P.G. Wodehouse in his Own Words
Page 14
(A Damsel in Distress)
*
‘I’ve got to take a few pints of soup to the deserving poor,’ said Myrtle. ‘I’d better set about it. Amazing the way these bimbos absorb soup. Like sponges.’
(‘Anselm Gets His Chance’ from Eggs, Beans and Crumpets)
*
‘That girl, to my certain knowledge, plays the organ in the local church and may often be seen taking soup to the deserving villagers with many a gracious word.’
(‘Fate’ from Young Men in Spats)
Charity – as practised by Wodehouse’s aristocrats – was not an unmixed blessing, since the donors seemed to feel it conferred on them a mixed bag of seigneurial rights …
She looked like a vicar’s daughter who plays hockey and ticks off the villagers when they want to marry their deceased wives’ sisters.
(Laughing Gas)
* * * *
The Country, it seemed, exerted a fatal fascination over the City Dweller, no matter in which city he dwelt …
It’s funny about people who live in the city. They chuck out their chests, and talk about little old New York being good enough for them, and there’s a street in heaven they call Broadway, and all the rest of it; but it seems to me that what they really live for is that three weeks in the summer when they get away into the country.
(‘At Geisenheimers’ from The Man with Two Left Feet)
… even when that summer place is no further than Long Island and lives
‘like the mosquitoes that infest it, entirely on its summer visitors’
(Uneasy Money).
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the rural idyll persists in persisting …
It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away. The sun was sinking over the hills and the gnats were fooling about all over the place, and everything smelled rather topping – what with the falling dew and so on …
(‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ from Carry On, Jeeves)
*
The spreading fields of wheat took on the appearance of velvet rubbed the wrong way as the light breeze played over them.
(Spring Fever)
*
Somewhere in the woods beyond the river a nightingale had begun to sing with all the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats …
(Ring for Jeeves)
Living there, however, was a somewhat different proposition:
You know how it is in these remote rural districts. Life tends at times to get a bit slow. There’s nothing much to do in the long winter evenings but listen to the radio and brood on what a tick your neighbour is. You find yourself remembering how Farmer Giles did you down over the sale of your pig, and Farmer Giles finds himself remembering that it was your son, Ernest, who bunged the half-brick at his horse on the second Sunday before Septuagesima.
(‘The Ordeal of Young Tuppy’ from Very Good, Jeeves)
*
Except for an occasional lecture by the vicar on his holiday in the Holy Land, illustrated by lantern slides, there was not a great deal of night-life in Dovetail Hammer.
(Cocktail Time)
Except, of course, for the village pub(s) …
In most English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers blaming the Government.
(Something Fresh)
… and the occasional function at the Village Hall …
[It] was one of those mid-Victorian jobs in glazed red brick which always seem to bob up in these olde-worlde hamlets and do so much to encourage the drift to the towns. Its interior, like those of all the joints of its kind I’ve ever come across, was dingy and fuggy and smelled in about equal proportions of apples, chalk, damp plaster, Boy Scouts and the sturdy English peasantry.
(The Mating Season)
CHAPTER TEN
… and Clergy
I’m an agnostic. My attitude has always been, we’ll have to wait and see.
Though he was not in any sense a churchgoer, the Church had an early and profound influence on the young Wodehouse. Four of his genuine uncles were vicars and, irrespective of which ‘aunt’ he was staying with, church attendance was compulsory …
Not only were we scooped in and shanghaied to church twice on Sunday, regardless of age or sex, but on the Monday morning at eight o’clock – eight, mark you – there were family prayers in the dining room.
(‘Fate’ from Young Men in Spats)
There is ample evidence that the Bible (King James’s authorised version) as well as Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer featured prominently at the Princes’ and it is no coincidence that the poetic language of those two great works instinctively found early echoes in his own unique literary style …
* * * *
The cook burst into tears and said something about the Wrath of the Lord and the Cities of the Plain – she being a bit on the Biblical side.
(‘Ukridge and the Home from Home’ from Lord Emsworth and Others)
* * * *
Wodehouse the writer was no respecter of persons – and constantly turned them until he saw their funny side – but he was particularly fascinated by the pecking order of parsons. The hierarchy of the Church never ceased to fascinate – most of his attention being devoted to the lowly Curate …
You know Mr Brotherhood, the curate. That nice young man with the pimples.
(Uncle Dynamite)
*
His trust … is like the unspotted faith of a young curate in his Bishop.
(‘The Amazing Hat Mystery’ from Young Men in Spats)
Like so many vicars, he had a poor opinion of curates.
(‘Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo’ from Meet Mr Mulliner)
‘They train curates to judge bonny babies. At the theological colleges. Start them off with ventriloquists’ dummies, I shouldn’t wonder.’
(Uncle Dynamite)
‘She said he had got to steal the pig.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He told her to go to hell.’
‘Strange advice from a curate.’
(Service with a Smile)
England was littered with the shrivelled remains of curates at whom the lady bishopess had looked through her lorgnette. He had seen them wilt like salted slugs at the episcopal breakfast table.
(‘Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo’ from Meet Mr Mulliner)
Keggs looked reproachful, ‘like a bishop who has found his favourite curate smoking marihuana’.
(Something Fishy)
Anyone who has ever heard a curate at a village concert rendering ‘Old Man River’, particularly the ‘He don’t plant taters, he don’t plant cotton’ passage, with that odd effect of thunder rumbling in the distance, has little doubt that his spiritual needs are in safe hands.
Not that a vicar’s lot was always a happy one …
The Bishop … was talking to the local Master of Hounds about the difficulty he had in keeping his vicars off the incense.
(‘Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court’ from Mr Mulliner Speaking)
*
[The Rev. Rupert Bingham] seemed subdued and gloomy, as if he had discovered schism among his flock.
(‘Company for Gertrude’ from Blandings Castle)
*
The Rev. Henry looked as disturbed as if he had suddenly detected Pelagianism in a member of his Sunday-School class.
(‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ in Grand Magazine, July 1905)
Interdenominational backsliding seems to have been a constant concern to Wodehouse clergy. In Laughing Gas it even affects the heroine who gives ‘a sort of despairing gesture, like a vicar’s daughter who has discovered Erastianism in the village’.
One can, of course, understand their concern. One slip and the dear old C of E could easily find itself in the same pew as Market Snodsbury, ‘most
ly chapel folk with a moral code that would have struck Torquemada as too rigid’ (Much Obliged, Jeeves).
Worse – creeping atheism might set in …
She didn’t like him being an atheist, and he wouldn’t stop being an atheist, and finally he said something about Jonah and the Whale which was impossible for her to overlook. This morning she returned the ring, his letters and a china ornament with ‘A Present from Blackpool’ on it, which he bought her last summer while visiting relatives in the north.
(The Mating Season)
And then what would the Bishop have to say?
Anybody who has ever attended Old Boys’ dinners knows that Bishops are tough stuff. They take their time, these prelates. They mouth their words and shape their periods. They roam with frightful deliberation from the grave to the gay, from the manly straightforward to the whimsically jocular. Not one of them but is good for at least twenty-five minutes.
(Big Money)
What’s more their influence extends far beyond the spiritual into the realms of the commercial:
Just as all American publishers hope that if they are good and lead upright lives, their books will be banned in Boston, so all English publishers pray that theirs will be denounced from the pulpit by a bishop. Full statistics are not to hand, but it is estimated by competent judges that a good bishop, denouncing from the pulpit with the right organ note in his voice, can add between ten and fifteen thousand to the sales.
(Cocktail Time)
About his own religion he was deliberately ambiguous. Even though he told an interviewer late in life – ‘I am a Spiritualist, like my friend Conan Doyle’ and he had shown interest in Spiritualism from time to time over a period of years, it’s much more likely that he was closer to the mark when he told another interviewer in the year before he died – ‘I’m an agnostic. My attitude has always been, we’ll have to wait and see.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wodehouse in Wonderland
What a curious place this is … There’s no doubt about it, this is the abode of the damned.
(Letter to Guy Bolton – 19 July 1930)
*
The best-laid plans of mice and men end up on the cutting room floor.
(Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin)
As a matter of fact, I don’t think there is much to be written about this place. What it was like in the early days, I don’t know, but nowadays the studio life is all perfectly normal, not a bit crazy … I don’t believe I shall get a single story out of my stay here.
(Letter to William Townend, 18 August 1930)
* * * *
Wodehouse, in fact, played two engagements in Hollywood – which was remarkable in view of how the first one ended – and the time he spent there was probably the least productive of those pre-war years, at least in terms of what he was supposed to be doing. It was an experience he would share with many other ‘real’ writers as variously gifted as Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Dorothy Parker … the list was endless.
At the end of the 1920s Warner Brothers had given the movies their voice and now Hollywood – in a predictable panic – was reaching for those who presumably had the ability to put words into the actors’ mouths. Money was no object.
On a brief trip in 1929 he had been a spectator of the surrealistic scene:
In every studio there are rows and rows of little hutches, each containing an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering out through the bars. You hear them whining piteously to be taken for a walk. And does the heart bleed? You bet it bleeds. A visitor has to be very callous not to be touched by a spectacle such as this.
(‘Slaves of Hollywood’, Saturday Evening Post, 7 December 1929)
But on 8 May 1930 Wodehouse – accompanied by his step-daughter, Leonora – stepped off the train in Hollywood, ready to transform the movie business.
It was an era when only a man of exceptional ability and determination could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or another. I happened to be engaged as a writer but I might quite as easily have been scooped in as a technical adviser or a vocal instructor … The heartiness and hospitality reminded one of the Jolly Innkeeper (with entrance number in Act One) of the old-style comic opera.
You crossed the continent to find yourself cheek by jowl with all the people you’d been cheek by jowl with back home:
New York till then had been full of authors … You would see them frisking in perfect masses in any editorial office you happened to enter. Their sharp, excited yapping was one of the features of the first or second act intermission of every new play that was produced. And in places like Greenwich Village you had to watch your step very carefully to avoid treading on them … The demand for authors in those early talkie days was so great that it led to a revival of the old press-gang. Nobody was safe if he merely looked like an author.
* * * *
You can’t heave a brick in Hollywood without beaning an English elocution teacher. I am told there are English elocution teachers making good money in Hollywood who haven’t even got roofs to their mouths.
(Laughing Gas)
*
A fellow I met in the canteen looked as if he might be a writer of additional dialogue or the man in charge of the wind machine.
(Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin)
* * * *
To begin with Wodehouse quite liked the place. After all, it was as good a spot to work as any other and that was all that mattered:
I have arranged with the studio to work at home, so often I spend three or four days on end without going out of the garden: I get up, swim, breakfast, work till two, swim again, have a lunch-tea, work till seven, swim for the third time, then dinner, and the day is over. It is wonderful. I have never had such a frenzy of composition.
(Letter to William Townend, 26 June 1930)
The composition, however, was of his own stuff – not the studio’s. (‘I don’t see much of the movie world. My studio – MGM – is five miles from where I live, and I only go there occasionally.’)
Those occasional trips convinced him that he and his physical environment were not to be compatible:
I think California scenery is the most loathsome on earth – a cross between Coney Island and the Riviera – but by sticking in one’s garden all the time and shutting one’s eyes when one goes out, it is possible to get by.
As life goes on, though, don’t you find that all you need is a wife, a few real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke? (Make that two Pekes and add a swimming pool.)
(Letter to William Townend, 28 October 1930)
It became abundantly clear to him at an early stage that the studio hadn’t the faintest idea what do with him, now that they had him. It was also beginning to dawn on him that many of the studio executives not only didn’t know what to do with him – they didn’t know what they were doing. Period.
Imagine the effect of all this on a sensitive-minded author. Taught at his mother’s knee to love the truth, he finds himself surrounded by people making fortunes by what can only be called chicanery … After a month or two in such an environment could you trust that author to count his golf shots correctly or to give his right circulation figures?
(‘The Hollywood Scandal’ from Louder and Funnier)
* * * *
Mr Schnellenhamer of the Perfecto-Zizzbaum Motion Picture Corporation describes the play (Scented Sinners) he wants developed as a screenplay:
‘Powerful drama of life as it is lived by the jazz-crazed, gin-crazed Younger Generation whose hollow laughter is but the mask for an aching heart,’ said Mr Schnellenhamer. ‘It ran for a week in New York and lost a hundred thousand dollars, so we bought it. It has the mucus of a good story. See what you can do with it.’
(‘The Castaways’ from Blandings Castle)
*
When a studio executive charges you, look to the left but leap to the right. This baffles the simple creature.
&nbs
p; (Barmy in Wonderland)
*
You can’t go by what a man in my position promises. You don’t really suppose, do you, that you can run a big studio successfully if you go about keeping your promise all the time.
(Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin)
* * * *
By now MGM, to Wodehouse’s great surprise, had taken up the further six-month option on his contract and he was stuck, growing ever more frustrated that he was doing virtually nothing to earn his $2,000-a-week salary.
One small diversion was a visit to Hearst Castle at San Simeon – the folly built by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in which he installed his mistress, Marion Davies, as hostess. Wodehouse had first met Marion in 1917, when – as an eighteen-year-old ex-Ziegfeld Girl – she had played an ingénue in Oh, Boy!.
An invitation from Hearst was greatly prized and the guests came in relays, a fact that was brought home to Wodehouse at mealtimes:
Meals are served in an enormous room, and are served at a long table, with Hearst sitting in the middle on one side and Marion Davies in the middle on the other. The longer you are there, the further you get from the middle. I sat on Marion’s right the first night, then found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it time to leave. Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor.
(Letter to William Townend, 25 February 1931)