The Joy of P. G. Wodehouse
His entertaining Jeeves and Bertie stories have inspired TV series, Facebook pages, and Twitter memes
On trips to England, I’ve never made it to Stratford-upon-Avon, but I’ve often walked fondly past a restaurant called Drones, named for the club where Bertie Wooster and his companions threw bread rolls and imitated a hen laying an egg.
What that says about my literary priorities is perhaps best left unexamined.
The restaurant, alas, closed before I could see whether a meal there might inspire the hilarity its namesake did. But the fictional Drones lives on in the work of P.G. Wodehouse, a British banker-turned-humorist who became an American citizen and wrote some of the finest comic novels and short stories of the 20th century.
Wodehouse’s most popular tales involve the rich and idle Bertie, an Oxford-educated Edwardian gentleman, and his unflappable valet, Jeeves.
Bertie is 24 years old when their adventures begin, and Jeeves, a decade or so older. The tales about the two appeared between 1915 and 1974, and in those I’ve read, the two men don’t age. Nor does the dynamic between them change.
Jeeves is forever steering Bertie away from social disasters, whether they center on inappropriate women he’s…
