Today, the idea of the “Comic Novel” feels largely archaic—something stuffy and British, a phrase uttered in an accent that died out by the 1940s. Obviously, funny novels continue to be written (The Nix, for example, or the recent Pulitzer Prize winner Less, or the historical adventure-satire Madness is Better than Defeat, which I reviewed on this blog), but generally the comedy is meant to be only a supplement to serious social commentary or psychological depth or postmodern meta-commentary. The purely comic novel, one in which the comedy is the central element, seems to have reached its heyday in the early twentieth century, during the careers of British novelists P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, arguably the two greatest practitioners of the form.
P.G. Wodehouse, who’s books I’ve had the pleasure of reading and listening to ever since I was a child when my dad would play cassettes of them on long car rides (thus infusing that very British sentence structure into my developing writer’s mind) is considered by many the quintessential comic novelist. Not only are his characters memorably ridiculous, from man-child Bertram Wooster, a rich gentlemen essentially incapable of properly doing anything without the aid of his valet Jeeves, to the absent-minded Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth and Lord of Blandings Castle (described memorably in Something Fresh in the following manner: “He was as completely happy as only a fluffy-minded old man with excellent health and a large income can be. Other people worried about all sorts of things: strikes, wars, suffragettes, diminishing birth rates, the growing materialism of the age, and a score of similar subjects. Worrying indeed seemed to be the twentieth century’s speciality. Lord Emsworth never worried. Nature had equipped him with a mind so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of life that, if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out again a moment later.”), but his prose style also makes every sentence into a work of comic genius, from the unexpected similes (“She felt, as she so often felt in her brother Galahad’s society, as if foxes were gnawing her vitals.”) to farcical exchanges of dialogue, such as the following from The Code of the Woosters:
“No, all I wanted was to tell you to go to an antique shop in the Brompton Road — it’s just past the Oratory — you can’t miss it — and sneer at a cow-creamer.”
I did not get her drift. The impression I received was that of an aunt talking through the back of her neck.
“Do what to a what?”
“They’ve got an eighteenth-century cow-creamer there that Tom’s going to buy this afternoon.”
The scales fell from my eyes.
“Oh, it’s a silver what-not, is it?”
“Yes. A sort of cream-jug. Go there and ask them to show it to you, and when they do, register scorn.”
“The idea being what?”
“To sap their confidence, of course, chump. To sow doubts and misgivings in their mind and make them clip the price a bit. The cheaper he gets the thing, the better he will be pleased.”
Ultimately, though, it’s the plots that make Wodehouse novels such comedic masterpieces—yes, plot, that ugly thing we modern “literary” writers look down upon. Each of his novels is perfectly crafted, with an amusing central conflict and a host of smaller and sillier subplots that always perfectly converge into a wonderful tangle by the novel’s end. The Code of the Woosters, for example, involves Bertie being called upon to steal a cow creamer (as introduced above) by his Aunt Dahlia, which brings him into conflict with Roderick Spode, leader of a London Fascist organization known as the Black Shorts, and magistrate and collector Sir Watkyn Bassett, who also desires the cow creamer and whose daughter Madeline Bertie must also reconcile with his friend and her future fiancé Gussie Fink-Nottle after the two had a falling out. As expected, antics ensue when everyone converges at Totleigh Towers, Sir Watkyn’s country house.
By contrast, Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels are much darker, carrying in them notes of bitterness and misanthropy. It’s no accident that he’s most famous for Brideshead Revisited, his serious novel written later in his career about Catholic grace, aristocratic nostalgia, and repressed same-sex desire. His earlier novels are usually satires, but even they have similar moral undercurrents to Brideshead. His first published work, for example, Decline and Fall (1928), centers on Paul Pennyfeather, a theology student who, after being expelled from Oxford due to a misunderstanding, is forced to teach at a public school in Wales. The novel is a brilliant critique of the British education system and of British society more generally, and unlike P.G. Wodehouse, Waugh isn’t afraid of making scathing social commentary on race relations, imperialism, marriage, etc. A Handful of Dust, meanwhile, might begin as a classic comic novel, centering on Tony Last, an aristocrat with an ugly country estate (Waugh’s satire of Gothic architecture) and a bored wife Brenda who decides to have an affair with a young man named Jon Beaver, but the novel takes a dark turn halfway through when Tony ends up leaving England for an expedition into the Brazilian jungle, one that ends with a bleak but memorable plot point involving the complete works of Charles Dickens. Wodehouse’s novels, meanwhile, almost always end happily, with everything more or less working out and everyone ending up largely where they started.
I confess, despite my love of Wodehouse, I do find myself preferring Waugh’s dark worldview. His comedy may not be nearly as laugh-out-loud funny, but there is something movingly sinister about the way his novel’s end. More specifically, even in his most humorous and satirical works, Waugh includes small, serious passages, and the contrast between these grave sections and the surrounding hilarity is particularly affecting. In Decline and Fall, there is a moment near the end when Paul reflects on Captain Grimes, one of his fellow teachers who’s always getting into trouble and running from the law and who, after escaping prison, was last seen fleeing into the Edgon Mire, where he seemingly drowned. But, as Paul notes:
[He] knew that Grimes was not dead. Lord Tangent was dead; Mr. Prendergast was dead; the time would even come for Paul Pennyfeather; but Grimes, Paul at last realized, was of the immortals. He was a life force. Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in Wales; drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America; engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire, he would rise again somewhere at sometime, shaking from his limbs the musty integuments of the tomb.
Surely he had followed in the Bacchic train of distant Arcady, and played on the reeds of myth by forgotten streams, and taught the childish satyrs the art of love? Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods of all the histories, fire brimstone, and yawning earthquakes, plague and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears? Had he not, like some grease-caked Channel swimmer, breasted the waves of the Deluge? Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?
This is not a passage that would ever appear in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, and its presence in Waugh’s first novel (published when he was only twenty-four) reveals an impressive wisdom. Waugh recognizes that his satire is about more than just Britain in the 1920s, and so here he gives Decline and Fall a Biblical, mythical scope and connects his ridiculous characters to larger social and historical forces. For P.G. Wodehouse, by contrast, Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth are utterly ahistorical and exist only in the pages of his story, in their timeless little world.
There is one moment, though, when even Wodehouse pauses to make a more serious social comment—likely a lapse, as it occurs in one of his first novels, Something Fresh (1915). At the end of the novel, after a series of antics involving a stolen scarab, a broken engagement, and Lord Emsworth’s classic absent-mindedness, Joan Valentine, our young heroine, reflects melancholically on the nature of her life:
I think I have it now. My life has been such a series of jerks. I dash along—then something happens which stops that bit of my life with a jerk; and then I have to start over again—a new bit. I think I’m getting tired of jerks. I want something stodgy and continuous. I’m like one of the old bus horses that could go on forever if people got off without making them stop. It’s the having to get the bus moving again that wears one out. This little section of my life since we came here is over, and it is finished for good. I’ve got to start the bus going again on a new road and with a new set of passengers. I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one lot of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?…Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It’s like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it’s about nothing—just a jumble.
It’s a wonderful passage, not just because it’s a rare instance of genuine feeling from Wodehouse, but also because it’s an insightful meta-commentary on the comic novel itself.