Paul Jennings (British author)

Not to be confused with Australian children's writer Paul Jennings.

Paul Francis Jennings (20 June 1918 – 26 December 1989) was a British humourist. He mostly wrote short articles; his most famous collection is The Jenguin Pennings, published in 1963 by Penguin Books (hence the Spoonerism of the title).

Jennings lived for much of his life in East Bergholt, Suffolk, England, UK, with his wife, Celia, and their six children.

Career

Jennings began his career serving in the Royal Signals during the Second World War. His first publication was "Moses was a Sanitary Officer" in the April 1943 edition of Lilliput magazine. Freelance work for Punch and The Spectator soon followed. Leaving the army with the rank of Lieutenant, he briefly worked as a scriptwriter for the Central Office of Information and then spent two years as an advertising copywriter; throughout this period his freelance work continued to be published.

In 1949 he joined The Observer, contributing a fortnightly column entitled "Oddly Enough" until 1966. After leaving The Observer, he continued to write until his death, mainly seeing print in Punch, The Times and the Telegraph magazine.

Style

In general his articles take the form of whimsical ponderings. Some are based in real life incidents, often involving his friend Harblow; for instance, one of his most celebrated pieces, "How to Spiel Halma" (1949), concerns their attempts to establish the rules of halma from the instructions in a German set using their extremely limited knowledge of the language:

The obvious meaning of this was that the Against-man must naturally again after that treat, this Stone how possibly in the own House of the Player to shut in.

Sometimes his pieces would be poems, or written in novel forms of language, such as the Romance-eschewing Anglish, or that of a toy 19-letter pipewipen (typewriter). Other articles were extended flights of fancy, such as "The Unthinkable Carrier" (1960), based on the idea of cutting Britain free of the Earth's crust so that it could float around the oceans and guarantee world peace, with the Isle of Wight kept in place by a tow chain. In a late 1950s piece, "Sleep for Sale", he prefigured the concept of the Capsule hotel ("Over to you, capitalists. But remember, I thought of it first.").[1] Several of his pieces touched on the invented philosophical movement of Resistentialism. This concept probably owes some of its force to the contempt that Jennings - a devout Catholic - felt for the intellectual fashion he was parodying.

Jennings was an admirer of James Thurber,[2] who in 1955 attended a dinner party at Jennings' house and subsequently wrote of the conversation in a New Yorker piece.[3]

Bibliography

Oddly Enough collections

General collections

Books on British Life

Children's Books

Novel

As editor

References

  1. ↑ Paul Jennings, Sleep for Sale. In: Idly Oddly, 1959
  2. ↑ Paul Jennings, Thurber, Punch, March 1965. In: The Paul Jennings Reader, Bloomsbury, 1990
  3. ↑ James Thurber, The moribundant life, or, grow old along with whom?, The New Yorker. In: Alarms and Diversions, Penguin, 1957
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