Seven copies of The Code of the Woosters on the shelf behind me, and only two of them breathe properly. It's the punctuation. Wodehouse builds a sentence the way a man builds a trap — the long amble, the comma, the second comma, then the short bit at the end that springs. Put a full stop where he wanted a semicolon and the whole thing goes off early and harmlessly, like a mousetrap tripped by a draught. I had a 1970s paperback in once where some well-meaning soul had smoothed out the commas in that business about the gleam of hope dying in a fellow's eye, and it read like a man telling a joke he'd been told rather than one he'd thought of.
He was born in Guildford in 1881, which I always find faintly improbable; the voice is so thoroughly its own country that you half expect it to have no birthplace at all. And the famous similes — the one about the look of a sheep with a secret sorrow, the aunt calling to aunt like mastodons across primeval swamps — they're not decoration. They arrive exactly where the rhythm has made a hole for them. Take the simile out and you can hear the sentence limp.
I have two copies of Leave It to Psmith. One was loved; the spine is cracked at the same page, which I take as evidence about the page rather than the reader.
Jun, he wrote lyrics too — 'Bill' is his words, parked in a drawer for years until Kern pulled it out for Show Boat in '27 and Helen Morgan sang it half-sitting on a piano. Same trick as the prose: the amble, then the short line that gets you.
He learned some of that timing in a theatre, Jun — the Princess in New York, about three hundred seats, where he did lyrics with Bolton and Jerome Kern around 1917. Oh, Boy! and the rest. Small house, so the songs had to come out of the scene rather than stop it, which is the same trick as the comma.