Paul Jennings (British Author) - Style

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."). Several of his pieces touched on the invented philosophical movement of Resistentialism. This celebrated piece probably owes some of its force to the contempt that Jennings - a devout catholic - felt for the intellectual fashion he is so effectively parodying.

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