Wodehouse: Mattering By Being Willing Not To Matter

Good article in the October issue of First Things by Joseph Bottum called God and Bertie Wooster , which looks at the work of P.G. Wodehouse and why it was so important in the 20th century:

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse--"P.G. Wodehouse," as he signed his work; "Plum," as he was called by his friends--wrote more than fifty novels, over three hundred short stories, and some twenty-odd plays: a total of ninety-seven books before his death in 1975 at age ninety-three. And the curious thing is that not a single one of them mattered. Not a single one of them converted a soul, or turned a tide, or saved a battle, or carried a flag, or seized a day. He published several million words during his lifetime, and even amid the verbal bloat of our own hyperinflated times, it's hard to imagine a more pointless waste.

Except--well, except that maybe in the sheer insouciance of their failure to be important, they came to be very important indeed. Maybe P.G. Wodehouse matters precisely because he was willing not to matter. Maybe we should take seriously the fact that a major English literary talent of the twentieth century was content to use his perfect prose for no purpose greater than the construction of pleasant farces, gentle comedies, and the buzz of language as it passes through an Edwardian fantasy world of stern aunts, spineless noblemen, soppy girls, and young men in spats.

Still, there was something in those ninety-seven books that the twentieth century needed. You can't say modern times lacked serious fiction, or biting satire, or experimental poetry. You can't say the world was short on big ideas, or intellectual politics, or what Friedrich Nietzsche called philosophizing with a hammer. But maybe we were a little deficient in laughter during the twentieth century. Maybe we still are, in the twenty-first.

Wodehouse may be our best answer to Nietzsche, but he isn't entirely clear on how Young Men in Spats trumps Thus Spake Zarathustra. But suppose that laughter offers blessed escape for a while from the terrible mattering that possessed modern times. Suppose that Christendom--the deep unity of Western culture through the years--survives best not when it is trying to respond to the relentless thud with which secular history marches, but when it dances a little. And suppose that God's grace doesn't dwell just in the tears we shed at the tragedy of the world, but also in the play of comedy. Wodehouse titled one of his best novels Joy in the Morning, after a passage in Psalm 30 that Jeeves quotes to Bertie Wooster: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." And it's true. Joy does come in the morning, and laughter from reading P.G. Wodehouse. That's a small grace, but a real one.