One of my main projects at the moment is reading each of Stephen Fry’s three Ws: Wodehouse, Waugh, and Wilde.
Wilde, so far, I’ve picked up the complete short fiction and read two short stories, “The Happy Prince” and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” having read the former before in the form of a children’s picture book. However, I can’t imagine that the picture book has the same ending. First, I suppose, I will talk about the other story, though, then get back to “The Happy Prince.” Minor (outline, not detail) spoilers ahead:
“The Nightingale and the Rose” was very much a story that I did not as a whole enjoy at the time I read it, but most definitely wished I had written. It was beautiful not in the way that I expected but in the way that I find admirable that one would write it. I later read the story aloud and my audience of one was much more attuned to the eventual ending than I was when I first read it. This may be in part because I read it while working at the bookshop, and in part because I sorta skimmed over the Student’s lines when I was first reading it. When I first read it, I thought of the story in two parts: the beginning (which included the middle) and the end. On the second, aloud, reading, it was clear that the end was interspersed throughout the story all the way to the beginning. What was the beginning? A pretty (depending, I suppose on your definition—I found it pretty) fairy tale about a noble bird (I said depending on your definition, for my audience decreed the bird to be stupid, rather than noble). What was the end? A cynical look at human—or at the very least, adolescent—nature. I would make the case for human nature, for the whole character of the Student includes more than just the adolescent trope but the scholar trope, which, as we shall see in “The Happy Prince,” can be stretched to include the entirety of “civilized” man. The ultimate result of the story was that (remember, in my opinion, not my audience’s) one received the idea of all non-human characters being somewhat more innocent, pure, and noble of mind while all of the humans were shallow and ugly. And as a natural result of the structure of the story, this leaves one at the end with the human characters—with nothing but the bad taste of civilization in one’s mouth.
That brings us nicely to “The Happy Prince,” a tale with another bird as our main protagonist. Now, the reason I can’t but imagine that the children’s book I read was slightly different is that it for the most part has a similar message to “The Nightingale and the Rose.” The animals (and inanimate objects) are noble, while humans fall far short of the bar. It should be said that this bird doesn’t act of its own accord, but after appeals to its better nature. The majority of the city that we see merely shows human suffering, not human shallowness. If memory serves, those helped by the Happy Prince are indeed only indicative of human suffering, with the exception of the writer, who exhibits an inflated ego. All this makes for a similarly pretty fairy tale—until it comes time for the end. At the end we get another look at how humans are unable to recognize the noble actions taken by the non-humans, and instead exhibit unintentional disdain for them. These humans are just as phony and self-absorbed as those in “The Nightingale and the Rose.” But again, I would consider this story worthy, if not optimistic, and of a tone I admire. Oh yes, except for the very end. The story ends with two one-sentence paragraphs starring God. As much as I despise the tone or message or whatever embodied by God’s conceited remarks, I would possibly accept it as an ending if there had been any indication during the rest of the story that heaven was at all involved. It was a wonderful cynical story until it brought in the jarring, disorienting upper realm. If I ever read this aloud, I might very well skip what must have been intended as a moral.
As for Waugh, I’m about halfway or a little more through Scoop. I’m enjoying it, but I’ll probably need something more (I intend to try Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited before making a final decision) to make me state that I love Waugh. It’s fun with plenty of things that make me laugh, but the end seems to keep getting more and more remote.
I have no problem of that sort with Wodehouse. Again, though they are very much lifted straight from his pages, I don’t consider having seen Jeeves and Wooster as having read Wodehouse, for though the dialogue and action is there, it most definitely is Bertie’s narration that completes the effect of those stories. What have I read? Well, on paper, just Leave it to Psmith. I have also listened to Thank You, Jeeves and most of The Code of the Woosters as read by Simon Callow (who does a remarkable job with the characters, and even sometimes makes me forget that it’s not Hugh Laurie reading Bertie). I started with those, rather than The Inimitable Jeeves and Carry On, Jeeves, though those come first, because I do have sitting in my room Life with Jeeves, the collection that includes those two plus Very Good, Jeeves. I haven’t started reading it yet, however, because I do have the Waugh left to finish, and I have been reading other things, as briefly detailed below.
I am currently offline as I type this, so cannot access what I have previously said about Wodehouse, but I assume I did mention that I adore him. I really do not know what else to say. His plots are amazingly and beautifully intricate, his dialogue is remarkably funny, and his narration is utterly hilarious. So far, what I’ve read, being Jeeves stories and Leave it to Psmith—I’ll probably tackle Uncle Dynamite next, cause I have owned it for about 15 years probably and never read it—his style is much the same in each. Psmith’s role in his story is much a conflation of Bertie and Jeeves, and his personality is rather different from both, but the stories themselves might very well be one and the same. Wodehouse harmonizes on the same theme over and over and it never gets old. Please, please go read some.
My other readings at the moment are, of course the Wilde stories, the poems of Nash and Housman, and inspired by a Mark Twain kick brought on by listening to and then watching Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight!, beginning A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, of which there will be more spoken in the next entry.
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