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Commentary: Need a balm for these troubled times? I recommend the works of P.G. Wodehouse
Seeking succor when the world seems to be closing in on you is a quintessentially human habit. Some people do it by gorging on comfort food like macaroni and cheese, others choose drink, or drugs, or gardening, or the warmth of a puppy.
I always know when I’m feeling blue, because I feel the gravitational pull of my long shelf of P.G. Wodehouse books.
If you’ve never read Wodehouse, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. I’m well past that point; some of his stories and novels I’ve read dozens, even hundreds of times, and they can still make me convulse in laughter. More so when the outside world provides little to laugh about.
Evelyn Waugh, who admitted to learning a hell of a lot from Wodehouse, may have put it best: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale,” he wrote in a 1961 essay designed in part to defend Wodehouse over the one blot on his life story (more on that in a bit). “He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”
And what is that world? It’s timeless, and yet dated. Orwell narrowed it down to the Edwardian era — 1901 to 1919 — long before the irruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression. Its inhabitants are those of “there will always be an England” England: stern vicars, timid curates, lords and earls, penniless titled wastrels living on allowances from their uncles, imperious aunts, upper-crust twits.
They’re all presented on the page by an inspired farceur whose exquisitely penned prose seems effortless, but belies the painstaking craftsmanship needed to make his split-second timing come off.
Some Wodehouse lines are like time bombs, detonating with a momentary delay. My favorite comes in an exchange with the soupy Madeline Bassett in “The Code of the Woosters,” when Bertie comes up with a quote he heard from Jeeves, actually the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, to describe his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle as “a sensitive plant.”
“Exactly,” Madeline replies. “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
“Oh, am I?”
Where to start with Wodehouse? He used several framing devices for his novels and short stories. The golf stories are narrated by the “oldest member” of an upper-class golf club who buttonholes unwary younger members to regale them with his memories of golfers he has known.
The peak of this series, to me, is “Farewell to Legs,” featuring a playboy who takes a house in a placid golfing community and discomposes its dour Scottish golfers with his high jinks: “Angus became aware with a sinking heart that here, as he had already begun to suspect, was a life-and-soul-of-the-party man, a perfect scream, and an absolutely priceless fellow who simply makes you die with the things he says.”
Then there are the fish stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his local pub the Angler’s Rest, involving his inexhaustible circle of relatives. To me, the glory of the Mulliner stories are a sequence of three stories — “Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo,” “The Bishop’s Move” and “Gala Night,” all related to his brother Wilfred’s invention of a tonic meant to “provide Indian Rajahs with a specific which would encourage their elephants to face a tiger of the jungle with a jaunty sang-froid,” and what happens when unsuspecting users swallow a tumblerful of something that should be taken by the teaspoon.
Some are set in New York and Hollywood, where Wodehouse spent some time writing lyrics for musicals with Jerome Kern and others. (His best-known song is probably “Bill,” from “Show Boat.”)
But at the summit of Wodehouse’s genius are the stories of Bertie Wooster and his “gentleman’s personal gentleman,” or valet, Jeeves. Of the short stories, all narrated by Bertie, to my mind the greatest are a trilogy beginning with “The Great Sermon Handicap,” continuing with “The Purity of the Turf,” and concluding with what may be the single funniest short story ever penned in English, “The Metropolitan Touch.”
Bertie and Jeeves, as the British essayist Alexander Cockburn once asserted, are a pairing as momentous in literary history as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Wodehouse never exhausted the counterpoint between Bertie’s slangy gibbering and half-remembered literary allusions with Jeeves’ carefully modulated responses: “Very well, Jeeves, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?” “Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.”
Bertie is both a classic unreliable narrator and a stock comic character given life. Having inherited a fortune from parents who are almost never mentioned, he’s rich enough for financial difficulties to never be a plot obstruction, though he’s always willing to tide over a pal brought low by “unfortunate speculations” at the racecourse. Jeeves is a deus ex machina; we learn almost nothing about him, except for imperturbability and skill at solving the crises that Bertie falls into through his pure cloth-headedness.
Bertie’s romantic relations are entirely sexless, 20th-century echoes of courtly love, though throughout the oeuvre he gets engaged to at least six women by my count. Among them towers the frighteningly domineering Honoria Glossop. (“Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.”)
Jeeves extricates Bertie from every one of these entanglements, and thankfully so, because every fiancée begins their relationship with the determination to toss Jeeves out on his ear.
Wodehouse aficionados wage a never-ending debate over which Jeeves and Wooster book is his masterpiece, with “The Code of the Woosters” (1938) and “Joy in the Morning” (1946) typically trading the top two spots.
I’m partial to the former, in part because it features the only overtly political character Wodehouse ever devised. He’s Roderick Spode, a would-be British dictator plainly based on the real-life British fascist and Hitler partisan Oswald Mosley.
Spode is the leader of a gang of fascist toughs known as the Black Shorts. “You mean ‘shorts,’ don’t you?” Bertie says when he first hears about Spode. “No,” he’s told, “by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.” “Footer bags, you mean?” Bertie asks, a Britishism for football shorts. “How perfectly foul.”
Spode throws his weight around Brinkley Court, the country estate where the story takes place, harrying Bertie endlessly for reasons we don’t need to go into, until Jeeves provides Bertie with a magic word guaranteed to turn dictator Spode into a shrinking mouse. At the climax, Bertie presses his advantage, informing his nemesis:
“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode,’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”
It’s no spoiler to tell you that the magic word Jeeves provides to Bertie is “Eulalie.” As for who or what Eulalie is, and why it reduces Spode to jelly, you’ll have to read the book.
That brings us to that one blot on Wodehouse’s life. When World War II broke out, he was living peaceably in the French resort of Le Touquet. When the Nazis came through in 1940 they interned Wodehouse and transported him to Berlin, from which the Germans persuaded him to make a handful of “nonpolitical” radio broadcasts for his British compatriots.
There was an uproar at home. Newspaper columnists condemned Wodehouse as a “Quisling,” libraries took his books off their shelves, there were condemnatory speeches in Parliament.
The truth is that the broadcasts were indeed nonpolitical; if the Germans thought they had scored a propaganda victory it was instantly evident that they were wrong, and they halted the broadcasts after only five. Wodehouse had displayed nothing worse than the stupidity of the innocent. He knew nothing of the political context, much less that his broadcasts came at a moment when the very future of Britain was in question.
But that fit precisely with Wodehouse’s literary landscape. Farce, of course, depends on its characters’ failure to recognize what is near at hand; Wodehouse in his splendid isolation in France and in a bygone fictional Eden was incapable of recognizing the crisis in Britain was so near at hand that his broadcasts would strike hard at his countrymen’s diminishing morale.
Orwell’s opinion of Wodehouse’s attackers was withering. “It was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did,” he wrote in 1946, “but to go on denouncing him three or four years later — and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery — is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. … In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practicing appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940.”
One could go on. The pleasures of Wodehouse are inexhaustible, so I’ll stop here. With some news about Trump’s tariffs threatening to disturb my peace today, and having just finished a rereading of “The Code of the Woosters,” I will share the next few hours with G. Darcy (“Stilton”) Cheesewright, Zenobia Hopwood, Edwin the Boy Scout, Boko Fittleworth and Percy, Lord Worplesdon, and their horseplay in and around Steeple Bumpleigh, Hampshire.
Looking back on the affair and its satisfying resolution, Bertie tells Jeeves, “There’s an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. … Something about Joy doing something.”
“Joy cometh in the morning, sir?”
“That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s dashed good.”
The water that flows down irrigation canals to some of the West’s biggest expanses of farmland comes courtesy of the federal government for a very low price — even, in some cases, for free.
In a new study, researchers analyzed wholesale prices charged by the federal government in California, Arizona and Nevada, and found that large agricultural water agencies pay only a fraction of what cities pay, if anything at all. They said these “dirt-cheap” prices cost taxpayers, add to the strains on scarce water, and discourage conservation — even as the Colorado River’s depleted reservoirs continue to decline.
“Federal taxpayers have been subsidizing effectively free water for a very, very long time,” said Noah Garrison, a researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “We can’t address the growing water scarcity in the West while we continue to give that water away for free or close to it.”
The report, released this week by UCLA and the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, examines water that local agencies get from the Colorado River as well as rivers in California’s Central Valley, and concludes that the federal government delivers them water at much lower prices than state water systems or other suppliers.
The researchers recommend the Trump administration start charging a “water reliability and security surcharge” on all Colorado River water as well as water from the canals of the Central Valley Project in California. That would encourage agencies and growers to conserve, they said, while generating hundreds of millions of dollars to repair aging and damaged canals and pay for projects such as new water recycling plants.
“The need for the price of water to reflect its scarcity is urgent in light of the growing Colorado River Basin crisis,” the researchers wrote.
The study analyzed only wholesale prices paid by water agencies, not the prices paid by individual farmers or city residents. It found that agencies serving farming areas pay about $30 per acre-foot of water on average, whereas city water utilities pay $512 per acre-foot.
In California, Arizona and Nevada, the federal government supplies more than 7 million acre-feet of water, about 14 times the total water usage of Los Angeles, for less than $1 per acre-foot.
And more than half of that — nearly one-fourth of all the water the researchers analyzed — is delivered for free by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to five water agencies in farming areas: the Imperial Irrigation District, Palo Verde Irrigation District and Coachella Valley Water District, as well as the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District in Nevada and the Unit B Irrigation and Drainage District in Arizona.
Along the Colorado River, about three-fourths of the water is used for agriculture.
Farmers in California’s Imperial Valley receive the largest share of Colorado River water, growing hay for cattle, lettuce, spinach, broccoli and other crops on more than 450,000 acres of irrigated lands.
The Imperial Irrigation District charges farmers the same rate for water that it has for years: $20 per acre-foot.
Tina Shields, IID’s water department manager, said the district opposes any surcharge on water. Comparing agricultural and urban water costs, as the researchers did, she said, “is like comparing a grape to a watermelon,” given major differences in how water is distributed and treated.
Shields pointed out that IID and local farmers are already conserving, and this year the savings will equal about 23% of the district’s total water allotment.
“Imperial Valley growers provide the nation with a safe, reliable food supply on the thinnest of margins for many growers,” she said in an email.
She acknowledged IID does not pay any fee to the government for water, but said it does pay for operating, maintaining and repairing both federal water infrastructure and the district’s own system.
“I see no correlation between the cost of Colorado River water and shortages, and disagree with these inflammatory statements,” Shields said, adding that there “seems to be an intent to drive a wedge between agricultural and urban water users at a time when collaborative partnerships are more critical than ever.”
The Colorado River provides water for seven states, 30 Native tribes and northern Mexico, but it’s in decline. Its reservoirs have fallen during a quarter-century of severe drought intensified by climate change. Its two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are now less than one-third full.
Negotiations among the seven states on how to deal with shortages have deadlocked.
Mark Gold, a co-author, said the government’s current water prices are so low that they don’t cover the costs of operating, maintaining and repairing aging aqueducts and other infrastructure. Even an increase to $50 per acre-foot of water, he said, would help modernize water systems and incentivize conservation.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Reclamation, declined to comment on the proposal.
The Colorado River was originally divided among the states under a 1922 agreement that overpromised what the river could provide. That century-old pact and the ingrained system of water rights, combined with water that costs next to nothing, Gold said, lead to “this slow-motion train wreck that is the Colorado right now.”
Research has shown that the last 25 years were likely the driest quarter-century in the American West in at least 1,200 years, and that global warming is contributing to this megadrought.
The Colorado River’s flow has decreased about 20% so far this century, and scientists have found that roughly half the decline is due to rising temperatures, driven largely by fossil fuels.
In a separate report this month, scientists Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall said the latest science suggests that climate change will probably “exert a stronger influence, and this will mean a higher likelihood of continued lower precipitation in the headwaters of the Colorado River into the future.”
Experts have urged the Trump administration to impose substantial water cuts throughout the Colorado River Basin, saying permanent reductions are necessary. Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter, researchers at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, have suggested the federal government set up a voluntary program to buy and retire water-intensive farmlands, or to pay landowners who “agree to permanent restrictions on water use.”
Over the last few years, California and other states have negotiated short-term deals and as part of that, some farmers in California and Arizona are temporarily leaving hay fields parched and fallow in exchange for federal payments.
The UCLA researchers criticized these deals, saying water agencies “obtain water from the federal government at low or no cost, and the government then buys that water back from the districts at enormous cost to taxpayers.”
Isabel Friedman, a coauthor and NRDC researcher, said adopting a surcharge would be a powerful conservation tool.
“We need a long-term strategy that recognizes water as a limited resource and prices it as such,” she wrote in an article about the proposal.
The sale of Warner Bros. — whether in pieces to Netflix or in its entirety to Paramount — is stirring mounting worries among Hollywood union leaders about the possible fallout for their members.
Unions representing writers, directors, actors and crew workers have voiced growing concerns that further consolidation in the media industry will reduce competition, potentially causing studios to pay less for content, and make it more difficult for people to find work.
“We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends,” said Michele Mulroney, president of the Writers Guild of America West. “There are lots of promises made that one plus one is going to equal three. But it’s very hard to envision how two behemoths, for example, Warner Bros. and Netflix … can keep up the level of output they currently have.”
Last week, Netflix announced it agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV studio, Burbank lot, HBO and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. It also agreed to take on more than $10 billion of Warner Bros.’ debt. But Paramount, whose previous offers were rebuffed by Warner Bros., has appealed directly to shareholders with an alternative bid to buy all of the company for about $78 billion.
Paramount said it will have more than $6 billion in cuts over three years, while also saying the combined companies will release at least 30 movies a year. Netflix said it expects its deal will have $2 billion to $3 billion in cost cuts.
Those cuts are expected to trigger thousands of layoffs across Hollywood, which has already been squeezed by the flight of production overseas and a contraction in the once booming TV business.
Mulroney said that employment for WGA writers in episodic television is down as much as 40% when comparing the 2023-2024 writing season to 2022-2023.
Executives from both companies have said their deals would benefit creative talent and consumers.
But Hollywood union leaders are skeptical.
“We can hear the generalizations all day long, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless it’s on paper, and we just don’t know if these companies are even prepared to make promises in writing,” said Lindsay Dougherty, Teamsters at-large vice president and principal officer for Local 399, which represents drivers, location managers and casting directors.
Dougherty said the Teamsters have been engaged with both Netflix and Paramount, seeking commitments to keep filming in Los Angeles.
“We have a lot of members that are struggling to find work, or haven’t really worked in the last year or so,” Dougherty said.
Mulroney said her union has concerns about both bids, either by Netflix or Paramount.
“We don’t think the merger is inevitable,” Mulroney said. “We think there’s an opportunity to push back here.”
If Netflix were to buy Warner Bros.’ TV and film businesses, Mulroney said that could further undermine the theatrical business.
“It’s hard to imagine them fully embracing theatrical exhibition,” Mulroney said. “The exhibition business has been struggling to get back on its feet ever since the pandemic, so a move like this could really be existential.”
But the Writers Guild also has issues with Paramount’s bid, Mulroney said, noting that it would put Paramount-owned CBS News and CNN under the same parent company.
“We have censorship concerns,” Mulroney said. “We saw issues around [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel. We’re concerned about what the news would look like under single ownership here.”
That question was made more salient this week after President Trump, who has for years harshly criticized CNN’s hosts and news coverage, said he believes CNN should be sold.
The worries come as some unions’ major studio contracts, including the DGA, WGA and performers guild SAG-AFTRA, are set to expire next year. Two years ago, writers and actors went on a prolonged strike to push for more AI protections and better wages and benefits.
The Directors Guild of America and performers union SAG-AFTRA have voiced similar objections to the pending media consolidation.
“A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less,” the union said.
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the union has been in discussions with both Paramount and Netflix.
“It is as yet unclear what path forward is going to best protect the legacy that Warner Brothers presents, and that’s something that we’re very actively investigating right now,” he said.
It’s not clear, however, how much influence the unions will have in the outcome.
“They just don’t have a seat at the ultimate decision making table,” said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. “I expect their primary involvement could be through creating more awareness of potential challenges with a merger and potentially more regulatory scrutiny … I think that’s what they’re attempting to do.”
Businessman Brian Kahn has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in a case that brought down a hedge fund, helped lead to the bankruptcy of a retailer and damaged West Los Angeles investment bank B. Riley Financial.
Kahn, 52, admitted in a Trenton, N.J., federal court Wednesday to hiding trading losses that brought down Prophecy Asset Management in 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the losses exceeded $400 million.
An investor lawsuit has accused Kahn of funneling some of the fund’s money to Franchise Group, a Delaware retail holding company assembled by the investor that owned Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and other chains.
B. Riley provided $600 million through debt it raised to finance a $2.8-billion management buyout led by Kahn in 2023. It also took a 31% stake in the company and lent Kahn’s investment fund $201 million, largely secured with shares of Franchise Group.
Kahn had done deals with B. Riley co-founder Bryant Riley before partnering with the L.A. businessman on Franchise Group.
However, the buyout didn’t work out amid fallout from the hedge fund scandal and slowing sales at the retailers. Franchise Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. A slimmed-down version of the company emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
B. Riley has disclosed in regulatory filings that the firm and Riley have received SEC subpoenas regarding its dealings with Kahn, Franchise group and other matters.
Riley, 58, the firm’s chairman and co-chief executive, has denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and an outside law firm reached the same conclusion.
The failed deal led to huge losses at the financial services firm that pummeled B. Riley’s stock, which had approached $90 in 2021. Shares were trading Friday at $3.98.
The company has marked down its Franchise Group investment, and has spent the last year or so paring debt through refinancing, selling off parts of its business and other steps, including closing offices.
The company announced last month it is changing its name to BRC Group Holdings in January. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At Wednesday’s plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kelly Lyons said that Kahn conspired to “defraud dozens of investors who had invested approximately $360 million” through “lies, deception, misleading statements and material omissions.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp released Kahn on a $100,000 bond and set an April 2 sentencing date. He faces up to five years in prison. Kahn, his lawyer and Lyons declined to comment after the hearing.
Kahn is the third Prophecy official charged over the hedge fund’s collapse. Two other executives, John Hughes and Jeffrey Spotts, have also been charged.
Hughes pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Spotts pleaded not guilty and faces trial next year. The two men and Kahn also have been sued by the SEC over the Prophecy collapse.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
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