The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 13
Barmy In Wonderland was an adaptation of George S. Kaufman’s play The Butter And Egg Man. It took him three months to adapt and the pair split the royalties 50-50. It also uses Wodehouse’s recent experience of touring with a play where the leading actor was a drunk. Do Butlers Burgle Banks? was written from a play of Guy Bolton’s, Money In The Bank.
The most unsatisfactory novelisation of a play script is Ring For Jeeves. This comes from a play Guy Bolton wrote with Wodehouse called Come On, Jeeves. The theatrical background of the novel is obvious in the setting and action, but it works well as a story. But not as a Jeeves one, for Jeeves acts out of character. Had the butler part - and Jeeves is a butler in this novel - been given to another character then that would have been fine. As it is, the work detracts from itself as Jeeves ceases to be a credible character in this novel in light of what we know of him elsewhere. Jeeves got into the play as Bolton had written a major part for a butler, and asked his good friend Wodehouse if he could use the name Jeeves for this character, as it would be good for box office. (In fact it never received a West End run out, but it was performed in the provinces.) Wodehouse presumably persevered with Jeeves in this role when he came to write the script up as a novel because a Jeeves story would be good for book sales, too. Wodehouse the businessman had overcome Wodehouse the artist. But Wodehouse was always a businesslike writer. The writers he admired were those who turned out their regular amount of words for a decent income.
Wodehouse could also be ruthless with characters in his novels. Though short-story plots would be based around the characters concerned, with his novels the characters had to do, and be, what the plot demanded, hence such oddities as Monty Bodkin losing his aristocratic background because the plot requires it. Similarly the Empress of Blandings can sometimes be manhandled by a single person whereas at other times she requires a minimum of two to shift her according to the needs of the plot.
The novel Doctor Sally is based upon Wodehouse’s play Good Morning, Bill. This in turn had been based upon a play by the Hungarian Ladislas Fodor. Wodehouse would have worked from a translation of the original play. The Small Bachelor is based upon the musical comedy Oh, Lady! Lady! the second of the shows which Wodehouse, Bolton and Kern wrote for the Princess Theatre. But the plot has been vastly expanded as the original script ran to only 15,000 words, and so new characters and plot lines were added for the novel. Doctor Sally however is a very thin work, reflecting more slavish devotion to the script of the play, just as the novel If I Were You is also obviously a neat play in different clothing.
In taking the basis of a plot from another writer to create Doctor Sally, Wodehouse was only doing what he had done in the past. The idea for Uncle Fred Flits By was developed from a suggestion by William Townend, to whom Wodehouse would write asking if he had any spare plots which he might like to offload on his friend. For his part, Wodehouse would also make plot suggestions to Townend. The pair worked in very different genres and so while the ideas one had might well be unsuitable for their own work it could be relevant for the other. Another from whom Wodehouse would solicit ideas was Bob Davis, the editor of Munsey’s Magazine. Davis would suggest plots to his writers - Wodehouse admits they were not normally very good - and then buy the resulting story from them. From this process came The Coming Of Bill, a very strange Wodehouse product. It is a saga rather than a light novel and there are two deaths in it, including a friend of the hero. It concerns the falling apart of a marriage and the subsequent patching up of the union. Interestingly, this marriage is based on a brief courtship with the bride and groom hardly knowing one another. This is the basis of most of the happy endings in Wodehouse’s novels, but here it is suggested that it does not necessarily make for a happy foundation of married life. The force for bad in the book is provided by an aunt who butts in with her strange views on child rearing and also views the father of the child as ‘the enemy.’ The whole thing is a bit too unbelievable to take seriously as a real slice-of-life drama, but it is definitely closer to that than a light Wodehouse farce. Wodehouse’s talents were wasted writing a book like this.
Wodehouse could write about real people and situations - as a great adapter he frequently did - but he needed to clothe them with the Wodehouse treatment. The starkness of The Coming Of Bill makes it a strange bedfellow with most of the rest of the Wodehouse oeuvre. Wodehouse claimed that the plot did not matter, only the treatment, but here it shows that the plot does matter. If the plot is not suitable for the Wodehouse treatment, then the treatment cannot work. The failure of this novel illustrates Wodehouse’s great success elsewhere with this technique.
Many of Wodehouse’s characters are based on people he knew, either from meeting them or reading about them. That Spode leads the black shorts because all the shirts had run out is a masterly piece of satire by Wodehouse. Not only does it make Spode look as daft as the author is keen to make him out to be, but it also reflects the political situation at the time. The British Union of Fascists, whose leader Wodehouse was attacking in particular, wore black shirts, the British Fascist Association wore brown ones, Commander Locker-Hampton’s anti-Communists vigilantes were garbed in blue ones, Major Douglas’ Social Credit movement wore green shirts and the Independent Labour Party’s Guild of Youth took red shirts as their uniform.
Lord Tilbury, formerly Sir George Pyke, is based upon Lord Northcliffe. Tilbury House, the centre of the Pyke empire is given the same location as Northcliffe House. Blumenfield, who relies upon his twelve-year old son for his artistic decisions on the basis that what appeals to a twelve-year old will appeal to the general public, has copied Abraham Erlanger’s familial arrangement and methods of working.
It is not only the humans of Wodehouse’s acquaintance which made it into his work. When Wodehouse’s parents returned to England they bought a dog, a mongrel called Bob, who gets into the supporting cast, under his own name, in Love Among The Chickens. Ethel and Plum Wodehouse were also great dog lovers, and one of their pekes, Susan, gets a walk-on part in The Go Getter. Norman Murphy, in his fascinating In Search Of Blandings has shown that you can have a fair old stab at working out the chronology of Wodehouse’s books simply by knowing which dog he owned at the time as there are often references to them. For instance, the Mixer stories are written by a bulldog, which is the type of dog Wodehouse had at the time. The only dog the Wodehouses could not get on with was an Aberdeen terrier, which they gave away. Bertie Wooster could not take to this terrier either when it appeared in the chronicles as Stiffy Byng’s Bartholemew.
Ukridge and Lord Uffenham are based upon people Wodehouse knew as, in a different sense, was James Orlebar Cloyster. Psmith was based upon someone he had been told about. Once he had a character, or came across one, he could develop others from it. Psmith is the genesis of many of the characters in Wodehouse novels. Lord Ickenham is an obvious development of the Psmith character, but so too are figures such as Jimmy Crocker and Joe Vanringham, who appear in books published 20 years apart. Bertie Wooster is an evolution of another character Wodehouse wrote about, and this in turn was simply an adaptation of the typical stage dude figure. Sometimes no adaptation was required. Most of Wodehouse’s butlers are simply stage butlers. Lord Emsworth, an elderly man prone to absent-mindedness, is not a type of character previously unknown in the world of humorous writing.
With Wodehouse the genius lay in what he did with his raw materials, not the raw materials themselves. He just took what was already readily at hand and fashioned something on which was left his own imprint.
The quest for plots and incidents was a never-ending one. Wodehouse would buy them from others if necessary, or adapt those he came across. Gally was a member of the Pelican Club, whose activities provided Wodehouse with his basis for the Clothes Stakes in Uncle Fred In The Springtime, which is a retelling in adapted form of the story of The Great Hat Stakes, organised by Joe Scott, whereby the first hat to come through the door of the American Bar of the Criterion after 7pm would be the winner. Odds were offered on wide range of headgear, with a black top hat at 11-10, a bowler at 6-4 and 9-4 on an opera hat. Just after 7pm a waiter from a nearby restaurant came through the doors. He was an Indian waiter wearing a turban and was almost certainly bribed by Scott to make an entrance at that juncture. Scott leapt to his feet and embraced the Indian declaring ‘Twenty-eight and a half quid in the book and not a penny laid on it.’ Mustard Pott similarly cleans up with insider information in the Clothes Stakes, when first through the door is someone he has locked in the club’s telephone booth and who is still in his outfit from the previous night’s fancy dress party.
Sometimes Wodehouse’s inspiration is obvious, such as his short story Mr Potter Takes A Rest Cure which is his take on Saki’s The Lull, and his The Secret Pleasures Of Reginald, which was published in Vanity Fair in 1915, is so written that it could be slipped into a Saki anthology without many people noticing. Reginald is even the name of one of Saki’s main characters. There must be many long-forgotten stories in magazines which gave Wodehouse a germ of an idea to which he could give the Wodehouse treatment, but he also took inspiration from his own work. A regular short story plot is the young man behaving out of character to impress a girl he wants to marry, she being unsure if this would be a good match as he seemed too perfect, and some incident causes him to revert to his more typical behaviour, whereupon the girl realises that he was not as she had imagined and that he was her ideal mate after all. This idea even surfaces twice within the same collection of short stories, A Few Quick Ones in The Right Approach and Joy Bells For Walter. At least these appear as the third and eighth stories in the collection. In The Man With Two Left, the first story, Bill The Bloodhound is about Alice Weston, a chorus girl who is not prepared to marry out of the profession. The second story, Extricating Young Gussie, relies upon a father forbidding his daughter’s marriage to someone not on the stage.
The same ideas would come round time and time again, as would the same character-types. Wodehouse was aware of this, sending himself up nicely in his introduction to Summer Lightning:
A certain critic - for such men, I regret to say, do exist - made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.
Once Wodehouse had the idea for a plot of a novel he would write out a detailed structure, often as much as a third of the length of the finished work. Into this he would also set down bits of dialogue in skeleton form to be written up later. It was the forming of the plot that was his main concern: he averred that he always thought that in writing the book he was wasting valuable time, as the difficult part of writing was in drawing up the plot. Beginnings of books often caused him problems and these would frequently be rewritten over and over again. He would have difficulties in organising the action so as to bring all of his major characters in to play a scene and making sure that the plot lines had been introduced evenly throughout the text. In Performing Flea he writes about Uncle Fred In The Springtime:
After writing 150 pages I have about 40 which are right. Every time I write a book I swear I’ll never write another with a complicated plot. In this one - in the first 40 pages - I have either brought on to play a scene or mentioned heavily each of my principal characters - ten including Lord Emsworth’s pig. So the going ought to be easier now.
Wodehouse felt that unless his plots moved slickly they were inclined to bore the reader. Often he would be left with loose ends and incongruities. Frequently one plus one cannot equal two for Wodehouse’s plot to work and normally he recognises this and puts in an explanation of why the obvious cannot happen. Sometimes, though, Wodehouse’s plots stretch credibility too far. In Sam The Sudden, Sam dispossesses a burglar of his trousers to prevent him scarpering while he toddles next door to hob-nob with the neighbours. Why does the burglar, left free to roam around Sam’s house, not just go upstairs and help himself to a pair of Sam’s trousers? The answer is that the plot needs Lord Tilbury to enter the house and be robbed of his trousers. Normally Wodehouse would have spotted the flaw, and written in some excuse as to why the burglar cannot just pinch a pair of Sam’s trousers, but here he forgets. French Leave, one of the most disappointing of his novels, leaves a lot of loose ends. What happens to the money Old Nick nicked from Mrs Pegler? What happened to the dossier Quibolle? Why does Old Nick have to escape using the balcony when the police do not know that he is a criminal? Too many characters have too little to do. Jo Trent just drops out halfway through. What was her point, except to have a maid called Fellowes? And, what, really was the need for that? Kate Trent does not really do anything, and she is neither the voice of authority nor does she provide an obstacle to be overcome. The novel is based, loosely, upon a play of Guy Bolton’s Three Blind Mice about three sisters who run a small farm and set out to blow their inheritance in a quest for husbands and happiness, but somewhere the whole has become a disjointed conjunction of ideas.
Once Wodehouse had sorted the plot out tightly then he was confident with the writing process and could steam ahead. Problems occurred when, as he termed it, the plot ‘went off the rails’ as he was writing it. When it was clear in his mind, and transferred neatly to the paper, the writing process would be very rapid. The final 40,000 words of Leave It To Psmith - in other words about the second half of the book - took him three weeks to write. Once he had got a completed story written he felt he had broken the back of the work, and could concentrate on the bit he particularly relished, the tinkering and polishing. As he got older this process took longer and played a greater part in the whole operation. In an interview in 1971 for The Guardian he told Richard Usborne:
I’m always re-reading and rewriting what I’ve written. You put it down straight first time. Then you fiddle with it, change it, change it again, and it gets better.
Frequently this revision process could also involve the changing of plots as ideas might be added or taken away, as could characters. The serial Uncle Fred In The Springtime, written for the Saturday Evening Post, is a case in point, as the magazine decided that the plot was too complicated to be followed on a weekly basis, and so Wodehouse dropped one plot line and a couple of characters. The novel as published in book form was the original, longer version. Magazine stories and serials could also be rewritten before being published in book form. Sometimes this could amount to minor tinkerings, at other times substantial rewrites, such as when he formed the novel Laughing Gas from a 16,000-word, four-part magazine series. Public complaints about the ending of Leave It To Psmith when it was serialised lead to Wodehouse writing a new ending for book publication. Novels would also get transformed into magazine series. The Swoop, which was only published in Britain, was rewritten in 1916 for Vanity Fair about an invasion of America.
American editions of his works were often slightly different from English ones, and occasionally there were major changes. Something New (the American title for Something Fresh) included a 20-page scene which was taken from Mike, which had not been published in America. When Wodehouse submitted The Luck of the Bodkins to the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine rejected it. In a much shortened - by about a quarter - version it was accepted by the Red Book in America and The Passing Show in Britain. The American book publication used the text of the magazine version, while his British publishers preferred the fuller, original version.
The Prince And Betty was originally written for an American audience, and received magazine serialisation in May 1912. The story was a straightforward romance. For book publication in America, Wodehouse interweaved the plot from Psmith, Journalist, which had been serialised in Britain but not America. However, in England A & C Black were to publish Psmith, Journalist, and so the British version of The Prince And Betty was published in its original form as a straightforward romance story, by Mills & Boon. As a further indication of how Wodehouse would reuse material, the American version of The Prince And Betty was rewritten as a five-part serial, A Prince For Hire, which appeared in the American Illustrated Love Magazine in 1931.
My Man Jeeves includes the only four stories about Reggie Pepper which made it into book publication (and then only in Britain). Reggie Pepper is the catalyst for Bertie Wooster. Wodehouse, the great adapter, fashioned the character of Reggie Pepper from that of the standard stage dude, and then modified this figure to create Bertie Wooster. But Wooster was not born as a fully formed character. The early Bertie Wooster still has strong traces of a stage dude about him, with the stories punctuated with lots of ‘don’t you knows’, just as the Pepper stories are. As Wooster evolved into a more rounded character over the course of these early stories, so too did Jeeves. Jeeves’ tastes also became more upmarket. In the magazine version of the sole short story narrated by Jeeves he calls Bertie ‘the guv’nor’. Wodehouse changed this for the book publication of this story to reflect a more educated Jeeves. The early Jeeves of My Man Jeeves is not the well-read Jeeves of later works.
The four Jeeves stories in My Man Jeeves were to reappear in Carry On, Jeeves. The plots of three of the Reggie Pepper stories were also to reappear. Doing Clarence A Bit Of Good becomes Jeeves Makes An Omelette, while Helping Freddie is reproduced virtually word for word as the Jeeves story Fixing it For Freddie, with Jeeves taking on the role played by one of Pepper’s friends. Rallying Round Old George later becomes a Mulliner story, George And Alfred. Only seven Pepper stories were published in magazines.
Reggie Pepper first appeared in September 1911 in Helping Freddie in The Strand. He is a young man about town, who lives off the wealth inherited from his uncle who was a colliery owner. He narrates his own tales and describes himself as ‘a chap who’s supposed to be one of the biggest chumps in London’. [Disentangling Old Percy] Pepper is a more self-centred character than Bertie. Bertie’s head is full of ideas of performing valiant deeds for his friends, and he has a strict code of honour. It is this which causes him problems. Reggie Pepper is less virtuous, and so has less of a chance to get into scrapes. Pepper is a more earthy character than Wooster:
