Latin Woostered and Hard-Boiled: The Classical Style of P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler

Abstract

Latin Woostered and Hard-Boiled: The Classical Style of P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler KATHLEEN RILEY The Victorian classicist Benjamin Jowett, outlining his vision for Oxford’s classical curriculum (or “Greats”), believed “the function of the scholar was to bring Greek ideas into contact with the modern world, and the purpose of university education was to produce not scholars or researchers but statesmen and men of the world.”1 One Oxford alumnus who exemplified this vision was Oscar Wilde. For him the classics were not just essential to education ; they were an important part of another aspect of the modern world—mass entertainment. From his journalism to his plays and his novel, Wilde incorporated the ancient world in literary “products” designed to be consumed by large middle -class audiences. Effectively, he found a way of reconciling Parnassus and Piccadilly, the cloister and the marketplace. Two later writers, born at a time when Wilde was making his mark as a wit, cultural critic and boulevardier, also epitomized Jowett’s worldly vision—though their training ground was not Oxford but an English public school, Dulwich College, founded by Elizabethan actor-manager Edward Alleyn. They were P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, near contemporaries who, while apparently very different from one another, had in common a classical education to which they subsequently ascribed their great facility as English prose stylists. The current Master of Dulwich College, Joseph Spence, maintains: “Chandler’s Philip Marlowe may speak with a Los Angeles accent, but his syntax owes more to Virgil and Livy than to any later writers.”2 And Chandler himself remarked: “It would seem that a clasarion 26.2 fall 2018 sical education might be a rather poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise.”3 Wodehouse described his schooling on the “Classical side” as “the best form of education I could have had as a writer.”4 And here is another point of comparison with Wilde, of whom Seamus Heaney once said: “The lighter his touch, the more devastating his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground.”5 Heaney was referring to the brilliant paradoxes and high-wire wordplay of Wilde the Society satirist, the subversive insider and scourge of Victorian hypocrisy, but he also pinpointed an intrinsic aspect of Wilde the freelance classicist. Wilde wore his erudition lightly but the sheer nimbleness of his creative genius, the assiduous court paid to triviality , the formation of so “delicate [a] bubble of fancy”6 as The Importance of Being Earnest, all had a rootedness and authority attributable in large measure to his formal classical training. Wodehouse as weaver of whimsy and Chandler as purveyor of pulp fiction have a similar rootedness and authority that derive from a solid grounding in classics. Like Wilde again, and his pitch-perfect High Comedy, Wodehouse and Chandler create very particular worlds in their writing—contrasting worlds of light and dark. Chandler ’s is the Los Angeles demimonde, a world of hard edges, of blackmailers, femme fatales and tuxedoed racketeers, of seedy saloons and gambling joints; a world both repellent and seductive in its lurid, noirish venality. In his penultimate novel, The Long Goodbye, L.A. is personified as “a city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” Descending the mean streets of this urban underworld is Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe, a hero with mythic resonance, “a shopsoiled Galahad,”7 a gumshoe Aeneas every bit as worldweary as Virgil’s hero and just as attuned to the lacrimae rerum, the tears inherent in the human condition. If Chandler depicts a city and its inhabitants indisputably banished from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Allah (a notorious Hollywood hotel of the 1930s and ’40s), Wode18 latin woostered and hard-boiled house captures a world delightfully preserved in prelapsarian aspic or, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “a world of pristine paradisal innocence. For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man; no ‘aboriginal calamity’. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit.”8 An article in the New Yorker, in March...