The humiliation of PG Wodehouse His genius can’t be reduced to IP

Well, this, I remember thinking when I saw the press release for the first time, needs nuking from orbit. Twice, just to make sure. The target in question was a new collection of short stories called Jeeves Again: Twelve Original Stories from the World of P.G. Wodehouse.

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond — including Roddy Doyle, Frank Skinner and Alan Titchmarsh — Jeeves Again, is the new anthology that reimagines Jeeves and Wooster through fresh eyes,” burbled the press release. “Jeeves Again is the statement publication for this 50th anniversary year, showcasing Wodehouse’s enduring legacy as a much-beloved and perennially relevant British Literary icon.” (Punctuation and capitalisation all sic.)

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond…” I marvelled. “And beyond!” I exclaimed. “Statement publication?” I thought. The only statement that this makes, as far as I can see, is that we imagine that what made Wodehouse work was the Jeeves ‘n’ Wooster brand, and the reason that Alan Titchmarsh isn’t P.G. Wodehouse is that he hasn’t been allowed to write the characters — rather than the fact that nobody before or since has written comic prose like that, and the reason they haven’t is because it’s bloody hard.

Would we, on Mozart’s birthday, invite a cash-in tribute album where someone who used to be on EastEnders produced a piece for the harpsichord? I wondered aloud. “No, we would not,” I said to myself. “Jesus bicycling Christ,” I muttered. What a shitshow. So. I am in an awkward position. Many of the contributors to this book are people I admire. One or two I count as friends. I therefore say this, as Dame Edna would have put it, in a loving way: this is one of those projects that should have been strangled in its cot.

Some of the more acute of these writers have picked up on Wodehouse’s stylistic tics — the definite article where a possessive is expected, or the surprising verb of motion (“I trickled home”; we “biffed off”) — and the less acute have contented themselves with sprinkling the text with epithets such as “spiffing” and “dashed”, or populating the scene with “chaps” and “blighters”. We get, across these stories, a good number of aunts, hangover cures, bathetic classical allusions, over-elaborate metaphors and unsuitable fiancées. Wodehouse isn’t, to thwart the cliche, inimitable; but what makes him sublime is.

To be fair — and I detest being fair like sin, but critical self-respect demands it — this collection isn’t all bad. Nearly half the authors are in the “more acute” camp. Frank Skinner, John Finnemore, Andrew Hunter-Murray and Jasper Fforde just about get away with it, and sometimes even sparkle. Dominic Sandbrook cleverly dodges the challenge of the prose by presenting a series of spoof historical documents about the later career of Roderick Spode; Roddy Doyle yoinks the Jeeves-and-Wooster set up into his Irish comfort-zone (“Ah Jaysis, Jeeves”) with some elan. The rest are pretty much duds.

But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.

Yes, Jean Rhys set Wide Sargasso Sea in what would now probably get called “the Bronteverse”: but she was doing her own, very different thing. She wasn’t the contributor to a project lashed up by the Charlotte Brontë estate to squeeze a bit more dough out of the wind-lashed moor genre. Nobody would create a franchise extension of Lolita — “from the world of Vladimir Nabokov!” — by asking a collection of that book’s admirers to produce some new stories featuring Humbert and Lo, with cameos from that adorable rascal Clare Quilty. Without Nabokov’s prose, the world of Lolita is nothing, and without Wodehouse’s prose, Jeeves and Wooster are nothing.

A common mistake — betrayed in the fact that nobody sane would think of doing this with Nabokov — is to assume that because something is popular fiction, or genre fiction, or comic fiction, the prose doesn’t matter. Sometimes, it doesn’t: Harlan Coben and Dan Brown are very limited stylists, but their thrillers work excellently. But often, it does. As witness, for instance, the disappointing results of Lee Child passing the Jack Reacher franchise to his brother. Lee Child makes what Lee Child does look easy, but it very much is not. And when it comes to comic fiction, even more than the literary type, prose is everything. Comic fiction is super difficult, and Wodehouse’s is at the absolute pinnacle of what has been achieved there.

Corporate interests will tend to see everything that makes money as reducible to IP: because, right enough, that is how the biggest entertainment products of our time do work. The special sauce of the Marvel, DC and Star Wars universes *is* the IP in the characters and worldbuilding. They’ve always been the products of divers hands — many thousands of journeyman writers and artists, some sublimely talented and some much less so, have worked on comics, novels, films and whatnot based on these properties since the middle of the last century. Fans, and I include myself among them, will tend to read an X-Men comic very happily because we can be pretty sure at some point Wolvie will call someone “bub” and pop his claws (“snikt!”), or a ninja will show up, and this will tickle a small childish part of our soul in an agreeable way.

But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetisable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.

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