Volume 29, Number 14 · September 23, 1982
The Natural Artificer
By Alexander Cockburn
P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography
by Frances Donaldson
Knopf, 369 pp., $18.50
Somewhat as if Robinson Crusoe tried to tell Man Friday about Yorkshire pudding, it's hard to explain Wodehouse to the uninitiated. He evolved a comedy of manners and a mannered style that came into perfect fluency and equilibrium by the early Thirties. In the early Fifties that tautness of control began to slacken. I myself believe that he reached the summit of his careful art with The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938, and Joy in the Morning, largely written as the Germans were preparing to invade France, polished as they bore Wodehouse off from Le Touquet to internment in Germany, and published after the war. His latest biographer, Frances Donaldson, believes the peak came earlier, with Thank You, Jeeves, in 1934. Wodehouse himself preferred Quick Service, published in 1940.
Review, 3893 words
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