P.G. Wodehouse in his Own Words

by Barry Day

  As soon as he got back into the swing of New York life, Wodehouse was full of plans for their renewed collaboration:

  And now how are the chances of a musical by us? I have abandoned all other forms of work and am spending my whole time working on lyrics and am pleased to report that the old Muse is in the real 1916—1918 form … Of course, the difficulty is that one is so handicapped, working this way without a story and characters …

  A fear that haunts me, of course, is that I may be thirty years behind the times and be turning out stuff that would have been fine for 1917 but no good for 1946. But I don’t believe there is any reason to feel like this. The numbers I hear on the radio sound exactly like those of twenty and thirty years ago. My theory is that the business of keeping up to date is entirely the headache of the composer. If he is modern and the lyricist does his lyric to the music, the lyricist can’t go wrong … Anyway, I’m working away like the dickens.

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 9 January 1946)

  He was soon back in the old routine and relieved to be so:

  I was thinking it over the other day and was surprised to find that I couldn’t recall a single day in the last twenty years when I have been bored. I find that I get into a routine of work and walks and reading which makes the time fly. I never want to see anyone – except you, of course – and I never want to go anywhere or do anything.

  (Letter to Bolton, 7 March 1946)

  Although he did stumble across one new hobby of sorts …

  I think my vicissitudes must have soured a once sunny nature, for nowadays I seem to spend my time looking about me for people to sue. A man here wrote a book about building a house and called it Mr Blandings Builds His Castle. I would have dismissed it just as a pretty compliment, but my lawyer said there was gold in them thar hills and wrote a stiff letter demanding compensation. His lawyers offered $100 and mine rejected that scornfully and finally worked them up to $1,500, which is pretty nice sugar. I am now suing the Kleenex people for using Jeeves in their advertisements and trying to think of somebody else to persecute.

  (Letter to Thelma Cazalet-Keir, 18 December 1947)

  In 1952 they bought a house in Remsenburg, New York State:

  There are lots of nice drives you can take, but the catch is that if you want to go anywhere when you are living in Remsenburg, you have to do it by car, so the Wodehouse home is in ferment at the moment, everybody except Squeaky, the Pekinese, starting to drive.

  Bunny used to be a very good driver, but hasn’t driven for a long time. Peggy, our maid, used to drive in Ireland when she was small and has started taking lessons. It must be 35 years since I drove and I doubt if I would have the nerve to do it today … When we were first married we had a little Chevrolet two-seater, and I think that’s what we want now. I myself am going to buy a bicycle!

  (Letter to Sheran Cazalet, 25 May 1952)

  Once the Wodehouses were settled in, their natural propensity for Pekes evolved into providing a home for sundry other stray cats and dogs – all of whom (in his indulgent estimation) required the Wodehouse presence:

  The whole point of buying this house was that we would have a place where we could turn the key and go away whenever we wanted to, and now I don’t see how we are ever going to move even for a day.

  (Letter to Denis Mackail, 8 July 1952)

  It was ostensibly a complaint but the tone seems tinged with relief. To Bolton he wrote:

  You and I were mugs not to go in for huntin’ and fishin’ in our youth or at least to have developed a fondness for bridge like S. Maugham. The only thing that we both did that was smart was to take up Pekes.

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 15 April 1950)

  They continued to work – separately and together – with rather mixed results. Wodehouse continued to produce his comic novels at the rate of about one a year. He was finding the work took more out of him as the years went by but the critics on both sides of the Atlantic saw no diminution in the standard of the finished product. On the other hand, little of what the Wodehouse/Bolton collaboration produced came to anything – except the basis for the occasional gag:

  Any time he has a good idea for a play, I am always ready to help him out. He knows that he can count on my support. It is not always convenient for me to stroll round the corner from my home to his and say, ‘How are you getting on?’ but I never fail him.

  We are the closest of friends. If Guy saw me drowning, he would dive in to the rescue without a moment’s hesitation, and if I saw Guy drowning, I would be the first to call for assistance.

  (Introduction to Bolton’s Gracious Living, Limited)

  * * * *

  Wodehouse badly wanted another Broadway success and worried about his failure to achieve it like a Peke with a bone:

  I know just what is wrong with my stuff for the American stage. American audiences want plays about the relationship of men and women, while I write about some kind of venture like finding a diary or smuggling jewels and so on. It’s all right in novel form, because I can nurse the thing along with a lot of in-between stuff, giving them the old personality, as it were, but for a stage play I doubt if you can get by with a story that doesn’t deal primarily with sex relations. My type of story is apt to be thin on the stage. So why don’t we try to get something sexy for a Jeeves play?

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 5 February 1951)

  Wodehouse went to considerable pains to cultivate the image of a man who was largely unaware of what went on around him and, by and large, it served him well. From the letters, however, it is clear that his commercial sense was very much of this world:

  My last book lost money and Doubleday [his American publishers] … write to say that they will be obliged to reduce my advance. To which I have replied Like Hell you’ll reduce my advance, adding that I consider them lousy publishers who never do a thing to push an author and am going elsewhere with my next. Curse and blast them! In the course of the years they have sold a million and a half of my books, and now this!

  (Letter to Denis Mackail, 14 December 1952)

  * * * *

  In the early 1950s William Townend, his old Dulwich friend and lifelong correspondent, came up with the idea of publishing a selection of their letters. Wodehouse warmed to the idea as a way to create a form of autobiography without having to commit himself to something too formal.

  As usual, though, he covered his tracks when he read the first draft:

  The impression these letters have left me with is the rather humbling one that I am a bad case of arrested mental development. Mentally, I seem not to have progressed a step since I was eighteen. With world convulsions happening every hour on the hour, I appear to be still the rather backward lad I was when we brewed our first cup of tea in our study together, my only concern being the outcome of a Rugby football match.

  (Letter to William Townend, 18 April 1953)

  He was – he would always claim – ‘a not very complex man’. Which, coming from a man of his achievements, is a more complex thought than it at first appears.

  It was – as David Jasen says – the way he wished to appear. It was true enough, as far as it went, and it was a convenient persona he sustained to the end.

  He was a naturally self-contained man and increasing age and his chosen geographical isolation made him more so:

  Another very marked change I notice in the senile Wodehouse is that I no longer have the party spirit. As a young man I used to enjoy parties, but now they have lost their zest … Why people continue to invite me I don’t know … Cornered at one of these affairs by some dazzling creature who looks brightly at me, expecting a stream of good things from my lips, I am apt to talk guardedly about the weather, with the result that before long I am left on one leg in a secluded corner of the room in the grip of that disagreeable feeling that nobody loves me.

  He also perfected a modus operandi all his own when he decided it was time to leave a party. In Carry On, Jeeves Bertie says of Jeeves – ‘He seemed to flicker and
wasn’t there any more.’ In Wodehouse family circles this became known as the Wodehouse Glide.

  This morning they are putting in the bar in a small room on the other side of the house. God knows why we want a bar … What is supposed to happen is that the County saunter in for a drink, and we mix it at the bar. The County little knows that if they come within a mile of us, we shall take to the hills.

  * * * *

  My wife tries to drag me to routs and revels from time to time, but I toss my curls at her and refuse to stir. I often think that the ideal life would be to have plenty of tobacco and be cut by the County.

  (Uncle Dynamite)

  His face wore the strained, haggard look it wears when he hears that guests are expected for the weekend.

  Fortunately, the Gods were inclined to be kind …

  You will be grieved to hear that my monastic seclusion is being gradually broken into. Nella has made friends with a woman who lives next door to the Post Office and last Sunday we were all going to dinner at her house in spite of my protests. By great good luck the worst blizzard in eighteen years broke loose, so the date was scratched.

  (Letter to Edward Cazalet, 6 February 1966)

  When there were guests at Remsenburg there would be the occasional game of bridge in which Wodehouse would take part. His grand-daughter recalls that he was ‘a pretty moderate player’ but never particularly engaged in the pursuit. On one occasion he was asked by his partner why in the previous hand he had not played his ace earlier.

  ‘Oh, I played it as soon as I found it.’

  * * * *

  He would often return in correspondence to his list of ‘needs’. In 1930 it was ‘about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke’ – which, Hollywood being Hollywood, after all, he amended to ‘two Pekes and a swimming pool’. In 1932 he examined his soul, as he put it, and added ‘a library subscription and tobacco money, plus an extra bit for holidays’.

  By the Remsenburg years he has reduced the ‘two friends’ to one and in 1960 he is telling that one (Bolton) about his unvarying routine:

  Work in the morning, at twelve watch a television serial in which I am absorbed, lunch, take the dog to the post office, which covers two till three, brood on work till five, bath, cocktails, dinner, read and play two-handed bridge and the day is over. The same routine day after day, and somehow it never gets monotonous.

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 6 June 1960)

  Despite his earlier strictures, television managed to infiltrate and become an important part of his regimen:

  It is now three minutes to twelve, so I must go and watch Love of Life.

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 6 June 1964)

  Edge of Night, which was rotten for a time but has now bucked up, a girl having been found in the doctor’s bed stabbed with a carving knife (doc not yet arrested but going through a bad spell).

  (Letter to Edward Cazalet, 1 November 1970)

  * * * *

  Wodehouse was no longer a young man. He was sixty-five when he returned to America and as he approached seventy, health became a minor irritation, if not, as yet, a real problem. He began to suffer attacks of giddiness:

  The score, then, to date is that I am deaf in the left ear, bald, subject to mysterious giddy fits and practically cock-eyed … My doctor, summing up the subject of my giddy fits and, confessing his inability to explain them, said, ‘Well, if you have any more, you’d better just have them.’ I said I would.

  (Letter to William Townend, 14 March 1951)

  And so he did – making fun of his various aches and pains to the Constant Readers of his regular correspondence … ‘It affects me as if I were tight, causing me to lose control of my legs. I’m all right when I’m sitting down but can’t navigate’ … (To Guy Bolton, April 1959). ‘What a nuisance it is being 92 and gradually decaying,’ he wrote to Ira Gershwin at Christmas 1973. At the time Gershwin himself was a spring chicken of seventy-seven …

  * * * *

  The years passed peacefully enough … novel succeeding novel … tending to the menagerie that soon contained dogs (plural) and cats (ditto) … regular walks with friend and neighbour Bolton … and the increasingly vocal affection of his public. Media coverage of his eightieth birthday was remarkable for a man who had hardly been seen in public for a decade:

  I seem to have become the Grand Old Man of English Literature. Grimsdick [his British publisher] tells me they have already received more than five hundred inches of press notices of my birthday and more coming in all the time.

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 28 October 1961)

  Having my octogenarianism hurled at me … shook me a bit. I consoled myself with the thought that I can still touch my toes fifty times every morning without a suspicion of bending knees, which I’ll bet not many octogenarians can.

  (Letter to Denis Mackail, 7 January 1960)

  Asked in his mid-eighties if he was afraid of death, he replied – ‘Heavens, no. I am far too well balanced. The only thing I ever fear is that the last chapters of any book I write won’t work out.’

  The octogenarian duly became a nonogenarian and with the same sort of inevitability – a biographer arrived, managed to evade the Cerberus called Ethel, and gave Wodehouse’s public its first detailed account of this remarkable life. Anyone who has written about him since owes a debt to David A. Jasen and his Portrait of a Master.

  There was, of course, the typical Wodehouse smokescreen:

  I always thought I was about the dullest subject there was; but he drinks in my every word, blast him. I can’t imagine what he thinks he’s going to do with the book if he ever writes it. Publishers may be asses, but surely they aren’t asses enough to spend money on a thing like that.

  Well, fortunately they were and they did.

  * * * *

  Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse – he had been knighted in the 1975 Honours List – died in the local hospital on St Valentine’s Day at the age of ninety-three. He had been an American citizen for nearly twenty years by then and his adopted country had made him feel welcome and at home. (‘Thank God for being an American,’ he wrote to Townend describing his naturalisation, ‘And I don’t mean God is, I mean I am.’) Even so it would not be fanciful to think that a lot of his heart always remained in the land of his birth and the timeless world of which he wrote.

  There was occasional talk of a return visit to England but it never came to pass.

  I never have any urge to re-visit England, but I do sometimes pine for Scotland. I spent a wonderful week there with Ian Hay a great many years ago, driving from spot to spot playing golf. It’s a fascinating country and I don’t wonder you have gone back there to live. I feel that I should find England so changed. Everyone tells me I wouldn’t recognise London if I saw it again. Not that I did like London much. Nor New York. Edinburgh and Paris are the only two cities.

  (Letter to Compton Mackenzie, 10 March 1962)

  There were the dogs and so forth to worry about … perhaps next year. Besides, it was all a bit of a fag. And then, when the knighthood finally arrived, the years were just too many.

  In a 1925 story about Bertie’s enforced escape to the USA to avoid an aunt’s ire, he had written prophetically:

  What I mean is … much as I like America I don’t want to have England barred to me for the rest of my natural.

  The door, in fact, had been ajar for quite a while but, for his own reasons, Wodehouse had never quite chosen to push it open …

  The unfinished and untitled novel he left by his bedside was fittingly given the posthumous title Sunset at Blandings.

  Everyone who has read and enjoyed the World According to Wodehouse will have their personal summation of the man and what he stood for but few would disagree with the verdict of his first official biographer, Frances Donaldson, when she wrote: ‘He gave happiness to others as few people are privileged to do, and he was happy himself.’

  * * * *

  At the end of ‘The Red-Headed League’ Holmes remar
ks to Watson – ‘L’homme c’est rien – l’oeuvre c’est tout, as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand.’

  Wodehouse would almost certainly have agreed. But for once he would not have found le mot juste … In his case l’homme was most certainly not rien …

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS

  THE COLLECTOR’S

  WODEHOUSE

  Wodehouse was that perfect Anglo-American: his subject was nearly always England, but he became an American and lived on Long Island. The Collector’s Wodehouse series is itself a wonderful amalgam of British and American, conceived by David Campbell at Everyman’s Library in London.

  Wodehouse will always be part of our most joyous reading experiences. The Collector’s Wodehouse, when complete, will be the first complete hardback series of Wodehouse’s works by any one publisher. In every case, the editor has gone back to the first edition of each book and corrected errors that had crept into the innumerable paperback editions. Each book has been re-typeset using that classic English typface, Caslon. Further, these are printed on acid-free paper and are sewn and bound in full cloth. Andrzej Klimowski is the perfect illustrator for Wodehouse and both David Campbell and I are certain that no other Wodehouse collection will surpass or outlive this one.

  Translated into more than thirty languages, even collected, we are told, by a Russian monk living in a hermit’s cell on Mount Athos, PGW and his stories are miracles in which we all share.