3 DECEMBER 1983, Page 32

Political Plum

Richard West

The World of Uncle Fred P.G. Wodehouse (Hutchinson £9.95)

When the Book Marketing Council recently published a list of the dozen best novels since the war, it notably failed to include any from Britain's greatest novelist of the century, P.G. Wodehouse. This was to be expected from the Council, whose last activity was a book promotion in Barnsley, the Yorkshire mining town famous for Arthur Scargill, Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Parkinson. Barnsley was chosen ostensibly because it was 'typical'; actually because it was thought by London smarty-boot publishers to be the most philistine, beer-sodden dump in the land, and therefore the most difficult place to flog copies of novels by Rushdie, Koetzee and similar caring, and meaningful chaps. Barnsley people greatly resented this patronising publicity stunt. They stayed away from the bogus lectures and func- tions. The one bookshop in Barnsley, apart from W.H.Smith, actually closed soon

afterwards, possibly as a reaction to the Book Marketing Council.

And now the Council judges have failed to include a book by Wodehouse. This may be because one of the judges was Peter Parker. I think it has not been pointed out that Mr Parker, before he was head of British Rail, was head of the Booker Mc- Connell sugar firm, that also founded the Booker Prize, largely to get some good publicity after the bad publicity it had got from the discontent of its Asian sugar hands, and from backing the Negro demagogue Forbes Burnham, now the dic- tator of Guyana. Another Booker McCon- nell magnate, Lord Campbell of Eskan also became the head of the New Statesman, and founded there yet another literary prize. It is interesting to observe that Shiva Naipaul's latest novel which gives an unflat- tering picture of somewhere resembling Guyana (as did his excellent non-fiction book on the Jonestown masacre) failed to appear on the Booker Prize short list. He does not have the trendy political views of a Rushdie or Koetzee.

Perhaps political bias explains the amaz- ing absence of P.G. Wodehouse's name from the list of great writers. Some of the dirt that was slung at Wodehouse during the war still sticks, though he was anything but a Fascist. In fact he produced in the character Roderick Spode and his Blackshort Movement by far the most memorable and most damning attack on Sir Oswald Mosley, because it made him a figure of fun: `When you say "shorts" you mean "shirts" of course.'

`No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts'.

'Footer bags, you mean? Bare knees.'

'How perfectly foul.'

The volume under review contains the four stories about Frederick Altamount Cornwallis, fifth Earl of Ickenham, a tall sprightly man in his sixties, surprisingly fit in,spite of his diet of whisky-and-soda, a lover of jokes and mischief, the scourge of his timorous nephew Pongo Twistleton. 'Uncle Fred' distinctly resembles the late soldier-turned-actor Donald Wise, whose visit to any ridiculous Asian or African trouble spot is guaranteed to change that place from tragedy into farce.

The stories of 'Uncle Fred' are not in the league of Right Ho, Jeeves, Joy in the Morning or the sublime The Code of the Woosters, from which I quoted the words about Roderick Spode. But all four works are studded with jewels of writing, in- cluding the very good bit on why Pad- dington Station is so unlike all the other stations in London. Wodehouse was much better at sociology than all those writers who take it seriously.

Uncle Dynamite, a complete novel, in- troduces the peppery Sir Aylmer Bostock, former Governor of Lower Barnatoland (itself a name of genius) and another col- onial bore Major Brabazon-Plank whose African sculpture is a 'peculiar sort of what-not-executed in red mud by an artist apparently under the influence of trade gin.'

P.G. Wodehouse can never go out of fashion, and, what is more, you can read him over and over again at quite short inter- vals, every two years perhaps, compared to the four or five years one takes to re-read the Sherlock Holmes stories, David Cop- perfield, Scoop or The Good Soldier Schweik.

Recently I committed a bit of a howler by my suggestion that Shakespeare never por- trayed an Irishman. Several readers, eluding the drama critics Bernard Levin and Giles Gordon have kindly written to point out Irishmen in Henry VI (which I must confess I have neither seen nor read), the Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. To compensate for this lapse of memory, may I point out a very good bit on the Irish in P.G. Wodehouse's The Mating Season?: "Irishmen don't talk like that" said Gussie. "Have you read J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea? If you can show me a single character in it who says "faith and begob", I'll give you a shilling. Irishmen are poets. They talk about their souls and mist and so on. They say things like "An evening like this it makes me wish I was back in County Clare, watching the cows in the tall grass" '.