There are basically two kinds of people in the world: those who think that PG Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer in the English language; and those who for the life of them can’t see what the fuss is about. I am firmly in the former camp, which is why I was fascinated by BBC4’s Wodehouse in Exile (screened last Monday and still available on iPlayer as I write on Sunday morning).

It deals with the one great blunder that Wodehouse made in his life – broadcasting (on German radio) some light-hearted reminiscences of his time as an internee in a German prison camp. Coming at the height of World War II and before the United States entered the war, this was a bone-headed idea which led to him being accused of treachery in Britain and to permanent (if luxurious) exile in the United States.

It was a terrific production, with Tim Piggott-Smith giving a wonderful performance as a bemused innocent at large in a dangerous world, and by Zoe Wanamaker as Ethel, Wodehouse’s fiery, exotic wife. Nigel Williams’s screenplay did a great job of explaining how ‘Plum’ got into the mess, and of what a tragedy it turned out to be.

Checking with the two Wodehouse biographies (Robert McCrum’s and Frances Dolandson’s) in my collection suggests that the screenplay was pretty accurate. But what was most striking to me was a realisation that the reason Wodehouse was so good at bringing two of his greatest creations – Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth – to life is that he was, in a way, just describing himself. In real life he was, like Bertie, a good-hearted, innocent chump.

As readers of this blog know, I love the Economist‘s cover art, even if I think the editorial line is sometimes nuts. This week the magazine (which persists in describing itself as a “newspaper”) has decided that the way to expand Heathrow airport is to do so by building up to four new runways to the west, over what is now a reservoir.

One side-effect of this idea would be to place the flight-path directly over Windsor Castle, which might cheese off its current owners, a thought neatly captured by the cover.

Writing to his Commanding Officer, Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman…

My Dear Sir Francis

I fear we have shipped up – a close shave. I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day. I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve under you. I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job.  It was the younger men that went under first. Finally I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them. After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.

Good-bye and good-bye to dear Lady Bridgeman

Yours ever

R. Scott

Excuse writing – it is -40, and has been for nigh a month

[Source]

The letter has been acquired by Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute and released 101 years since Scott’s final diary entry (for March 29, 1912).

It’s Good Friday and when driving one of my kids to the station I was surprised by how much traffic there was. When I was a kid, Good Friday was the most boring and longest day of the year. In Catholic rural Ireland in the 1950s, you see, nothing, but nothing, moved on Good Friday. All the shops and offices were closed. No pubs, no buses. And almost no traffic. Then at 3pm everyone trooped to the church for three hours of interminable ceremony supposedly commemorating the passion and crucifixion of Christ. And all this decades before Mel Gibson got in on the act.

One Good Friday, though, sticks in my memory. We were staying with my grandparents in the tiny Mayo village where they lived. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day. Nothing moved. Even the stray dogs in the street seemed to stop scratching. I know because I was out all day on the street watching them, waiting for my father to arrive.

He had gone to Dublin the previous day on the train to buy our family’s first car — a Morris Minor — and was driving it back to Mayo. This was a big deal in the 1950s. And an even bigger deal for us, because it was the biggest purchase my parents had ever made up to that point. (They weren’t able to afford to buy a house until much later.) The weeks preceding this particular Good Friday had been taken up with intense discussions of what vehicle to buy. I seem to remember that it came down in the end to a choice between a boxy-looking Fiat and the Morris. Brochures were solemnly consulted, and opinions sought. But in the end it came down to the solid British product. And that is what I was excitedly awaiting on that hot, airless afternoon.

What I was desperate for, of course, was that Da should arrive before I was dragged off to church by my ultra-devout mother. I didn’t hold out much hope: Dublin was a long way away, and in those days people were supposed to drive new cars gently. They used to have notices on the back saying “Running in, please pass.”

But miraculously he made it in time! To this day I can recall the shiny black metalwork of the tiny car, the shiny chromework, its red upholstery, the clean functional dashboard dominated by a single dial. And the smell! That new-car smell that, even today, people remark upon when they enter a new vehicle. And then I was dragged off to church. Needless to say, I remember nothing of the ensuing service. But I still remember the aroma of our new car.

Well, it’s a start anyway.

Wonderful little memoir by Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Review of Books about his first paid employment — working for Vladimir Nabokov, who what then teaching his Eng Lit course at Cornell.

So began the course. Unfortunately, distracted by the gorges, lakes, movie houses, corridor dates, and other more local enchantments of Ithaca, I did not get around to reading any of Anna Karenina before Nabokov sprang a pop quiz. It consisted of an essay question: “Describe the train station in which Anna first met Vronsky.”

Initially, I was stymied by this question because, having not yet read the book, I did not know how Tolstoy had portrayed the station. But I did recall the station shown in the 1948 movie starring Vivien Leigh. Having something of an eidetic memory, I was able to visualize a vulnerable-looking Leigh in her black dress wandering through the station, and, to fill the exam book, I described in great detail everything shown in the movie, from a bearded vendor hawking tea in a potbellied copper samovar to two white doves practically nesting overhead. Only after the exam did I learn that many of the details I described from the movie were not in the book. Evidently, the director Julien Duvivier had had ideas of his own. Consequently, when Nabokov asked “seat 121” to report to his office after class, I fully expected to be failed, or even thrown out of Dirty Lit.

What I had not taken into account was Nabokov’s theory that great novelists create pictures in the minds of their readers that go far beyond what they describe in the words in their books. In any case, since I was presumably the only one taking the exam to confirm his theory by describing what was not in the book, and since he apparently had no idea of Duvivier’s film, he not only gave me the numerical equivalent of an A, but offered me a one-day-a-week job as an “auxiliary course assistant.” I was to be paid $10 a week.

I guess that this was the course which eventually led tp one of my favourite books — Lectures on Literature. It contains some of the best dissections of novels that I have ever read.

It is also highly idiosyncratic (which is probably why, as a non-literary type, I love it). There’s a neat review of it on Amazon which says:

Vladimir Nabokov’s approach to European literary masterpieces is both funny and enlightening. Of special interest for the uninitiated into the Nabokovian world view are the essays “Good Readers and Good Writers” and “The Art of Literature and Commonsense”. But beware: if you want to read a straight academic approach to the writers treated in this book you have chosen the wrong book. Some of Nabokov’s comments are fantastic, especially his reading of Flaubert and Proust are exceptionally good, but they are not wissenschaft in the traditional manner. These lectures say more about Nabokov the writer than they say about other writers.

Quite so.