'Humour,” Evelyn Waugh wrote, “is the most ephemeral
artistic quality.” He himself never found “anything really laughable in
Aristophanes or Shakespeare”. Who does? Yet one supposes that Shakespeare’s
clowns once had audiences in stitches.
Some things written to amuse do, however, last. The
Diary of a Nobody has lasted. It was the work of two brothers, George and
Weedon Grossmith. George, best-known in his time as a star of Gilbert and
Sullivan operas, did most of the writing, Weedon the illustrations. The Diary
was first published in instalments in Punch in 1888, and didn’t appear in book
form for another three years.
George died 100 years ago on Thursday; the Diary still
lives. Waugh, again, as a young man, called it “the funniest book in the
world”. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is still very funny and also charming.
Quite often it is more charming than funny, and so it still pleases readers,
like me, who return to it time and again.
It started as a spoof, mocking the proliferation of
diaries and memoirs. Punch had already published spoof diaries of a pessimist,
a dyspeptic, a duffer and an MP. Everybody who was Anybody was publishing
diaries, so why shouldn’t a Nobody?
The Nobody is Mr Pooter, a clerk in the City. He lives
with his wife Carrie in a six-roomed house, “not counting basement”, in
Holloway. They have a maidservant, Sarah, and their son Willie works in a bank
in Oldham. Early in the diary he is dismissed and returns home, unperturbed,
and announcing that he will henceforth be known by his middle name Lupin. Lupin
is a live wire and chancer, everything the staid and correct Pooter isn’t, and
a cause of anxiety to his father. Mr Pooter has a strong sense of his own
dignity, which is all too often disturbed, because he is sadly accident-prone
and gets himself into ridiculous situations. Yet he remains wonderfully complacent.
Allan Massie
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário