“I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express on the small of the back.” (The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923)
“Like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” (Summer Moonshine, 1938)
Two quotes I got while playing with the Random Wodehouse Quote at The Drones’ Club. Great fun.
I ran across it just now while reading about what little we know of P.G. Wodehouse’s meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in New York in the 1920s. Both were successful authors and shared a literary agent. Both lived in Great Neck on Long Island. Wodehouse saw “Scott” on the bus once and wrote a letter about it, but then the curtain falls. (via Books, Inq.)
Ah, Wodehouse. A genius who has fallen victim to the fact that he made it look so easy that people assumed it was easy.
Wodehouse was pure gold–and he got there through hard work. His writing process was *crazy*–12 hour days of incessant revisions on typewritten sheets tacked to his walls.
Have you read Hugh Laurie’s article on “How P.G. Wodehouse Saved My Life?” I’m not sure what you feel about the man in general, but it is, also, pure gold.
http://www.pgwodehousebooks.com/lauriesaved.htm
“But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by PG Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.”
I have not read that. Looks wonderful.
Didn’t Wodehouse his style of writing is to sit at his typewriter and curse?