P.G. Wodehouse in his Own Words

by Barry Day

  … the unexpected adjectives … the transferred epithets …

  ‘… like a bereaved tapeworm’ (Pigs Have Wings) … ‘like a smitten blancmange’ (Sam the Sudden) … or, even worse, ‘a pole-axed blancmange’ (The Inimitable Jeeves) … ‘one of the scaliest silences I’ve ever run up against’ (Carry On, Jeeves)

  … the surrealistic verb forms …

  ‘You must surge round him like glue’ (Heavy Weather). ‘You must … flock around her like a poultice.’ (Right Ho, Jeeves). ‘I trousered the key’ (‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ from Carry On, Jeeves).

  Who, having once absorbed the image, can ever contemplate leaving a room again, when one can emulate Jeeves and … shimmer out? Or walk over to the Drones Club when to toddle or ankle over to the bally place is the –

  ‘Mot juste, sir?’

  ‘Precisely, Jeeves!’

  Incidentally, at least one commentator has observed that when, in the first few pages of a novel, Wodehouse repeats the device of having Jeeves complete a quotation for Bertie or Bertie persistently uses abbreviations (‘I could see at a g.’ … ‘the persp. was bedewing the forehead’), you are watching an old pro relying on the t. and t. (tried and tested) while he works himself into the swing of things.

  (Ira Gershwin was paying lyrical tribute to this latter device when he wrote in the song ’S Wonderful’:

  Don’t mind telling you

  In my humble fash

  That you thrill me through

  With a tender pash.

  When you said you care,

  ’Magine my emosh;

  I swore, then and there,

  Permanent devosh.

  That was in 1927 but Wodehouse had been using it long since.)

  * * * *

  The lines on the printed page look effortless, as though they had leapt straight from brain to typewriter fully-formed. In reality, Wodehouse said – ‘I’m always re-reading and re-writing what I’ve written. You put it down straight the first time. Then you fiddle with it, change it, change it again, and it gets better.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Wodehouse’s War

  I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare – or, if not, it’s some equally brainy bird – who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping. And what I’m driving at is that the man is perfectly right.

  (‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ from Carry On, Jeeves)

  A great deal has been written about what happened to P. G. Wodehouse during World War II – too much in my view. Rereading it, I am struck by two things …

  An unworldly man, who had come to live largely in the universe he had created inside his head, did a thoughtless thing, finally realised it and repented.

  A lot of other people – many of them, it would seem, from motives of personal or professional jealousy – chose not to accept the obvious explanation, blew matters up out of all proportion and insisted on fanning the flames for the rest of Wodehouse’s life and beyond.

  In the process they might well have succeeded in overshadowing and undermining a unique literary reputation. Fortunately, the good sense of the bookbuying public saw things otherwise. As we entered the new millennium some hundred million books by P. G. Wodehouse in more than twenty languages had been sold around the world – which, in itself, says it all.

  * * * *

  Rather than extend the debate, I have simply selected from Wodehouse’s own words spoken or written during that period. Clearly, any selective quotation is open to question but, then, I hope I have already made my own position known …

  * * * *

  Politics – at local, national or international level – were always transmuted into the narrative of Wodehouse fiction. On 4 September 1937 he is writing to William Townend from Hollywood:

  What a hell of a mess the world has got into! I suspect plots all around me, don’t you? I mean, this Japan business, for instance. My idea is that Italy and Germany said to Japan, ‘Hey! you start trouble in the East and do something to make England mad. Then they will take their Mediterranean fleet over to Shanghai, and then we’ll do a quick jump on their neck while they have no ships on this side.’ I’ll bet they’re sick we haven’t fallen for that.

  By 23 April 1939 (to Townend from France) he must have been one of the few people who could conceivably have said:

  Do you know, a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from war than it is at present … I think if Hitler really thought there was a chance of a war, he would have nervous prostration.’

  Incidentally, doesn’t all this alliance-forming remind you of the form matches at school … I can’t realise that all this is affecting millions of men. I think of Hitler and Mussolini as two halves, and Stalin as a useful wing forward. Anyway, no war in our lifetime is my feeling. I don’t think wars start with months of preparation in the way of slanging matches …

  The ghastly thing is that it’s all so frightfully funny. I mean, Hitler asking the little nations if they think they are in danger of being attacked. I wish one of them would come right out and say, ‘Yes, we jolly well do!’

  Came the ‘Phoney War’ – those first few months when everything seemed suspiciously like ‘business as usual’. Except that some blighters were acting up. On 3 October, still writing from France:

  Didn’t you think that was a fine speech of Churchill’s on the wireless? Just what was needed, I thought. I can’t help feeling that we’re being a bit too gentlemanly. Someone ought to get up in Parliament and call Hitler a swine.

  By 23 January of the following year:

  I agree with you about the weariness of war. I find the only thing to do is to get into a routine and live entirely by the day. I work in the morning, take the dogs out before tea, do a bit of mild work after tea, then read after dinner. It is wonderful how the days pass … My only fear is that Germany will be able to go on for years on their present rations. Apparently a German is able to live on stinging nettles and wood fibre indefinitely.

  The Germans in his view, were in the same category as Hollywood producers – probably down to the accent.

  Having completely underestimated the threat, the Wodehouses made no attempt to leave their French home in Le Touquet until the very last moment. In a scene straight from one of his novels, their car broke down and they were still there when the German forces occupied the area. On 21 July 1940 – aged fifty-eight – Wodehouse was arrested and interned, before being transported to a prisoner-of-war camp in a lunatic asylum in Tost, Upper Silesia. He stayed there until he was released, shortly before his sixtieth birthday – a mandatory release date – on 21 June 1941. He was kept in Germany for the next two years. After his release came the five broadcasts which were to cause the furore.

  It was not until 11 May 1942 that he could reply to the many letters Townend had been sending to him in the camp. To Wodehouse it seems to have been Dulwich Revisited and he might easily have been writing home to his parents:

  Camp was really great fun … I played cricket again after twenty-seven years, and played havoc with the opposition with slow leg-breaks … We used to play with a string ball (string wound round a nut) which our sailors manufactured.

  He later referred to ‘my beloved Tost, where life was one long round of cricket, lectures, entertainments and Red Cross parcels’.

  None of which interfered with his writing:

  I used to sit on my typewriter case with the machine balanced on a suitcase and work away with two German soldiers standing behind me with guns, breathing down the back of my neck. They seemed fascinated by this glimpse into the life literary.

  By contrast he found the time in Berlin dull:

  It’s extraordinarily hard to describe my life there. I suppose I was in the middle of all sorts of interesting things, but they didn’t touch me … I lived the life of a hermit, plugging away at
my writing.

  (30 December 1944)

  In the autumn of that year the Wodehouses had been transferred to Paris for some reason and they were there when the city was finally liberated. It was only now that he became fully aware of the arguments that were raging around his head and the attacks on him in the British press, many of them based on imaginary interviews …

  I wish, by the way, when people invent scenes with one, that they wouldn’t give one such rotten dialogue. Can you imagine me saying some of the things he puts into my mouth? But I suppose there is nothing to be done about it now.

  In Paris, with the war clearly winding to a close, he had time to contemplate the longer-term consequences of the broadcasts. Townend had written, suggesting that he felt the negative newspaper comment was starting to fall off. On 15 February 1945 Wodehouse replied:

  It’s fine if the papers are beginning to change their attitude. But I’m afraid there is a long way to go before things can come right, but I haven’t a twinge of self-pity. I made an ass of myself, and must pay the penalty.

  In May he was able to pick up his correspondence with Guy Bolton. His top news item was, predictably, his work:

  I have been working steadily all through these troubled years, and now have four novels and ten short stories in my drawer.

  … but he soon reverts to the broadcasts. Bolton had been very active in organising US opinion on behalf of Wodehouse’s early release and it was gratitude for this action – one that had no UK parallel, by the way – that decided Wodehouse on making the broadcasts, ostensibly only to American audiences. In a letter of 1 September 1945:

  It never occurred to me that there could be any harm in doing this, and I particularly wanted to do something in acknowledgement of all the letters I had had from American readers, so I jumped at it … Isn’t it the damnedest thing how Fate lurks to sock you with the stuffed eelskin …

  To Ira Gershwin he added:

  I thought it a good idea at the time, but have since changed my mind. I suppose I was in an unbalanced mental state after a year behind barbed wire, but that was all I actually did – give five short descriptions of life in camp, purely designed as entertainment for the boys in the U.S.A.

  He speculated to Townend on his concerns about public opinion:

  You know how one’s moods change from day to day. I go for a walk and work up a spirit of defiance and come home and write a belligerent page or two indicating that I don’t give a damn whether the public takes a more favourable view or not, because all my friends have stuck to me and it’s only friends I care about. Then I sleep on it and wonder if this is quite judicious! Also, comedy will keep creeping in and at the most solemn moments. I wrote this yesterday:

  ‘The global howl that went up as the result of my indiscretion exceeded in volume and intensity anything I had experienced since the time in my boyhood when I broke the curate’s umbrella and my aunts started writing letters to one another about it.’

  … What do you think? Will the reaction be ‘Ha, ha. I don’t care what this chap has done. He makes me laugh’ or ‘Mr Wodehouse appears to imagine that his abominable action is a subject for flippancy.’ You see. It might go either way, and I can’t tell in advance …

  And there – in Wodehouse’s own words and between the lines – I believe you have what he would call the res. One could, I suppose, argue that this is a clever writer seeding his personal correspondence in the expectation of eventual publication but that is to attribute a deviousness he was never to demonstrate in any other context in an extraordinarily long life.

  Personally, I am persuaded that Wodehouse’s friend and wartime inquisitor, Malcolm Muggeridge, had it about right when he concluded:

  It was an act of folly. But it was a product of his peculiar temperament. It wasn’t that he was other-worldly, or un-worldly, as much as that he was a-worldly; a born neutral in relation to the conflicts, individual and collective, which afflict mankind.

  By April 1947 the Wodehouses had been granted their American visas. Ethel couldn’t contemplate the journey without first taking a side trip to London, naturally, on her own. (‘She reported that things weren’t as bad as she had been led to expect. But then she had a suite at The Ritz, and I imagine you don’t see the real stark modern London life there.’) On the 18th they joined the S.S America at Cherbourg. Except in his fertile imagination Wodehouse never made the return trip …

  * * * *

  Even though the official papers have now been released, the occasional intriguing footnote to the episode still appears. As late as 12 October 1966 Wodehouse sent to his son-in-law, Peter Cazalet, a copy of a letter he had received from an old Hollywood friend, Gene Markey.

  Markey had apparently met Major Victor Cazalet at a social gathering in 1943 and Cazalet had taken him aside to say:

  This is extremely confidential, but as you’re a friend of Plum’s, you’ll be glad to hear that something is about to break, something very good for Plum, which will affect his status as a prisoner of war and be greatly to his advantage. I have just got hold of this information and I’m on my way to London to give it to the top boys.

  Markey went on to add:

  He couldn’t tell me what it was, but said I’d be reading about it when the story was released. He had to take a plane at midnight, and I walked out to the car with him and said goodbye. He flew to Gibraltar, the plane crashed and he was killed. And the good news about you that he was taking to London never reached there.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Uncle Plum in the Autumn*

  My earnest hope is that the entire remainder of my existence will be one round of unruffled monotony.

  (Thank You, Jeeves)

  *

  Like Jeeves, I know my place, and that place is down at the far end of the table among the scurvy knaves and scullions.

  (Over Seventy)

  *

  In the course of a long life I have flitted about a bit. I have had homes in Mayfair, in Park Avenue, New York, in Beverly Hills, California, and other posh localities, but I have always been a suburbanite at heart, and it is when I get a plot calling for a suburban setting that I really roll up my sleeves and give of my best.

  (Preface to Sam the Sudden)

  The world only knows him as he wishes to be known.

  (David Jasen)

  I look in my glass, dear reader, and what do I see? Nothing so frightfully hot, believe me. The face is slablike, the ears are large and fastened on at right-angles. Above the eyebrows comes a stagnant sea of bald forehead, stretching away into the distance with nothing to relieve it but a few wisps of lonely hair. The nose is blobby, the eyes dull, like those of a fish not in the best of health. A face, in short, taking it for all in all, which should be reserved for the gaze of my nearest and dearest who, through long habit, have got used to it and can see through to the pure white soul beneath. At any rate, a face not to be scattered about at random and come upon suddenly by nervous people and invalids.

  I myself … am – strictly speaking – no Ronald Colman … But do not be too hasty. Wait a bit. See me first in my new autumn suit with the invisible blue stripe. Suspend judgment till my last lot of collars come from the makers. Ah! you hesitate. Exactly. Mine is a style of beauty that grows on you. It has to have time to get its effect.

  (‘On Ocean Liners’ from Louder and Funnier)

  * * * *

  Even before the war he never thought would happen happened, Wodehouse was getting restive to return to America.

  In December 1939, now ensconced at Le Touquet – and clearly oblivious to the threat just the other side of the Maginot Line – he is writing to his old sparring partner, Guy Bolton:

  I am longing to come over and get down to it. We could turn out a terrific amount of work collaborating. We might do a straight play as well as musicals.

  Six years later he is still stuck in France but finally the elusive visas – like the ‘letters of transit’ in Casablanca – come through and the final
(thirty-year) chapter in Wodehouse’s life begins:

  Isn’t it marvellous about the visa! Apart from the fact that I am now able to come to America, there is the other angle – that if the US Govt., after reading the facts as supplied by the British Govt., have come to the conclusion that it was all right admitting me to the USA, there couldn’t be much in those facts to kick at. In other words, the British Govt. have practically given me a clearance.

  (Letter to Guy Bolton, 13 July 1946)

  On the eve of one world war he had made a decisive trip to the US; in the aftermath of another he returned there for good.

  Apart from Ethel, Bolton was to be the rock on which that last third of his life would be built. ‘You only need one friend,’ he once said. Bolton was that friend. In extreme old age Bolton – who died in 1979 at ninety-five – was to say that it was only Wodehouse’s continued presence on the planet that kept him going. They were friends and near neighbours on Long Island, meeting virtually every day to work or walk – and often both.