Vikram Doraiswami pays tribute to PG Wodehouse’s timeless brilliance

VIKRAM DORAISWAMI, the Republic of India’s plenipotentiary to the Court of PG Wodehouse in the UK, last week paid tribute to the author to mark the 50th anniversary of his passing.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century, was born on October 15,1881 and died on February 14, 1975.

Indians, in particular, warm to his two most famous creations – Bertie Wooster, who is well off, but is unfamiliar with the concept of “work”, and Jeeves, his gentlemens’ gentleman.

It was confidentially pointed out to members of the PG Wodehouse Society (UK), gathered at the Savile Club near Claridge’s, that the said Vikram Doraiswami has been spotted sneaking into a building in the Aldwych, where he allegedly moonlights as India’s High Commissioner to the UK.

At the society, where he was welcomed by Tim Andrew, its chairman, and Paul Kent, vice-chairman, he passes himself off as just “Vikram”.

Indeed, when Vikram made his debut at the society in 2023, he claimed Jeeves was “a disguised Indian”. He also said that Wodehouse has more followers in India than in the land of his birth.

Kent introduced Vikram as the evening’s main event: “The first time was such an unqualified success we’ve decided to invite him back. In two visits, he’s established himself as a friend of the society.”

Vikram expressed regret that he had missed a service at Westminster Abbey where there is a memorial plaque to Wodehouse. Since two of his favourite Wodehouse stars – Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – had been present, Vikram admitted: “I would have been quite happy to ensure somebody had needed a burial at that point of time to get there.”

He offered an apology to Bill Franklin, president of the PG Wodehouse Society in America, who was in the audience, “because there are a lot of references here to cricket, which as you all know, is an Indian sport invented by the British”. Vikram revealed he has been a Wodehouse fan “since the age of 12, when I picked up my mum’s copy of Summer Lightning”.

Indeed, he quoted Wodehouse’s introduction to Summer Lightning: “A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

Vikram spoke of the art of innovation in Wodehouse’s writing: “Growing up in India, I saw in this ability to stick with great discipline to his defined stylistic batting crease, but to innovate brilliantly within it, a similarity to Indian classical music. Here, too, the artist improvises within a set frame of chords and scales which we call raagas.”

“But this theme is also visible, if in a less highbrow art form, in the gloriously exhilarating stew that is the Indian film Industry,” he went on. “Here, too, the core theme is about boy meeting girl, boy losing girl, and boy getting girl again at the last reel, something that Wodehouse did to perfection time and again. No wonder then that Indians continue to lap up both Bollywood and Wodehouse, albeit not simultaneously, of course.”

Vikram said he was offering “with some trepidation a layman’s perspective on the enduring value of the work of this wizard of a wordsmith, a true master of metaphor. But in my defence, let me just say that there is no better time than this to revisit Wodehouse: even a cursory look at headlines shows us the value of his advice to tune out, if at least for a brief moment. As he said, ‘If there is a better world to detach oneself from than the one functioning at the moment, I have yet to hear of it.’”

He emphasised Wodehouse worked hard in order to produce perfect prose, and used cricketing analogies to make his argument: “The softness of Wodehouse’s hands while at bat is visible in every sentence of his work.

“We all know how deftly he used a few well-tested, structurally solid and finely chiselled core themes repeatedly. And yet the repetition of core themes does not pale, even though he crafted well over 150 plots – counting books and short stories together – which sparkle with his deft creativity, even within the tight confines of familiar or similar places.”

Vikram said: “The consummate skill with which Wodehouse could turn a sentence – often including multiple ideas, covering some that turn ninety degrees in the space of a sentence – is better than anything that even the legendary Bishan Singh Bedi produced.”

He gave two examples.

“Take this line from Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin, which threatens to turn sharply, but is actually a straight ’un: ‘There are girls, few perhaps but to be found if one searches carefully, who when their advice is ignored and disaster ensues, do not say, ‘I told you so’. Mavis was not of their number.’

“Or this line, a personal favourite: ‘It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused AB Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.’”

Doraiswami addresses the gathering

Wodehouse made hard work look simple and effortless. “Take this complex sentence from his school stories (Tales of St Austin’s): ‘No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.’”

Vikram joked about WFH: “He was ahead of his times and perhaps even our time: after all, he was the original success story in terms of his output and his success while working exclusively from home. Indeed, there may be no better advertisement for the millennial generation to visit the world of Wodehouse than to recognise that it is possible to succeed while working from home.”

Wodehouse was self-deprecating, but did occasionally tip the hat in his own direction but with tongue firmly in his cheek.

In The Clicking of Cuthbert, Vladimir Brusiloff, that densely bearded portrayer of persecuted peasants, says: “No novelists any good except me. Sovietski – yah! Nastikoff – bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. PG Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.”

Wodehouse worked harder than most of his contemporaries, concluded Vikram, “to produce a world of moderation, grace and subtlety. Few authors can claim to have created a world as perfect as he did. And for those brief hours of pleasure that we are given by re-entering his perfect, ageless, and gentle world, we should be very grateful. There are few things that are better than the knowledge that Wodehouse’s world remains one of the few things that will survive the chaos of our current age just as they did through two world wars, a cold war and much else.”

Vikram looked forward “to being around in spirit at least – sort of like Banquo popping in for supper – when the centenary of his passing comes around. I will try not to scare our grandchildren, who will by then be running our society for their descendants to continue to delight in the art, craft, graft and skill of Sir PG Wodehouse.”