All praise to the man who baffles the foreigner

Evelyn Waugh called him "the performing flea of English literature", but for a performing flea, PG Wodehouse is showing remarkable longevity. It's not unusual for the lighter and apparently more trivial writers of an age to attain immortality, after more pompous and gravid novelists just disappear "like an eel into mud", as the master would put it.

Everyman are currently issuing, in handsome editions, Wodehouse's complete novels at a rate of four every six months or so. Reading through the 20 or so already out – and there are about 70 more to come – it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that here is one of the great novelists of the last century.

One of the most inescapable proofs of Wodehouse's greatness is that he wrote, surely, only for an English readership. Foreign readers often find his tone very hard to catch. Notoriously, he has often been thought of abroad as a satirist, denouncing the idle rich and their delusions. Even in America, which he loved and where he set much of his best work, he looks like a writer who mocks the idiocies of Wooster, the Drones and Lord Emsworth, constantly relying on their lackeys to get them out of trouble. That is entirely missing the point.

But the main reason that he tends to baffle foreign readers is that he exists, just as the greatest English writers do, at the very heart of the English language. He gives the sense of being absolutely idiomatic, and at the same time absolutely original in the way he uses language, so that his best phrases seem at once proverbial and yet coined just that minute. "Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes." "Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind." Or, best of all, the moments when metaphysical poetry and surrealism deliriously hit each other head on: "it was often said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers."

There is a fascinatingly bizarre aspect to Wodehouse; to anyone outside England, he seems to be writing something not far from gobbledegook. You have to imagine a German professor of English Comedy Wissenschaft hunching over something like this, dictionary in hand: "My Uncle Tom has a peculiarity I've noticed in other very oofy men. Nick him for the paltriest sum, and he lets out a squawk you can hear at Land's End. He has the stuff in gobs, but he hates giving it up."

It's a sort of Shakespearean mastery of the language, to be able to invent not just original and poetic phrases, but completely new words; to have seen that the way English works is by moving words from one part of speech to another, and to do it with abandon. Wodehouse is so deliriously funny an author that one sometimes forgets how bold a user of English he is; when Bertie says "Tuppy's manifest pippedness excited my compash," or "I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire", it is so idiomatic, the audacity of the sentence hardly registers.

The orchestration of the plots is always most beautifully done, but the real retch-making hilarity in Wodehouse always comes from his mastery over, and delight in linguistic invention. His similes are celebrated, of course, like Honoria Glossop's laugh resembling "a cavalry charge over a tin bridge". But many of his funniest inventions spring from nothing more than a manipulation of language conventions. For my money, the funniest moment in all Wodehouse comes in his masterpiece, The Code of the Woosters, with Madeline Bassett's telegram to Bertie; "Please come here if you wish, but oh Bertie, is this wise? Will not it cause you needless pain seeing me? Surely merely twisting knife wound Madeline." That is a joke about conventional syntax, and comes from a writer, who, like Shakespeare, saw all the possibilities of the English language.

Of course, there is much more to it than that, and next to his boundless virtuosity, there is a great charm and tenderness; one of the most affecting pleasures of the Jeeves and Wooster series is the tender love that exists between Bertie and his valet. At the end of one of the great novels, like The Code of the Woosters, you almost expect Jeeves, after he has seen off all rivals for Bertie's love, to give his master a goodnight kiss. It is a terribly English passion; chaste, sexless, slightly selfish, but for all that obviously deeply felt and never quite expressed, even when Jeeves is trying to persuade Bertie to take him on a round-the-world cruise.

And, artificial as they are, the novels last so wonderfully well because they do seem to say something profound about the English character. In the week of the Conservative Party conference, who can fail to be reminded, from time to time, of Wodehouse? Can anyone look at Ann Widdecombe's bosom making its strident demands from the platform to an audience of equally formidable ladies, and not think that this is a Conference of the Aunts?

Wodehouse has the last word on the spectacle; it is an occasion, as he says, "when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps."

p.hensher@independent.co.uk