by Barry Day
I was handicapped as a writer by the fact that I knew nothing about anything. All the other members of my circle had backgrounds on which they could draw … I alone had nothing to write about except what I could dig out of a brain which had never amounted to much at the best of times … I had a certain facility for dialogue and a nice light comedy touch – at least, I thought it was nice – but what I needed was plots … Plots were my trouble.
After a while he found that ‘I had become a slanter.’
A slanter is a writer who studies what editors want. He reads the magazines carefully and turns out stories as like the ones they are publishing as he can manage without actual plagiarism. It is a deadly practice.
(Introduction to The Man with Two Left Feet)
The hotel was in the heart of bohemian Greenwich Village. In the musical, Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918) he would immortalise it in song:
Oh, down in Greenwich Village
There’s something, ’t would appear,
Demoralizing in the atmosphere.
Quite ordinary people
Who come and live down here
Get changed to perfect nuts within a year.
It’s a sort of kind of something in the air …
My favourite Aunt Matilda
Found Oshkosh rather slow,
So she moved to Greenwich Village
And took a studio
When she was eighty-three years old or so.
She learned the ukulele,
She breakfasted at Polly’s,
And, what is worse,
She wrote free verse,
And now she’s in the Follies!
I was very hard up in my Greenwich Village days, but I was always very happy. There were trees and grass and, if you wanted to celebrate the sale of a story, two wonderful old restaurants, the Brevoort and the Lafayette … everything such as food and hotel bills was inexpensive: one could live on practically nothing, which was fortunate for me because I had to.
(Introduction to The Small Bachelor)
* * * *
Like Shakespeare’s Tempest, the Isle of Manhattan was full of noises – not merely the traffic that Wodehouse had complained about but the sound of the various accents that made up its ethnic melting pot. For a writer with Wodehouse’s ear it was a mother lode and before long he was weaving the speech patterns of the city streets into his dialogue. J. B. Priestley was to claim that, if this wasn’t the way American gangsters talked, it was certainly the way ‘they would like to talk’.
By contrast with his native woodnotes wild, he found American English to be a zestful living language and he contributed several coinages of his own. The Oxford Dictionary credits him with introducing such words and phrases as – ‘To put on the dog’, ‘to give someone the elbow’, ‘lulu’, ‘hoosegow’, ‘hornswoggle’, ‘calaboose’, ‘lallapaloosa’, ‘crust’ (for nerve) and ‘to oil out’. There are probably many more for the lexicographer to disinter.
In Wodehouse’s hands it added up to a unique literary argot.
When two countries are divided by a common language, there are bound to be times when confusions occur. One such happened to Ethel Wodehouse – much to her husband’s amusement:
Did Mummie tell you about herself at the highbrow dinner in New York? Somebody asked her what she thought about the League of Nations, and she said it was a wonderful production but lacking in comedy and that the dresses were wonderful. Thinking they were talking about The League of Notions. Droll, what?
(Letter to Leonora Wodehouse – 1 May 1921)
* * * *
Like so many of its visitors, he found New York to be a cornucopia in so many ways …
In New York you may find every class of paper which the imagination can conceive … If an Esquimau came to New York, the first thing he would find on the bookstalls in all probability would be the Blubber Magazine, or some similar production written by Esquimaux for Esquimaux. Everybody reads in New York and reads all the time.
(Psmith, Journalist)
… though later in life he was to become less enthusiastic about the content of what he read …
American papers today go in exclusively for gloom … The only ones that do not prophesy the collapse of civilisation at 3.30 sharp (Eastern Standard Time) a week from Wednesday are those who make it Tuesday afternoon at 2.45.
In those early days, however, it was the multitude of magazines that kept him going. Most of his income was coming from the pulp magazines … ‘There was practically one per person … and it was entirely owing to them that I was able in those days to obtain the calories without which it is fruitless to try and keep the roses in the cheeks.’
Later he would come to realise why he was not having comparable success with the prestige magazines – his name was all wrong:
My pulp magazine stories had been by ‘P. G. Wodehouse’ … and this at a time when a writer in America who went about without three names was practically going around naked … Those were the days of … Earl Derr Biggers … Mary Roberts Rinehart, Clarence Buddington Kelland … And here was I, poor misguided simp, trying to get by with a couple of contemptible initials … In anything like a decent magazine I would have stood out as conspicuously as a man in a sweater and cap at the Eton and Harrow match.
For some time to come his byline would now read – ‘Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’ – and it seemed to do the trick. Only when he received $20,000 for a serial in the Saturday Evening Post did he feel ‘safe in becoming P. G. Wodehouse again’.
* * * *
As a pioneer commuter Wodehouse eventually found himself facing a problem that was to dog him for years – income tax.
The general problem about the income-tax appears to have been that it is all right this time, but it mustn’t happen again. I was looking through a volume of Punch for the year 1882 the other day, and I came across a picture of a gloomy-looking individual paying his tax.
‘I can just do it this time’, he is saying, ‘but I wish you would tell Her Majesty that she mustn’t look on me as a source of income in the future.’
At first I felt toward the United States Government as I would feel towards any perfect stranger who insinuated himself into my home and stood me on my head and went through my pockets. The only difference I could see between the United States Government and the ordinary practitioner in a black mask was that the latter usually left his victim carfare.
(Vanity Fair, May 1919)
In fact, it turned out to be twin problems. International tax law had yet to recognise the possibility of transatlantic travel – with the result that he found himself being taxed on his income from the UK and the US by both countries.
I’m off tomorrow to Paris … I find that if I stay longer than six months [in England] I am liable to pay income tax on everything I make in America as well as England, in addition to paying American income tax!
(Letter to William Townend – 21 February 1921))
Over the years various advisors offered him a number of imaginative suggestions to circumvent this archaic legislation, while remaining within the law. Some worked, some didn’t and all were expensive. In a situation worthy of a Wodehouse plot, several were taken to court by the revenue authorities as test cases.
In the UK Wodehouse prevailed against the Special Commissioners but the US situation turned out to be more complex. However, he managed to win his fair share of the legal arguments and even appeared successfully before the Supreme Court at the end of the 1940s before the Great Tax Saga ended.
It was a subject which was to recur both in his fiction and his private correspondence …
In his dedication to Right Ho, Jeeves (1935) he originally intended to make a flamboyant dedication to Raymond Needham, KC, the man who had represented him before the Special Commissioners …
Who put the tax-gatherers to flight
When they had their feet on my neck
And their hands on my wallet.
… but was eventually persuaded that
he might further antagonise the Inland Revenue and so restricted himself to a more orthodox line!
‘[Uncle Tom’s] just had a demand from the income tax people for fifty-eight pounds one and threepence, and all he’s been talking about since I got back has been ruin and the sinister trend of socialistic legislation and what will become of us all.
(Right Ho, Jeeves)
*
‘Why dash it, if I could think of some way of doing down the income-tax people, I should be a rich man. You don’t know a way of doing down the income-tax people, do you Bertie?’
‘Sorry, no. I doubt if even Jeeves does.’
(The Mating Season)
*
When government assessors call
To try and sneak your little all
You simply hit them with an axe;
It’s how you pay your income tax
In Bongo, it’s on the Congo
And I wish that I was there.
(‘Bongo on the Congo’ from Sitting Pretty)
* * * *
New York never ceased to fascinate, warts and all. When he returned after the war for what was to be a permanent stay, he told a radio interviewer – ‘Every time I come back to New York it is like meeting an old sweetheart and finding she has put on a lot of weight.’
And radio had created another cultural phenomenon …
Except for the occasional gruff grunter, all New York taxi drivers are rapid-fire comedians, and they are given unlimited scope for their Bob Hopefulness by the fact that in American cabs there is no glass shutter separating them from their customer … If you take a taxi nowadays, your ride is not so much a ride as an audition.
But New York was to provide Wodehouse with the ultimate revelation …
In New York, I have always found, one gets off the mark quickly in matters of the heart. This, I believe, is due to something in the air.
(Thank You, Jeeves)
In the Big Apple Plum was to find his Eve. Pelham Grenville Wodehouse fell in love …
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pearls, Girls … and Plums
A successful marriage is not so much to do with whether a couple is in love as a shared communion of tastes that enable them to live with each other harmoniously.
(Letter to Leslie H. Bradshaw – 24 October 1914)
I began to realise that my ideal wife was something … a lot more clinging and drooping and prattling, and what not.
(Bertie in ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ from Carry On, Jeeves)
‘What was it the poet said of couples like the Bingese?’
‘“Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one”, sir.’
‘A dashed good description, Jeeves.’
‘It has, I believe, given universal satisfaction, sir.’
(‘Jeeves and the Old School Chum’ from Very Good, Jeeves)
All you need is a girl,
Just one dear little girl
Standing near to cheer you
When everything seems going wrong.
Though the going is tough,
You’ll win through sure enough:
All you need to succeed
Is a girl just to help you along.
(‘All You Need Is A Girl’ – Sitting Pretty)
* * * *
On 3 August 1914 Wodehouse found himself making up the fourth on a blind date – though it’s doubtful that he realised what it was called or that he was on one. He had arrived in New York only the day before and the occasion was certainly propitious in more ways than one. It was the day World War I broke out …
Before he left England he had tried to enlist but, once again, his eyesight was the decisive factor – ‘I was rejected for service because of my eyes. They had been bad as a child and I was kept out of the navy because of them. I tried to enlist again over here [the US] when America went to war, but I was rejected once more.’
Ethel Rowley Wayman (née Newton) was a widow and four years younger than Wodehouse. She was the precise opposite of him in almost every way – vivacious and worldly where he was shy and almost antisocial. They were clearly meant to be two sides of one coin and within days Wodehouse had proposed to her.
Their courtship was informal, to say the least. Every day Wodehouse would take his intended bathing at Long Beach, Long Island. ‘We used to go down to the Pennsylvania Railroad Station. We’d ride down to Long Beach and have a swim and lunch, and then come back on the train. Of course, there were hardly any motors then. Anyway, I couldn’t have afforded that.’
On 30 September they were married at the Little Church Around the Corner on East 29th Street at Madison Avenue.
Wodehouse was to write a song about it that was used in Sally (1920):
Dear little Church ’Round the Corner,
Where so many lives have begun,
Where folks without money see nothing that’s funny
In two living cheaper than one.
Our hearts to each other we’ve trusted:
We’re busted, but what do we care?
For a moderate price
You can start dodging rice
At the Church ’Round the Corner,
It’s just ’round the corner,
The corner of Madison Square.
For the next sixty-one years Ethel was to stand as a shield between him and the rest of the world, except where his writing was concerned. One can’t speak for her but for him it was an ideal marriage. ‘It was an awfully curious thing how everything altered just after we got married.’
Married life really is the greatest institution that ever was. When I look back and think of the rotten time I have been having all my life, compared with this, it makes me sick.
(Letter to Leslie Bradshaw, 10 October 1914)
He might even have offered Ethel the advice he put into the mouth of a character in The Adventures of Sally 1922:
Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his forehead first, and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from the husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.
It was a role he chose to play in public from then on – and it takes a man with brains to do that!
* * * *
All Wodehouse’s biographers seem agreed that he was inhibited emotionally and that this is the reason that there is so little sexuality in his writing. There is quite likely a good deal of truth in that but there may also be a clue in a remark he made to a Sunday Telegraph interviewer in 1961 – ‘I’m all for incest and tortured souls in moderation, but a good laugh from time to time never hurt anybody.’
Souls in torment and ripped bodices simply didn’t fit into the ironically cheerful universe he went to such pains to create out of whole cloth. Love and marriage were all very well – except for Bertie, who must escape the latter at all costs – (‘I don’t know anything that braces one up like finding you haven’t got to get married after all.’ – Jeeves in the Offing). That apart, they were essentially the stuff of farce for as long as the plot lasted.
* * * *
When it comes to love, there’s a lot to be said for the à la carte as opposed to the table d’hôte.
(Ring for Jeeves)
*
Ginger and Magnolia were locked in an embrace so close that it seemed to me that only powerful machinery could unglue them.
(Much Obliged, Jeeves)
*
A frightful, tender, melting look, that went through me like a red-hot brad-awl through a pat of butter and filled me with a nameless fear.
(Joy in the Morning)
*
A woman’s smile is like a bath-tap. Turn it on and you find yourself in hot water.
(Candlelight)
*
When I see that profile of hers I feel the only thing worth doing in the world is to grab her and start shouting for clergy and bridesmaids to come running.
(‘Life with Freddie’ from Plum Pie)
&nb
sp; *
Where one goes wrong when looking for the ideal girl is in making one’s selection before walking the full length of the counter.
(Much Obliged, Jeeves)
So romantic love – in Wodehouse’s fiction – is, at best, dangerously disruptive to the natural male order of things. And at worst …
‘But what is the love life of newts, if you boil it right down? Didn’t you once tell me that they just wagged their tails at one another in the mating season?’
‘Quite correct.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Well, all right, if they like it. But it’s not my idea of molten passion.’
(The Code of the Woosters)
*
‘Did yer know … that the Herring Gull, when it mates, swells its neck, opens its beak and regurgitates a large quantity of undigested food?’
‘You don’t say? That isn’t a part of the Church of England marriage service, is it?’
(Something Fishy)
* * * *
Nor would any feminist (without a keen sense of humour) be handing out awards to Wodehouse for his depiction of her sex. He was in total agreement with Tennyson’s description in ‘Princess’ that woman was like unto ‘A rosebud set with little willful thorns!’
So many Wodehouse women had an irritating laugh … or, as Jeeves might well have said with Catullus – Nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est (‘For there is nothing sillier than a silly laugh’).