by Barry Day
My line was good sound English stuff … stories of rich girls who wanted to be loved for themselves alone, and escaped convicts breaking into lonely houses on Christmas Eve, when the white snow lay all around …
The curious thing about those early days is that, in spite of the blizzard of rejection slips, I had the most complete confidence in myself. I knew I was good. Today [1957] I am a mass of diffidence and I-wonder-if-this-is-going-to-be-all-rightness, and I envy those tough authors, square-jawed and spitting out of the side of their mouths, who are perfectly sure, every time they start a new book, that it will be a masterpiece … but with each new book of mine, I have, as I say, always that feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one on one’s toes and makes one write every sentence ten times … When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, ‘But he did take trouble.’
* * * *
There was one area, however, in which he could follow both Barrie’s advice and his own inclinations and that was in the writing of school stories.
In 1898 the Public School Magazine was started by publishers A & C Black and a short while later their rivals, Newnes, brought out a competitor in The Captain. Both were ready-made for Wodehouse’s work. ‘Wodehouse Preferred, until then down in the cellar with no takers, began to rise a bit.’
His school stories broke a certain amount of new ground. Much has been made of their lack of sex or religious moralising – the muscular Christianity in which the genre was inclined to indulge – but this is hardly surprising, since these qualities did not reflect their author’s personality. Wodehouse’s school stories very much did. In them he was able to express the happiness he had known at Dulwich and the personal code by which he and his contemporaries had lived. They were written for himself and his generation of public school-boys – a generation grown older but not altogether grown up – and they rang true.
And there was another component – and one which makes them still readable today. Their style was Early Ironic. While the characters did what they did wholeheartedly, the books’ attitude makes it clear to the reader that what we are witnessing is a prelude to real life and not the life itself. Wodehouse the gentle satirist is already at work.
Although the school stories were far from being the sum total of his work in that first decade of the century, they were certainly his most typical and successful. But by the time it ended, other influences were at work and it was time to move on. His final school novel, Mike – a combination of two separate serials, Jackson Junior and The Lost Lambs – was published in 1909, and in November of that year he wrote to a friend, Leslie Bradshaw that ‘The School stories have served their turn, and it would hurt my chances of success to have them bobbing up when I’m trying to do bigger work. I have given up boys’ stories absolutely.’
* * * *
Before Charon finally arrived, Wodehouse was to write about a hundred works of fiction (with one partly finished on his hospital bedside table), sixteen plays, eight libretti and lyrics for twenty-eight musical comedies. Asked about his philosophy of writing:
I don’t have a set of rules guiding me. I just go on living. You don’t notice things when you’re writing. Just writing one book after another, that’s my life … I wrote another book, then I wrote another book, then I wrote another book, and continued to do so down the years … But there has never been anything dramatic and sensational about any of my productions. I have always run a quiet, conservative business, just jogging along and endeavouring to give satisfaction [by maintaining quality of output] … I would call myself a betwixt-and-between author – not on the one hand a total bust and yet not on the other a wham or socko. Ask the first ten men you meet, ‘Have you ever heard of P. G. Wodehouse?’ and nine of them will answer, ‘No.’ The tenth, being hard of hearing, will say, ‘Down the passage, first door on the right.’
I am a creature of habit and as a result of forty years of incessant literary composition have become a mere writing machine. Wherever I am, I sit down and write … It has all helped to keep me busy and out of the public houses.
How did he get himself started every day?
I sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.
I haven’t any violent feelings about anything. I just love writing. What really makes me happy is to get a really good plot for a novel and then sit back and write it.
(Radio Interview)
I much prefer writing books and short stories to writing dialogue for plays. There’s no author’s narrative in plays …
(Interview)
Of course, the trouble is that one is never quite happy unless one is working – and by working I don’t so much mean the actual writing as the feeling that one could write if one wanted to. It is the in-between times that kill one.
(Letter to William Townend, 13 September 1934)
Throughout his life interviewers rarely managed to elicit a truly serious response from him on the one subject he took extremely seriously. But then, it was not in the Code of the Wodehouses to take oneself seriously in public.
On why a writer writes he was a little more forthcoming:
It’s a funny thing about writing. If you are a writer by nature, I don’t believe you write for money or fame or even for publication, but simply for the pleasure of turning out the stuff … What makes a writer write is that he likes writing. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.
* * * *
I don’t suppose he makes enough out of a novel to keep a midget in doughnuts for a week. Not a really healthy midget.
(The Luck of the Bodkins)
* * * *
In a letter to William Townend written on 5 April 1945, referring to the uninterrupted literary output of his prisoner-of-war years, and at a time when it was uncertain how the British bookbuying public might react:
I really don’t care if these books are published or not. The great thing is that I’ve got them down on paper, and can read and re-read them and polish them and change an adjective for a better one and cut out dead lines.
(In fact, his postwar work proved as popular as ever on both sides of the Atlantic.)
Once the bank was safely behind him, he was never in any doubt as to what his future held:
Certainly I have done much better at writing than I would have done in some of the other professions. I’m thinking at the moment of the second-hand bridge business, snail-gathering and getting hit in the stomach by meteorites … As a writer I have always rather kept off snails, feeling that they lacked sustained dramatic interest.
If pressed, he might well have added whelk-stall running to the list …
Owing to my having become mentally arrested at an early age, I write the sort of books which people, not knowing the facts, assume to be the work of a cheerful, if backward, young fellow of about twenty-five.
A revealing remark, in many ways, because that was precisely the image he sought to cultivate for the rest of his life.
About the nature of his work he was quite clear:
It’s what I always feel about my work – viz. that I go off the rails unless I stay all the time in a sort of artificial world of my own creation. A real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb.
It was all very well for him to say it about his own work but the same remark from a third party would not pass unremarked …
George Orwell calls my stuff Edwardian (which God knows it is. No argument about that, George) and says that the reason for it being Edwardian is that I did not set foot in England for sixteen years and so lost touch with conditions there. Sixteen years, mark you, during most of which I was living in London and was known as Beau Wodehouse of Norfolk Street.
You’re right about my books being early Edwardian. I look upon myself as
an historical novelist … I don’t believe it matters and intend to go on hewing to the butler line, let the chips fall where they may … my stuff has been out of date since 1914 and nobody has seemed to mind.
(Letter to Denis Mackail, December 1945)
His literary ambitions, he claimed, were modest enough:
I feel about my stuff that it never contains what you might call surprises. You are never likely to feel like Keats on first reading Chapman’s Homer but I do have the ambition to keep the old Wodehouse pemmican up to the level.
(Letter to Denis Mackail, 12 April 1931)
… an endeavour, he tended to feel, not exactly helped by fellow professionals giving the game away …
[J. B. Priestley, for instance] ‘analyses me, blast him, and called attention to the thing I try and hush up – viz that I have only got one plot and produce it once a year with variations. I wish to goodness novelists wouldn’t review novels …
(Letter to Denis Mackail, October 1932)
In an ideal world a chap would just produce the stuff and leave it like that. Unfortunately, the writer’s world intends to be littered with gushing readers – as Bertie found when he was confused with the Barbara Cartlandesque writer, Rosie M. Banks …
‘My nephew has probably told you that I have been making a close study of your books of late?’
‘Yes, he did mention it. How – er – how did you like the bally things?’
‘Mr Wooster, I am not ashamed to say that the tears came into my eyes as I listened to them. It amazes me that a man as young as you can have been able to plumb human nature so surely to its depth; to play with so unerring a hand on the quivering heart-strings of your reader; to write novels so true, so human, so moving, so vital!’
‘Oh, it’s just a knack,’ I said.
The good old persp. was bedewing my forehead by this time in a pretty lavish manner. I don’t know when I’ve been so rattled.
(‘No Wedding Bells for Bingo’ from The Inimitable Jeeves)
*
Everyone has some pet aversion – some dislike slugs, some cockroaches; George disliked women writers.
(‘Parted Ways’ from Strand Magazine, December 1914)
* * * *
She wrote novels: and that instinct of self-preservation which lurks in every publisher had suggested to him that behind her invitation lay a sinister desire to read those to him one by one.
The rich contralto of female novelist calling to its young had broken the stillness of the summer afternoon.
(‘Mr Potter Takes a Rest Cure’ from Blandings Castle)
*
The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
(The Girl in Blue)
* * *
Wodehouse always publicly demurred at the idea of writing an out-and-out autobiography – although he found a cunning oblique way round it in Over Seventy, Performing Flea and Bring on the Girls …
The three essentials for an autobiography are that its compiler should have an eccentric father, a miserable misunderstood childhood and a hell of a time at his public school, and I enjoyed none of these advantages. My father was as normal as rice pudding, my childhood went like a breeze from start to finish, with everybody I met understanding me perfectly, while as for my school days at Dulwich, they were just six years of unbroken bliss.
Should he be put on the rack and made to write it …
I could mention, for instance, that when I was four years old I used to play with an orange, but I doubt that would interest them, and that at the age of six I read the whole of Pope’s Iliad
[which we happen to know he did]
which, of course, they wouldn’t believe.
And as for adolescence, I recall nothing except that I had a lot of pimples. (Today I have none. How often that happens! We start out in life with more pimples than we know what to do with and, in the careless arrogance of youth, fancy that they are going to last forever; but one morning we find we are down to our last half dozen, and then those go. There is a lesson in this for all of us, I think.) … Better, I think, to skip childhood and adolescence …
What infernally dull reading an author’s life makes. It’s all right as long as you are still struggling but once you have become financially sound there is nothing to say.
(Letter to Denis Mackail, 22 July 1955)
* * * *
Wodehouse was a little more forthcoming when it came to discussing his working methods:
I now write short stories at terrific speed. I’ve started a habit of rushing them through and then working over them very carefully, instead of trying to get the first draft exactly right, and have just finished the rough draft of an 8,000 word story in two days. It nearly slew me. As a rule, I find a week long enough for a short story, if I have the plot well thought out … On a novel I generally do eight pages a day – i.e., about 2,500 words … As a rule I like to start work in the mornings, knock off for a breather, and then do a bit more before dinner. I never work after dinner … Usually when I get to the last fifty pages of a story, it begins to write itself.
Naturally, age took its toll. In a letter to Guy Bolton he laments the fact:
When I remember that I wrote the last twenty-six pages of Thank You, Jeeves in a single day, I sigh for the past. Pretty darned good if I get three done nowadays.
I have never written a novel yet (except Thank You, Jeeves) without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 pages with notes, mostly delirious, before getting anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.
Nonetheless, the constant process of revision invariably paid off for him and when he comes to review the finished article …
It really reads as if I had written it straight off without a pause.
Not that what he read always struck him as his best stuff:
Golly, what rot it sounds when one writes it down! Come, come, Wodehouse, is this the best you can do in the way of carrying on the great tradition of English Literature? Still, I’ll bet the plot of Hamlet seemed just as lousy when Shakespeare was trying to tell it to Ben Jonson in the Mermaid Tavern. (‘Well, Ben, see what I mean, the central character is this guy, see, who’s in love with this girl, see, but her old man doesn’t think he’s on the level, see, so he tells her – wait a minute, I better start at the beginning. Well, so this guy’s in college, see, and he’s come home because his mother’s gone and married his uncle, see, and he sees a ghost, see. So this ghost turns out to be the guy’s father …’)
(Letter to William Townend, 23 April 1932)
I sometimes wish I wrote that powerful stuff the reviewers like so much, all about incest and homosexualism.
(Letter to Denis Mackail, 28 February 1960)
On the other hand, enough of this self-flagellation …
I wonder why people feel that writing dull books about, say, Shakespeare’s humour is respectable, but writing funny books themselves is infra dig?
Writer’s bloc is a recurrent theme:
After three months’ absolute deadness my brain begins to whir like a dynamo … I believe our rotten brains have to go through these ghastly periods of inertness before getting second wind … But if a writer keeps on writing, something generally breaks eventually.
… although, in reality, it was never a serious problem for him and even a diminished Wodehouse output would have seemed ambitious for most ‘serious’ writers. Even someone as dedicated as Graham Greene would talk of his daily 350 words. Of those whose methods have been recorded only Anthony Trollope seems to have come close. He claimed to finish one novel and start immediately on the next. Wodehouse was more than a little intrigued …
Did he sit down each morning and write exactly 1,500 words, without knowing when he sat down how the story was going to develop, or had he a careful scenario on paper? … Of course, if he did plan the whole thing out fi
rst, there is nothing so very bizarre in the idea of writing so many hundred words of it each day. After all, it is more or less what one does oneself. One sits down to work each morning, no matter whether one feels bright or lethargic, and before one gets up a certain amount of stuff, generally about 1,500 words, has emerged. But to sit down before a blank sheet of paper without an idea of how the story is to proceed and just start writing seems to me impossible.
(Letter to William Townend, 30 June 1945)
He flirted briefly with the idea of dictating his material:
How can anybody dictate? I should be feeling shy and apologetic all the time. The nearest I ever got was when Ethel brought me one of those machines Edgar Wallace used to use, where you talk on to a wax cylinder … when I played it back, I was appalled how unfunny the stuff sounded. I hadn’t known it till then but apparently I have a voice like a very pompous clergyman intoning. Either that or the instrument was pulling my leg. Anyway, I sold the damn thing next day.
(Letter to William Townend, 13 September 1945)
As far as the ‘stuff’ itself was concerned … he wrote to Townend, a fellow writer:
I suppose the secret of writing is to go through your stuff until you come on something you think is particularly good, and then cut it out.
(Letter to William Townend, November 1923)
I believe over-longness is the worst fault in writing … Isn’t it odd how one can spoil a story by being too leisurely in telling it?
