It keeps coming to my attention that not enough people are aware of P.G. Wodehouse, even literature students from good Christian universities.  I suppose he has not yet risen to the level of literature, but still. Don’t those well educated in letters need to take a break?  Have some fun?  And that’s what Wodehouse is, fun.  Rich, learned, erudite, whimsy.   His canon is full of rich cultural illusions, Biblical themes and well crafted wit, in the most harmless plots you ever dreamed of.  While the gods of industry and politics are off building and destroying kingdoms, Bertie Wooster is having it out with his butler over a dinner jacket.

Now that I think about it many of those Universities have C. S. Lewis centers, and Wodehouse is much older than Lewis.  Even Lewis gleefully exclaim, that the professor hiding from his wife in the attic reading Wodehouse was certainly doing real reading.  But in this day you shouldn’t have to feel bad about participating in the dying art of reading.  It’s certainly better than having you brain sucked out by the latest comic book made low for the masses by millions of dollars in CG graphics.  When static pictures are not enough that we must resort to the emotional tug of the moving picture, reading anything starts to look very sophisticated.  But even in 1917 Wodehouse was sophisticated.  The world out there is a mess and sometimes it does our souls good to play.

C. S. Lewis said that the lowest form of reading is done by those who read only newspapers.  Because even their stories have to be true.  He was trying to get at the idea that entertaining another world in your head is a sign of maturity(the maturity not necessary to watch movies).  As his sometimes friend Tolkien pointed out entertaining that other world can often make our living in this world better.  I spend a lot of time reading news stories and laughing at them mostly, for me that is an escape.  Who can really live like these freaks that are splattered over our news feeds?  Even when you get past the sensational headlines,  I find people trying to live without God or sense to be very hilarious.  Of course it’s also tragic and I try to address that all the time.  But that’s what real Christian joy is,  facing that insanity every day and laughing—anyway.

You can spend all your effort fighting for what is right.  But a lot of well meaning striving has resulted in a lot of death and carnage(I would be surprised to find Obama reading Wodehouse, not Bush.).  I often marvel at the West and the depth of it’s creations.  Walk through our museums, they don’t contain the weapons or heads of our vanquished foes.  We don’t fill them with the treasures stolen from those we conquered.  They are full of every sort of created thing from minute jewelry, ironwork, woodwork, furniture, paintings, and china to the architecture of the huge buildings themselves.  We also build other huge buildings just so that we can fill them with beautiful music.  Every night thousands of people fill other large halls to watch, play.  We are not off engaged in tribal wars, we are building and creating and singing and dancing.  Whatever the Baptists have to say about rhythmic ceremonial rituals, they sure beat scalping parties to the next camp.  Whatever you want to say about America’s past, one of the biggest problems we had wasn’t race wars.  It was over segregation.  Some people didn’t have access to the play house.

Wodehouse writes about the idle English gentleman often.  He seems harmless as he enjoys his smoking and the pursuit of felicitous matches.  But that English gentleman won World War I and II.  The U.S was not the only sleeping giant that the Germans kept overlooking.  Those eccentric men reading their papers in their clubs were preparing for war.  They loved a free and lazy world so much they were willing to give everything to save it.   Chesterton gets to this spirit in his Napoleon of Notting Hill.  But this is supposed to be in praise of Wodehouse.  And so it is, go and be idle, read Wodehouse.  I don’t think you can go wrong with anything he has written.  And today like never before there are countless easy ways to get him.  Librivox has a number of well produced audio books.  Some of his works are in the public domain,  surely this says something about his literary quality?  Mark Nelson has the perfect voice for these stories.   A lot of the Jeeves stories are held and published by various imprints.  But you can get them on your phone and start enjoying them in a few minutes. Or, hey you could go buy the actual book.   You too can become a better person, by reading harmless fiction.