Ask Jeeves

A name has floated in and out of my gravitational field recently.  Perhaps it's always been there, like a distant planet or black hole that no one's ever been able to find with a telescope but we know it's there because of the gravitational effect it has on the other planets.  I've finally fixed my telescope on him.

P. G. Wodehouse:  1881-1975, English humorist, and, as everyone who reads him says, a master of the English language.  Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, which I found at the Printers Row Lit Fest a few weeks ago, was delightful.  The plot was entertaining but doesn't really matter.  It involved an election, theft, petty revenge, a sleeping cat, unwise engagements, and a stolen book.  The core of the book is in (a) the characters and (b) the language.

(a) The Characters.  This is one of a series of books telling the adventures of Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves.  Bertie is a blundering, silly aristocrat who always manages to get himself in ridiculous predicaments (in this case, engaged to a woman he despises and falsely accused of theft).  The omniscient and omnicompetent Jeeves reads Shakespeare and philosophy for pleasure and always gets his master out of his scrapes.  The play between the two is golden.

So is (b) the language.  Take these lines:

"Hullo, aged relative."  "Hullo to you, you young blot.  Are you sober?" (16)

"I found myself of two minds.  On the one hand I felt a pang of regret for having missed what had all the earmarks of having been a political meeting of the most rewarding kind [because it ended in a food-throwing riot]; on the other, it was like rare and refreshing fruit to hear that Spode had got hit in the eye with a potato.  I was conscious of awed respect for the marksman who had accomplished this feat.  A potato, being so nobbly in shape, can be aimed accurately only by a master hand." (180)

"I sat up and eased the spine into the pillows.  I was conscious of a profound peace.  'Jeeves,' I said, 'I am conscious of a profound peace.'" (202-203).

Quite fun.