My Mother Was Right

As a child my mother foisted Wodehouse upon me. My parents were not much on strict cultural direction, but an exception was made for Wodehouse. It was purposefully placed in my hands. I have not regretted this, and, it turns out, neither has Hugh Laurie (bet you didn't know there was a Russian Wodehouse Society).

But I have always taken Wodehouse as the master of a niche, not of an art. Sort of a literary Pieter Brueghel or JJ Cale: he does his thing, and it's really good - but the flawless execution comes hand-in-hand with limited scope. And really, that's what you want from Wodehouse. He plays between the lines. You can pickup anything he wrote between 1881 and 1975 and you will not encounter an ugly or unpleasant moment.

But tonight I did find a bit of a surprise in his little-known but still-superb A Damsel in Distress. Written in 1919, this is still considered an "early work" (though I'd challenge anyone to find evidence of immaturity in it). And right there in chapter 5 is a passage about women that I am convinced has strong autobiographical content. Critics have always wondered about Wodehouse's women, and particularly about the lack of physical passion in his works and (apparently) his life. Day and Ring note that he had the mumps when young, and that impotence was not an unusual result. But this passage offers another possible explanation:

During the last the five years women had found him more or less cold. It was the nature of his profession that had largely brought about this cooling of the emotions. To a man, like George [or to Wodehouse -DrX], who has worked year in and year out at the composition of musical comedies, woman comes to lose many of those attractive qualities which ensnare the ordinary male. To George, of late years, it had begun to seem that the salient feature of woman as a sex was her disposition to kick. For five years he had been wandering in a world of women, many of them beautiful, all of the superficially attractive, who had left no other impress on his memory except the vigor and frequency with which they had kicked. Some had kicked about their musical numbers, some about their love-scenes; some had grumbled about their exit lines, others about the lines of their second-act frocks. They had kicked in a myriad differing ways - wrathfully, sweetly, noisily, softly, smilingly, tearfully, pathetically and patronisingly; but they had all kicked; with the result that women had now become to George not so much a flaming inspiration or a tender goddess as something to be dodged - tactfully, if possible; but, if not possible, by open flight.

Of course George does fall in love, and lives happily ever after. After some hunting, Wodehouse did too.