Editing P. G. Wodehouse (section)

==Writing==
{{See also|P. G. Wodehouse bibliography|P. G. Wodehouse short stories bibliography}}

===Technique and approach===
{{Quote box|width=40%|bgcolor=#c6dbf7|align=right | quote= When in due course [[Charon]] ferries me across the [[Styx]] and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, 'But he did take trouble.'|salign = right|source= — Wodehouse on Wodehouse, 1957<ref>Wodehouse, ''Over Seventy'', p. 23</ref>}}

Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that "It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out."<ref name="Paris Review">[[Gerald Clarke (author)|Clarke, Gerald]], "[http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3773/the-art-of-fiction-no-60-p-g-wodehouse P. G. Wodehouse, The Art of Fiction No. 60"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150814120619/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3773/the-art-of-fiction-no-60-p-g-wodehouse |date=14 August 2015 }}, ''[[The Paris Review]]'', Winter 1975</ref> He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions.<ref name="Punch interview">Wodehouse, P.G., Interview, ''[[Punch (magazine)|Punch]]'', May 1966, p. 654</ref> For a novel the note-writing process could take up to two years, and he would usually have two or more novels in preparation simultaneously. After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop.<ref name=Voorhees168>Voorhees (1966), p. 168</ref> When interviewed in 1975 he revealed that "For a humorous novel you've got to have a scenario, and you've got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in&nbsp;... splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible." He preferred working between 4 and 7&nbsp;pm—but never after dinner—and would work seven days a week. In his younger years, he would write around two to three thousand words a day, although he slowed as he aged, so that in his nineties he would produce a thousand. The reduced speed in writing slowed his production of books: when younger he would produce a novel in about three months, while ''[[Bachelors Anonymous]]'', published in 1973, took around six months.<ref name="Paris Review" /><ref>Voorhees (1966), pp. 168–169</ref> Although studies of language production in normal healthy ageing show a marked decline from the mid-70s on, a study of Wodehouse's works did not find any evidence of a decline in linguistic ability with age.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Cotter |first1=Paul E. |last2=Wilkinson |first2=Catherine |last3=Canavan |first3=Michelle |last4=O'Keeffe |first4=Shaun T. |title=Language change with aging in Pelham Grenville Wodehouse and George Bernard Shaw |journal=Journal of the American Geriatrics Society |date=August 2011 |volume=59 |issue=8 |pages=1567–1568 |doi=10.1111/j.1532-5415.2011.03531.x|pmid=21848833 |doi-access=free }}</ref>

Wodehouse believed that one of the factors that made his stories humorous was his view of life, and he stated that "If you take life fairly easily, then you take a humorous view of things. It's probably because you were born that way."<ref name="Paris Review" /> He carried this view through into his writing, describing the approach as "making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether".<ref>Easdale, p. 111</ref> The literary critic Edward L. Galligan considers Wodehouse's stories to show his mastery in adapting the form of the American musical comedy for his writings.<ref name=Galligan /> Wodehouse would ensure that his first draft was as carefully and accurately done as possible, correcting and refining the prose as he wrote, and would then make another good copy, before proofreading again and then making a final copy for his publisher.<ref name="Punch interview" />

[[File:Wodehouse blue plaque.jpg|thumb|right|alt=round blue plaque marking Wodehouse's residence, reading: P. G. Wodehouse, 1881–1975: Writer, lived here|The [[English Heritage]] [[blue plaque]] for Wodehouse at 17 Dunraven Street, Mayfair, in the [[City of Westminster]]]]
Most of Wodehouse's canon is set in an undated period around the 1920s and 1930s.<ref name=March334>Marsh, Pamela (21 December 1967). "The World of Wodehouse", ''[[The Christian Science Monitor]]'' '''60''' (23): 11, ''quoted'' in Pavlovski and Darga, p. 334</ref> The critic Anthony Lejeune describes the settings of Wodehouse's novels, such as the Drones Club and Blandings Castle, as "a fairyland".<ref name=Lejeune333>Lejeune, Anthony (11 December 1995). "Jeeves's England", ''[[National Review]]'': 132, ''quoted'' in Pavlovski and Darga, p. 333</ref> Although some critics thought Wodehouse's fiction was based on a world that had never existed, Wodehouse affirmed that "it did. It was going strong between the wars",<ref name="Paris Review" /> although he agreed that his version was to some extent "a sort of artificial world of my own creation".<ref name="Wodehouse and Donaldson, p. 144">Wodehouse and Donaldson, p. 144</ref> The novels showed a largely unchanging world, regardless of when they were written,<ref name=March334 /><ref name=Lejeune333 /> and only rarely—and mistakenly in McCrum's view—did Wodehouse allow modernity to intrude, as he did in the 1966 story "Bingo Bans the Bomb".<ref>McCrum, pp. 407 and 501</ref>

When dealing with the dialogue in his novels, Wodehouse would consider the book's characters as if they were actors in a play, ensuring that the main roles were kept suitably employed throughout the storyline, which must be strong: "If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them."<ref name="Paris Review" /><ref>Jasen, p. 166</ref> Many of Wodehouse's parts were stereotypes,<ref name=Galligan>Galligan, Edward L. "[https://www.jstor.org/stable/27544522  P.G. Wodehouse Master of Farce"], Sewanee Review, 1985, pp. 609–617 {{subscription required}}</ref> and he acknowledged that "a real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb."<ref name="Wodehouse and Donaldson, p. 144"/> The publisher [[Michael Joseph (publisher)|Michael Joseph]] identifies that even within the stereotypes Wodehouse understood human nature, and therefore "shares with [Charles] Dickens and Charles Chaplin the ability to present the comic resistance of the individual against those superior forces to which we are all subject".<ref>[[Michael Joseph (publisher)|Joseph, Michael]]. "P. G. Wodehouse", ''[[The Bookman (London)|The Bookman]]'', June 1929, p. 151</ref>

Much of Wodehouse's use of slang terms reflects the influence of his time at school in Dulwich, and partly reflects [[Edwardian era|Edwardian]] slang.<ref name="McCrum lang">[[Robert McCrum|McCrum, Robert]]. [http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/features/wodehouse-and-english-language# "Wodehouse and the English Language"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150617125009/http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/features/wodehouse-and-english-language |date=17 June 2015 }}, ''Oxford Today'', 5 May 2011</ref> As a young man he enjoyed the literary works of [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] and [[Jerome K. Jerome]], and the operatic works of Gilbert and Sullivan.<ref>McCrum, Robert, [https://www.jstor.org/stable/41213049 "The Wodehouse Jacquerie"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160316163508/http://www.jstor.org/stable/41213049 |date=16 March 2016 }}, ''[[The American Scholar (magazine)|The American Scholar]]'', Summer 2000, pp. 138–141 {{subscription required}}</ref> Wodehouse quotes from and alludes to numerous poets throughout his work. The scholar Clarke Olney lists those quoted, including [[John Milton|Milton]], [[Lord Byron|Byron]], [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow|Longfellow]], [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge|Coleridge]], [[Algernon Charles Swinburne|Swinburne]], [[Alfred, Lord Tennyson|Tennyson]], [[William Wordsworth|Wordsworth]] and [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]].<ref name=olney>Olney, Clarke. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/41395912 "Wodehouse and the Poets"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160307034812/http://www.jstor.org/stable/41395912 |date=7 March 2016 }}, ''[[The Georgia Review]]'', Winter 1962, pp. 392–399 {{subscription required}}</ref> Another favoured source was the [[King James Bible]].<ref name=olney/><ref>Vesterman, William [http://english.rutgers.edu/images/documents/faculty/vesterman-ja-2005.pdf "Plumtime in Nevereverland, The Divine Comedy of P. G. Wodehouse"], ''Raritan: A Quarterly Review'', Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Summer 2005, pp. 107–108</ref>

===Language===
[[File:Intrusion of Jimmy p073.jpg|thumb|alt=book illustration showing two men squaring up aggressively and a young woman, concealed, watching them. A caption reads: "He had gone to sleep thinking of this girl, and here she was."|Illustration from the 1910 novel ''[[A Gentleman of Leisure]]'']]
In 1941 the ''Concise Cambridge History of English Literature'' opined that Wodehouse had "a gift for highly original aptness of phrase that almost suggests a poet struggling for release among the wild extravagances of farce",<ref>Sampson, pp. 977–978</ref> while McCrum thinks that Wodehouse manages to combine "high farce with the inverted poetry of his mature comic style", particularly in ''[[The Code of the Woosters]]'';<ref name="McCrum lang" /> the novelist [[Anthony Powell]] believes Wodehouse to be a "comic poet".<ref>Voorhees (1966), p. 173</ref> [[Robert A. Hall Jr.]], in his study of Wodehouse's style and technique, describes the author as a master of prose,<ref name="Gage CA" /> an opinion also shared by Levin, who considers Wodehouse "one of the finest and purest writers of English prose".<ref>Levin, Bernard. "As Jeeves would have said: Perfect music, Sir", ''The Times'', 18 February 1975, p. 14</ref> Hall identifies several techniques used by Wodehouse to achieve comic effect, including the creation of new words through adding or removing prefixes and suffixes, so when Pongo Twistleton removes the housemaid Elsie Bean from a cupboard, Wodehouse writes that the character "de-Beaned the cupboard". Wodehouse created new words by splitting others in two, thus Wodehouse divides "hobnobbing" when he writes: "To offer a housemaid a cigarette is not hobbing. Nor, when you light it for her, does that constitute nobbing."<ref name="Gage CA" />

Richard Voorhees, Wodehouse's biographer, believes that the author used clichés in a deliberate and ironic manner.<ref>Voorhees (1966), p. 165</ref> His opinion is shared by the academic [[Stephen Medcalf]], who deems Wodehouse's skill is to "bring a cliché just enough to life to kill it",<ref name="Medcalf 338">[[Stephen Medcalf|Medcalf, Stephen]] (1976). "The Innocence of P. G. Wodehouse" in ''The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Work'', ''quoted'' in Pavlovski and Darga, p. 338</ref> although Pamela March, writing in ''[[The Christian Science Monitor]]'', considers Wodehouse to have "an ability to decliché a cliché".<ref name=March335>Marsh, Pamela (21 December 1967). "The World of Wodehouse", ''[[The Christian Science Monitor]]'' '''60''' (23): 11, ''quoted'' in Pavlovski and Darga, p. 335</ref> Medcalf provides an example from ''Right Ho, Jeeves'' in which the [[Teetotalism|teetotal]] [[Gussie Fink-Nottle]] has surreptitiously been given whisky and gin in a punch prior to a prize-giving:

<blockquote><poem>
&thinsp;'It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest.'
'Yes, sir.'
'What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?'
'One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.'
'You mean imagination boggles?'
'Yes, sir.'
I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.<ref name="Medcalf 338" />
</poem></blockquote>

The stylistic device most commonly found in Wodehouse's work is his use of comparative imagery that includes similes. Hall opines that the humour comes from Wodehouse's ability to accentuate "resemblances which at first glance seem highly incongruous". Examples can be seen in ''Joy in the Morning'', Chapter 29: "There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action", or ''Psmith'', Chapter 7: "A sound like two or three pigs feeding rather noisily in the middle of a thunderstorm interrupted his meditation."<ref name="Gage CA" /> Hall also identifies that periodically Wodehouse used the stylistic device of a [[Hypallage|transferred epithet]], with an adjective that properly belongs to a person applied instead to some inanimate object. The form of expression is used sparingly by Wodehouse in comparison with other mechanisms, only once or twice in a story or novel, according to Hall.<ref name="Transferred Epithet">Hall, Robert A. Jr. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177754 "The Transferred Epithet in P. G. Wodehouse"], ''Linguistic Inquiry'', Winter 1973, pp. 92–94 {{subscription required}}</ref>

<blockquote><poem>
"I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar on the teaspoon."
—''Joy in the Morning'', Chapter 5

"As I sat in the bath-tub, soaping a meditative foot&nbsp;..."
—''[[Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit]]'', Chapter 1

"The first thing he did was to prod Jeeves in the lower ribs with an uncouth forefinger."
—''[[Much Obliged, Jeeves]]'', Chapter 4
</poem></blockquote>

Wordplay is a key element in Wodehouse's writing. This can take the form of puns, such as in ''Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit'', when Bertie is released after a night in the police cells, and says that he has "a pinched look" about him.<ref name="Gage CA" /> Linguistic confusion is another humorous mechanism, such as in ''Uncle Dynamite'' when Constable Potter says he has been "assaulted by the duck pond". In reply, Sir Aylmer, confusing the two meanings of the word "by", asks: "How the devil can you be assaulted by a duck pond?"<ref name="Gage CA" /> Wodehouse also uses metaphor and mixed metaphor to add humour. Some come through exaggeration, such as [[Bingo Little]]'s infant child who "not only has the aspect of a mass murderer, but that of a mass murderer suffering from an ingrown toenail", or Wooster's complaint that "the rumpuses that [[Bobbie Wickham]] is already starting may be amusing to her, but not to the unfortunate toads beneath the harrow whom she ruthlessly plunges into the soup."<ref>Voorhees (1966), pp. 166–167</ref> Bertie Wooster's half-forgotten vocabulary also provides a further humorous device. In ''Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit'' Bertie asks Jeeves "Let a plugugly like young Thos loose in the community with a cosh, and you are inviting disaster and&nbsp;... what's the word? Something about cats." Jeeves replies, "Cataclysms, sir?"<ref name="Gage CA" />