by Barry Day
… and in a later (29 April 1946) letter he would ally himself with Kipling, who maintained that ‘the principal thing in writing is to cut … it’s like raking slag out of a fire to make the fire burn brighter. I know just what he means … The trouble is to know what to cut. I generally find with my own stuff that it’s unnecessary lines in the dialogue that are wrong, but then my books are principally dialogue.’
I write primarily to have something to read in the long winter evenings, and the heart of England is still sound …
Before he got into his stride as a writer of full-length novels Wodehouse was heavily involved in writing for the musical theatre. (‘Simultaneously short stories and musical comedies kept fluttering out of me like bats out of a barn.’) It was to influence his sense of construction and pace ever afterwards:
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One of them is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn. The ones that fail are the ones where the writer loses his nerve and says, ‘My God! I can’t write this, I must tone it down.’
(Letter to William Townend, 23 January 1935)
The more I write the more I am convinced that the only way to write a popular story is to split it up into scenes, and have as little stuff between the scenes as possible. The principle I always go on in writing a long story is to think of the characters as if they were living salaried actors. The one thing actors – important actors, I mean – won’t stand is being brought on to play a scene which is of no value to them in order that they may feed some less important character, and I believe this isn’t vanity but is based on an instinctive knowledge of stagecraft …
(Letter to William Townend)
Writing the dialogue for them to say was never a problem from the first. But what did they look like?
I find the most difficult thing in writing is to describe a character. Appearance, I mean.
(Letter to William Townend, 15 May 1938)
What a sweat a novel is till you are sure of your characters. And what a vital thing it is to have plenty of things for a major character to do. That is the test. If they aren’t in situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troupe talk their heads off about them.
(Letter to William Townend)
People are always asking me … well, someone did the other day … if I draw my characters from living figures. I don’t. I never have, except in the case of Psmith. He was based more or less faithfully on Rupert D’Oyly Carte, son of the Savoy theatre man. He was at school with a cousin of mine, and my cousin happened to tell me about his monocle, his immaculate clothes and his habit, when asked by a master how he was, of replying: ‘Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah.’ I instantly realised that I had been handed a piece of cake and bunged him down on paper, circa 1908.
The ‘P’ in Psmith, of course, was silent (‘as in pshrimp’). ‘Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis.’
The other exception Wodehouse might have made is Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, who appears to have been based on a friend of his young days called Herbert Westbrook, seasoned with a hint or two of his old school chum and lifetime correspondent, William Townend. Thereafter, everyone else was a hybrid.
He was well aware of the ingredients he required:
I have to have jewels, comic lovers and about a dozen American crooks before I can move.
… and where his orientation lay. He was a humorist, pure but never simple …
Humorists, as I see it, have always been looked askance at, if not actually viewed with concern. At English schools in my boyhood they were divided into two classes, both unpopular. If you merely talked amusingly, you were a ‘silly ass’ (‘You are a silly ass!’ was the formula). If your conversation took a mordant and satirical turn, you were a ‘funny swine’. And whichever you were, you were scorned and despised and lucky not to get kicked. It is to this early discouragement that I attribute the fact that no Englishman, grown to man’s estate, ever says anything brighter than ‘Eh, what?’ and ‘Most extraordinary.’
In order to be a humorist, you must see the world out of focus, and today, when the world is really out of focus, people insist that you see it straight. Humour implies ridicule of the established institutions, and they want to keep their faith in the established order intact.
(Over Seventy)
If as you walk along the streets of any city [in America] you see a furtive-looking man who slinks past you like a cat in a strange alley which is momentarily expecting to receive a half-brick in the short ribs, don’t be misled into thinking it is Baby Face Schultz, the racketeer for whom the police of thirty states are spreading a dragnet. He is probably a humorist.
In later years he sometimes found new styles of humour a little disconcerting. Reviewing The Best of Punch 1957 he confessed that ‘the difference between wit and humour has always beaten me’. At least half the pieces in the collection, he considered, ‘will give grave offence to somebody or other. For everything humorous (or witty) does give offence nowadays.’
* * * *
He had a domelike head, piercing eyes, and that cynical twist of the upper lip which generally means an epigram on the way.
(America, I Like You)
* * * *
But except for those first Barrie-influenced years, Wodehouse stuck to what he instinctively knew he could do and created his cockeyed, timeless universe. And – lo and behold! – the editors found they wanted to publish it and went on wanting to for decades. When in 1953 Penguin reprinted five titles in one day, putting a million Wodehouses into print, they put him on a new and higher plateau – a Mount Olympus of publishing.
Not that the lower slopes had been exactly unimpressive. As early as the 1920s his name was beginning to be a literary nonpareil – not to say a sine qua non, dash it!
As a matter of fact, I really am becoming rather a blood these days. In a review of Wedding Bells at the Playhouse the critic says ‘So-and-so is good as a sort of P. G. Wodehouse character.’ And in a review of a book in The Times they say ‘The author at times reverts to the P. G. Wodehouse manner’ …
This, I need scarcely point out to you, is jolly old fame. Once they begin to refer to you in that casual way as if everybody must know who you are, all is well.
(Letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 7 August 1920)
… and later:
… a letter turned up the other day addressed to ‘P. G. Wodehouse, London’. I am going to write to myself and address it ‘P. G. Wodehouse, England’, and see if it arrives. The next step will be to send one addressed simply ‘P. G. Wodehouse’.
(Letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 12 September 1924)
The only real problem he ever had in those early days was establishing himself in America. One editor asked him to write stories ‘about American characters in an American setting’ – which caused Wodehouse to fume:
It can’t have come on him as a stunning shock to find that I was laying my scene in England. What did he expect from me? … I’m all for spreading a little happiness as I go by, so I told him I would have a pop at some Hollywood stories.
If only those blighters would realise that I started writing about Bertie Wooster and comic earls because I was in America and couldn’t write American stories and the only English characters the American public would read about were exaggerated dudes. It’s as simple as that. Another thing I object to in these analyses of one’s work is that the writer picks out something one wrote in 1907 to illustrate some tendency. Good Lord! I was barely articulate in 1907!
(Letter to Denis Mackail, 1951)
He was to come across one other irritation – the tendency of publishers to want to retitle his books …
The Editor of the Newnes magazine which is running Sam in the Suburbs serially wants to change the title and has decided on SUNSHINE SAM!!!! I have written him an anguished lette
r of protest.
Can you imagine such a foul title? Isn’t it pure Ruby M. Ayres? The only thing it could be except Ruby M. Ayres is Harold Bell Wright, in which case Sunshine Sam would be a quaint, drawling old westerner, who cheers up the other cowboys with his homely philosophy, showing that you can be happy though poor, provided you do as the good book says.
(Letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 30 March 1925)
Other than that, Wodehouse suffered most of the other minor problems an author is heir to.
There were the Critics …
Why is it that a single slam from even the most patent imbecile can undo all the praise of a hundred critics?
(Letter to Denis Mackail)
I could see by the way she sniffed that she was about to become critical. There has always been a strong strain of book-reviewer blood in her.
(Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen)
Has anyone ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
… the Life Sedentary …
If I go for an exercise walk, I’m too tired to write, and if I don’t get any exercise, my brain doesn’t work!
… the Adoring Public …
When I write a book, the golden words come pouring out like syrup, but let a smiling woman steal up to me with my latest and ask me to dash off something clever on the front page, and it is as though some hidden hand had removed my brain and substituted for it an order of cauliflower.
He took to writing –
You like my little stories, do ya?
Oh, glory, glory, hallelujah!
(‘It sometimes goes well, sometimes not.’)
Although he did his best to keep his admirers at a safe distance, there were social occasions that could not be avoided. On one of them, unbeknownst to him, ‘Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove’ (Very Good, Jeeves). All evening long at a Hollywood dinner the lady sitting next to him rhapsodised over his work. Her sons, she gushed, had masses of his books and never missed reading each new one as it came out. ‘And when I tell them that I have actually been sitting at dinner next to Edgar Wallace, I don’t know what they will say.’
(In another version of the same anecdote he used Hugh Walpole!)
Over time he necessarily grew accustomed to being interviewed and, while he clearly never enjoyed the experience, took it in good part. His wartime experience, however, raised a quiet caveat:
Writers on daily and weekly papers always will go all out for the picturesque. When they interview you, they inevitably alter and embroider.
As a rule this does not matter much. If on your arrival in New York you are asked ‘What do you think of our high buildings?’ and you reply, ‘I think your high buildings are wonderful’, and it comes out as ‘I think your high buildings are wonderful. I should like some of these income-tax guys to jump off the top of them’, no harm is done. The sentiment pleases the general public, and even the officials of the Internal Revenue Department probably smile indulgently, as men who know that they are going to have the last laugh. But when a war is in progress, it is kinder to the interviewee not to indulge in imagination.
(Letter to William Townend, 18 April 1953)
Later in life with American television came the celebrity author interview about which Wodehouse was predictably sceptical, when it was applied to him …
I don’t imagine the great public listens spellbound … and says, ‘My God! So that’s Wodehouse! How intelligent he looks! What a noble brow! I must certainly buy that last book of his!’ Much more probably they reach out and twiddle the knob and get another station.
(Letter to William Townend, 15 May 1947)
If they wanted to interview me on radio, that would be different. I have an attractive voice, rich, mellow, with certain deep organ tones in it calculated to make quite a number of the cash customers dig up the $3.50. But it is fatal to let them see me … I wouldn’t risk twopence on anyone who looks as I do on the television screen … Say 1905 or thereabouts, I really was an eyeful then. Trim, athletic figure, finely chiselled features and more hair on the top of my head than you could shake a stick at …
He was to retain his down-to-earth perspective on the proper place of the popular writer in the literary food chain:
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels … The truth is that a novel, after all, is rather a commercial sort of affair. A letter to the papers is Art for Art’s sake.
(‘To the Editor, Sir …’ from Louder and Funnier)
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
(Cocktail Time)
But Wodehouse did admit to suffering from one professional problem that was probably unique to him. He was frequently interrupted in full flow ‘because of Pekes who keep insisting on being placed on one’s knee’.
* * * *
When Wodehouse wasn’t actually writing, walking or nursing Pekes, he was almost certainly reading the work of other writers and his taste was catholic.
Not surprisingly, he had an early addiction to W. S. Gilbert and once, as a young man, disgraced himself at a dinner party by laughing uproariously at a Gilbert anecdote – before his host had reached his well-honed punchline. ‘I had a rather distinctive laugh in those days, something like the last bit of water going down the waste-pipe in a bath … And it was at this juncture that I caught my host’s eye. I shall always remember the glare of pure hatred which I saw in it … His eyes, beneath their beetling brows, seared my very soul.’
Gilbert might have been more sympathetic, had he been aware of one vital fact:
It never pays to be honest with examiners. I lost an English Literature prize at school because I compared W. S. Gilbert to his advantage with Shakespeare. (I still think I was right.)
(Letter to a fan, Mr Sheerin, 10 January 1974)
Dickens with his gallery of grotesques was, of course, another favourite, as, for more jingoistic reasons, was Kipling:
Doesn’t Kipling’s death give you a sort of stunned feeling? He seems to leave such a gap. I didn’t feel the same about Doyle or Bennett or Galsworthy. I suppose it is because he is so associated with one’s boyhood. It has made me feel older all of a sudden.
(Letter to William Townend, 20 January 1936)
… and there was an enduring affection for W. W. Jacobs:
When I started out as a writer 72 years ago, W. W. Jacobs represented to me perfection. Others might abide my question, but he was free, as the fellow said. Even in my early twenties, when my critical faculties were nothing to write home about, I could see how good he was and how simply and unerringly he got his effects, and nothing has changed in my high opinion of him since.
(Letter to Sir Hugh Greene, Chairman of the Bodley Head, enclosing a promotional paragraph for a new book)
He became close – for him – to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and greatly admired the Sherlock Holmes stories. References to them crop up frequently in the fiction …
‘Ah,’ said Mike, as a thunder of large feet approached along the corridor, ‘here if I mistake not, Watson, is our client now.’
(Spring Fever)
I could never get him [Doyle] to talk of Sherlock Holmes, and I think the legend that he disliked Sherlock must be true. It is with the feeling that he would not object that I have sometimes amused myself by throwing custard pies at the great man.
(Introduction to The Sign of Four)
In one respect at least Wodehouse became a Holmes doppelgänger. Who wrote – ‘Tell me the whole story in your own words … omitting no detail, however slight’? and who wrote – ‘I must understand every detail … Take time to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential’?
Wodehouse wrote the first and Doyle the second. It evidently pleased one master to
echo another, because over a period of some forty years Wodehouse used this precise word form repeatedly – ‘Begin at the beginning and omit no detail, for there is no saying how important some seemingly trivial fact may be.’
‘As the fellow said – there’s no police like Holmes.’
On one occasion Doyle was telling Wodehouse how on a visit to America he had seen an advertisement for the ‘Conan Doyle School of Writing’ – a totally unauthorised organisation. His method of relating the story was what struck Wodehouse most:
Well, what most people in his place would have said would have been, ‘Hullo! This looks fishy.’ The way he put it … was: ‘I said to myself, “Ha, there is villainy afoot.”’
The connection with Doyle was to have a postscript. Writing to biographer Hesketh Pearson (12 November 1944) to thank him for his new book on Doyle, Wodehouse recalls how Doyle had once asked him to find out who was the author of an attack on Sir Nigel (1903) in Punch. ‘I found it was E. V. Lucas, one of his best friends, so not wanting to stir up trouble, I thought that the best thing was to pretend to have forgotten all about it!’
Literary feuds have always been commonplace but Wodehouse drew a clear line of demarcation between the writer and his or her work. During the war A. A. Milne (he of Christopher Robin fame) wrote a virulent letter about Wodehouse to the Daily Telegraph, yet in a letter to Townend (27 November 1945) Wodehouse could still write: