It drives me crazy when I read a favorite author, and I'm overwhelmed by their talent. I simultaneously love them and want to murder them.
I've been reading some older PG Wodehouse, written when he was still discovering the style that would eventually make him one of the most revered comic writers in... hmm I can't say The West. Because one of his biggest fan bases is in India. Probably any country with educated English-speakers has a decent contingent of Wodehouse fans, cause he was a master of wordplay.
And one of his greatest masteries was over the simile. When you read a fabulous Pratchett simile, you are seeing the grandchild of PG Wodehouse. But they're almost non-existent in his early works. The comic characters are emerging, and the comic set pieces, but when do the similes start?
Of course I've tried to find clues in Wodehouse interviews to how he wrote so well. He once said he reads all of Shakespeare every year or so. In past I'd read that and think: What a different time we live in. People used to be so well read in the westerns classics. Not a virtue in and of itself--it's all Dead White Men--but there were so many Latin and ancient Greek and mythological and Biblical and Shakespearean references, it created a sort of common language among anyone educated in the English grammar school. Even Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse's dumbest character, could reference Balaam's ass thanks to his education.
It only occurred to me lately to wonder: What influence did this have on Wodehouse's writing, aside from his ability to reference Shakespeare? I only read or watch maybe one play per year. Maybe what's missing in my writing is that I don't read Shakespeare every year!
I still don't see myself reading the swan of Avon's works annually. But I've started bookmarking various performances, because I could certainly up the number of the bard's works I watch every year. Then who knows... maybe in forty years I'll be a Wodehousian genius.
________
The brilliant scene where the normally shy, now drunk, Gussie Finknottle gives out the Snodsbury Grammar School prizes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoNBVEj3650
"But let me tell you that there's nothing to stick on side about in winning a prize for Scripture knowledge. Bertie Wooster----"
I don't know when I've had a nastier shock. I had been going on the assumption that, now that they had stopped him making his speech, Gussie's fangs had been drawn, as you might say. To duck my head down and resume my edging toward the door was with me the work of a moment.
"Bertie Wooster won the Scripture-knowledge prize at a kids' school we were at together, and you know what he's like. But, of course, Bertie frankly cheated. He succeeded in scrounging that Scripture-knowledge trophy over the heads of better men by means of some of the rawest and most brazen swindling methods ever witnessed even at a school where such things were common. If that man's pockets, as he entered the examination-room, were not stuffed to bursting-point with lists of the kings of Judah----"
I heard no more. A moment later I was out in God's air, fumbling with a fevered foot at the self-starter of the old car.
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