The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

"This is a collection of critical essays written in the fifties. Two of them discuss Wodehouse, quite briefly, but in beautiful ways. I’ll probably be accused of being like Wodehouse’s Florence Craye for including it – “steeped to the gills in serious purpose”. But it’s worth including because it’s one of the very few attempts to write about why humour like Wodehouse’s matters. A critic once said these are “serious essays against high seriousness”. One of those two stories, “Balaam and His Ass”, is about the comic master-servant relationship and why there is a beauty to it. The other, “Dingley Dell and the Fleet” talks about Wodehouse as an “expert on Eden”. Auden describes why characters can live on beyond and outside their novels, and why innocence matters – which strikes me as rather fascinating and important, if we are going to think about why Wodehouse has had such appeal to such a wide range of people, including Wittgenstein , Salman Rushdie and the late Queen Mother. As Auden says, characters like this just seem to endure. The red-faced Aunt Dahlia who is “built rather on the lines of Mae West” and sends Bertie epic telegrams. Aunt Agatha, the “nephew-crusher” who “chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth”. The “amiable and boneheaded” Lord Emsworth, “drooping like a wet sock”. The “immaculate” Psmith, lounging in the Drones club. The list goes on. It’s the quality of his style and his jokes. For instance, “She came leaping towards me like Lady Macbeth coming to get first hand news from the guest room.” Or, “[He] clasped her to his bosom, using the interlocking grip”. Or, “She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.” But even in quoting you miss something. You need them within the structure and rhythm of the stories themselves. He worked and worked at his plots. The details came easily to him, and that was the sort of writing that he enjoyed, but the plotting was more difficult. He was always asking his friends for ideas about how to plot. But the work paid off. He also writes very good love stories. So I think it’s his exceptional style, and the sheer joy of stories which offer a world where things come right. They give us a little glimpse of Eden."