Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (7 page)

In the three decades since his death, much has changed in India, but Wodehouse still commands the heights. His works are sold on railway station platforms and airport book-stalls alongside the latest best-sellers. In 1988 the state-run television network broadcast a ten-part Hindi adaptation of his 1923 classic
Leave It to Psmith,
with the Shropshire castle of the earl of Emsworth becoming the Rajasthani palace of an indolent maharaja. (The series was a disaster: Wodehousean purists were appalled by the changes, and the TV audience discovered that English humor does not translate too well into Hindi.) Quiz contests, a popular activity in urban India, continue to feature questions about Wodehouse's books (“What is Jeeves's first name?” “Which of Bertie Wooster's fiancées persisted in calling the stars ‘God's daisy chain’?”) But, alas, reports from St. Stephen's College tell me that the Wodehouse Society is now defunct, having fallen into disrepute when one of its Practical Joke Weeks went awry.

Many are astonished at the extent of Wodehouse's popularity in India, particularly when, elsewhere in the English-speaking world, he is no longer much read. Americans know Wodehouse from reruns of earlier TV versions of his short stories on programs with names like
Masterpiece Theatre
on public television, but these have a limited audience, even though some of Wodehouse's funniest stories were set in
Hollywood, and he lived the last three decades of his life in Remsenberg, Long Island. The critic Michael Dirda noted in the
Washington Post
some years ago that Wodehouse “seems to have lost his general audience and become mainly a cult author savored by connoisseurs for his prose artistry.” That is increasingly true in England and the rest of the Commonwealth, but not in India. While no English-language writer can truly be said to have a “mass” following in India, where only 2 percent of the population read English, Wodehouse has maintained a general rather than a cult audience amongst this Anglophone minority: unlike others who have enjoyed fleeting success, he has never gone out of fashion. This bewilders those who think that nothing could be further removed from Indian life, with its poverty and political intensity, than the cheerfully silly escapades of Wodehouse's decadent Edwardian Young Men in Spats. Indians enjoying Wodehouse, they suggest, makes about as much sense as the cognoscenti of Chad lapping up Jay McInerney or Candace Bushnell.

At one level, India's fascination with Wodehouse is indeed one of those enduring and endearing international mysteries, like why Pakistanis are good at squash but none of their neighbors are, or why the Americans, who can afford to do anything correctly, have never managed to understand that tea is made with boiling water, not merely boiled water. And yet many have convinced themselves that there is more to it than that. Some have seen in Wodehouse's popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj, the British Empire in India. Writing in 1988, the journalist Richard West thought India's Wodehouse devotees were those who “hanker after
the England of 50 years ago [i.e., the 1930s]. That was the age when the English loved and treasured their own language, when schoolchildren learned Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Rudyard Kipling…. It was Malcolm Muggeridge who remarked that the Indians are now the last Englishmen. That may be why they love the quintessentially English writer, P. G. Wodehouse.”

Those lines are, of course, somewhat more fatuous than anything Wodehouse himself ever wrote. Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself, and the Raj is largely absent from his books. (There is only one notable exception I can recall from his oeuvre, in a 1935 short story: “Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience.” But Indians saw that that comment was meant to elicit laughter, not agreement.) If anything, Wodehouse is one British writer whom Indian nationalists could admire without fear of political incorrectness. My former mother-in-law, the daughter of a prominent Indian nationalist politician, remembers introducing Britain's last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, in 1947 to the works of Wodehouse; it was typical that the symbol of the British Empire had not read the “quintessentially English” Wodehouse but that the Indian freedom fighter had.

Indeed, it is precisely the lack of politics in Wode-house's
writing, or indeed of any other social or philosophical content, that made what Waugh called his “idyllic world” so free of the trappings of Englishness, quintessential or otherwise. Unlike almost any other writer, Wodehouse does not require his readers to identify with any of his characters: they are stock figures, almost theatrical archetypes whose carefully plotted exits and entrances one follows because they are amusing, not because one is actually meant to care about them. Whereas other English novelists burdened their readers with the specificities of their characters’ lives and circumstances, Wodehouse's existed in a never-never land that was almost as unreal to his English readers as to his Indian ones. Indian readers were able to enjoy Wodehouse free of the anxiety of allegiance; for all its droll particularities, the world he created, from London's Drones Club to the village of Matcham Scratchings, was a world of the imagination, to which Indians required no visa.

But they did need a passport, and that was the English language. English was undoubtedly Britain's most valuable and abiding legacy to India, and educated Indians, a famously polyglot people, rapidly learned and delighted in it — both for itself, and as a means to various ends. These ends were both political (for Indians turned the language of the imperialists into the language of nationalism) and pleasurable (for the language granted access to a wider world of ideas and entertainments). It was only natural that Indians would enjoy a writer who used language as Wodehouse did — playing with its rich storehouse of classical precedents, mockingly subverting the very canons colonialism had taught Indians they were supposed to venerate. “He
groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.” Or: “The butler was looking nervous, like Macbeth interviewing Lady Macbeth after one of her visits to the spare room.” And best of all, in a country ruled for the better part of two centuries by the dispensable siblings of the British nobility: “Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.”

That sentence captures much of the Wodehouse magic — what P. N. Furbank called his “comic pretence of verbal precision, an exhibition of lexicology.” Wodehouse's writing embodied erudition, literary allusion, jocular slang, and an uncanny sense of timing that owed much to the long-extinct art of music-hall comedy: “She… [resembled] one of those engravings of the mistresses of Bourbon kings which make one feel that the monarchs who selected them must have been men of iron, impervious to fear, or else short-sighted.” Furbank thought Wodehouse's “whole style [was] a joke about literacy.” But it is a particularly literate joke. No authorial dedication will ever match Wodehouse's oft-plagiarized classic, for his 1925 collection of golfing stories
The Heart of a Goof:
“To my daughter Leonora, without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”

Part of Wodehouse's appeal to Indians certainly lies in the uniqueness of his style, which inveigled us into a sort of conspiracy of universalism: his humor was inclusive, for his mock-serious generalizations were, of course, as absurd to
those he was ostensibly writing about as to us. “Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” The terrifying Honoria Glossop has “a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.” Aunts, who always loom large in Wodehouse's world, bellow to each other “like mastodons across the primeval swamp.” Jeeves, the gentle-man's personal gentleman, coughs softly, like “a very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.” Evelyn Waugh worshiped Wodehouse's penchant for tossing off original similes: “a soul as grey as a stevedore's undervest”; “her face was shining like the seat of a bus driver's trousers”; “a slow, pleasant voice, like clotted cream made audible”; “she looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.” My own favorites stretch the possibilities of the language in unexpected ways: “She had more curves than a scenic railway”; “I turned him down like a bedspread”; and the much-quoted “if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

This insidious but good-humored subversion of the language, conducted with straight-faced aplomb, appeals most of all to a people who have acquired English but rebel against its heritage. The colonial connection left strange patterns on the minds of the connected. Wodehouse's is a world we can share with the English on equal terms, because they are just as surprised by its enchantments. As we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of his first novel, perhaps that is as good an argument as any for a long-overdue Wodehouse revival in England.

D
URING 2003, A GREAT DEAL, SOME OF IT VALUABLE
, was written about the much-heralded centenary of that great writer and humanist George Orwell. But earlier that year most of the world press missed another centenary altogether — also that of an Englishman of letters with something of an Indian connection. This might not be entirely surprising, since few reputations are as evanescent as those forged in the transient arena of popular journalism, which is where Malcolm Muggeridge, who would have turned one hundred in March 2003, made his name. But just three decades ago, at the height of his fame, Malcolm Muggeridge was surely among the half-dozen best-known Britons in India, and it is a little too soon, in my view, for us to have completely forgotten him.

Muggeridge is best remembered in India as the man who “discovered” Mother Teresa — the journalist whose impassioned reporting of her work, captured first on BBC television and then more memorably in the 1969 book
Something Beautiful for God,
first catapulted the Calcutta missionary to worldwide attention. At the time Muggeridge declared that he “saw life as an eternal battle between two irreconcilable opposites, the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit.” His admiration for Mother Teresa helped convince him of the triumph of the spirit, and turned him into an increasingly religious figure, who was finally received into the Roman Catholic faith in 1982, at the age of seventy-nine. “God made the world,” Muggeridge observed, “and saw that it was good.” When he died in 1990 it was the Malcolm Muggeridge of Catholic compassion whom the Indian obituarists all memorialized.

But this was in fact an unlikely ending for a notorious libertine; for most of his life it was the world of the flesh that Muggeridge inhabited, and in which he dazzled. The son of a socialist factory clerk in a London suburb, Malcolm Muggeridge was a brilliant student at Cambridge who developed by his late twenties into a formidable writer and commentator of sharp intelligence, admirable originality (“never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream,” he once remarked), and coruscating wit (Prime Minister Anthony Eden “was not only a bore, he bored for England”). Muggeridge wrote plays, published novels, and reported on pretty much every event of worldwide importance from the 1930s to the 1970s. He did so, of course, in print, his byline appearing in virtually every English newspaper we have ever heard of in India, from the
Guardian
and the
New Statesman
to the
Listener
and
Punch
(which he edited for five years). But he was also a famous radio broadcaster on the BBC from the 1940s, and an early television celebrity, so
famous in Britain that Madame Tussaud's immortalized him in wax in 1968 alongside such other cultural icons of the day as Elizabeth Taylor and the Beatles.

Muggeridge also produced a remarkable amount of personal reflection, scribbling frank and perceptive dissections of his contemporaries into his diaries (for the delectation thereafter of a wide readership), and authoring two volumes of memoirs with the delicious title
Chronicles of Wasted Time.
Much of Muggeridge's appeal, it must be said, lay in his irreverence. Visiting Tokyo after World War II, he attended a public appearance by Emperor Hirohito and described him as a “nervous, shy, stuttering, pathetic figure, formerly god.” He began an interview with Salvador Dalí not with some pretentious question about modern art but by asking what happened to the painter's famous upwardly pointed mustaches at night (“they droop,” Dalí replied). Muggeridge was so contemptuous of the soap-opera conduct of the British royal family in the 1950s that the BBC briefly exiled him from the ether (he was too popular for them to banish him altogether). This was in reaction to the relatively decorous affair between Princess Margaret and the gentlemanly Group Captain Peter Townsend; one shudders to think what Muggeridge would have made of Princess Di and Fergie.

But if he was famously contrarian, it was in the service of a larger cause — the preservation of a society in which “everything should be subject to criticism,” authority was always suspect, and conformism was to be avoided. Though brought up as a socialist, and married to the niece of the famous Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Muggeridge was
wary of the socialists’ starry-eyed idealism, and fierce in his denunciations of Stalinism. Reporting from Moscow, he was amongst the first to broadcast exposés of Soviet tyranny, at a time when the Communist experiment was still idealized by the Left; and he was equally early to denounce Fascism and Nazism in his journalism from Berlin. Within a decade of World War II he was scathing about the dangers of liberalism, calling it “the destructive force of the age” because it assumed a willingness on the part of individuals to live amicably “seeking one another's good” — a “fantasy” that “in human terms, cannot be.” Hence Muggeridge on the welfare state: “a kind of zoo which provides its inmates with ease and comfort and unfits them for life in their natural habitat.”