Performing Flea

From a Letter to Pete

I,OTOH, take pleasure in stories where the problems are entirely trivial, maybe because it distracts me from the real problems folks can't do anything about.

Virtually all of P.G. Wodehouse is like that (except for some early stories), about the shocks and embarrassment suffered by Bertie in the course of a life spent living in expensive digs with his gentleman's personal gentleman, or visiting the vast country estates of his rich friends and relatives, or traveling to New York for a six-month's stay to get away from his overbearing aunts. (We never hear anything about his parents, both presumably long dead.)

Wodehouse said he was writing "musical comedies without the music," and never pretended otherwise. When the Irish writer Sean O'Casey called him "English literature's performing flea," Wodehouse used the phrase "Performing flea" as the title for his autobiography. And he's still read and enjoyed today, while O'Casey is a footnote to the Irish Literary Revival (who dat?).

Some folks likewise get off on the Busby Berkeley stuff, which obviously had great appeal in the 30's because it gave folks a ninety-minute vacation to a happier world. A biography of Vladimir Nabokov was wisely entitled, "Escape into Esthetics."

Of course PhD's have been done, in the thousands, on this topic. Do artists (or whatever you want to call them) do what the oyster does, turn irritating grit into pearls? My answer to that question, allowing myself the guilty pleasure of a generalization the way I might eat a Belgian chocolate, is Yes. True, in modern times there's been a huge vogue for reality-based art, much praised because instead of being "escapist" (bad) it "raises our consciousness" (good), especially on social issues (best). Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, etc. But I believe the appeal of that stuff is still based on healing the hurt, though as a counter-irritant rather than as an emollient. After the first or thousandth time, nobody needs to be told that being poor or stupid or downtrodden is a bummer, yet stories and art that depict injustice or unfairness or poverty or such are always popular. (12/8/03)