P.G. Wodehouse in his Own Words

by Barry Day

  So Wodehouse returned to Wonderland:

  ‘You would like Hollywood, you know. Everybody does. Girdled by the everlasting hills, bathed in eternal sunshine. And if you aren’t getting divorced yourself, there’s always one of your friends who is, and that gives you something to chat about in the long evenings. And it isn’t half such a crazy place as they make out. I know two-three people in Hollywood that are part sane.’

  (The Luck of the Bodkins)

  *

  Everybody liked Bill Shannon, even in Hollywood, where nobody likes anybody.

  (The Old Reliable)

  *

  She had a sort of ethereal beauty; but then every girl you see in Hollywood has either ethereal beauty or roguish gaminerie or a dark, slumbrous face that hints at hidden passion.

  (‘The Rise of Minna Nordstrom’ from Blandings Castle)

  * * * *

  I got away from Hollywood at the end of the year because the gaoler’s daughter smuggled me in a file in a meat pie, but I was there long enough to realise what a terribly demoralising place it is.

  Well, it made a nice story but it didn’t happen to be the whole truth.

  As he was coming to the end of the extended contract, Wodehouse gave a routine interview to the Los Angeles Times. On 7 June 1931 their readers read the frankest comments about Hollywood any of its denizens had yet put into words:

  They paid me $2,000 a week – $104,000 – and I cannot see what they engaged me for. They were extremely nice to me, but I feel as if I have cheated them. You see, I understood I was engaged to write stories for the screen … Yet apparently they had the greatest difficulty in finding anything for me to do. Twice during the year they brought completed scenarios of other people’s stories to me and asked me to do some dialogue. Fifteen or sixteen people had tinkered with those stories. The dialogue was really quite adequate. All I did was touch it up here and there – very slight improvements.

  Then they set me to work on a story called Rosalie

  [Wodehouse had worked on the stage musical in 1928],

  which was to have some musical numbers … When it was finished, they thanked me politely and remarked that as musicals didn’t seem to be going so well they guessed they would not use it.

  That about sums up what I was called upon to do for my $104,000. Isn’t it amazing?

  If it is only names they want, it seems such an expensive way to get them, doesn’t it?

  Naturally, my reputation is for light humour, jolly nonsense. I was led to believe there was a field for my work in pictures. But I was told my sort of stuff was ‘too light’. They seem to have such a passion for sex stuff. I wonder if they really know the tastes of their audiences.

  The people who were most amazed by the interview were the studio money men back in New York. It gave them the excuse many of them had been looking for – in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash – to move in and clip the financial wings of their spendthrift West Coast colleagues. As he had said in an earlier context – Wodehouse Preferred began to look distinctly iffy in the eyes of Hollywood. When the Wodehouses left at the end of the year, he could hardly have expected to be back in a professional capacity.

  Of course, my career as a movie-writer has been killed dead by that interview. I am a sort of Ogre to the studios now. I don’t care personally, as I don’t think I could ever do picture writing. It needs a definitely un-original mind. Apparently all pictures have to be cast in a mould.

  (Letter to William Townend, 26 August 1931)

  The movies are getting hard up and the spirit of economy is rife. I was lucky to get mine while the going was good. It is rather like having tolerated some awful bounder for his good dinners to go to his house and find the menu cut down to nothing and no drinks.

  (Letter to Denis Mackail, 10 May 1931)

  The only thing that excused the existence of the Talkies was a sort of bounderish open-handedness.

  Destructive criticism is what kills an author. Cut his material too much, make him feel that he is not a Voice, give him the impression that his big scene is all wet, and you will soon see the sparkle die out of his eyes.

  Once a combination of Santa Claus and Good-Time Charlie, Hollywood has become a Scrooge.

  Do you realise that all that year I was away from London, when everybody supposed that I was doing a short stretch at Dartmoor, I was actually in Hollywood.

  (‘The Hollywood Scandal’ from Louder and Funnier)

  * * * *

  In the summer of 1936 Wodehouse received a surprising second offer from MGM. For years he had been led to understand that his name was synonymous with mud in Hollywood but, apparently, Time – which wounds all heels – had healed all wounds. The Wodehouses duly arrived on 10 October with a contract for $2,500 a week for six months and a further six-month option.

  It was to be a replay of six years earlier. He was asked to work on a Jack Buchanan picture …

  I altered all the characters to earls and butlers with such success that they called a conference and changed the entire plot …

  The actual work is negligible … So far I’ve had eight collaborators. The system is that A gets the original idea, B comes to work with him on it, C makes the scenario, D does preliminary dialogue and then they send for me to insert class and what not, then E and F, scenario writers, alter the plot and off we go again.

  You have to surround yourself with highly trained specialists – one to put in the lisps, another to get the adenoid effects, a third to arrange the catarrh.

  (‘The Hollywood Scandal’ from Louder and Funnier)

  But what uncongenial work picture-writing is. It makes one feel as if one were working with one’s hands tied. Somebody’s got to do it, I suppose, but this is the last time they’ll get me.

  (Letter to William Townend, 24 June 1937)

  It is only occasionally that one feels one is serving a term on Devil’s Island.

  (Letter to Denis Mackail)

  Conscience was still gnawing at him:

  The fact is, I’m not worth the money my agent insists on asking for me. After all my record here is eighteen months, with only small bits of pictures to show for it, I’m no good to these people. Lay off old Pop Wodehouse, is the advice I would give to any studio that wants to get on in the world. There is no surer road to success.

  (Letter to William Townend, 6 May 1937)

  What must have turned it into an out-of-body experience for him was the fact that the main project he was given to work on was Rosalie. The wretched woman seemed to haunt him. Then, to no one’s surprise – least of all his – he found himself once more being moved into the wings. The story on which he had originally worked with Guy Bolton and the Gershwins was finally filmed – with music by Cole Porter!

  To his relief, MGM chose not to pick up their option and Wodehouse finished his second and last Hollywood stint in a rather happier frame of mind than might have been expected. RKO were about to make a film of his 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress and asked him to help out. Fred Astaire was to star with comedy team Burns & Allen, and he would be reunited with the Gershwins. As a tribute to their old friend, they had Astaire sing the title song in the grounds of Totleigh Castle, Upper Pelham Grenville, Wodehouse, England.

  By August of 1937 his work was finished and he could write finis in a letter to Townend:

  I don’t like doing pictures. A Damsel in Distress was fun, because I was working with the best director here – George Stevens – and on my own story, but as a rule pictures are a bore.

  On 28 October the Wodehouses sailed for Europe on the Ile de France …

  2ND INTERMISSION

  Style

  One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Wodehouse’s style cries out for one of his own original similes to describe its hybrid quality. It was like a well-worn suitcase into which a favourite Uncle had crammed the trea
sures of a lifetime … it was – but that way madness lies.

  Sufficient that the man could take the ordinary image and the vernacular phrase and – as he would say – put a spin on the ball.

  Waugh’s favourite image was ‘the acrid smell of burned poetry’ (in ‘The Fiery Wooing of Mordred’, from Young Men in Spats). (Wodehouse returned Waugh’s compliment – in typical Wodehouse fashion – by describing a character in Frozen Assets (1963) as resembling ‘something unpleasant out of an early Evelyn Waugh novel’.)

  Hilaire Belloc – best remembered for describing Wodehouse in the mid-1930s as ‘the best living writer of English … the head of my profession’ – chose ‘quaking like a jelly in a high wind’. Biographer Frances Donaldson felt that nothing summed up Bertie better than ‘the tall thin one with a face like a motor mascot’ – though precisely what a motor mascot looked like she wasn’t too sure. It is often the surprising rather than the particularly apposite Wodehouse image that has one ‘staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit’ (The Code of the Woosters). You see how catching the whole thing is?

  * * * *

  She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.

  (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen)

  *

  Her face now was pale and drawn, like that of a hockey centre-forward at a girls’ school who, in addition to getting a fruity one on the shin, has just been penalised for ‘sticks’.

  (Right Ho, Jeeves)

  *

  He looked like a halibut which has just been asked by another halibut to lend it a couple of quid till next Wednesday.

  (‘The Word in Season’ from A Few Quick Ones)

  *

  In The Code of the Woosters the arch-fiend, Roderick Spode has ‘the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’, while in Psmith in the City a character ‘scattered his aitches as a fountain its sprays in a high wind’.

  *

  [The mass upon mass of bees] shoved and writhed and muttered and jostled, for all the world like a collection of home-seeking City men trying to secure standing room on the Underground at half-past five in the afternoon,

  (Uneasy Money)

  * * * *

  Not content with creating imagery, Wodehouse was given to inventing – or at least, modifying – language:

  * * * *

  He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled …

  (The Code of the Woosters)

  *

  A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.

  (‘Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey’ from Blandings Castle)

  * * * *

  It was the sound as much as the meaning of the word that seemed to appeal and the old Dulwich training came in handy when it came to ladling out the classical and foreign phrases. In the mouths of Bertie and his friends they often emerged a little mangled but usually managed to convey the res. Nor was Wodehouse averse to using them to enliven his correspondence. Reporting to William Townend on his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt in October 1959, he says – ‘We kidded back and forth with quite a bit of élan and espièglerie.’ But always there is the sense that neither the speaker nor the hearer knows quite what the words mean.

  When not hiding behind a smokescreen of pseudo-sophistication or erudition, the classic Wodehouse conversation is positively minimalist – the argot of the inarticulate:

  ‘What ho!’ I said.

  ‘What ho!’ said Motty.

  ‘What ho! What ho!’

  ‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’

  After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

  (‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ from My Man Jeeves)

  ‘Yo-ho! Yo frightfully ho!’

  (‘The Awful Gladness of the Mater’ from Mr Mulliner Speaking)

  * * * *

  He had many stylistic parlour tricks that would be trotted out regularly. Some of them were almost – but not quite – the literary equivalent of the radio catchphrases so beloved of early audiences of the medium.

  There was the mangled cliché:

  ‘Break his neck.’

  I nodded pacifically.

  ‘I see. Break his neck. And if he asks why?’

  ‘He knows why. Because he is a butterfly who toys with women’s hearts and throws them away like soiled gloves.”

  (The Code of the Woosters)

  Wodehouse’s abundant use of literary quotations might lead one to conclude that he was particularly well read. In fact, he was widely – but not particularly well – read. On closer inspection most of the references are the kind of tags with which a public-school boy of the period would be familiar.

  The frequency with which he uses Shakespeare, for instance, is deceptive. One would deduce that ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’ and ‘quills upon the fretful porpentine’ were required bedtime reading and for a Peke fancier he was remarkably fond of ‘the cat i’ the adage’. In fact, he only came really to study ‘Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies’ in prison camp. When he was packing, ‘the very first thought that occurred to me was that here was my big chance to buckle down and read the Complete Works … a thing I had been meaning to do any time these last forty years, and about three years ago I had bought the Oxford edition for that purpose. But you know how it is. Just as you have got Hamlet and Macbeth under your belt, and are preparing to read the stuffing out of Henry the Sixth, parts one, two and three, something of Agatha Christie’s catches your eye and you weaken.’

  Nonetheless, that Oxford edition more than earned its keep:

  ‘What’s that thing of Shakespeare’s about someone having an eye like Mother’s?’

  ‘An eye like Mars, sir, to threaten and command, is possibly the quotation for which you are groping, sir.’

  (Joy in the Morning)

  *

  I felt that if the thing was to be smacked into, ’twere well ’twere smacked into quickly, as Shakespeare says.

  (Joy in the Morning)

  *

  Bertie frequently believes that Jeeves himself came up with these insightful utterances:

  Leaving not a wrack behind, as I remember Jeeves saying once.

  The next moment I was dropping like the gentle dew upon the place beneath. Or is it rain? Jeeves would know.

  And when Jeeves happens to invoke Dickens – ‘It is a far, far better thing …’ – Bertie’s admiration knows no bounds. ‘As I said before, there is nobody who puts these things more neatly than he does.’

  And if the Bard was not sacrosanct, nor was anyone else with literary pretensions … There was Sir Walter Scott …

  Oh, Woman in our hours of ease

  Uncertain, coy, and hard to please.

  When pain and anguish rack the brow,

  A ministering angel, thou.

  … and, of course, “the poet Burns”, who – Jeeves was obliged to remind Bertie – “wrote in the North British dialect” …

  ‘Oh,’ says the poet, ‘what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive’, and it was precisely the same, Lord Emsworth realised, when first we practice to shoot airguns.

  Byron’s Assyrian, coming down ‘like the wolf on the fold’, is frequently invoked. Also Keats and his ‘stout Cortez’ with his ‘eagle eyes whose men …

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  … and, of course, the occasion when Bertie remarks to Jeeves that the morning seems very dark outside …

  ‘There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’

  ‘Season of what?’

  ‘Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.’

  ‘Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?’

  ‘I have one in rea
diness, sir, in the icebox.’

  (The Code of the Woosters)

  ‘You know your Shelley, Bertie.’

  ‘Oh, am I?’

  (The Code of the Woosters)

  … and, Francis Bret Harte …

  If, of all words of tongue or pen,

  The saddest are, ‘It might have been’

  … Tennyson …

  I don’t know if you happen to be familiar with a poem called ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by the bird Tennyson whom Jeeves had mentioned when speaking of the fellow whose strength was as the strength of ten … the thing goes, as you probably know,

  Tum tiddle umpty-pum

  Tum tiddle umpty-pum

  Tum tiddle umpty-pum

  and this brought you to the snapperoo or pay-off which was ‘someone had blundered’.

  (Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit)

  Gally was hurt. He was feeling as the men who brought the good news from Aix to Ghent would have felt if the citizens of Ghent had received them at the end of their journey with a yawn and an ‘Oh, yes?’

  (Pigs Have Wings)

  (If they had, it wouldn’t have been too surprising, since in Browning’s poem the ‘good news’ was taken from Ghent to Aix – so to the citizens of Ghent it would have been ‘old news’ indeed!)

  … not to mention Kipling’s ‘toad beneath the harrow’, which knows ‘Exactly where each tooth-point goes’.

  * * *

  There were the sheer inventions – usually in combined word forms:

  ‘Lady Constance spurned the grass with a frenzied foot’ (Heavy Weather).’ ‘He waved a concerned cigar.’ (Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit). ‘I shot an aghastish puff of smoke.’ (Joy in the Morning). A character in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit was ‘eating gooseberries in an over wrought sort of way’ … while Bingo Little was ‘standing on the steps, looking bereaved to the gills’ (Nothing Serious). Muriel ‘gnashed her teeth in a quiet undertone’ (‘The Voice from the Past’ from Mulliner Nights) … while someone else ‘groaned civilly’ (A Few Quick Ones).