‘பெருந்தேவிக்கு பி. ஜி. உடௌஸ் வேண்டாம்’ (‘PG Wodehouse? Not for Perundevi’ )

பெருந்தேவிக்கு பி. ஜி. உடௌஸ் வேண்டாம், published at: https://solvanam.com/, Issue 256 / October 13, 2021

https://solvanam.com/2021/10/13/%e0%ae%aa%e0%af%86%e0%ae%b0%e0%af%81%e0%ae%a8%e0%af%8d%e0%ae%a4%e0%af%87%e0%ae%b5%e0%ae%bf%e0%ae%95%e0%af%8d%e0%ae%95%e0%af%81-%e0%ae%aa%e0%ae%bf-%e0%ae%9c%e0%ae%bf-%e0%ae%89%e0%ae%9f%e0%af%8c/

It was only after a couple of false starts that I was able to write this story in Tamil. At first it seemed ill-considered and wrong-headed to attempt in Tamil a story that depended so much on P G Wodehouse’s fiction, especially the use of Wardour Street English and Mayfair slang, and engagement breakups. Would the readers have some idea of PGW’s novels in order to make sense of what my characters were talking about? If not, would it be possible for me to build that background knowledge into the story without sounding pedantic? Hadn’t I better write this story in English? These were some of my misgivings.

But, eventually, things turned out all right; the fact that there is an effortless combination of the suburban (Bertie’s Mayfair slang, I mean) and the classical (Jeeves’s Wardour Street, of course) in PGW’s fiction fell smoothly into place in one of the conversations in the story without any “hard labour” on my part to explain the idea.

PGW’s books are what Chesterton called the “good bad books” – books which don’t pretend to be literature but which continue to be read when the so-called classics are no longer read. In the last three decades, I haven’t touched even one PGW. But in my younger days, he was a passion. So much so that by the time I left Madras Christian College with a BA degree, I had read some twenty five novels of PGW from among the 40-odd Penguin paperback volumes that lined a top rack in Miller Memorial Library (https://mcc.edu.in/library-2/). And the temptation to attempt to write like Wodehouse was strong. One of those stories was published in the Madras edition of The Indian Express (in a supplement called ‘Youthink’) over forty years ago, and, a few years later, The Hindu published another story in its ‘Literary Review’ supplement. The latest one in the series is ‘Testing Times,’ published in 2015 in a webzine called Readomania (https://www.readomania.com/story/testing-times).

That I went back to Wodehouse for scene-setting and backgrounding in a story in Tamil suggests how deep and abiding the influence of this producer of what Chesterton called “amiable nonsense” is on me.