P.G. Wodehouse in his Own Words

by Barry Day

  (‘The Rough Stuff’ from The Clicking of Cuthbert)

  * * * *

  Most divorces spring from the fact that the husband is too markedly superior to his wife at golf; this leading him, when she starts criticising his relations, to say bitter and unforgivable things about her mashie-shots.

  (‘Rodney Fails to Qualify’ from The Heart of a Goof)

  * * * *

  The least thing upsets him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

  (‘Ordeal by Golf’ from The Clicking of Cuthbert)

  * * * *

  The fourth hole found him four down, and one had the feeling that he was lucky not to be five.

  (‘Excelsior!’ from Nothing Serious)

  * * * *

  There are few better things in life than a public school summer term … The freedom of it after … even the most easy-going private school, is intoxicating.

  (Jackson Junior or Mike at Wrykyn)

  Being a solidly-built young man, he may well have avoided some of the ragging that new boys at a public school invariably face. In Mike, one of his later school stories, though, he can summon up some of the angst involved, as well as parody the form:

  In stories of the ‘Not Really a Duffer’ type, where the nervous new boy, who has been found crying in the boot-room over the photograph of his sister, contrives to get an innings in the game, nobody suspects that he is really a prodigy till he hits the Bully’s first ball out of the ground for six.

  (Chapter 40)

  Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and Takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?’

  (Chapter 32)

  … to which Mike Jackson replies –

  ‘The last, for choice, but I’ve only just arrived, so I don’t know.’

  (The Lost Lambs or Mike and Psmith from Mike)

  Because of his parents’ peripatetic lifestyle, Wodehouse was by turns boarder and day boy but he infinitely preferred being a boarder, because ‘it offered much more opportunity for making friendships and generally feeling that one was part of the life of the school …’ Although, as he later recalled, ‘I was pretty friendly with everybody but I had no intimate friends.’ (The exception he overlooked was William ‘Bill’ Townend with whom he shared a room for just over a year and with whom he corresponded for the next fifty. Their letters were to form the basis for Performing Flea).

  We were a great all-round school in those days … The brainless athlete was quite a rarity. We might commit mayhem on the football field, but after the game was over we trotted off to our houses and wrote Latin verse.

  For the first few years he applied himself to his books and there is no doubt that his grasp of languages acquired in these years taught him a great deal about the origins and construction of the English language. In his fiction he prefers to play with his erudition but before you can play, you have to know what you are playing with. The classical education is there for all to see but made palatable by the hoops Wodehouse sends it jumping through.

  Though Latin and Greek were his main subjects, there was also French …

  Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look that announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

  (The Luck of the Bodkins)

  ‘Do you speak French fluently?’

  ‘Very, what I know of it. Which is just that word, l’addition and, of course, Oo, là, là!’

  (Something Fishy)

  I never succeeded in speaking French but I learned to read it all right … I stuck to the normal grunts and gurgles of the foreigner who finds himself cornered by anything Gallic.

  (Introduction to French Leave)

  He also found the currency a little confusing …

  I went down to the town [Le Touquet] to buy some stamps yesterday and tried to pay the woman at the shop with a piece of toilet paper, which I thought was a fifty franc bill. She laughed heartily …

  (Letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 19 December 1934)

  It is what the French would call an impasse. In fact, it is what the French do call an impasse. Only they say ahm-parrse. Silly, of course, but you know what Frenchmen are.

  ‘What asses these Frenchmen are! Why can’t they talk English?’

  ‘They are possibly more to be pitied than censured, m’lord. Early upbringing no doubt has a lot to do with it.’

  (Ring For Jeeves)

  * * * *

  The Headmaster during Wodehouse’s time was A. H. Gilkes, one of the legendary Victorian headmasters, comparable, say, with Rugby’s Dr Arnold. ‘He was a man with a long white beard who stood six-foot-six in his socks and he had one of those deep musical voices … he also always scared the pants off me.’

  Which perhaps goes some way to explain his cathartic treatment of his fictional headmasters:

  The Rev. Aubrey was taking the senior class in Bible history, and when a headmaster has got his teeth into a senior class, he does not readily sheathe the sword.

  (‘Bramley is So Bracing’ from Nothing Serious)

  From the fact that he spoke as if he had a hot potato in his mouth without getting the raspberry from the lads in the ringside seats, I deduced that he must be the headmaster.

  (Right Ho, Jeeves)

  He was later to parody Gilkes – a man not over-given to encouraging his pupils:

  So you made a century against Tonbridge, did you, my boy? Well, always remember that you will soon be dead, and in any case, the bowling was probably rotten.

  In retrospect his view of Gilkes became ambivalent and he concluded that perhaps, after all, the man had not been consistently stern enough:

  Boys respect strength, nothing but strength. They may dislike it, but they respect it. A school is like a child. The mother who alternately spoils and storms at a child makes it unmanageable. Same with headmaster and school.

  Armine won a scholarship to Oxford and once again it looked as though Wodehouse was about to tread in his brother’s steps. At which point reality bit.

  The ever-temperamental rupee took a nosedive, causing Wodehouse Senior to conclude that ‘two sons at the university would be a son more than the privy purse could handle. So Learning drew the loser’s end, and Commerce got me.’

  He writes to his friend, Eric George – ‘Friend of me boyhood, here is some dread news for you. My people have not got enough of what are vulgarly but forcibly called “stamps” to send me to Varsity … Oh! Money, money, thy name is money! (a most lucid remark).’

  Not surprisingly, the disappointment caused him to take his foot off the academic pedal. In the summer term of 1899 he came twenty-fourth in his Classics class – which might not have been so bad, had there been more than twenty-five in the class … Instead, he concentrated on his other interests, becoming one of the five editors of the school magazine, The Alleynian, to which he continued to contribute for the rest of his life.

  The legacy of Dulwich is impossible to pin down in concrete terms but it would be fair to see the basic public-school values of fair play, loyalty and honesty reflected in the writings of the next seventy years – the Code of the Wodehouses. That and the conviction that, as long as one abided by the rules of the game, a chap should be left to do whatever he wanted to do – in his case, write.

  Dulwich provided the first stable society Wodehouse had ever known. In a sense he never left it …

  * * * *

  ‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’

  ‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’

  (The Code of the Woosters)

  Even so, there was to be one glorious moment in the academic sun, when in 1939 Oxford University gave him the acclaim that Dulwich had withheld in the form of an honorary degree …

  I had a great time at Oxford. I stayed with the Vice-Chancellor, who is a splendid chap, and enjoyed every minute of
it. Did Victor tell you that I rolled up to the Christ Church dinner in a black tie, to find four hundred gorgeous beings in white tie and decorations? It never occurred to me that an all-men dinner would be white tie. However, the robes hid my shame quite a bit. They were dove-grey and scarlet – very dressy. I had to wear them all day, and was sorry I couldn’t go round in them in private life. They certainly do give one an air.

  (Letter to Molly Cazalet, 10 July 1939)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Uneasy Money

  The Autumn of 1900, when, a comely youth of some eighteen summers, I accepted employment in the Lombard Street office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Reluctantly, I may mention. As the song says – ‘I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it’, but my hand was forced.

  I must ask you in future to try and synchronise your arrival at the office with that of the rest of the staff. We aim as far as possible at the communal dead heat.

  (Ice in the Bedroom)

  * * * *

  After Dulwich Wodehouse’s idea of a good time would have been to linger in the parental Shropshire nest and write – something he was now beginning to do in earnest, though without marked commercial success. Wodehouse Senior, however, was a firm believer in the work ethic – even though he was no longer driven by it himself. He used his Asian contacts to secure a position at the bank …

  I do not blame [my parents] for feeling that a son in a bank making his £80 a year, just like finding it in the street, was a sounder commercial proposition than one living at home and spending a fortune on stamps [to publishers].

  I have always thought it illustrative of the haphazard methods of education in the nineties … that I should have been put on the Classical side at Dulwich and taught to write Greek and Latin verse and so on when I was going to wind up in a bank. I had had absolutely no training for commerce, and right through my two years at the bank I never had the slightest inkling of what banking was. I simply could not understand what was going on.

  There were only two things connected with Higher Finance that I really understood. One was that from now on all that I would be able to afford in the way of lunch would be a roll and butter and a cup of coffee, a discovery which, after the lavish midday meals of school, shook me to my foundations. The other was that if I got to the office late three mornings in a month, I would lose my Christmas bonus. One of the great sights of the City in the years 1901–02 was me rounding into the straight with my coat-tails flying and just about making it across the threshold while thousands cheered. It kept me in superb condition, and gave me a rare appetite for the daily roll and butter.

  In one of his first novels, Psmith in the City (1910), he has his archetypal schoolboy hero, Mike Jackson – a loosely autobiographical character from earlier school stories – tread the same precarious path:

  Inside, the bank seemed to be in a state of some confusion. Men were moving about in an apparently irresolute manner. Nobody seemed actually to be working … As he stood near the doorway, one or two panting figures rushed up the steps, and flung themselves at a large book which stood on the counter near the door. Mike was to come to know this book well. In it, if you were an employee of the New Asiatic Bank, you had to inscribe your name every morning. It was removed at ten sharp to the accountant’s room …

  There were, admittedly, compensations in the cameraderie of people working together for a common purpose, ‘something akin to, though a thousand times weaker than, the public school spirit. Such a community lacks the main motive of the public school spirit, which is pride in the school and its achievements. Nobody can be proud of the achievements of a bank.’

  However, Wodehouse was to make a name for himself in banking circles – of sorts …

  Possibly because I was a dedicated literary artist with a soul above huckstering or possibly – and this was the view more widely held in the office – because I was just a plain dumb brick, I proved to be the most inefficient clerk whose trouser seat ever polished the surface of a high stool.

  He was shunted from the Postal Department – where he found sticking stamps onto letters reasonably congenial, if not mentally taxing, work – to Inward Bills to Outward Bills to Cash … ‘always with a weak, apologetic smile on my face and hoping that suavity of manner would see me through … my total inability to grasp what was going on made me something of a legend in the place’. He imagined the legacy and reputation that would follow him down the corridor of the years … ‘You should have seen P.G. Wodehouse. Ah, they don’t make them like that nowadays. They’ve lost the pattern.’

  *

  They train bank clerks to stifle emotion, so that they will be able to refuse overdrafts when they become managers.

  (‘Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate’ from Ukridge)

  *

  The whole secret of success, if you were running a business and had Monty Bodkin working for you, was to get rid of him at the earliest possible moment.

  (Heavy Weather)

  *

  ‘If you were not handicapped by a public school … education,’ he said, ‘I could suggest many professions. But I fear that your upbringing has hardly fitted you for them. There is the Church, of course.’

  (‘The Pro’ from Pearsons Magazine, August 1906)

  * * * *

  Essentially, Lombard Street was a branch office which trained promising young men for a couple of years before sending them off to the Far East to manage one of the bank’s subsidiaries. (‘They are put to work when young, and they stay put. They are mussels. Each has his special place on the rock, and remains glued to it all his life’ – The Girl on the Boat.)

  The prospect of being transported East of Suez appalled Wodehouse: ‘The picture of myself managing a branch was one I preferred not to examine too closely. I couldn’t have managed a whelk-stall.’

  He was saved by what psychiatrists would undoubtedly see as an act of self-immolation. One day, on being given a pristine new ledger, this man who could not stop writing found himself using that first blank page to write a fantasy about the opening of a new ledger. He was well into it before he realised the heinous nature of his crime – he had Defaced A Ledger. It was the work of a moment to neatly remove the offending page but a dénouement was at hand.

  A minor war ensued between the Head Cashier and the printer who had provided the ledger. The list of suspects was short to the point of containing only one name. It was the most dramatic thing that happened to him in the world of finance … (‘It was immediately after this that I found myself at liberty to embark on the life literary.’)

  * * * *

  Fortunately, his real interests now showed signs of being profitable in their own way. All through his two years in the bank, Wodehouse had been writing non-stop. Sometimes on the bank’s time and always on his own in his ‘horrible lodgings … off the King’s Road’.

  ‘I wrote everything in those days … verses, short stories, articles for the lowest type of weekly paper – only a small proportion of them ever reaching print.’ Nonetheless, he managed to place some eighty pieces. The prospect of the waiting whelk-stall was only one reason he was not looking forward to being sent to the East … ‘The other, of course, was that I wanted to abandon commerce and earn my living as a writer, and I felt that this could be done only by remaining in London. The cross all young writers have to bear is that, while they know that they are going to be spectacularly successful some day, they find it impossible to convince their nearest and dearest that they will ever amount to a row of beans.’ He felt from the moment he joined the bank that he had two years ‘to establish myself on a pinnacle of fame as a writer’.

  Midway through his brief tenure at the bank Wodehouse contracted mumps and retired to utilise the recuperation at his parents’ Shropshire home. ‘I went back to my people to have them there. I wrote nineteen short stories in three weeks, I just sent the stories out … (all of which, I regret to say, editors were compelled to decline owing to lack of space. The editors regrette
d it, too. They said so.)’

  ‘They were awful. And to make matters worse, they were all written in longhand. My trouble, as with all beginning authors, was that I did not know how to write.’ He collected rejection slips and ‘some of them were rather pretty’ … ‘I could have papered the walls of a good-sized banqueting hall’ … ‘But what I always feel about rejection slips is that their glamour soon wears off. When you’ve seen one, I often say, you’ve seen them all.’ … ‘Worse bilge than mine may have been submitted to the editors of London in 1901 and 1902, but I should think it very unlikely.’

  Three weeks’ intensive practice may or may not have helped his style but it may well have affected his future content. Mumps is one of the most undermining illnesses that can plague an adult male and it almost certainly left Wodehouse sterile and possibly impotent. Several of his biographers have speculated that this fact alone may account for the asexuality of his subse quent characters and storylines.

  * * * *

  Although he did not know it at the time, his eventual salvation was at hand.

  The Globe was an evening paper with a hundred-year history. Its popular ‘By the Way’ column was currently being run by one Harold Begbie, assisted by William Beach-Thomas, whom Wodehouse had known as a master at Dulwich. The connection was enough to cause Wodehouse to pay him a visit …

  I went to see Beach-Thomas to ask if he could get me any work, and he said that he and Begbie often wanted to take a day off and would be glad of somebody who would fill in for them. The payment was ten shillings and sixpence per day.