Double Issue Review: Hyde Park and P.G. Wodehouse
Tobacco Cellar and Bookshelf
One of the great beauties of the pipe smoking experience comes through the varieties of enjoyment on offer. Not only are every pipe and every blend subtly or even wildly different, but the smoke itself can serve many different purposes. Do you need a meditative moment away from the insanity of life? A deep bowl filled with unsubtle leaf will bring you into cadence like a rolling bass note. Are you chewing over a knotty mental problem and in the mood for a wrestling match? Load up something spicy or bitter and stoke your inner argumentation. And then sometimes, you're looking for a sprightly middle, a bantering back and forth smoke. Something that will talk back to you. And for this purpose, you might do much worse than Peterson's Hyde Park.
Is it an aromatic? Well yes, but not exactly. Will it bite back with some zest? Sometimes, but not always. Do you want a blustery spring day walk through the open air rustled into your bowl? Look no further. Sometimes a waft of caramel sweetness, sometimes a sneezy pinch of rose-and-soap floral perfume, combinations that really should not work together this well. It's a blend that will engage your attention without tiring it or requiring too much thought, a pass-time amusement with some intelligence and wit.
The reviewer is something of a devotee of Peterson blends, especially given their long history stretching back to the now-extinct Dunhill line of tobaccos. With this selection, we find something really special. It is, if the word choice can be excused, simply a “fun” blend to smoke. Amusing. Delightful. An enjoyment, nothing more. But quite enough at that!
So what better book to pair Hyde Park with than a selection from P.G. Wodehouse' sprawling and sprightly library? If you've never experienced the sparkling dry sharpness of his perfectly tuned wit, you're in for a unique treat. I've read two or three Wodehouse novels in the last few months, and cannot as I sit here recall for you the precise details of a single one of the stories. However, this is missing the important nature of Wodehouse, his goal being entertainment more so than edification. The specific scrapes that Bertie Wooster or the redoubtable Psmith weave themselves into and out of are hardly The Point. The journey, the patter, is the purpose.
Wodehouse brings you into a world of slightly heightened reality, introduces you to characters who resemble real people you probably know, peppers the whole with some of the best humor writing in the English language, then winds up some comedy of errors plot device and lets it go. Because I do not have his facility with the English language, I cannot come up with a better adjective for Wodehouse' prose than sparkling. This is writing that dances along the page, doing backflips for the sheer fun of it, showing off and laughing uproariously and bringing you into every joke conspiratorially. It is compulsively readable, always a little snatch of something new to entice you.
If you'll indulge me in a moment of poetic fancy, it is the very existence of literature and pipe smoke that reminds us that the past is a country we can still visit. It's becoming increasingly fashionable to view the past as a tragedy, an unreachable golden age filled with heroes and heroines, never to be seen again. But literature from another era reminds us that human flaws, foibles, and loveable quirks are all but unchanging. We recognize our brothers and sisters from the past when we encounter them in a garden of gorgeous prose or while enjoying one of their pastimes. They weren't so different from us, after all. We can go back, for a few moments. Enough to draw strength for the journey onward.
First the smash-up with Aunt Cecelia's ruddy back-garden, then the bizarre interlude with cousin Basil's two potential fiancés, and to crown it the ruddy rain simply won't stop at all. Nothing for it but to sit in the conservatory consuming these rather topping breakfast quaffs Jeeves kindly brought round while thoughtfully abolishing the final tin of Dunhill we packed. Dash this rain, and the Hon. Guy of North Chippings, and double dash the day we ever heard of the Chesley Youth Home Guards. It’s not fair, being made to suffer this way. You wonder where Jeeves has taken himself off to.