Fluff? Fluff!

Fifty years ago, give or take an eon, I was a chipper young lad in graduate school. It was my habit to show up in class a few minutes early, so I could have my choice of seats — up front if I was the cheerful bouncing boy, in a shady back corner if befuddled. I carried extracurricular reading material with me, so the time should not be lost.

One afternoon as I settled into a second-row seat and opened a book, the professor finished up scribbling abstruse theorems on the board, then brushing chalk from her hands, she turned round and deigned to give the paperback a glance. It was, I recall, “The Code of the Woosters.”

The dignified, and excellent, professor did something with her lips. It was not quite a sneer, and not exactly a grimace. A prim compression, let us call it. Its meaning was clear.

“P.G. Wodehouse,” I offered, gaily raising the cover to her icy glance. “Great stuff.”

Here the professor — and I repeat, she was top of the stack — here the professor, I say, did not exactly snort, nor sniff, yet her nostrils tellingly expressed disapprobation. Then she ventured: “Some of us don’t have time for fluff.”

Fluff?
Wodehouse? Fluff!

Here I restrained the impulse to draw myself up to my full height — a bit shorter than her — and exclaim: “My dear woman. You know not beans of what you speak.” However, the rest of the class was filing in, and the class was a prerequisite for graduation.

To add poison to her presumptuousness, Pelham Grenville had just recently shuffled off his mortal coil, a mere 90-minute drive from that benighted classroom.

Could I truly help the immortal Wodehouse, in any way, by denouncing this hound in human form for her execrable taste, her blasphemous mouth, when doing so might cost me a master’s degree, plus the $2,000 annual salary increment at whatever wretched high school institution to which I was about to be consigned?

I doubt it.

So I sat there in the second row, and assiduously took notes, while penning far-from-complimentary doodles in the margins of my hardbound 5-by-7-inch blue notebook.

Skip ahead 49 years. I am now an old man, in everything but spirit, and P.G. Wodehouse has just dragged me back from the lip of the grave. I have written recently about breaking my hip, and what came next. (For more on this, you may consult the DSM-5; see especially the chapter “Unending Torment and Unendurable Pain.” Alternatively, check out the Buddhist text: Life is suffering.)

For several weeks I was encumbered with the mentality of a horse: hors de combat. Upon regaining some trifle of my normal aplomb, I found myself unable to do just about anything, except plump the pillows and read. But not even that. Truly, I found myself unable to read anything but Wodehouse.

Reading Wodehouse requires little physical effort, no strain upon the frontal, parietal, temporal or occipital lobes, nor the corpus callosum. Once entered into Wodehouse’s world, alongside Bertie Wooster, the inimitable Jeeves, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Roderick Spode, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, and numerous aunts, the troubles of this world recede unto that distant darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.

So it was that after weeks of agony, sleepless nights and groans aplenty, this week I fell into a dream of Wodehouse people. I was there upon some uncertain mission; I had to obtain some sort of information from some six or seven men, all of them eccentric, and all with ridiculous names.

Not knowing precisely what I was there for, I stumbled through my labors, which inexplicably seemed to lighten as I became accustomed to this human menagerie. Suspecting I had just about enough goods to wrap it up, suddenly the Wodehouse men were replaced by women. Again the ridiculous names, the eccentric behaviors. Then somehow feeling upon the verge of enlightenment — that none of this made any sense, and that none of it was important — I awoke. With a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

P.G. Wodehouse, half a century gone, had restored me to the world. And back in this world I have remained. Pip pip, my dear Pelham G.

Fluff? My dear woman …

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