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Notes -
Recently read Robert Shankland's 1954 biography of Stephen T. Mather, written apparently quite straight in what I can only describe as a jaunty Wodehousian style. This has inspired several reflections:
-1954 was of course 30-odd years into Wodehouse's career as a bestselling author (modulo the whole German radio broadcasts episode), meaning that Shankland, in writing a piece of serious if perhaps hagiographic biography, presumably knew he sounded a bit like Wodehouse and chose to write like that anyway.
-One naturally considers Wodehouse's style as a parody of the dominant straight middle-highbrow style of the time. Indeed, Wodehouse occasionally steps outside this to parody the genuinely avant-garde (the occasional modern poet character) or popular crime fiction (various episodes of jewel theft and so on.).
-At the same time, virtually everything Wodehouse ever wrote and said was in more or less the same distinctive voice--is it really a parody if you're just like that naturally, so to speak?
-This also inspires the speculation that Wodehouse's style read as relatively colorless New Yorker prose to the audiences of its day. Imagine sitting down to Psmith in the City or Right Ho, Jeeves and having it read like Atul Gawande's longform medical pieces or something. It's enough to give a guy vertigo.
-At the same time, one can see cheeky flashes of Wodehouse from time to time in A. J. Liebling, who was after all a New Yorker fixture, and perhaps even John McPhee. Was Raymond Chandler a pioneering modernist with his works of hard-boiled fiction? Maybe--but he also went to Dulwich within two years, I think, of Wodehouse.
There's probably a coherent essay lurking in all this but I can't put my finger on it.
Separately, I just started Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue and while I don't have any definite textual evidence yet I am extremely confident that George Macdonald Fraser must have read it and lifted a good deal of the style and possibly some more or less intact episodes for the Flashman books. Flash does run into the Glanton gang at one point, Fraser was never one to shy away from primary sources, and the voice will be strikingly familiar to Flashman readers.
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