by Barry Day
Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2012 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
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Extracts from the works of P. G. Wodehouse
© 2001 The Trustees of the P. G. Wodehouse Estate
Format and linking narrative copyright © 2001 Barry Day
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-575-3
CONTENTS
Cover
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
A Note on Sources
Chapter One
Young Plum
Chapter Two
Upstairs … Amitae, Materterae … and
other Relations
Chapter Three
Downstairs … Butlers, Gentlemen’s
Gentlemen … and So Forth
Chapter Four
Dulwich
Chapter Five
Uneasy Money
Chapter Six
America, I Like You
Chapter Seven
Pearls, Girls … and Plums
1st. Intermission
Writing … and Writers
Chapter Eight
‘Bring on the Girls …’
Chapter Nine
Clubs and Codes …
Chapter Ten
… and Clergy
Chapter Eleven
Wodehouse in Wonderland
2nd Intermission
Style
Chapter Twelve
Wodehouse’s War
Chapter Thirteen
Uncle Plum in the Autumn
The Collector’s Wodehouse
Available from Overlook
Also Available from the Overlook Press
Praise for the Work of P.G. Wodehouse
DEDICATION
In view of the subject’s strongly expressed aversion to footnotes (‘obscene little fly-specks scattered about all over the page’) there will be none in this book. (1) If the attributions given are insufficient for the reader, then, as Wodehouse so eloquently put it elsewhere – ‘Sucks to you!’
Nor will there be a Dedication. On the whole he felt its day was probably over. Having in his long career passed through ‘the curt, take-it-or-leave-it dedication’ – ‘To J. Smith’ – the ‘somewhat warmer’ – ‘To My Friend Percy Brown’ – quite a few of ‘those cryptic things with a bit of poetry in italics’ –
To F. B. O.
Stark winds
And sunset over the moors
Why?
Whither?
Whence?
And the role of distant drums
– and the occasional ‘nasty dedication, intended to sting’ –
To J. Alastair Frisby
Who
Told Me I Would Never Have A Book Published
And
Advised Me
To
Get A Job Selling Jellied Eels
– he found himself pondering the questions that had crept into many another author’s mind – ‘What is there in this for me?’ ‘What is Wodehouse getting out of this?’ I asked myself, and the answer, as far as I could see, was, ‘Not a thing.’
Thus, no Dedication (2) …
(1) From the Foreword to Over Seventy.
(2) Except, possibly, ‘To Wodehouse, Sir Pelham Grenville, LLD (1881–1975)’.
INTRODUCTION
Watching Alec Guinness over the years gave me pleasure on two distinct levels. There was the consummate actor becoming someone else in front of my eyes and, being interviewed, there was the private man, modest and reclusive, the face a blank page on which any character could be drawn.
Except … why did I find myself wondering whether this wasn’t simply one more performance and perhaps one of his most effective, since to project blandness in an age geared to glamour and excitement guaranteed him a degree of the privacy he clearly craved. In other words – how do we know when an actor isn’t acting?
Something comparable happens when you come to deal with Wodehouse and his life, though in his case it takes place on three parallel planes. There are the bare bones of factual data, occasionally augmented by his own diary notes; there are his ‘autobiographical’ writings and letters (of which more anon); and there are the transpositions from the factual to the fictional world of the novels and stories. And somewhere in that narrative curve lies a version of the way things were with this remarkable storyteller. In other words – how do we know when a storyteller isn’t telling a story?
Wodehouse himself gives us a warning clue in his 1946 correspondence with Guy Bolton prior to the writing of Bring On the Girls, their collaborative account of their years in the musical theatre …
I think we shall have to let truth go to the wall if it interferes with entertainment … That is what we want to avoid in this book – shoving in stuff just because it happened. Even if we have to invent every line of the thing, we must have entertainment.
When it came to the collection of his letters to his old friend, William Townend – published as Performing Flea (UK, 1953) and Author! Author! (US, substantially revised, 1962) – the same thought process was clearly at work. Writing to Townend in response to his original suggestion, Wodehouse makes it clear that ‘the great thing, as I see it, is not to feel ourselves confined to the actual letters. I mean, nobody knows what was actually in the letters, so we can fake as much as we like … Also, these letters give me a wonderful opportunity of shoving in thoughts on life to a much greater extent than I do in my actual letters … I have always wanted to write my autobiography but felt too self-conscious. This will be a way of doing the thing obliquely.’
For a man who – like Alec Guinness – professed to be nothing more than a simple, retiring sort of chap, never so happy (in Wodehouse’s case) as when he was peacefully pecking away at his old manual typewriter, these occasional insights pose a fascinating possibility …
Was the ‘Plum’ Wodehouse we thought we knew – the pipe-smoking, Peke-loving chap exclusively inhabiting some private and personal universe he carried around in his head – perhaps his own finest creation? Was this divine dottiness, this amiable otherworldliness the perfect protection used by a man shrewd enough in the ways of the world to realise that it was the perfect way to ensure the privacy he craved to do the one thing he was driven to do – write?
In the same letter to Bolton he tells his friend firmly that he will have to fill in the local contemporary colour, because ‘I am so constituted as to never notice what is going on around me and, if asked, would say that there have been no changes in New York since 1916.’ Isn’t there a note here of protesting a little too much?
‘So, how do we know that Mr Wodehouse is an unworldly literary recluse, Watson? Elementary. Mr Wodehouse makes sure to constantly tell us so himself.’
Which raises another speculation … Who was it who said: ‘They became what they beheld’? Does constant repetition of a single part eventually turn the actor into the character he is portraying?
Holmes would probably go on to prove with ample textual reference that Wodehouse merely found the temporal trappings
uninteresting and irrelevant to the imaginative world he wished to celebrate. Certainly, he missed none of the behavioural clues to the comédie humaine that went on all around him. However stylised his characters may be, their characteristics are universal. If we did not see ourselves in their foibles and failings, we shouldn’t find them amusing, since the basis of all comedy is truth.
If I compare Wodehouse to Oscar Wilde, I can already sense a frisson among Wodehouseans. Yet there are important similarities. In the last hundred years or so, no one – with the possible exception of Noël Coward – has used words with such consistent wit. (Both Coward and Wilde, incidentally, used their work to create and maintain their desired persona.) And no one has so clearly perceived their own lives as a continuing work of fiction.
Wilde came to see his life as a play – in his case, one that didn’t follow the plot he had envisaged. Nonetheless, he was determined to act it out, rather than bring down the curtain.
Wodehouse lived in the imaginative universe of humorous fantasy he had pieced together from the elements of his own early Edwardian life that had pleased him most, ignoring those that did not. Although best known for his fiction, the Wodehouse world owes its distinctive structure to the musical comedies of his early years. He himself referred to his early novels as ‘musical comedies without the music’ and thought of them in terms of ‘acts, chorus numbers, duets and solos’. The experience taught him that the only way to write a story was ‘to split it up into scenes and have as little stuff between the scenes as possible.’
And, by definition, what was good enough for telling a story was surely good enough when it came to telling the story of your own life.
In any case, where was the boundary between the one and the other? So, with that small caveat lector, let us begin …
BARRY DAY
2001
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Wodehouse’s words are drawn from his three ‘autobiographical’ works – Over Seventy (America, I Like You in US), Performing Flea (Author! Author! in US), Bring on the Girls, his letters, miscellaneous interviews and, of course, the fiction. In almost all cases the quotations are attributed but in the case of some of the interview material – where Wodehouse was inclined to repeat (and occasionally contradict himself) on minor points, we have taken the liberty of condensing it for easier reading. In those cases you will have to take our word for it that all the words are vintage Wodehouse.
Lyrics from Sitting Pretty. Words and music by Jerome Kern and P.G. Wodehouse. © 1924 UNIVERSAL – POLYGRAM INT.PUBL.,INC. (ASCAP) 100.00%
Lines from ‘’S Wonderful’ are used by kind permission of the Ira Gershwin Estate.
The typewriter illustration is reproduced by kind permission of Lynne Carey.
Illustrations by Geoffrey Salter are reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books.
CHAPTER ONE
Young Plum
*
‘Do you really want to hear the story of my life, Biscuit?’ he said wistfully. ‘Sure it won’t bore you?’ ‘Bore me? My dear chap! I’m agog. Let’s have the whole thing. Start from the beginning. Childhood – early surroundings – genius probably inherited from male grand-parent – push along.’
(Big Money)
P. G. Wodehouse was born at 1 Vale Place, Epsom Road, Guildford, Surrey on 15 October 1881, the third son of Ernest and Eleanor Wodehouse.
If you ask me to tell you frankly if I like the names Pelham Grenville, I must confess that I do not. I have my dark moods when they seem to me about as low as you can get … At the font I remember protesting vigorously when the clergyman uttered them, but he stuck to his point. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said firmly, having waited for a lull, ‘I name thee Pelham Grenville’ … I was named after a godfather, and not a thing to show for it but a small silver mug which I lost in 1897 … I little knew how the frightful label was going to pay off thirty-four years later. (One could do a bit of moralising about that if one wanted to, but better not for the moment. Some other time, perhaps.) …
(Preface to Something Fresh)
In his formative years the young Wodehouse understandably had trouble pronouncing a mouthful like ‘Pelham’. It tended to come out as ‘Plum’ and the affectionate diminutive stuck with him for life.
The Wodehouses could, had they chosen to, have laid claim to a rather distinguished family tree. Some reference books trace the lineage back to the Norman Conquest and Lady Mary Boleyn – sister to Anne – certainly crops up there. Although he made little overt mention of it, there is evidence that he was quietly proud of his origins.
In Thank You, Jeeves he has Bertie say:
I think that in about another half jiffy I should have been snorting, if not actually shouting, the ancient battle cry of the Woosters … There comes a moment when a fellow must remember that his ancestors did dashed well at the Battle of Crécy and put the old foot down.
And should he ever forget, he has his Aunt Dahlia to remind him:
Where’s your pride, Bertie? Have you forgotten your illustrious ancestors? There was a Wooster at the time of the Crusades who would have won the Battle of Joppa single-handed, if he hadn’t fallen off his horse.’
(Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen)
To judge by the portraits of him as a child, there is every likelihood that Wodehouse was a bonny baby himself but babies sui generis tend to fare poorly in the Wodehouse canon. One might well speculate that he shared the well-defined views of his hero Freddie Widgeon in ‘Noblesse Oblige’ from Young Men in Spats:
It would be paltering with the truth to say that he likes babies. They give him, he says, a sort of grey feeling. He resents their cold stare and the supercilious and up-stage way in which they dribble out of the corner of their mouths on seeing him. Eyeing them he is conscious of doubts as to whether Man can really be Nature’s last word.
Observing what it was that Bingo was carrying, Oofy backed hastily.
‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t point that thing at me!’
‘It’s only my baby.’
‘I dare say. But point it the other way.’
(‘Leave It to Algy’ – A Few Quick Ones)
In Eggs, Beans and Crumpets a baby is described as being ‘blob-faced’ but then
‘There’s never been much difference between babies of that age. They all look like Winston Churchill.’
(Cortin in the unproduced play Arthur)
Another baby looked like ‘a homicidal fried egg’, and when it smiled, ‘a slit appeared in the baby’s face’.
Nor, according to Wodehouse, do they improve with keeping:
The infant was looking more than ever like some mass-assassin who has been blackballed by the Devil’s Island Social and Outing Club as unfit to associate with the members.
(‘Sonny Boy’ from Eggs, Beans and Crumpets)
A spectacled child with a mouth that hung open like a letter-box.
(The Luck of the Bodkins)
A small boy with a face like a prune run over by a motor bus.
(Galahad at Blandings)
The boy’s face closely resembled a ripe tomato with a nose stuck on it.
(‘The Bishop’s Move’ from Meet Mr Mulliner)
He … had the peculiarly loathsome expression which a snub nose sometimes gives to the young.
(Psmith in the City)
Wodehouse, of course, was never to have a child of his own, though he eventually acquired a step-daughter who distinctly brightened his days. A. A. Milne later claimed that Wodehouse had once told him that he would quite like a son but ‘he would have to be born at the age of fifteen, when he was just getting into the house eleven’.
Wodehouse himself had no recollection of having made such a remark but he did recall having attributed the sentiment to Mike in Psmith in the City (1910):
Small boys … filled him with a sort of frozen horror. It was his view that a boy should not be exhibited publicly until he had reached an age when he might be in the running for some sort of col
ours at a public school.
(‘Odd chap, Milne.’)
* * * *
Wodehouse Senior was a magistrate in Hong Kong. Wodehouse Junior describes him as being ‘as normal as rice pudding’. Of his mother, significantly, he has nothing to say. To him she was in every way a distant relation – some six thousand miles distant, to be precise. She had given birth to Pelham Grenville at Guildford, Surrey, when on home leave visiting a sister – an early Aunt.
I am told that I was taken to Hong Kong at the age of one, but that was my only visit … I think I started my life in England at the age of two or three …
In fact, he followed the classic pattern of families with ‘colonial’ parents, who invariably gave the child over to the care of an amah or mother substitute when abroad and then returned it to the old country to be educated. Wodehouse rarely saw his mother from the age of two until he was well into his teens. ‘We looked upon mother more like an aunt,’ he recalled. ‘She came home very infrequently.’
My father was very indulgent to us boys, my mother less so. Having seen practically nothing of her until I was fifteen, I met her as virtually a stranger and it was not easy to establish a cordial relationship. With my father, on the other hand, I was always on very good terms – though never in any sense very close. In those days, parents tended to live a life apart from their children.
