How to pronounce Wodehouse

A kindly soul once corrected my pronunciation of P.G. Wodehouse, and I’m profoundly grateful to him for saving me from making a complete ass of myself when I began mixing in Wodehouse Society circles (if only he’d taught me how to use cutlery as well).

I had been pronouncing Wodehouse as if it rhymed with road-house and toad-house. Whereas the ‘wode’ in P.G. Wodehouse should rhyme with good. Here’s a little mnemonic to help you remember.

Every good house has some Wodehouse.

Not only natty, but true. Every good house really should have some P.G. Wodehouse to help the inmates from sinking too deeply into despair.  So it was only natural that, having recently returned to Australia, I set out to compile an ‘emergency’ Wodehouse kit to keep me going until I’m reunited with my books.

This simple task has proved more difficult than you might expect. Adelaide was once a city with so many bookshops that my friends and I designed pub-and-bookshop-crawls around them. But when I recently attempted a nostalgic pub-and-bookshop tour, I discovered Something Fishy. Adelaide has fewer bookshops than it used to, and most of them have little or no Wodehouse.

One of the reasons for the lack of P.G. Wodehouse in Adelaide’s bookstores is, I suspect, a tendency on the part of local readers to take our Literature seriously. Too seriously perhaps, but we’re a serious-minded lot. We take great pride in our Writer’s Week, which The Adelaide Review describes as ‘deep and worldly‘ (although it’s much better than that).

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

From: The Girl in Blue (1970)

For budding Wodehouse readers in Adelaide, and other places suffering a Wodehouse shortage, there are several ways to get hold of his books.

1. Ask your nearest bookstore to order a specific Wodehouse title for you.
2. Haunt second-hand bookshops and swoop on any Wodehouse you find.
3. Explore your local library (if you are lucky enough to have one).
4. Order your Wodehouse books online.

Adelaide Library’s small (but pleasantly surprising) P.G. Wodehouse selection includes some hidden gems

Browsing the shelves in a bookshop or library, not knowing what you’re going to find, is one of life’s great pleasures. Ordering a book, online or in person, reduces this experience to a commercial transaction, but if you are looking for a specific title it’s sometimes the only way.

I’ll be placing my future orders in person because it’s an opportunity to discuss Wodehouse with booksellers, and hopefully persuade them to stock more of his stuff. If I’m successful, perhaps one day some lucky person will find a Wodehouse book while browsing, take it home, and discover the unmitigated pleasures of the world he created — a world Evelyn Waugh once compared to Eden, and that I call Plumtopia.

Happy book hunting!

HP