Where to start reading P.G.Wodehouse?

[wolfpup]

@wolfpup

I was delighted to see that Louder and Funnier, one of the rarest Wodehouse books on the used market, has been added, as well as the wonderful semi-autobiography America, I Like You, oddly published by Overlook under its original UK title Over Seventy.

I’ve just made an interesting discovery, FWIW. I have a copy of America, I Like You but, following my own advice about Overlook Press, I ordered the Overlook edition of Over Seventy – the only version currently in print – so I could have a clean new copy.

It turns out that the two books are quite substantially different. In fact at first glance they’re not even the same book because all the chapter titles are different. It turns out that America, I Like You was first published in the US in May, 1956 by Simon & Schuster, but then for the UK edition, it was completely reorganized, parts of it rewritten, some things deleted, and a considerable amount of new material added, and published in October of the following year by Herbert Jenkins. It’s evident that there’s much more material in Over Seventy and obviously Wodehouse thought it benefited from the edits and additions which I suppose is why Overlook chose that edition, but from a casual perusal the much shorter America seems somehow snappier.

Oh, well, there are so many differences that it’s like discovering a brand new Wodehouse book.

I should be clear that the Overlook books are completely faithful reprints of the original editions. We’re talking here about an unusual case where there were two quite different original editions.

[Buck_Godot]

His wooster stories are his best known and what everyone raves about, but for my money, I prefer his Mulliner stories.

You get a more variety, and I personally prefer his third person voice to his first person.

[Buck_Godot]

@wolfpup

With regard to things that are “not too dated”, it’s all dated, though not in a bad way. But to fully appreciate some of the humor you really have to acquire some perception of life and culture in early 20th century Britain – the pervasiveness and role of the servant class, for instance, or the prevalence in society of what Wodehouse called the “knut”, the independently wealthy young aristocrat who didn’t have to work and spent his time in idle leisure.

I would go further and claim that they were dated at the time that he wrote them and that was part of the fun. His books are really about the lingering dated remnants of the aristocracy being faced with the rise of modernity such as existed in the 1920’s. After a couple of short stories its pretty easy to figure out the world that he is portraying.

Young gentlemen are foolish ne’er-do-well’s who are constantly broke and so try to borrow money from each other so they can going on drinking binges, resulting in such youthful hijinks as stealing helmets off policemen, and falling head over heals in love with the daughters of stodgy aristocrats, who do not approve of such frivolity, but who in the past had some rather embarrassing adventures of their own when they were a child at boarding school and received that unfortunate nickname.