by Barry Day
My personal animosity against a writer never affects my opinion of what he writes. Nobody could be more anxious than myself, for instance, that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his bloody neck, yet I re-read his early stuff at regular intervals and with all the old enjoyment.
* * * *
Any English mystery, however bad, is better than any American story, however good.
(Letter to Denis Mackail, 25 December 1950)
Do you know, I think the greatest gift one can have is enjoying trash. I can take the rottenest mystery out of the library and enjoy it. So I can always have something to read.
(Letter to William Townend)
He was an avid reader of thrillers – particularly of the work of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. And – despite his misinformed dinner partner – Edgar Wallace (‘Nine hundred of every thousand of Edgar Wallace’s are worth the seven-and-sixpence every time’).
Of the mystery genre:
If I were writing a mystery story, I would go boldly out for the big sensation. I would not have the crime committed by anybody in the book at all.
(‘Thrillers’ from Louder and Funnier)
I hold strong views on them, one of which is that the insertion into them of a love interest is a serious mistake …
Nobody appreciates more than myself the presence of girls in their proper place – in the paddock at Ascot, fine; at Lord’s during the luncheon interval of the Eton and Harrow march, capital: if I went to a night club and found no girls there, I should be the first to complain: but what I do say is that they have no business in Lascar Joe’s Underground Den at Limehouse on a busy evening. Apart from anything else, Woman seems to me to lose her queenly dignity when she is being shoved into cupboards with a bag over her head.
True, [Sherlock Holmes] would sometimes permit them to call at Baker Street and tell him about the odd behaviour of their uncles or step-fathers … in a pinch he might even allow them to marry Watson … but once the story was under way they had to retire into the background and stay there. That was the spirit.
(‘Thrillers’ from Louder and Funnier)
* * * *
I always bar … the sort of story where Chapter Ten ends with the hero trapped in the underground den and Chapter Eleven starts with him being the life and soul of a gay party at the Spanish Embassy.
(Thank You, Jeeves)
*
He looked like one of those millionaires who are found stabbed with paper-knives in libraries.
(Big Money)
* * *
In the prisoner-of-war camp he became more interested in Shakespeare:
Shakespeare’s stuff is different from mine, but that is not to say that it is inferior. There are passages in Shakespeare to which I would have been quite pleased to have put my name. That ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ thing. Some spin on the ball there … The man … could crack them through the covers when he got his eye in. I would place him definitely in the Wodehouse class.
And the fellow apparently suffered the same slings and arrows as every other writer:
A thing I can never understand is why all the critics seem to assume that his plays are a reflection of his personal moods. You know the sort of thing I mean … Timon of Athens is a pretty gloomy piece of work, which means that Shakespeare must have been having a rotten time when he wrote it. I can’t see it. Do you find your private life affects your work? I don’t.
(Letter to William Townend, 24 February 1945)
It would be interesting to know to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private affairs. If life is flowing smoothly, are the novels they write in that period of content coloured with optimism? And if things are running crosswise, do they work off the resultant gloom on their faithful public? If, for instance, Mr W. W. Jacobs had toothache, would he write like Hugh Walpole? If Maxim Gorky were invited to lunch by Trotsky to meet Lenin, would he sit down and dash off a trifle in the vein of Stephen Leacock?
(Love Among the Chickens, 1921)
Wodehouse could turn out the stuff and that was all that mattered. When a correspondent grew pedantic because Wodehouse had quoted ‘the ravelled sleave of care’ as ‘sleeve’ in Bachelors Anonymous (1973), he got short shrift. ‘Shakespeare couldn’t even spell his own name, so I don’t think we need worry about “sleaves” and “sleeves”.’
Wodehouse was never notably enthusiastic about new developments in literature. For example, he doesn’t appear to have shown much interest in modern American writers, though he did meet Scott Fitzgerald …
He was off to New York with [Ernest] Truex, who is doing his play, The Vegetable. I believe those stories you hear about his drinking are exaggerated. He seems quite normal, and is a very nice chap indeed. You would like him. The only thing is, he goes into New York with a scrubby chin, looking perfectly foul. I suppose he gets a shave when he arrives there, but it doesn’t show him at his best in Great Neck. I would like to see more of him.
(Letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 14 November 1923)
What curious stuff the modern American short story is. The reader has to do all the work. The writer just shoves down something that seems to have no meaning whatever, and it is up to you to puzzle out what is between the lines.
(Letter to William Townend, 1 November 1946)
… and as for the novel …
I find myself more and more out of tune with the modern novel. All that frank, outspoken stuff with those fearless four-letter words. It was a black day for literature, I often think, when the authorities started glazing the walls of public lavatories so that the surface would not take the mark of the pencil, for the result was that hundreds of your literatteurs, withheld from expressing themselves in the medium they would have preferred, began turning the stuff out in stiff-covered volumes at 12s. 6d.
* * * *
Being of a naturally cheerful disposition himself, he found the Russian writers distinctly heavy going:
No wonder Freddie [Rooke] experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a hard day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard only to find the vodka-bottle empty.
(Jill the Reckless)
If there was one thing worse than pretentious literature in the Wodehouse world, it would have to be the pretentious literary luncheon:
It seemed to take one into a new and dreadful world … with other authors, mostly fairies, twittering all over the place, screaming, ‘Oh, Lionel!’ and photographs of you holding the book, etc. Gosh! Dumas was the boy. When he had finished a novel he kept on sitting and started another. No snack luncheons for him.
Had either of them taken a moment, they might have shaken a fraternal head – in their respective languages, of course – at the spectacle of the Algonquin Round Table at which Wodehouse made a solitary appearance in his Broadway heyday. After which he complained to Guy Bolton – ‘All those three hour lunches … when did those slackers ever get any work done?’
Nor is it likely that Dumas (père or fils) would have had any more patience than Wodehouse for some of the figures on what he saw as the fringes of literature:
The literary agent was a grim, hard-bitten person, to whom, when he called at their offices to arrange terms, editors kept their faces turned, so that they might at least retain their back collar studs
(‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ from Meet Mr Mulliner)
*
All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.
(‘Leave It to Jeeves’ from My Man Jeeves)
*
‘You told them you were expecting to sell a hundred thousand copies?’
‘We always tell them we’re expecting to sell a hundred thousand copies,’ said Russell Clutterbuck, letting him in on one of the secrets of the publishing trade
.
(French Leave)
But one detects that – in his heart of hearts and although he dabbled in it himself from time to time – Wodehouse’s deepest literary distrust was reserved for poetry and for vers libre in particular. ‘He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did’ (The Girl on the Boat).
In ‘The Fiery Wooing of Mordred’ from Young Men in Spats he refers to ‘the unpleasant, acrid smell of burned poetry’.
It was a poetic drama, and the audience, though loath to do anybody an injustice, was beginning to suspect that it was written in blank verse.
(Jill the Reckless)
*
‘Is it vers libre?’
‘Sir?’
‘Doesn’t it rhyme?’
‘No, sir. I understood you to say that rhymes were an outmoded convention.’
‘Did I really say that?’
‘You did, indeed, sir. And a great convenience I found it. It seems to make poetry quite easy!’
(The Small Bachelor)
*
I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.
(Right Ho, Jeeves)
*
She could never forget that the man she loved was a man with a past … Deep down in her soul there was always the corroding fear lest at any moment a parti cularly fine sunset or the sight of a rose in bud might undo all the work she had done, sending Rodney hot-foot once more to his Thesaurus and rhyming dictionary. It was for this reason that she always hurried him indoors when the sun began to go down and refused to have rose trees in her garden.
(‘Rodney Has a Relapse’ from Nothing Serious)
The poetry virus always seeks out the weak spot …
*
I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
(The Small Bachelor)
*
Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet’s eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns.
(Uncle Fred in the Springtime)
*
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Bring On the Girls …’
Broadway, the Great White Way, the longest, straightest, brightest, wickedest street in the world.
(Psmith, Journalist)
*
Musical comedy is the Irish stew of the drama. Anything may be put into it, with the certainty that it will improve the general effect.
(‘Bill the Bloodhound’ from The Man with Two Left Feet)
*
Writing musical comedies is like eating salted almonds – you can always manage one more.
‘If one is expecting to be treated fairly,’ said the Duchess with a prolonged yawn, ‘one should not go into the show-business.’
(Jill the Reckless)
*
I have always had just the sort of mentality which the music-hall satisfied. It took strong men to drag me to see Tree in Julius Caesar, but if Harry Tate’s Motoring was on in Islington I was there in two jumps. Sentimentalising about the halls is the one sure sign of senile decay, and I do it all the time.
Even at the tender age of twelve, the music hall appealed to the artist in me … it was my earliest ambition to become a comedian on the halls … It was because a music-hall comedian required vim, pep, espièglerie, a good singing voice, and a sort of indefinable je-ne-sais-quoi – none of which qualities I appeared to possess – that I abandoned my ambitions and became a writer.
(‘Looking Back at the Halls’ from Louder and Funnier)
* * * *
Wodehouse’s theatrical career began in December 1904, when he was asked to write a lyric for a musical comedy called Sergeant Brue. It was a song on what was to become for him a recurring theme – the comical crook – and it was called ‘Put Me in My Little Cell’.
On the strength of its success – (‘Encored both times,’ he confided to his diary. ‘Audience laughed several times during each verse. This is fame.’) – he was asked to work on another show. ‘Regular job at £2 a week, starting with the run of The Beauty of Bath (1906) to do topical Gilbertian verses.’ Since he was doing precisely this on a daily basis for the ‘By the Way’ column on The Globe, this was a painless introduction to the cut-throat world of lyric writing.
Working with him on the show was the young American composer Jerome Kern, with whom Wodehouse was to collaborate frequently a decade later. Their first number (‘Oh, Mr Chamberlain’) was sung by the leading actor-manager Seymour Hicks, and, although Wodehouse recalled it as being ‘a pretty poor effort all round, but Jerry’s melody was so terrific that the number used to get six or seven encores every night and I spent most of the next year writing encore verses’.
I would write encore verses for the old-fashioned type of topical song … with the sickening feeling at the back of my mind that by the time they were presented to the public they would be out of date and possess no meaning.
He was to dabble intermittently in other West End pro ductions until he went to America in 1914 for what became an extended stay, when he was stranded there on the outbreak of war.
* * * *
In 1915 he was working for Vanity Fair, ‘a swanky magazine devoted to Society and the Arts’. Wodehouse used to write anything up to five pages each month under a variety of pen names – Pelham Grenville, J. Plum, C. P. West (‘which, incidentally, is about as good a pen name as anyone ever thought of’) and P. Brooke-Haven among them. Since the magazine didn’t take fiction, he had to make do with comic articles.
One of his many roles was Dramatic Critic and it was in that capacity that he visited the Princess Theatre on the evening of 23 December 1915 to review the opening night of Very Good Eddie.
The Princess was a small theatre by Broadway standards (it held only 299 people) but it was making a big experiment. In the face of the expectedly lavish musical extravaganzas – usually either British imports or adaptations of Middle European operettas – it was attempting ‘chamber musicals’ with small casts, orchestras and budgets and using contemporary themes. Without seeking to do so as deliberate policy, the principals were effectively inventing the modern American musical. One of the principals of this particular show was already known to Wodehouse – Jerome Kern.
From the back of the stalls Kern and his collaborator, Guy Bolton, anxiously watched the Vanity Fair critic to judge his reaction to their offering. He seemed to be favourably impressed, although in his diary he would write that he had ‘enjoyed it in spite of lamentable lyrics’.
* * * *
It isn’t easy for a man to register a great deal of emotion in a dark theatre when he’s only got a bald head to do it with, but Mr Pottinger was making a darned good try.
(‘Back to the Garage’ from Strand Magazine, July 1929)
* * * *
Kern and Bolton totally agreed about the Very Good Eddie lyrics and, when Kern introduced Wodehouse to Bolton a little later, it was suggested that they work as a trio in future. This they did intermittently for the next decade, as well as working with other writers and composers as the occasion arose. And arise it often did for those in demand. Wodehouse could claim to have been involved in more than thirty musical comedies between 1915 and 1928 alone. Kern had six shows running in one year (1917).
This ‘trio of musical fame, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern’ (George S. Kaufman) began to craft the ‘integrated musical’ in which songs sprang naturally out of plot and character. Hitherto, it had been the habit to stop the plot arbi
trarily and ‘interpolate’ a totally unconnected number in the hope that it might become an individual hit. Kern himself had done his share of interpolation and was heartily sick of the practice …
* * * *
Here, a composer who had not got an interpolated number in the show was explaining to another composer who had not got an interpolated number in the show the exact source from which a third composer who had got an interpolated number in the show had stolen the number which he had got interpolated. There, two musical comedy artists who were temporarily resting were agreeing that the prima donna was a dear thing but that, contrary as it was to their life-long policy to knock anybody, they must say that she was beginning to show the passage of years a trifle and ought to be warned by some friend that her career as an ingénue was a thing of the past.
(Jill the Reckless, 1921)
* * * *
One of the trio’s first assignments was Miss Springtime (1916) for the diminutive but fiery Broadway producer Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, who might just as well have added ‘Napoleon’ to his roster of Christian names. He was, according to Wodehouse, a man ‘who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices at the time of the full moon’. He was also given to keeping a loaded revolver in his desk – ‘no doubt in case he ever met the Duke of Wellington … Why shouldn’t a fellow shoot a chap from time to time if the situation seemed to call for it? What’s the sense of having a loaded revolver if you never use it?’
In the subsequent Have a Heart (1917) Wodehouse was to lampoon him – but not in an Erlanger show!
Napoleon was a homely gink,
He hadn’t time to doll up,
