P.G. Wodehouse

The genius of P.G. Wodehouse lies less in the fact of what he's writing than in how he writes. In fact, I could see him penning a tome on the various habits of the Pomacea canaliculata, the common garden snail, and I would be enraptured the whole way through, perhaps with rivulets of tears coursing down my cheeks, my sobbing cataracts pooling on the floor below me.

To illustrate the point, I offer some choice quotes from the book I finished last night, Leave It To Psmith.

"At the open window of the great library of Blandings Castle, drooping like a wet sock, as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against, the Earl of Emsworth, that amiable and boneheaded peer, stood gazing out over his domain."

Hilarious, to be sure, but perhaps best appreciated when compared to what he didn't write: "At the open window of the great library of Blandings Castle...the Earl of Emsworth...stood gazing out over his domain."

That's quite a different piece altogether, now isn't it. And consider how each appositive or aside changes the direction of the text dramatically: "drooping like a wet sock." The grand vision of a rustic castle is now adorned with some human slouching like a soggy sock. But Wodehouse doesn't stop there: "as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against." Talk about a spineless character! He sounds like an anthropomorphic invertebrate who ends up being the Earl himself, but is actually amiable (though dense as iridium).

That's just the first line of the book.

I won't proceed through the rest of the text, stripping humor from the lines by meticulous, and ridiculous, examination, but I will pick out a couple other winners:

"He could not analyse the sound, but the fact that there was any sound at all in such a place at such an hour increased his suspicions that dark doings were toward which would pay for investigation. With stealthy steps he crept to the head of the stairs and descended.

One uses the word 'descend' advisedly, for what is required is some word suggesting instantaneous activity. About Baxter's progress from the second floor to the first there was nothing halting or hesitating. He, so to speak, did it now. Planting his foot firmly on a golf-ball which the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who had been practising putting in the corridor before retiring to bed, had left in casual fashion just where the steps began, he took the entire staircase in one majestic, volplaning sweep. There were eleven stairs in all separating his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the third and tenth. He came to rest with a squattering thud ont he lower landing, and for a moment or two the fece of the chase had left him."

And finally, a selection from a speech of Psmith's:

"Mine, Miss Clarkson, is a refined and poetic nature. I like to be surrounded by joy and life, and I know nothing more joyless and deader than a dead fish. Multiply that dead fish by a million, and you have an environment which only a Dante could contemplate with equanimity. My uncle used to tell me that the way to ascertain whether a fish was fresh was to peer into its eyes. Could I spend the springtime of life staring into the eyes of dead fish? No!"

Read it with laughter and joy as your reward for doing so.