Saturday, August 13, 2005
THE EARLY WODEHOUSE
Was reading Robert McCrum's much acclaimed biography of PG Wodehouse.
Accounts of Plum's brief career in the bank and his travails as a freelance writer are very revealing. Some of the snippents extracted from Plum's By-the-Way column in The Globe 'seem stiff and unfunny' and are a far cry from the virtuoso Jeeves and Blandings novels of the thirties and forties.
Take for instance this piece from one of his columns in the Globe:
Herr Nyman, a poet of the young Finnish School, has been expelled from the native town by the Russian authorities. Their idea is to make him a young Finished poet.
or this:
After forty-six years the widow of an Indian mutiny veteran has just obtained her husband's share of the Lucknow prize money. He was in Lucknow; she is in luck now.
Funny, but seems as though the young Wodehouse was trying too hard to make an impression.
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Was reading Robert McCrum's much acclaimed biography of PG Wodehouse.
Accounts of Plum's brief career in the bank and his travails as a freelance writer are very revealing. Some of the snippents extracted from Plum's By-the-Way column in The Globe 'seem stiff and unfunny' and are a far cry from the virtuoso Jeeves and Blandings novels of the thirties and forties.
Take for instance this piece from one of his columns in the Globe:
Herr Nyman, a poet of the young Finnish School, has been expelled from the native town by the Russian authorities. Their idea is to make him a young Finished poet.
or this:
After forty-six years the widow of an Indian mutiny veteran has just obtained her husband's share of the Lucknow prize money. He was in Lucknow; she is in luck now.
Funny, but seems as though the young Wodehouse was trying too hard to make an impression.
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