Guy Bolton (2) (1884–1979)

A semi-entertaining, though not terribly reliable, account of Bolton's and Wodehouse's career in musical comedy from about 1914 to 1930. (You know it's not reliable when Wodehouse tells a story about inventing Jeeves, set in the later 1920s, when the character had already been around.) Some of the stories are funny, but after a time, the bubbles start to fall flat and the champagne loses its flavour. It's somewhat overwritten and forced-funny toward the end. Not one of Wodehouse's better efforts, in my view. Stick to Wooster.… (altro)

I have been a huge fan of P. G. Wodehouse’s book for nearly forty years, having started to read them while I was still at school. His novels are delightful, written with a mastery of the English language that few other writers come close to matching. Yes, they are ridiculous, as removed from reality as is possible, but any reader prepared to suspend disbelief for just a few pages is sucked in and likely to become addicted. I have read some of the Jeeves and Wooster stories several times over, and never cease to be entranced with each return. I would not have thought he was capable of writing dull prose.

Unfortunately, this volume of memoirs proves me wrong. This book seemed more like a feeble attempt to copy Wodehouse’s style, but one undertaken by someone who hadn’t actually read anything that the master had written, but had instead been given a potted description of how Wodehouse’s humour worked.

The book does not attempt to catalogue Wodehouse’s whole life but focuses, instead, on his early years co-writing musical comedies, with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton (the latter of whom also co-wrote this book). It offers some interesting insights into the perils that faced the aspiring producers, and indeed the writers, of musical comedies in New York in the early years of the twentieth century, which proved to be a rackety business Sadly, the effortless cadence and beauty o Wodehouse’s fiction never gets an airing. The tone, which aspires to be charmingly self-deprecatory, simply falls flat, and betrays an unwonted predictability and staleness.

Rather than offering much wanted insights into how Wodehouse wrote, this book has slightly eroded Wodehouse’s stature in my esteem.… (altro)