The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 17
‘But dash it!’
‘It’s no good saying “But dash, it!” Do you think that I didn’t say “But, dash it!” when she forced these nauseous productions on me? You’ve got to do them. She insists. The first thing she will want to know is how they went.’
‘But the tough eggs at the back of the row will rush the stage and lynch me.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder.’
And later, Wodehouse twists the knife a little further:
I was sorry for the unhappy young blister of course, but it piqued me somewhat that he seemed to consider that he was the only one who had any troubles.
‘Well, I’ve got Christopher Robin poems.’
‘Pah!’ he said. ‘It might have been Winnie The Pooh.’
Well, there was that, of course.
Wodehouse again returned to the subject of Alfred Duff Cooper in Cocktail Time, which concerns a would-be politician who has written a sensational book. Cooper had written a biography of Earl Haig and another on Tallyrand:
Literary composition is not entirely barred to those whose ambition it is to carve for themselves a political career, but it has to be the right sort of literary composition - a scholarly life of Tallyrand for instance.
As well as containing digs at some of those whose conduct Wodehouse had taken exception to, some of his post-war works can be seen to be influenced by his wartime experiences in other ways. In Joy In The Morning, Wodehouse is at great pains to point out that writers can suffer from a lack of common sense:
One has of course to make allowances for writers, all of them being more or less potty.
I doubt you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.
I am not a vindictive man, but I was feeling in no amiable frame of mind towards this literary screwball. I mean, it’s all very well for a chap to plead he’s an author and expect on the strength of it to get away with conduct which would qualify the ordinary man for a one-way ticket to Colney Hatch.
One of Wodehouse’s defences of his wartime conduct was to ask for forgiveness and understanding as he realised that he had been ‘an ass’. These passages from Joy In The Morning, which was published in 1946 in America and a year later in Britain, can be seen a furtherance of this aim. But Wodehouse was not down on his profession of authorship far from it. His dislike of politicians, and sideswipes at them, had been a feature of his pre-war work. Now they often took a different style, in that politicians were compared unfavourably with authors. In Joy In The Morning comes this aside:
You can’t get away from it that he is one of the hottest of England’s young litterateurs. He earns more per annum than a Cabinet Minister.
In Much Obliged, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster gives up canvassing for his friend Ginger Winship and retires from the political fight for a fight over a Rex Stout novel. Much Obliged, Jeeves is critical of politics. Bertie Wooster is campaigning for a friend just because he is a pal as he has little understanding of the policies or issues involved. The candidate, Ginger Winship, is prepared to lose the election because love is more important than politics. Spode’s interest in getting into the House of Commons is depicted to be shallow when he abandons the idea after a potato is thrown at him at a political rally. Spode is never shown as possessing a desire to create a better world by his presence in the Commons, he is merely concerned in finding a suitable platform for his oratory.
Cocktail Time also brings the world of politics and literature into competition, and Sir Raymond Bastable chooses the world of literature. Lord Ickenham gives him this advice about the lower house:
‘Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot. I wouldn’t mix with them for any money you could offer me.’
Wodehouse was to continue to cheer himself up with a few sideswipes at politicians in the Wooster novels:
I love Gus like a brother, but after years of non-stop sleep he has about as much genuine intelligence as a Cabinet minister. [Much Obliged, Jeeves]
I knew the old relative to be quite choosy in the matter of guests. Cabinet ministers have sometimes failed to crash the gate. [Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit]
I had always supposed that poachers were tough-looking eggs who wore whatever they could borrow from the nearest scarecrow and shaved only once a week. He, to the contrary, was neatly clad in form-fitting tweeds and was shaven to the bone. His eyes were frank and blue, his hair a becoming grey. I have seen more raffish cabinet ministers. [Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen]
One of the more surprising reverberations of the wartime controversy was sparked off again by the publication of Performing Flea, a heavily edited selection of letters from Wodehouse to Townend. The book was carefully proof-read by libel lawyers, who suggested deleting the phrase ‘lawyers really are the damnedest fools.’ From this book sprang events which led to the forming of a friendship between Wodehouse and William Connor, of the infamous Cassandra broadcasts. In Performing Flea, Wodehouse had remembered that Cassandra had accused him of being called Pelham Grenville and hoped that the WD in WD Connor stood for Walpurgis Diarmid. Connor took up the theme in a Daily Mirror article - pointing out, among other things, that his initials were actually WN - and a lunch was arranged between the two of them. Out of this grew a friendship, and they would lunch together when Connor came to New York and kept up a regular correspondence. Wodehouse’s letters were always addressed ‘Dear Walp’.
This friendship has puzzled many. Was Wodehouse really so saintly that he could forgive someone who had damaged him so greatly? It is possible. It is also a possibility that he recognised that, if his greatest wartime accuser was going round saying that Wodehouse was actually a great bloke and a good pal of his, then this would be very beneficial to his reputation and Wodehouse might have set out for that initial lunch determined to become friends.
As Wodehouse got older his output slowed down. He spent less time each day writing, and when he worked he frequently found he was not able to rattle through the work as quickly as he once could. But all things are relative. Between 1946 and 1974 at least one new Wodehouse book was published in Britain each year, with the exception of 1955.
His inspiration was slightly on the wane. His novels became shorter and the process by which he put them together changed. Earlier in his career he had frequently over-written and at the polishing and revision stage he had to prune back his work. By the end of his career he was writing very short, and the polishing stage involved putting a lot of extra material in to plump out the work. This is graphically shown in Sunset At Blandings, an unfinished novel Wodehouse was working on at the time of his death. Wodehouse had written the draft copy of 16 chapters of a 22-chapter novel. These amount to only 30,000 words; at that ratio the finished book would only consist of around 40,000 words. Some of his earlier novels are two-and-a-half times this length. The ‘industry standard’ novel is normally at least 60,000 words. Wodehouse would have gone back through the text adding fresh material as much as revising.
It is a shame in a way that this unfinished novel came to be published, though the editing and notes by Richard Usborne throws light on Wodehouse’s methods of construction as well on his working techniques. Artistically, A Pelican At Blandings would have been a happier end to the Blandings saga. It has the feel of a retirement book. Lord Emsworth starts the book happy and alone at his castle, believing he is at last free of potential interruptions from his sisters. At the end of the book this happy state is returned to, with Gally and Emsworth unaccompanied at the castle. It would be a suitable drawing down of the curtain on Blandings. Wodehouse, who was 87 when the book was published, might consciously or sub-consciously have conceived it as such.
As Wodehouse got older so, too, did the new characters in his books. The author was in his late forties when he created Gally Threepwood who was only a few years his senior. His later works outside the Jeeves and Blandings cycles feature romances between the older generation and Sunset At Blandings features such a romance at its core.
When the Wodehouses first returned to New York they took an apartment in New York City. Guy Bolton had a house in the Long Island settlement of Remsenburg, and the Wodehouses bought a house there, too. Originally this was for use as a summer house, with their New York apartment being their base for the winter months, but in 1955 they gave up the apartment and moved to Remsenburg permanently. They bought the surrounding land to provide privacy. This land included a wood which ran down to a river. Here Wodehouse would exercise the dogs which were a central part of the extended family which also contained a number of cats. Some of these animals had come to the house as strays.
In his essay In Defence of PG Wodehouse, George Orwell had written: ‘if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end up being horribly ashamed of ourselves.’ What Orwell had feared transpired. The British government was still unwilling to forgive Wodehouse and on 16 December 1955 Wodehouse took out American nationality. He gave as his public reasons the fact that it cut back on red tape if he wanted to make a trip out of the country - which he by then had no intention of doing anyway - and that it seemed good manners to be a national of the county one lived in. Wodehouse was to end his life having lived in America for longer than he had in Britain. But he retained his English accent throughout his life, and his manuscripts were written with English spellings. The language he wrote in had always been freely adapted from the slang and idioms of both his native land and his adopted one. Normally he did so unselfconsciously, although sometimes he felt the need to slip footnotes into the text as he went along:
Coshes they are called, though blackjack is, I believe the American term [Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit]
Despite settling permanently in America, he would still set most of his work in England, even though, by the time he was writing his final work, he had not set foot in his native land for about forty years, nearly half his lifetime. In his language Wodehouse had carved out a world of his own; it was here that his England was situated. The march of time had only a cursory influence on Wodehouse’s fiction and some of his later works are hard to pin down to any set period. The Code of the Woosters, by nature of Spode’s dictatorship, is obviously set in the 1930s, the decade in which it was written. Jeeves In The Offing must be set no earlier than the 1960s as Spode is threatening to revoke his peerage, something which it only became possible do to by an Act of Parliament early in this decade. However the characters are not thirty years older than they were in The Code of the Woosters and Bertie is still happily going to stay at country houses with his valet in tow without it being remarkable - which, by the 1960s it would most certainly have been. Victory in the parliamentary by-election is between the Liberal and Conservative parties and there does not appear to be a Labour candidate. Shortly after when The Code of the Woosters was set, England was in a world war, but that is not when Jeeves In The Offing takes place. World wars are rarely registered in Wodehouse’s work, although Jeeves was involved in the First World War as was the hero of the Indiscretions Of Archie, and Lord Ickenham and Peasemarch were both in the Home Guard in the Second World War.
Perhaps Wodehouse’s work can be best termed as increasingly anachronistic, or maybe it is simply that it became even less anchored in any particular period of English history. He had created his template for his characters to work in, and this remained virtually constant throughout, with a few minor modifications and updates when the plot required it. Thus in Cocktail Time, Lord Ickenham is watching television in a pub, but he is doing so only so that it can give him an idea of how to hide a letter. Sometimes Wodehouse would be aware that his plots belonged to an age since past, and would excuse them. Even during the war he was writing this in Joy In the Morning:
If I were to submit a story to your aunt about a girl who couldn’t marry a fellow without some blasted head of family’s consent, she would hoot at it. That is to say, I am not allowed to turn an honest penny by using this complication in any work, but it is jolly well allowed to come barging in and ruining my life.
After the war he moved away from writing short stories. Only three of his 32 post-war works are collections of short stories; whereas he published thirteen collections before the war and two of his novels, The Inimitable Jeeves and Indiscretions Of Archie, started life as a series of magazine short stories. This reflected market conditions: there was no longer a plethora of magazines around which published short stories, so Wodehouse rarely wrote them. One magazine which did publish short stories was Playboy, so Wodehouse wrote for that, and these stories found their way into A Few Quick Ones and Plum Pie. Playboy also serialised Frozen Assets.
Wodehouse became more reclusive as he got older. He rarely travelled from Remsenburg, and grew to love the solitude and privacy of the area. It was a place where it was possible to walk around without seeing a soul, apart from a gardener or two. This was more Plum’s idea of bliss than Ethel’s, who was always naturally sociable, whereas her husband’s degree of reserve and shyness meant he was always politely sociable. Wodehouse, however, was not the total recluse some have painted him as. Journalists came to the house to interview him. He would go for walks with Guy Bolton when Bolton was around and he would travel to New York to preside at dinners of a branch of the Old Alleyian Society or to have lunch with English friends who were over in America. The Old Alleyian dinners were changed to Sunday lunches so that Wodehouse would not have to spend a night away from Remsenburg. His daily pattern was to do his exercises before breakfast which had been a feature of his life since 1919, and were based upon an article he had read in Collier’s. His exercising would occupy three-quarters of an hour, after which he would make his own breakfast. After breakfast he would settle down to work until midday whereupon he would watch television until lunch. After lunch he would take the dogs for a walk to collect the post. He might return to do some more work, before having a bath round five o’clock prior to cocktails and the evening meal. The Wodehouses ate early so as to allow their maid, who did not live in, to return home in good time. After dinner he would sometimes play two-handed bridge with Ethel or he would read. In 1964 Armine’s widow, Nella, came to live with them.
His health deteriorated as he aged. He had a giddy fit while out walking, and managed to totter into a doctor’s surgery. The doctor thought that a ‘bum’ had stumbled in who was either seriously ill or very drunk. He called for an ambulance to take him to Bellevue Hospital where derelicts were normally sent. In an effort to discover his unexpected patient’s identity, he went through his pockets and discovered that the well-loved jacket had been made in Savile Row, the scruffy shoes were of a good make and that the visitor’s fingernails were manicured. The ambulance was directed to an upmarket private hospital instead. As well as having a stroke in his seventies, Wodehouse was later diagnosed as having a brain tumour. He faced up to what he supposed would be the end of him, as he felt he was unable to survive an operation at his age. This diagnosis was later changed to one of ‘don’t know’ and he was to live for another twenty-two years. By the end of his life arthritis meant that he could only get around with some difficulty with a walking stick. Ethel was often confined to bed by ill health, yet she was to outlive her husband by nine years.
In November 1974 Wodehouse received a telephone call from the British Consul General in Washington asking him whether he would accept a knighthood if one were offered. This was a question demanded by protocol, rather than by a worry that Wodehouse might snub Britain after his wartime treatment. Wodehouse duly received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours of 1975. Another knighted in this list was the 87-year old Charlie Chaplin, Wodehouse’s junior by half a dozen years. Wodehouse was too old to travel to Britain for the ceremony, but the Queen Mother, a keen reader of Wodehouse, was eager to travel to America to present him with his gong; as she later telegraphed to the Wodehouse centenary celebrations in New York, she was ‘a devoted admirer of his work’. But her schedules could not be re-arranged to allow this, so it was arranged that the ceremony would be held in the British Consulate at New York with the British Ambassador coming from Washington to confer the award.
But, before then, Wodehouse went into hospital suffering from pemphiguf, a skin disorder. He took with him the manuscript of the novel he was engaged upon and a song lyric he was working on. He had continued to work on song lyrics even though he had long since stopped working in musical theatre. On Valentine’s Day he got out of bed to walk across the room, and died. The Remsenburg post office lowered its flag to half mast, where it hung just clear of the piled-up snow. A fortnight later the Acting Consul General drove out from New York and presented Wodehouse’s insignia and warrant to Lady Wodehouse.
Timeless
Will there ever be another like PG Wodehouse? Indeed, how could there be another like him? He was a product of his age, and the conditions which forged him as a writer are no longer present in contemporary society.
His career depended upon two foundations. The principle one was the proliferation of magazines which published fiction around the time he became a freelancer. Indeed, it was only because of this that he was able to set out on the freelance path. What would a banking clerk do now if he wanted to become a fiction writer? What they could not do is chuck in their day job confident in the knowledge of selling enough pieces to magazines to make a living while they honed their craft. Few magazines these days publish fiction, and those that do tend to hunt out the stories they publish from established names. Wodehouse was in the right place at the right time. The Victorian love of reading, universal education and the absence of many competing attractions led to a healthy market for budding writers. Often a story of his would do the rounds of the magazines before it was accepted, and the Wodehouse bank account had a further addition. Some of his work he did not manage to sell to anyone.
