The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 6
Schooldays
To Adair, Sedleigh was almost a religion. Both his parents were dead; his guardian, with whom he spent the holidays, was a man with neuralgia at one end of him and gout at the other; and the only really pleasant times Adair had had, as far back as he could remember, he owed to Sedleigh. The place had grown on him, absorbed him. [Mike]
With a few technical variations, this can be seen as a statement of Wodehouse’s situation. Even when established as a high-earning author, he would return to the school to report on matches for The Alleyian, travelling over from France to do so. When the cricket XI went through the 1938 season unbeaten, Wodehouse paid for them to have dinner in the West End and watch a show at the Palladium. Even from across the Atlantic he would follow the scores of the Dulwich teams, despite the fact that they were of a different generation and he could know little, if anything, about the person or type of player behind the names. But the romance of the place, and of his schooldays, remained with him always. In trying to explain John Carroll’s emotions on unexpectedly encountering the girl he loves, Wodehouse writes:
Only once in his life before could he remember having felt as he felt now, and that was one raw November evening at school at the close of the football match against Marlborough when, after battling wearily through a long half-hour to preserve the slenderest of all possible leads, he had heard the referee’s whistle sound through the rising mists and had stood up, bruised and battered and covered in mud, to the realisation that the game was over and won.
This passage appears in Money For Nothing, published when Wodehouse was 46, and 28 years out of Dulwich. Wodehouse had been a member of the first XV in his final year and The Alleyian noted that at 12st 6lb he was: “A heavy forward. Has improved greatly, but still inclined to slack in the scrum. Always up to take a pass. Good with his feet. Still inclined to tackle high.”
Wodehouse was a good all-round school sportsman, and was a member of the cricket first eleven for two seasons. He also boxed, being noted for his scientific manner rather than his brutality. But declining eyesight curtailed his boxing career. It cannot have helped his cricket either, and it is no surprise that a great deal of this was played as a number eleven batsman. It was as a fast bowler that Wodehouse excelled. In his first season for the eleven he took seven wickets for 50 runs against Tonbridge, including the wicket of Kenneth Hutchings for 60. Hutchings was a fine schoolboy batsman who went on to play for England seven times. In his final year in the school Wodehouse played for the Remove against the Modern VI when he took the first nine wickets - eight bowled and one LBW. One of his team mates in his final season in the college XI was NA Knox, who also played for England, and was described by Sir Jack Hobbs as ‘the best bowler I ever saw.’ Wodehouse was to claim that one of his proudest achievements was that he used to go on to bowl before Knox, although ‘he was a child of about ten then.’ Knox was, in fact, three years younger than Wodehouse.
Cricket was to be a frequent setting of Wodehouse’s early writing, and a feature of his social life. He became a member of Surrey County Cricket Club, and, later, was a founder member of the Hollywood CC, taking the minutes at their inaugural meeting and contributing $100 to buy equipment. By then he was 53 and a non-playing member. He had continued to play cricket long after leaving school, though. Six times he had played at Lord’s for the Authors side.
Cricket is the great safety-valve. If you like the game, and are in a position to play it at least twice a week, life can never be entirely grey. [Mike]
Cricket began to have less of a role in his writing when he began to aim at the American market simply because this audience would not understand it. By then a keen golfer, Wodehouse made golf the subject of his sporting short stories, often using the same plotlines as he had employed in his cricket ones. One of the staples of these stories is that something - normally ownership or rights - depends upon the outcome of a sporting encounter. For example, Tom, Dick And Harry is about two cricketers who agree that whoever gets the higher score in the forthcoming match can have a free hand at wooing the object of their affections, only for them both to find that she is already engaged. This is the same storyline as the golf story The Long Hole.
But the biggest influence Wodehouse’s love of cricket had on his work came as a result of the Warwickshire County Cricket Club secretary cutting himself while shaving during a walking holiday in Yorkshire in 1910. The local doctor, having carried out remedial action, recommended a spell watching the cricket match at Hawes. The Warwickshire secretary, RV Ryder, was impressed with one of the Hawes bowlers - who, unbeknownst to him, had had an unsuccessful trial with Yorkshire - and at the end of the innings asked him if he would like to play for Warwickshire.
Being neither born nor resident in Warwickshire necessitated the bowler undertaking a two-year qualification period, and so he only played his first championship game in 1913. That season he took 106 wickets in first-class cricket. The next season was almost as productive for him - he finished with 90 wickets - but he received an accolade which was second only to being picked for England when he was selected for the Players against the Gentlemen. That year it was the highest accolade available, as England played no test matches. He took 4 for 44 in the second innings and helped the Players to victory. Pelham (‘Plum’) Warner, a leading figure in cricket’s establishment and frequently a selector, prophesied an England career for him.
One of those who had been impressed by his bowling was Wodehouse. He watched Warwickshire play Gloucestershire at Cheltenham in 1913 when he was down visiting his parents. He had been taken by the player’s bowling action - described by Wisden as ‘an easy action’ - rather than his performance, for the bowler only took one wicket in the match. When he was hunting around for a character name he remembered this bowler, Percy Jeeves, and gave the character his surname. The first Jeeves story appeared in America in September 1915, and four months later in Britain. Six months after this, Percy Jeeves was killed at the Battle of the Somme, leaving behind according some accounts a fiancée in Annie Austin, the younger sister of the Warwickshire scorer. She lived into her eighties, but never married. ‘He was very popular among his fellow cricketers’ recorded Wisden in its obituary. Fifty-nine years later, Reginald Jeeves’ creator was also to have his death recorded in Wisden, as ‘a member of the Dulwich College XI in 1899 and 1900’ and ‘godfather of MG Griffith the late Captain of Sussex.’
MG Griffith was christened ‘Mike’, as opposed to Michael, after Wodehouse’s schoolboy cricketer. His father was a friend of Wodehouse’s, a friendship which arose through both attending Dulwich College, though they were not contemporaries. This is a neat reversal of the more common habit of cricketers giving their names to fictional characters, of whom Sherlock Holmes is another example. Sherlock Holmes - originally called Sherringford Holmes and then Sherrington Hope - gained his Christian name from an amalgamation of the names of two Nottinghamshire players, Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock. Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, was named after Thomas and William Mycroft of Derbyshire and Dr Roylott, who appears in The Adventure Of The Speckled Band, came from a corruption of the name of Arnold Rylott, a Leicestershire cricketer. Lord Ickenham is Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton. Altamont was an alias used by Sherlock Holmes.
Recollecting his schooldays with Bill Townend, Wodehouse remembered waiting at the station for The Strand so as to read the latest Sherlock Holmes story. Later, Wodehouse and Doyle became friends as well as fellow contributors to The Strand. Indeed, Doyle was his captain on the occasion of Wodehouse’s greatest triumph as a batsman, when he scored sixty runs from the number four position for the Authors against the Publishers at Lord’s in 1911. When Wodehouse wrote: ‘isn’t there enough sadness in life without going out of your way to fasten long planks to your feet and jumping off mountains’ [Young Men In Spats] he is poking fun at his friend, who was a keen skier. Wodehouse’s books are speckled with phrases which are quotations and adaptations from Sherlock Holmes. In Right Ho, Jeeves, Bertie sets himself up as a form of consulting practice, obviously strongly influenced by his readings of Sherlock Holmes: (‘You know my methods, Jeeves. Apply them.’ ‘Tell me the whole story in your own words,’ I said. ‘Omitting no detail, however apparently slight, for one never knows how important the most trivial detail may be.’) Jeeves, in the end, has the last laugh. In planning Bertie’s discomfort he picks up on Bertie’s fascination with Sherlock Holmes to persuade him to raise a fire alarm in the night: ‘Possibly you may recollect that it was an axiom of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that the instinct of everyone, upon an alarm of fire, is to save the object dearest to them.’
Mystery stories were some of Wodehouse’s favourite reading throughout his life, and he was happy to give those authors he liked a boost in his own writings. In The Spot Of Art, Lucius Pim tells Bertie Wooster that ‘it is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace.’ Rex Stout gets similar approval in Much Obliged, Jeeves.
Bearing in mind Wodehouse’s love of mystery stories and his massive output, many have questioned why Wodehouse did not write this type of story himself. Erroneously, they have suggested that his facility in drawing out intricate plots for his farces would mean that he would be a good plotter of a detective novel. But farce plots are very different from detective ones. Wodehouse’s plots were always very mechanical: if A happens then B will follow. This is stated as a fact and the readers know that it will happen. If the policeman is pushed into the pond then he will decide that being a copper is too dangerous and will give up the force. But detective stories rely upon doubt, of readers nosing around at the edges. A Wodehouse comic novel does not encourage this. If you do so, you will find some rather rough edges. This is not so much a critique of Wodehouse, but of the genre.
Two other factors, more specific to Wodehouse, would also militate against success as a mystery writer. The first is that he was not a great originator: he far preferred to be an adapter, whether of plots, scenarios, phrases or characters. He liked always to have some form of template to work from. Whether he would have been happy dreaming up original plots with novel resolutions is extremely doubtful. Agatha Christie, another writer whose work Wodehouse enjoyed, made her reputation not on the brilliance of her prose, but on the ingenuity of the identification of her criminals. Wodehouse’s reputation rests very much on the opposite - on the brilliance of his language, not on the unexpectedness of his plots.
A second hindrance would be Wodehouse’s lack of attention to detail, or indifference to it. What is the Christian name of Psmith? Wodehouse calls him both Rupert and Ronald. Is Lord Emsworth’s favourite book written by Whiffle or Whipple? Does this author recommend a daily intake of 5,700 or 57,000 calories? Was Jeeves’ replacement as manservant called Brinkley or Bingley? Was Bertie Wooster’s prep school headmaster Aubrey Upjohn or Arnold Abney? Does Lord Emsworth like tea or not? What does Freddie Threepwood look like? Is he slim and blond or heavy and loutish looking? Is Monty Bodkin, Montague or Montrose and is he the nephew of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe or not? How many people does it take to manhandle the Empress of Blandings - one or two? How do you travel overland to Madeira when it is an island? Is the Market Blandings taxi driver Jno. or Ed. Robinson? How can Something Fresh be set between the hunting and shooting seasons when they overlap? How could Lord Emsworth have won a prize for tulips at the same time as Psmith’s father won a prize for roses when these seasons do not overlap? How can Lord Emsworth’s maternal grandmother be the Countess of Emsworth? How could Psmith, an alumnus of two public schools and a member of six London clubs, stay at Blandings confident of not being recognised as an impostor when the house was filling up with guests coming for the County Ball?
For all of these multiple-choice questions both answers are correct, depending on which book you happen to choose to find your answer from. Wodehouse explained that Psmith had his Christian name changed in Leave It To Psmith as Baxter was in that book and was given the name Rupert, so Psmith ceases to have the name of Rupert so as not to have two characters with the same first name. But why on earth can’t two characters who are always referred to by their surname have the same Christian name?
Bertie’s replacement manservant for Jeeves is called Brinkley in Thank You, Jeeves. In Much Obliged, Jeeves he is called Bingley. The reason for this is presumably that Brinkley was a name Wodehouse had already used when he christened Aunt Dahlia’s house. As Much Obliged, Jeeves is set at Brinkley, he perhaps decided he could not have a character with the name Brinkley as well. Why is not clear. Surely the social-climbing former valet having a name similar to that of the great house of the area could be a source of humour? Instead Wodehouse just changes the name of his character. This is the action of a man indifferent to detail. In picking Bingley, Wodehouse was selecting a name he had broken in. By that stage he had written about Teddy Bingley, a golfer who appears in Wilton’s Holiday; Gladys Bingley, Lancelot Mulliner’s fiancée; Bingley Crocker, the baseball-loving father of Piccadilly Jim; the golfer Marcelle Bingley; Little Johnny Bingley the adult midget child-actor; Elsa Bingley, secretary to John Shoesmith; Mrs Bingley, Lord Tilbury’s former cook, and Lancelot Bingley, the rising young artist. Lower Bingley contains people of sporting blood and Bingley-on-Sea is where Frederick Mulliner’s nanny lives and the Drones Club plays golf, and Bingley versus Bingley is one of the court cases which has given Sir Raymond Bastable a low opinion of the modern young woman.
Wodehouse could suffer from a lack of imagination, or maybe just interest, on occasion. He liked to fall back on the tried and tested in phrases, plots and scenarios. Who describes who as mentally negligible? Jeeves says this of Bertie Wooster, famously so, as a plot hinges upon it. But Keggs, the butler at Belpher Castle, ‘did not dislike Reggie, but intellectually he considered him to be negligible’. [A Damsel In Distress] Aunt Agatha eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as does Mugsy Bostock and also Abe Erlanger who features in Bring On The Girls, a slightly fictitious autobiographical account of Wodehouse and Bolton’s theatrical career; Pop Stoker merely chews broken glass. Even Wodehouse’s most famous dedication, in The Heart Of A Goof, ‘To Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time’ echoes one eight years before it in the first edition of A Gentleman Of Leisure, when the subject was Herbert Washbrook. Subsequently the dedication in this book was made out to Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in the play of the book.
For Wodehouse, plots were increasingly something to hang his humour on. He took great care over constructing them, but they are essentially linear in construction. Lateral thinking is not encouraged. For readers of Wodehouse novels in their original English, plots are not that essential, as we read the books primarily for the joy of the language. Therefore, some slight artificiality in the plot construction does not matter. In a detective story, where plot becomes far more important, this is more of a hindrance. I struggle to understand quite what it is that readers of Wodehouse’s works in translation get out of them. Logically, for them, plot must be far more important, as ideas such as ‘I could see that while not exactly disgruntled, he was far from feeling gruntled’ [The Code Of The Woosters] will lose everything in translation. For such readers of Wodehouse, presumably it is the general air of bonhomie and the richness of some of the characterisation which add the extra ingredients.
An idea of what Wodehouse might be like in translation for those too mono-lingual to be able to read his work in a foreign language is suggested by dramatisations of his work. These do not come off very well, simply because the richness of Wodehouse’s language and of his descriptions and scene-setting are lost. In dramatisations, the plots become a larger part of the overall package, and the work suffers as a result. While Wodehouse’s novels are still eagerly bought and read, the plays he wrote are rarely performed and hard to get hold of. Indeed, some have never been professionally performed.
Wodehouse was asked why he did not write mystery stories, and he replied that he did not have the ability to. This is not, as some have taken it, modesty, but realism. Wodehouse was a practical writer. Mystery stories, always popular, would have been a useful earner for the young and struggling Wodehouse looking to place his short stories in magazines. If he could sell it, he would write it.
His first book is based around a mystery story. The Pothunters is about - but only very slightly - some stolen cups and their recovery. A detective is called in, but his role is slight and the book concerns itself, in light of this vacuum, with other matters. Not only is detection and a detective-story plot largely absent, what there is of it does not make any sense. The first bit of detective work is when the ’tec decides that, because the breaking of the window was clumsily done, it was an amateur’s effort to break into the pavilion where the cups were temporarily being stored. The next bit is when he unmasks the villain, which depends more on lucky coincidence than clever detection. The detective happened to be walking past a public house when someone comes out and drops his wallet. He picks it up for him, noticing, as he does so, that there is quite of bit of money in it. He therefore takes his photograph (how is not recorded) and shows it to the groundsman who says that the chap in the photograph had been working on the school grounds ‘at the time of the robbery’. (The robbery took place at night in fact, so around the time would be more accurate.) So the detective toddles over to this chap’s house, and he obligingly confesses, just as he equally obligingly seems to have allowed his picture to be taken face on from close range, or otherwise how would it be good enough for the groundsman to be able to identify him?
