When the meatier conversation at the party is over and you have drearily listened to the latest on Chiang Kaishek,… and the other topics which are regarded as conversation in these funereal days of repeal, how joyful it is to find that the host is not entirely a sadist, but is going to enliven the social seminar with a showing of clowns and magicians.

In the book world, the magicians are the authors of literate detective stories…. Yet greater are the clowns, and of these the greatest living is a man who at so early a period as his christening indicated the future by giving himself the completely Wodehousian name of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

Plenty of fictioneers have written two or three funny stories; I doubt if any other has so gone on, year by year, producing funny books, so that Wodehouse has become not an author but a whole department of rather delicate art. He is the master of the touchingly inane, of the tears that may be either sympathy with a blundering character or joy over his mishaps, of the ultimate and lordly dead pan. His new novel, "Summer Moonshine" …, might be criticized as merely another hodgepodge of blissfully idiotic English gentry, bulging country houses, and half-pint girls pursued by enterprising Americans who talk not so much in Broadwayese as in what Broadwayese might become if it were a little brighter.

But each of Wodehouse's leisurely cyclones is different enough to make it as welcome as an old friend with a new anecdote, and at its appearance you remember its predecessors. Particularly you recall the loquacious Mr. Mulliner (in "Meet Mr. Mulliner" and several other collections) who, discoursing in the bar to such companions as the Half and Half, the Lemon Squash, and the Gin and It, soberly recounts the adventures of his nephew, the curate, after a drink of "Buck-U-Uppo," a tonic intended to nerve elephants on a tiger hunt. And you recall, from "Young Men in Spats" the one perfect comment on skiing: "Isn't there enough sadness in life without going out of your way to fasten long planks to your feet and jumping off mountains?"

Not since 1918 has there been, especially for responsible and informed readers, a sharper need of refuge in stories which have all the resounding surprise of a slapstick with none of its commonplaceness. With all his clowning, Wodehouse is the artist of the accurate and unexpected phrase. In "Summer Moonshine," we learn: "His manner was that of a stag at bay. Imagine a stag in horn-rimmed spectacles, and you have Elmer Chinnery at this moment. Landseer would have liked to paint him."

Mr. Chinnery, the fretful manufacturer of fish glue, was even luckier. He had Wodehouse.

Like The New Yorker magazine, Mr. Wodehouse is a more dangerous Communist propagandist than twenty Daily Workers. For he disposes of the gilded lily and the stuffed bodice not by misunderstanding them and frothing at the mouth, but by understanding them perfectly and smiling till the reader smiles with him, and that, to stuffiness, is deadlier than strychnine.