn’t own, I’d have to go to Amazon right away to buy it. But now I’m a faculty member at two different colleges. I have borrowing privileges all out of proportion to what I do for anybody.

So if J.H. posts a link to the effect that Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography was the best autobiography that Mark Noll claimed ever to have read, I can say, “Oh, it’s in the stacks at Bethel,” and a few minutes later I’ll have walked to the campus and secured the book for the next six months.

It turns out that Muggeridge is the insufferable sort of writer whose every sentence is a gemstone. But whatever. I have the book. It feels good in my hand, and the font is nice. The cover has a blurb from someone cranky and pompous:

And the title reminds me of:

He had published eight books … concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Or if Madame mentions Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m at IUSB, I can go to that library and soon the book is in my hand distracting me from the papers I should grade. Anne Lamott repeats her cleverest bits over and over, as Muriel Spark used to do. Anne Lamott must have learned from Muriel Spark, because she pays a sort of tribute to her:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

That person must be Muriel Spark because, a few lines later, Lamott says:

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

And soon I’m looking for evidence that Lamott herself is of the Roman church, but no, either she isn’t or I’m a bad researcher. And anyway she’s different from those other writers because she’s more explicitly self-effacing.

Now, you might wonder why my tone is so grouchy, why I’m so critical of these undeniably fine writers. Well, (1) I’m a grouchy guy; and (2) they were grouchy first, and when I was at a tender age I figured out, by reading such people, that eloquence could atone for being a grouch. Up to a point.