Wodehouse, Chandler, Sayers, Tolkien
0 Comments Published by ginny on Sunday, June 19, 2005 at 1:47 AM.
Wodehouse, Chandler, Sayers, Tolkien I keep trying to turn over some link in my head between P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
I know it’s there. It’s something…big. Something very cool. But I’m not sure exactly what it is, other than three of them having been English, two of them having written mysteries, and all of them having written in the thirties (and lived through the war).
That could be all it is: era. They all published between 1925 and 1945, with their best work concentrated in the late thirties (Sayers is the earliest, Chandler the latest).
Wodehouse and Chandler even attended the same prep school (Dulwich College), though Wodehouse left a month before Chandler arrived. And though they went to different colleges, Tolkien and Sayers were both Oxford-educated.
It could be that all I’m sensing is that all four of these writers are a product of the 20s, 30s, and 40s – certainly a rich and distinctive literary era. I think, though, it’s more than that. But what? The war?
Obviously, their commonality isn’t to do with their publication styles. Wodehouse bothe massively prolific and massively popular. He also became disastrously visible on the political stage during the second world war.
Sayers was less popularly inclined, involving herself in serious theological and literary work that was almost as well-known as her fictional output, most of which was concentrated in the early part of her life.
Chandler too has a fairly limited bibliography – there are only six novels – but his consistent publication of both short stories and longer fiction throughout his life, coupled with his clear understanding of the popular literary stage, is reminiscent of Wodehouse – only politically cannier.
Tolkien and Sayers, of course, share an interest in academia, though for Tolkien his efforts as a scholar and translator were, during his life, far more famous than his largely unpublished fictional output. Though he certainly made his living as a thinker, he cannot be considered a professional fiction-writer in the way the other three can.
So what is it? What right to I have to claim there’s some important an ineffable link between these four writers? (And it had better be a link that goes deeper than “I like all of them a lot.”)
I’m still not sure. It’s going to take a lot of thinking. But it has something to do with genre fiction – that is, with decidedly popular fiction that owes a lot of its enjoyableness to a strict adherence to generic conventions, but which also is at its greatest when it recognizes and tests those conventions. And these are all, I would maintain, very distinctively genre-writers, but all writers who approach their respective genres in different ways.
Two of the four are mystery-writers, of course – though Lord Peter Wimsey and Philip Marlowe are very different detectives.
Tolkien is fantasy – though the pitfall there is that he may not have considered his own work that way. He thought of it more as mythical history, and it certainly bears far less resemblance to Phillip K. Dick than it does to Thomas Hardy.
And Wodehouse? I know it’s genre fiction. I mean, it’s popular, and it’s convention-directed, and it’s delightful because of both of those things. But what genre is it? Comedy of manners? Society caper? Romance, even? I’m not certain. But I know it fits.
There’s something there – in the way in which all four both epitomize and transcend popular genre. They’re all models for genre-writers to come, too, especially Chandler and Tolkien.
This link I’m getting at also has something to do with culture/nationalism/place. All four of these writers created characters who are vividly marked as being from exactly where they’re from, if you know what I mean.
Wodehouse first conceived of Jeeves and Bertie while living, destitute, in Manhattan, but that cognitive disconnect only points all the more strongly to the way in which his greatest creations are more English than even the English. They are England – a fantasy England that may never have really existed, but you wish it had.
And in terms of Englishness, it’s also hard to get more so than Lord Peter, whose charming combination of glibness and stoicism bears a lot of resemblance to Bertie with about five times more brain, Holmes if he’d inherited money instead of mental illness, or even Jane Austen’s Catharine Moreland if she’d had an actual mystery on her hands.
Phillip Marlowe is also more American than America, in the same way Jeeves is more English than the English. The cowboy and the hard-bitten detective are American masculinity in the 1940s and 50s, and in the 1940s and 50s, American masculinity is America, and as there is no cowboy more cowboy-like than John Wayne, so there is no detective more detective-like than Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s novels both shaped and perfectly mirrored the American psyche of the time – and managed, astoundingly, to remain unique and artful creations of their own.
And Tolkien? To say The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarilion, and The Hobbit are about place is a bit of an understatement. They are place. The Silmarilion isn’t even a story – it’s just an outgrowth of the already fully-formed history of an entire world, as, to a slightly lesser degree, are the others. In the most literal sense, the place Tolkien wrote about, of course, was Middle-Earth, but as many scholars have noted, the exquisite detail in which Tolkien imagined that world, and the background against which he was able to create it, owe just as much to the changing, English world he saw around him every day. Frodo, Sam, and Gollum couldn’t live anywhere else but Middle-Earth, but Middle-Earth also couldn’t live anywhere else but England.
Then there’s something about character, too. The thing that got me on this tack in the first place, actually, was noticing once again how strikingly similar Bertie and Lord Peter are. They’re the same type: the drawling, unflappable, moderately handsome, suitably moneyed, young English gentleman. Both are easily taken for imbeciles (truer in Bertie’s case than in Lord Peter’s, though Bertie has more to him than meets the eye), both have a knack for stumbling into entangled and entangling situations, both have inscrutable manservants, both subtly (and not so subtly) challenge, while at the same time romancing, the conventions of the English aristocracy.
But slightly less obvious is the way in which Philip Marlowe falls right into the same vein. He isn’t, of course, English. Nor is he aristocratic. In fact, he couldn’t be farther from either. But dry, sarcastic wit? He has in spades. Unflappability? Pretty much his middle name. Irresistible and understated charm? Obviously, or all those shadowy women wouldn’t keep trying to seduce him. He’s also constantly being underestimated (and proving what a dangerous thing that underestimation can be), a lone wolf (though Bertie and Jeeves are of course soul mates, and Lord Peter has both Bunter and Harriet Vane, all of the novels are, I think, at their most satisfying when characters are operating independently), and unfortunately prone to ending up in extremely complicated situations.
All three writers were obviously attracted to characters who never stopped cracking jokes – especially when the going gets rough -- but whose humor only barely conceals a kind of deep emptiness or mistrust. (Wodehouse is the lightest here, but some of his other stories clearly point to an attitude that might be characterized as a despairingly unconquerable love for humanity.) Call it modernist sentiment, maybe?
And then Tolkien? He’s the oddball in this field, and maybe it shows that he doesn’t belong at all – since character is barely even the point of most of his work (though it is what I personally read for – I love you, Sam Gamgee). But I think, nonetheless, some of the key traits are there. Frodo definitely has that incurable loving lonerness – he couldn’t love the people of Middle Earth any more, but in the end he leaves them anyway. And of course, elves are an entire race of noble loners. Gandalf definitely has the dry wit down, as do a number of the dwarves and even, intermittently, Aragorn. Bilbo’s accidental heroism bears some resemblance to Bertie’s well-meaning bumbling, and if you want to talk about underestimating your adversaries, Hobbits would be a pretty good place to start.
I’m still not sure where I’m going with it all. It plays right into all my interests in popular fiction, though, which is increasingly (this year, anyway) what I see myself focusing on. I’m consistently fascinated by the stuff which is unapologetically, brilliantly, popular, you know? Much more so than in the political or the consciously literary, most of the time.
Maybe that’s just intellectual laziness, but I hope not. I think it’s maybe something related to the reason I love all these writers so much myself. Perhaps I also see in them something like the aching love I have for my time, my people, my place – for abandoned gas station pumps and reality television and the International House of Pancakes – a love that is always coupled with the realization that in some ways I can never fully belong to that time, that place, that people. Perhaps I see those who create art that is both truly beautiful and truly popular as being both in and out of the world, and perhaps that’s also something I see in myself.
Is that overly grandiose? Maybe. After all, everybody’s both in and out of culture all the time – it’s universal, we’re individual. But something about the very best of popular art, I think, captures that ineffable in-betweenness. It’s the impossibly sweet moment between the individual and the universal we’re after, I guess. And sometimes, wonderfully, we get it.
I know it’s there. It’s something…big. Something very cool. But I’m not sure exactly what it is, other than three of them having been English, two of them having written mysteries, and all of them having written in the thirties (and lived through the war).
That could be all it is: era. They all published between 1925 and 1945, with their best work concentrated in the late thirties (Sayers is the earliest, Chandler the latest).
Wodehouse and Chandler even attended the same prep school (Dulwich College), though Wodehouse left a month before Chandler arrived. And though they went to different colleges, Tolkien and Sayers were both Oxford-educated.
It could be that all I’m sensing is that all four of these writers are a product of the 20s, 30s, and 40s – certainly a rich and distinctive literary era. I think, though, it’s more than that. But what? The war?
Obviously, their commonality isn’t to do with their publication styles. Wodehouse bothe massively prolific and massively popular. He also became disastrously visible on the political stage during the second world war.
Sayers was less popularly inclined, involving herself in serious theological and literary work that was almost as well-known as her fictional output, most of which was concentrated in the early part of her life.
Chandler too has a fairly limited bibliography – there are only six novels – but his consistent publication of both short stories and longer fiction throughout his life, coupled with his clear understanding of the popular literary stage, is reminiscent of Wodehouse – only politically cannier.
Tolkien and Sayers, of course, share an interest in academia, though for Tolkien his efforts as a scholar and translator were, during his life, far more famous than his largely unpublished fictional output. Though he certainly made his living as a thinker, he cannot be considered a professional fiction-writer in the way the other three can.
So what is it? What right to I have to claim there’s some important an ineffable link between these four writers? (And it had better be a link that goes deeper than “I like all of them a lot.”)
I’m still not sure. It’s going to take a lot of thinking. But it has something to do with genre fiction – that is, with decidedly popular fiction that owes a lot of its enjoyableness to a strict adherence to generic conventions, but which also is at its greatest when it recognizes and tests those conventions. And these are all, I would maintain, very distinctively genre-writers, but all writers who approach their respective genres in different ways.
Two of the four are mystery-writers, of course – though Lord Peter Wimsey and Philip Marlowe are very different detectives.
Tolkien is fantasy – though the pitfall there is that he may not have considered his own work that way. He thought of it more as mythical history, and it certainly bears far less resemblance to Phillip K. Dick than it does to Thomas Hardy.
And Wodehouse? I know it’s genre fiction. I mean, it’s popular, and it’s convention-directed, and it’s delightful because of both of those things. But what genre is it? Comedy of manners? Society caper? Romance, even? I’m not certain. But I know it fits.
There’s something there – in the way in which all four both epitomize and transcend popular genre. They’re all models for genre-writers to come, too, especially Chandler and Tolkien.
This link I’m getting at also has something to do with culture/nationalism/place. All four of these writers created characters who are vividly marked as being from exactly where they’re from, if you know what I mean.
Wodehouse first conceived of Jeeves and Bertie while living, destitute, in Manhattan, but that cognitive disconnect only points all the more strongly to the way in which his greatest creations are more English than even the English. They are England – a fantasy England that may never have really existed, but you wish it had.
And in terms of Englishness, it’s also hard to get more so than Lord Peter, whose charming combination of glibness and stoicism bears a lot of resemblance to Bertie with about five times more brain, Holmes if he’d inherited money instead of mental illness, or even Jane Austen’s Catharine Moreland if she’d had an actual mystery on her hands.
Phillip Marlowe is also more American than America, in the same way Jeeves is more English than the English. The cowboy and the hard-bitten detective are American masculinity in the 1940s and 50s, and in the 1940s and 50s, American masculinity is America, and as there is no cowboy more cowboy-like than John Wayne, so there is no detective more detective-like than Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s novels both shaped and perfectly mirrored the American psyche of the time – and managed, astoundingly, to remain unique and artful creations of their own.
And Tolkien? To say The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarilion, and The Hobbit are about place is a bit of an understatement. They are place. The Silmarilion isn’t even a story – it’s just an outgrowth of the already fully-formed history of an entire world, as, to a slightly lesser degree, are the others. In the most literal sense, the place Tolkien wrote about, of course, was Middle-Earth, but as many scholars have noted, the exquisite detail in which Tolkien imagined that world, and the background against which he was able to create it, owe just as much to the changing, English world he saw around him every day. Frodo, Sam, and Gollum couldn’t live anywhere else but Middle-Earth, but Middle-Earth also couldn’t live anywhere else but England.
Then there’s something about character, too. The thing that got me on this tack in the first place, actually, was noticing once again how strikingly similar Bertie and Lord Peter are. They’re the same type: the drawling, unflappable, moderately handsome, suitably moneyed, young English gentleman. Both are easily taken for imbeciles (truer in Bertie’s case than in Lord Peter’s, though Bertie has more to him than meets the eye), both have a knack for stumbling into entangled and entangling situations, both have inscrutable manservants, both subtly (and not so subtly) challenge, while at the same time romancing, the conventions of the English aristocracy.
But slightly less obvious is the way in which Philip Marlowe falls right into the same vein. He isn’t, of course, English. Nor is he aristocratic. In fact, he couldn’t be farther from either. But dry, sarcastic wit? He has in spades. Unflappability? Pretty much his middle name. Irresistible and understated charm? Obviously, or all those shadowy women wouldn’t keep trying to seduce him. He’s also constantly being underestimated (and proving what a dangerous thing that underestimation can be), a lone wolf (though Bertie and Jeeves are of course soul mates, and Lord Peter has both Bunter and Harriet Vane, all of the novels are, I think, at their most satisfying when characters are operating independently), and unfortunately prone to ending up in extremely complicated situations.
All three writers were obviously attracted to characters who never stopped cracking jokes – especially when the going gets rough -- but whose humor only barely conceals a kind of deep emptiness or mistrust. (Wodehouse is the lightest here, but some of his other stories clearly point to an attitude that might be characterized as a despairingly unconquerable love for humanity.) Call it modernist sentiment, maybe?
And then Tolkien? He’s the oddball in this field, and maybe it shows that he doesn’t belong at all – since character is barely even the point of most of his work (though it is what I personally read for – I love you, Sam Gamgee). But I think, nonetheless, some of the key traits are there. Frodo definitely has that incurable loving lonerness – he couldn’t love the people of Middle Earth any more, but in the end he leaves them anyway. And of course, elves are an entire race of noble loners. Gandalf definitely has the dry wit down, as do a number of the dwarves and even, intermittently, Aragorn. Bilbo’s accidental heroism bears some resemblance to Bertie’s well-meaning bumbling, and if you want to talk about underestimating your adversaries, Hobbits would be a pretty good place to start.
I’m still not sure where I’m going with it all. It plays right into all my interests in popular fiction, though, which is increasingly (this year, anyway) what I see myself focusing on. I’m consistently fascinated by the stuff which is unapologetically, brilliantly, popular, you know? Much more so than in the political or the consciously literary, most of the time.
Maybe that’s just intellectual laziness, but I hope not. I think it’s maybe something related to the reason I love all these writers so much myself. Perhaps I also see in them something like the aching love I have for my time, my people, my place – for abandoned gas station pumps and reality television and the International House of Pancakes – a love that is always coupled with the realization that in some ways I can never fully belong to that time, that place, that people. Perhaps I see those who create art that is both truly beautiful and truly popular as being both in and out of the world, and perhaps that’s also something I see in myself.
Is that overly grandiose? Maybe. After all, everybody’s both in and out of culture all the time – it’s universal, we’re individual. But something about the very best of popular art, I think, captures that ineffable in-betweenness. It’s the impossibly sweet moment between the individual and the universal we’re after, I guess. And sometimes, wonderfully, we get it.
Labels: audience, books, nerd power, reading
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