by Barry Day
He would earn his money. Writing the ‘By the Way’ column involved continuous topicality. ‘You would quote something from the morning paper and then you’d make some comment on it. You learnt to skim the news and see things, well, wrong way up, perhaps, for jokes … It was always the same type of joke. Nobody had altered that formula in all the fifty years of [the column’s] existence. And that was only the start.’ Over the on-and-off seven years he was associated with the column, ‘I used to have to write a set of verses every morning between ten-thirty and twelve … six days a week. It was a discipline, you had to get it done.’
During his time at the bank, when the call came from Beach-Thomas, Wodehouse would find himself suffering from ‘non-existent attacks of neuralgia’ – but somehow he managed the balancing act and gained valuable professional experience in writing to a deadline.
Then – in September 1902 – Beach-Thomas told him that he needed someone to hold the fort for him while he took a five-week vacation. Was Wodehouse interested? ‘On September 9th,’ he confided to his diary, ‘having to choose between The Globe and the bank, I chucked the latter and started out on my wild lone as a freelance. This month starts my journalistic career.’ By the end of the year he had earned £65. 6s. 7d.
In August 1903 he was offered and accepted a more permanent job by taking over the column and of that period he would write:
In my early twenties it would not be too much to say that I was the talk of London. If you had not seen me riding my bicycle down The Strand to the offices of The Globe … frequently using no hands and sometimes bending over to pick up a handkerchief with my teeth, it was pretty generally agreed that you had not seen anything. And the public’s memory must be very short if the 22 not out I made for the printers of The Globe against the printers of the Evening News one Sunday in 1904 has been forgotten … I was leaving footprints on the sands of time, and good large footprints at that.
If he ever had any second thoughts, they were humorous ones …
I do sometimes find myself wondering if I might not have done better on leaving the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank to have bought a black mask and an ounce or two of trinitrotoluol and chanced my arm as a member of the underworld. When I see how well some of these underworld chaps are doing … it is hard not to feel that they are on the right lines.
Despite the number of times he issued a caveat or entered a nolle prosequi, he would insist in later life – ‘I enjoyed my two years at the bank enormously.’
* * * *
Perhaps one should put it down to the ‘cock-eyed’ comic vision of his that turned everything around until its funny side was showing, but Wodehouse in print had very little time for other professions than the one that had sought him out.
The legal profession was invariably shifty …
He came in now in that wary manner peculiar to lawyers, looking from side to side as if expecting to see torts and malfeasances hiding behind the curtains and mis demeanours under the piano.
(If I Were You)
*
The two lawyers then left, chatting amiably about double burgage, heirs taken in socage, and the other subjects which always crop up when lawyers get together.
(Big Money)
*
That’s what comes of being a solicitor, it saps the vital juices. [He] doesn’t even embezzle his clients’ money, which I should have thought was about the only fun a solicitor can get out of life.
(Ice in the Bedroom)
… and as for the police – well, what could you expect of people who couldn’t take a joke when a chap knocked their helmet off on Boat Race Night …?
The Sergeant of Police … was calm, stolid and ponderous, giving the impression of being constructed of some form of suet.
(Frozen Assets)
*
Some policemen are born grafters, some achieve graft and some have graft thrust upon them.
(Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen)
Then there was the Stock Exchange …
A youth and middle age spent on the London Stock Exchange had left Lester Carmody singularly broad-minded. He had to a remarkable degree that precious charity which allows a man to look indulgently on any financial project, however fishy, provided he can see a bit in it for himself.
(Money for Nothing)
… Accountants …
All chartered accountants have hearts as big as hotels. You think they’re engrossed in auditing the half-yearly balance sheet of Miggs, Montagu and Murgatroyd, general importers, and all the time they’re writing notes to blondes saying ‘Tomorrow, one-thirty, same place.’
(Ice in the Bedroom)
… and the Civil Service …
‘He’ll probably be an ambassador some day.’
‘Thus making a third world war inevitable.’
(Frozen Assets)
… and Politics …
He’s got about as much intelligence as a Cabinet minister.
(Much Obliged, Jeeves)
Practically all Governments ought to be in Colney Hatch [mental hospital].
(Letter to William Townend, 15 January 1949)
… not to mention those new-fangled Psychiatrist fellows …
‘… a psychiatrist.’
‘A what?’
‘One of those fellows who ask you questions about your childhood and gradually dig up the reason why you go about shouting “Fire!” in crowded theatres. They find it’s because somebody took away your all-day sucker when you were six.’
‘… I thought they were called head-shrinkers.’
‘That, I believe, is the medical term.”
(A Pelican at Blandings)
… or the Outer Hebrides of the Medical profession …
I wonder what an osteopath does if a patient suddenly comes apart in his hands? (‘Quick, Watson, the seccotine!’)
(Letter to William Townend, 22 December 1922)
Not that the contemporary Arts exactly came out smelling of roses …
If you threw a brick … you would be certain to brain some rising young interior decorator, some Vorticist sculptor or a writer of revolutionary vers libre. And a very good thing, too.
(The Small Bachelor)
In fact, you couldn’t trust any of them further than you could throw that brick …
Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.
(‘Success Story’ from Nothing Serious)
CHAPTER SIX
America,
I Like You
‘Hang it!’ said Bill to himself in the cab, ‘I’ll go to America!’ The exact words probably which Columbus had used, talking the thing over with his wife.
(Uneasy Money)
*
‘It looks like New York,’ I said to myself as I emerged from the Customs sheds. ‘It smells like New York. Yes, I should say it was New York all right.’
*
To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of under-statements. Being there was like being in heaven, without going to all the bother and expense of dying.
Why America? I have often wondered about that. Why, I mean, from my earliest years … was it America that was always to me the land of romance? It is not as though I had been intoxicated by visions of cowboys and Red Indians. Even as a child I never really became cowboy conscious and to Red Indians I was definitely allergic. I wanted no piece of them.
* * * *
By 1904 Wodehouse had his feet firmly under the table at The Globe and was beginning to have his fiction – almost exclusively school stories – published on a regular basis. One of the biggest perks the paper offered its employees was a five-week vacation and now, he determined, was the time to fulfil another of his dreams – to visit America.
‘And came a day when I realised that I was sufficiently well fixed to … pay a visit to America … People would see me walking along with a glassy look in my eyes and my mouth hanging open as if I had adenoids and would whisper
to one another, “He’s thinking of America.” And they were right.’ He likened his yearning to that of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter longing ‘to get back, back, back to his old Kentucky shack’.
The fare was not excessive, the trip took nine days each way, so he would have a clear fortnight in New York. On 14 April he set sail on the St Louis …
* * * *
The Captain was on the bridge, pretty sure he knew the way to New York but, just to be on the safe side, murmuring to himself, ‘Turn right at Cherbourg and then straight on.’
(‘Life With Freddie’ from Plum Pie)
He set to work swiftly and silently, like a New York Customs official dealing with the effects of a star of the musical comedy stage who has left her native America for a trip to Paris and, returning, has announced that she has nothing to declare.
(Money in the Bank)
* * * *
He found a different world with different manners. There was the little matter of getting a drink. When he arrived in 1921, for instance, Prohibition was in force …
Our first act was to summon a bell-boy and give him the Sinister Whisper, to which he replied with a conspiratorial nod and buzzed off, returning later with a bottle of whisky – at the nominal price of $17!!! I suppose if you tried to get champagne here, you’d have to throw in your Sunday trousers as well. Apparently you can still get the stuff, but you have to be darned rich.
(Letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 2 April 1921)
* * * *
The squarest man, deposited suddenly in New York and faced with the prospect of earning his living there is likely to quail for a moment. New York is not like other cities. London greets the stranger with a sleepy grunt. Paris giggles. New York howls.
(The Prince and Betty)
*
There are several million inhabitants of New York. Not all of them eke out a precarious livelihood by murdering one another …
(Introduction to Psmith Journalist)
*
On a typical sweltering late August afternoon one might well find ‘[one half of the populace] crawling about asking those they met if this was hot enough for them, the other maintaining that what they minded was not so much the heat as the humidity.
(Sam the Sudden)
*
In 1904 I found residents in the home of the brave and the land of the free, though delightful chaps if you got to know them, rather on the brusque side. They shoved you in the street and asked you who you were shoving, and used, when spoken to, only one side of the mouth in replying. They were, in a word, pretty tough eggs.
Fifty years later, however, he found ‘its inhabitants as polite as pallbearers … perhaps it is because I have been over here setting a good example’.
Conversation on the New York Subway is impossible. The ingenious gentlemen who constructed it started with the object of making it noisy. Not ordinary noisy like a ton of coal falling onto a sheet of tin, but really noisy. So they fashioned the pillars of thin steel, and the sleepers of thin wood, and loosened all the nuts, and now a Subway train in motion suggests a prolonged dynamite explosion blended with the voice of some great cataract.
(Psmith, Journalist)
To see the Subway in its most characteristic mood one must travel on it during the rush hour, when its patrons are packed into the carriages in one solid jam by muscular guards and policemen, shoving in a manner reminiscent of a Rugby football scrum.
(Psmith, Journalist)
I took to American food from the start like a starving Eskimo flinging himself on a portion of blubber. The poet Keats, describing his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer, speaks of himself as feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Precisely so did I feel … when the waiter brought me my first slab of strawberry shortcake … ‘No matter if it puts an inch on my waistline,’ I said to myself, ‘I must be in on this.’
And people would try and sell one things – like the Brooklyn Bridge, for example …
I don’t say I’ve ever sold Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge to anybody, but if I can’t get rid of a parcel of home-made oil stock to a guy that lives in the country, I’m losing my grip and ought to retire.
(Money for Nothing)
… they were clearly a species apart …
In my experience there are two kinds of elderly American. One, the stout and horn-rimmed, is matiness itself. He greets you as if you were a favourite son, starts agitating the cocktail shaker before you know where you are, slips a couple into you with a merry laugh, claps you on the back, tells you a dialect story about two Irishmen named Pat and Mike, and, in a word, makes life one grand, sweet song. The other, which runs a good deal to the cold, grey stare and the square jaw, seems to view the English cousins with concern. It is not Elfin. It broods. And every now and then you catch its eye, and it is like colliding with a raw oyster.
(Thank You, Jeeves)
… while the younger generation were clearly obsessed with sex …
If the youth of America has a fault, it is that it is always a bit inclined, when something shapely looms up on the skyline, to let its mind wander from the business at hand.
(‘The Unpleasantness at Kozy Kot’ from A Few Quick Ones (US edition))
For, like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.
(Summer Moonshine)
[Wilbur Trout] lost all restraint, springing from blonde to blonde with an assiduity which seemed to suggest that he intended to go on marrying them till the supply gave out.
(A Pelican at Blandings)
* * * *
Nonetheless, the return fare seemed to Wodehouse a good investment. In his diary he wrote – ‘In New York gathering experience. Worth many guineas in the future, but none for the moment.’
After that trip to New York I was a man who counted … The manner of editors towards me changed. Whereas before it had been, ‘Throw this man out,’ they now said, ‘Come in, my dear fellow, come in and tell us all about America.’
He was, indeed, prescient, for on his return to England in May, he was able to place numerous pieces imbued with his New Worldly wisdom. August, for instance, found him regaling the readers of Punch with ‘Society Whispers From The States’. (Later – in Carry On, Jeeves – he would have Lady Malvern drop into Bertie’s New York apartment, firmly convinced that a one-month stay was perfectly ample to write her magnum opus – America and the Americans. After all, a friend of hers had produced America from Within after being there only two weeks!)
He also began to sell his work in America and – as a symbol of his new status as an authentic Anglo-American author – he even acquired a US agent, one A. E. Baerman, who sold a novel, Love Among the Chickens, for $1,000.
It was Baerman, in fact, who precipitated Wodehouse’s second and more significant visit to the US in 1909. He used the simple device of not paying him the money he owed him. Whether Wodehouse ever did get it is not entirely clear but what he did achieve was to set up literary contacts that would stand him in good stead for years to come, and it was not long before he was inventing the concept of the transatlantic ‘commute’ – not such an expensive proposition when the second-class fare was only £10 each way. Not that he ever claimed it, but Wodehouse was probably the first significant writer to operate with equal success on both sides of the water. Between 1905 and 1916 his work appeared in some twenty US publications.
His constant companion on his travels was the faithful Monarch typewriter he bought with his first American earnings. For twenty-five years or so it travelled in the lap of luxury, becoming somewhat spoiled and temperamental in the process. Eventually, he had to buy a second model, which was forced to donate its parts to repair the beloved original. The day in 1935 the Monarch finally handed in its dinner pail was a black one in the Wodehouse family circle. He turned to a Royal but old habits died hard – ‘I don’t like these me
tal things which stick up and hold the paper down, so that you can’t get a clear view of what you’re writing.’
(Incidentally … have you ever noticed that if you ever strike a wrong letter on the typewriter it always comes out very clear and firm and black, while with the right letters you have to go back and hammer them twice to make them show at all?)
(Letter to Denis Mackail, December 1945)
In 1956 he bowed to the inevitable – an electric typewriter. It received a qualified approval: ‘… every now and then for no discoverable reason it prints an extra letter – as in the word “bestg” above. I’ll swear I never hit the “g” key. The bally machine simply decided that a “g” would look well at the end of the word “best” and shoved it in.’
With a little help from some of his new literary friends, he managed to sell short stories to Cosmopolitan and Collier’s for $200 and $300 respectively. Such success was heady stuff:
To seize pen and paper and post my resignation to The Globe was with me the work of an instant.
He immediately took a room at the Hotel Earle – later symbolically mis-remembered by Wodehouse as the Duke! – and settled in with his Monarch, ‘paper, pencils, envelopes and Bartlett’s book of Familiar Quotations, that indispensable adjunct to literary success … It so happens that I am not very bright and find it hard to think up anything really clever off my own bat, but give me my Bartlett and I will slay you.’
