P.M.C., who has set off with his love for their new (oh-my-goodness) home in Lebanon (a French colonial fantasy, among other things), began to peel away the layers of my Anglophilia several years ago. He was feeling uncertain about the island, and I trusted his judgement implicitly (being that he spends much more time/has some ancestors over there). And I could agree that London's profile as playland for the megamega-rich and Euro-trashy was smelling unsavory, smelling wholly unlike, say, a Wodehouse story.
When it comes to Jeeves and Wooster, my Anglophilia knows no bounds (or peeling), responds to no shifts or trends or irritating demi-aristos with weak chins and Mystic Tans. Wodehouse's Britain is one lodged in the era between the Wars in the most essential (and pleasing) way—the din of the Great War at the players' backs wholly ignored for the sake of Fred and Estelle lightness. His stories of town and country, club and breakfast-table are touched with the high style of that moment, the quick, comic, fast, freshness of (new) Modernity. Yet they are also stilted and wholesome, like a film set of a Swiss resort or the jam aisle at Fortnum and Mason—devoid of war, poverty, illness, and sex. The curious (and necessary) *absence of sex* in Bertie Wooster's accounts of bachelorhood is addressed in an odd, smart little Post post from yesterday.
Carry on.
4 comments:
I've always thought Lebanon was just a gypsy colony that got lucky. Maybe its refugees appear differently in the 901...
the gypsy king was lebanese?
okay, there are the Irish Travelers, of which their Gypsy Queen loved me for some reason and made me join her in a game of bowling once (an event I don't talk much about these days)...
The other gypsies, the Lebanese kind, I was invited to a giant social gathering way far back in my youth... All I know is they were eating raw hamburger meat and dolled up in such a way the Lincoln Tunnel would blush...
the lincoln tunnel is blushing just thinking about it.
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