P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters

Abstract

78 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews uprising of 1956 was clearly a “counter -revolution,” and even the Prague Spring of 1968 was a betrayal of “existing Socialism.” When Yudit as a young Hungarian student visited Prague with some friends soon after the Soviet intervention , she was baffled by the hostile reception of the sullen natives. Communist indoctrination, which hardly worked for my generation, must have been very strong in some families of “Kádár’s children”; Yudit confesses, “I only learned about what really happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 much later from a Greek friend.” It was a shock for her to learn the truth, but it also started a process of opening up, distancing herself from her father’s beliefs. During the story the father is slowly transformed into a tragic figure : while his daughter grows up and embraces “Western” (liberal democratic ) ideals, with the change of regime in 1990, he not only loses his power base but also his ideological certainties, dying as a sad, old man who had wasted much of his life. Yudit Kiss’s story is structured in a mosaic-like manner: personal reminiscences about her father and her family (including a vicious non-Jewish grandfather) alternate with snippets of foreign travels and accounts of books read. It is particularly interesting to learn how she embraces her almost forgotten Jewishness during a visit to Kraków and what she thinks about the “ethnic cleansing” perpetrated by the Serbians during the Bosnian War, but a conversation with a Gypsy boy about Seneca in the Budapest metro and another one with a Spanish anarchist who recommends to Kiss the reading of Arthur Koestler are also worthy of attention. The English critic who called this book “a remarkable memoir” is altogether right, thanks, among other things, to its very fluent rendering into English by the prizewinning Hungarian -born English poet George Szirtes. George Gömöri London P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters. Sophie Ratcliffe, ed. New York. W. W. Norton. 2013. isbn 9780393088991 From P. G. Wodehouse’s first letter published in 1899 at age seventeen to the last, written (days before his death) in February 1975, Sophie Ratcliffe’s splendid editing presents Wodehouse’s Matvei Yankelevich Alpha Donut United Artists Books Yankelevich unabashedly evokes his personal peccadilloes, his love-hate relationship with language, and the immortal setting of a bar in this compilation of poems and other short works. His voice is quirky, youthful, and personable throughout. The brief collection is literary and historical while maintaining its sense of humor, and the selected works combine to create an absorbing self-portrait of their author. July–August 2013 • 79 Derek Walcott Moon-Child Farrar, Straus & Giroux In a reimagining of his 1958 play Ti-Jean and His Brothers, Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott employs evocative creole language to address the folklore of St. Lucia while referencing its postcolonial present. A family must challenge a sinister planter—who might be the Devil himself— for the right to hold on to their island home. Nota Bene life in his own words. In the threequarters of a century of writing, we can see in the letters the author’s progression from schoolboy stories, through his work in musical theater as a lyricist, to his famously funny novels about the “mentally negligible” Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. Wodehouse’s Broadway musicals , written with Jerome Kern, would alone have sealed his fame. But the public remembered and treasured his whimsical and entertaining novels like Right Ho, Jeeves, Quick Service, Blandings Castle, and Joy in the Morning. There was, however, one dark and sinister cloud in an otherwise innocent life: during his internment in France during World War II, he was invited by the Germans to broadcast to the United States (not yet at war with Germany). His light and humorous talks described his life as a prisoner, meant to display British pluck to his countrymen, as he naïvely explained later. Wodehouse had no idea of the fury that exploded in England, with calls that he be put on trial for treason. He was reviled in Parliament and the press, his books were removed from library shelves, and there were even...