Quotations from P G Wodehouse are copyright of, and reprinted by permission of, the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate © 2012 The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

Society Meeting at The George, 213 The Strand, London, on the evening of 15th February 2011

A large gathering of some 70 or so members met for another very enjoyable evening. As usual there was much conversation, sluicing and catching up, prior to and after the entertainment for the evening.

Hilary Bruce, our Society chairman, began by giving parish notices about the upcoming society events (please see the Future Events section of this website or go to the latest edition of Wooster Sauce for details. Hilary also recalled the memorable biennial dinner at Gray’s Inn in October and thanked the many people involved in its organisation. The excellent photographs by Ginni Beard were also available to see and purchase from a folder provided. For a full report on this, please go to our Recent Events section.

Hilary then introduced Andrew Rumsey to everyone. Andrew is a member of the society and is Vicar of Gipsy Hill in South London. He is a contributor to Third Way magazine and a columnist for the website Ship of Fools. He has recently published the book entitled Strangely Warmed: Reflections on God, Life and Bric-a-brac, and it is from this book that he read at intervals during his talk. It was a most humorous talk with much insight into modern life, and was very well received by all those present. Andrew had a long ovation afterwards. Below is his talk reproduced in full, with references to the sections he read from his book. For more information on this book, click here.

Address to the P G Wodehouse Society, 15th Feb 2011

by Andrew Rumsey

I must begin by saying what a singular pleasure it is to speak this evening. Though I’ve only been a member of the Society for a year or two, Wodehouse has been my literary hero since boyhood, so I felt it was a kind of duty as well as a joy, to join up.

Societies are curious things, of course. They mean you belong, which is generally a good thing, but they also lump you in with others – which isn’t, always.

As a vicar this is a daily challenge, for churches are a notorious rag-bag of chalks and cheeses, whom you find yourself obliged to answer for. A few months ago, you might recall story in the news about a crackpot American Pastor who, looking for a nice church social event to hold after the beetle-drive and Harvest Supper, thought it would make a pleasant evening to burn some copies of the Koran. I was on Jury Service around that time and happened to reveal my profession to one of my fellow Jurors. After the inevitable awkward pause, he asked, mildly ‘so, you been burning Korans too then?’ It was somehow as if the lunatic preacher and I were accomplices and I’d stood by holding the cloaks whilst he stoked the fire. Brotherhood is all very well, but it has a cost – that’s what I’m trying to say.

It’s the warmth and the strangeness of church society that I explored in my recent book Strangely Warmed: Reflections on God, Life and Bric-a-brac. I’m going to subject you to some excerpts from this over the next twenty minutes or so, but, because I have Wodehouse’s towering genius before me in anything I write, whether shopping lists or sermons, I want to link these excerpts in to three or four features of his writing which provide continued inspiration.

For those of you who like to eye the agenda in advance, I’m calling these ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world’; ‘The mysteries of his pocket’; ‘The unduly intimate’ and, lastly, ‘Naboth’s Vineyard’.

1) ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world’.

Quote from back cover of J in the Offing … I think I read Evelyn Waugh’s tribute to him before I’d ever read a word Wodehouse wrote … because, as you know, it often appeared on the back of the Penguin editions. Wodehouse was, of course, well aware that he was writing nostalgically – that his stories evoked the language, customs and society of an already passing era. But all books are nostalgic in the sense that they provide us with imaginary homes, which we belong in, and can retreat to. And one feels that the door is always open with Wodehouse, we are welcomed in.

Anyone in the C of E has to reckon with the potency of nostalgia – and I’m fascinated by it. So I’d like to begin by reading the following piece from my book, entitled ‘Aunty Nostalgia’.

2) ‘The mysteries of his pocket’.

The feature of Wodehouse’s writing that continues to leave me awestruck is the way in which, like an artist, he homes in on particular ordinary details of life and transfigures them, makes them shine. I don’t believe there’s anyone better at this than him and there are so many examples. One of my favourites is a very simple line from Damsel in Distress where Albert, a young urchin, searches about his person for a cigarette.

Wodehouse writes …

Just that simple phrase ‘the mysteries of his pocket’ transforms everything – this grubby schoolboy’s pocket becomes an Aladdin’s cave. I love the particular way he itemises everything …

Now you don’t have to spend long as a vicar before you realise it is these particular, seemingly inconsequential details and objects which have the real power in church life. And so I wrote the following piece, entitled, ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is bric a brac’.

3) ‘The unduly intimate’.

So much of the hilarity of Wodehouse’s prose arises from the negotiation of social boundaries – the shibboleths that separate group or class or type.

One of my favourite examples of this concerns the objectionable character Bingley in Much obliged, Jeeves. Bingley, you will recall, was ‘unduly intimate, too free, forward, lacking in proper reserve, deficient in due respect, impudent, bold and intrusive’. The way Bertie reprises this dictionary list of Bingley’s over-familiarity builds the comic effect delightfully.

And, thinking about society, it strikes me that people can only rub along together comfortably when there is the right tension between closeness and distance, which is what manners help us to negotiate. The loss of manners is a symptom of social collapse, I believe. Anyway, after one too many cold calls from telephone companies, I wrote this piece, entitled ‘First name terms’.

4) ‘Naboth’s Vineyard’.

Unlike Bertie Wooster, you don’t need to have won the scripture knowledge prize at school to recognise this as the OT theme of Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker’s sermon aimed at provoking Sir Watkyn Bassett’s conscience in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.

The peculiarities of English Christianity are a rich seam of comedy for Wodehouse. Part of this comes from his relish in the poetry of the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer – ‘Naboth’ is an inherently funny word, crying out for comic employment.

But there is also his affection for the clergy which, unsurprisingly, I warm to. Harold Pinker, who ‘vetted the souls of the local yokels’, whose sermons are ‘manly and straightforward’ represents a strain of English cleric of which I’m rather proud. It’s a quality I observed in my father and uncle, who were also vicars, but which, to my regret, I see far less of in myself. It might be described as a kind of steely mildness, which can be at turns eccentric, unworldly and incredibly brave. You do come across it still but it is endangered, I think. And it’s this which I address in my final piece for you tonight, called ‘The Mild Man of Borneo’.

It has been a pleasure to enjoy your society this evening – thank you very much.