The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 9
Wodehouse was intelligent and self-effacing. The first attribute meant that he was perfectly able to summon the ability to cope with his banking tasks, although summoning the interest might be a bit harder - one of his colleagues remembered Wodehouse as cheerfully slapdash in his record-keeping in the postage department, where all new clerks were put to work. The second attribute meant that Wodehouse was not going to crow about it. Indeed, ever eager to exploit a situation for its humorous potential, his failure as a banker became one of his set pieces. He liked to make out that he was sacked from the bank for writing a humorous piece in the front of the new ledger, describing the grand ceremony of its opening. He was not. He left voluntarily, shortly after this incident, because he was then able to fulfil his desire to be a full-time writer.
This came about through a Dulwich connection. Learning that a former assistant master at Dulwich, William Beach-Thomas, was assistant editor of the By The Way column on The Globe newspaper, he applied to him for work. Beach-Thomas, remembering Wodehouse’s work for The Alleyian, agreed to let Wodehouse stand in for him on the column when he took a day off. This first happened on 16 August 1901, when Wodehouse earned a guinea for his labours. Other odd days followed before he was offered a full week’s work in April 1902. Wodehouse, telling the bank that he had neuralgia - the same reason Henry Blake-Somerset uses to excuse his absence from work in Frozen Assets - spent the week at The Globe. The duties were intense but not long. The working day on the By The Way column started at 10am and finished at midday. In this time Wodehouse had to write a set of topical verses and make humorous or facetious comments on the news of the day.
By September 1902 Wodehouse was ready to leave the bank. The Public School Magazine, which had published Wodehouse’s first professional work, was founded by A & C Black in 1898. Its success led to George Newnes starting up The Captain. Later Wodehouse was to say that reading a story in this magazine set him on to the idea that he, too, could write public school stories. In January 1902 The Public School Magazine started serialising The Pothunters. In March the magazine folded, unable to cope with competition from The Captain, with Wodehouse’s serial unfinished. A & C Black agreed to publish the full serial - which was given a hurried ending in the final issue - in book form instead. The company were to publish all of his public-school stories after they had been serialised in The Captain. Publication day was 18 September and Wodehouse was to receive a standard 10% royalty.
‘Are you going to write another?’
‘Dozens now that my time is my own.’
‘Wasn’t it always?’
‘No, I had a job in the City and could only write at night. Writing at night after a hard day at the office is difficult.’ [Company for Henry]
By now Wodehouse was making more from his writing than he was from his day job, and had saved £50 from his earnings. So when Beach-Thomas asked Wodehouse if he could stand in for him for a five-week spell while he took his annual holiday, Wodehouse gratefully abandoned his banking career and became a full-time writer. He was to remain one for 72 years.
That September the bank clerk on £6.13s a month, was transformed into a full-time journalist who had made £16.4s in his first month, a published author in book form and a contributor to Punch, which published its first article by him the day before his first book came out.
Wodehouse in his early years was as much a journalist as an author. It short, he was a hack, turning out anything and everything he could to make a pound. He worked quickly and with dedication. Happy with his own company, as he was to be all his life, he did not have an active social life to distract him, though he was a keen and regular games player. As industrious an author as a journalist, he had ten more books published in the six-and-half years after The Pothunters came out. And a varied collection they were too, including five more public-school tales, a children’s story, a collection of pieces from The Globe, two adult novels and a 22,000-word book written in five days aimed at the railway bookshop market as light reading for a journey.
The children’s story was William Tell Told Again, a reworking of a Swiss legend, for which Wodehouse was commissioned to write some text to accompany pictures by Philip Dadd and verses by John W. Houghton. It was the only children’s story he was to write, but the first of several books where the plot was already given to him and he merely had to put it into words.
The Swoop, Or How Clarence Saved England, is even more of an oddity in Wodehouse’s extensive canon. This was his reaction to the invasion-scare stories which were proving a profitable literary sub-genre at the time. These books sought to shake the British out of what their authors perceived as complacency towards German aggression and the threat of invasion and the nation’s lack of military preparedness.
Wodehouse saw another motive in this flourishing publishing activity, as he explains in his introduction to the book, which was published by Alston Rivers:
It is necessary that England should be roused to a sense of her peril, and only by setting down without flinching the probable results of an invasion can this be done. The story, I may mention, has been written and published purely from a feeling of patriotism and duty. Mr Alston Rivers’ sensitive soul will be jarred to its foundations if it is a financial success. So will mine. After all, at the worst, it is a small sacrifice to make for our country.
In The Swoop, nine foreign forces, including the Swiss navy, independently invade Britain at the same time, and 14-year old Clarence Chugwater, using his boy-scout training, comes to the rescue of his homeland. When the Germans arrive at his front door, his father tries to let the house to them, his elder brother endeavours to sell them life insurance, his younger brother wants them to buy his motor bike and his sisters attempt to interest them in buying tickets for a concert.
Britain is relaxed about these foreign invaders, the stop press of Clarence’s newspaper only carrying the news of the German army invading Essex after it has given the cricket scores. But eventually the British are forced to take these foreigners in their midst seriously as
the troops of Prince Otto had done grievous damage. Cricket pitches had been trampled down, and in many cases even golf-greens dented by the iron heel of the invader, who rarely, if ever, replaced the divot. Fishing was at a standstill. Croquet had been given up in despair. Near Epping the Russians shot a fox.
The commanders of the invading armies are signed on as music hall acts, and argue among themselves as to the size of their fees. When Clarence eventually rids the country of the invaders, he is rewarded by being given a music hall turn himself.
In 1903 Wodehouse was visited by Herbert Westbrook, a prep-school master who wanted to make a career as a writer, with a letter of introduction from one of Wodehouse’s former colleagues in the bank. A friendship sprang up between the two men, and Wodehouse was invited to visit him at his school. This establishment was eccentrically run by Baldwin King-Hall, a cricket fanatic who used to hold a morning meeting from his bed at ten o’clock while he ate his breakfast. Baldwin-King and Wodehouse also took to each other and Wodehouse left his Chelsea lodgings to move to Emsworth House where he took rooms above the stables. Wodehouse took no part in the teaching, but helped to put on plays and played in cricket matches on the school grounds.
Westbrook was a classicist with great charm and ambitious plans for the future. He had a communal attitude to property, but only in the sense of what’s yours is mine, for he would borrow money without intending to pay it back, and on one occasion borrowed Wodehouse’s dress clothes, leaving their rightful owner, who had needed them that night, to go out attired in the suit of an uncle of an entirely different build. This became raw material for the story First Aid for Dora.
That this is a Ukridge story is no coincidence, for Ukridge was based upon Westbrook. Or certainly the Ukridge of the short stories: the Ukridge who first appeared, in the first adult novel Wodehouse wrote, in Love Among The Chickens, is a slightly different beast. The Ukridge here is an amalgam of two people, the second of whom is Carrington Craxton. He and a friend had set themselves up as chicken farmers in Devon without either of them knowing anything about chickens. Townend, a friend of Craxton’s, relayed tales of some of their adventures to Wodehouse who used them as a basis for his novel. But Ukridge is not the central character in this story, it is the narrator, Jeremy Garnet.
Wodehouse was keen to establish a character for whom he could write a series of stories, and sixteen years later in Ukridge he saw someone who could be developed into such a character so Ukridge became a bachelor, more seedy and more fully drawn. Part of the style of Love Among The Chickens was retained in that the tales are told by a journalist friend, the bachelor James Corcoran, who inherited this role from Garnet. In other respects the style of the only Ukridge novel, which was all over the place, was abandoned. The novel starts with the story being narrated about Jeremy Garnet, then becomes narrated by him, and finishes with his wedding, which is written up in play form. When, fourteen years later, Wodehouse came to revise the work for a new edition, he made Garnet narrate the whole story, which is now minus the wedding scene. As a comic work, the novel lacks sufficient humour. It never really takes off. The situations are not developed enough. Maybe the author took the plots too closely from real life. However, it was the book which launched him in America. He had turned down an offer from a friend living in the States to help him get his school stories placed with an American publisher. He wanted to hit America as an adult writer. His school stories had served a purpose in getting him up and running in Britain and out of the bank, but they are not where he saw his long-term future.
Ukridge is the most immoral of Wodehouse’s leading characters. Wodehouse loved his creation and wrote about him at intervals throughout his life. The final Ukridge short story occurs in A Few Quick Ones, published in 1959. The Ukridge stories divide fans of PG Wodehouse. Some simply do not care for them, mainly because they do not care for Ukridge. Rogues can be popular characters, but they normally have to be loveable rogues. Ukridge is immoral, but lacks the charm or softer side to make us like him. One of the most popular characters in the history of British television sit-com is Del Boy in Only Fools And Horses. He is a rogue and a crook, but has a kinder side and can be generous with his money, time and emotions. He is a sympathetic character. He is also unsuccessful, which makes us well disposed to him rather than jealous. Ukridge is also unsuccessful on the whole, although he has his minor triumphs. The problem with these minor triumphs is that sometimes his victim is not deserving. When in Ukridge’s Dog College he does down his landlord by getting out of paying his rent and getting the landlord to settle his tradesmen’s accounts do we cheer him on? What have we got against his landlord? Psmith takes as his targets the more legitimate figures of established authority. We do not mind if they are taken down a peg or two; they are high enough already. But Ukridge does down those less able to take the punishment. Ukridge sponges off his fellow strugglers.
It is hard to sympathise with Ukridge. This detracts from the stories, which are well written and crafted, and often have more plot than Wodehouse would usually use for a short story. But Wodehouse’s fondness for his character is considerably above that which the average reader has. Richard Usborne in A Wodehouse Companion states that Ukridge contains ‘some of the best stories that Wodehouse ever wrote.’ The stories are probably better than our enjoyment of them. In Wodehouse At Work he writes ‘one loves that man.’ The problem is that many readers do not.
Ukridge is a liar, thief, blackmailer and con man. He has little in the way of conscience or scruples. He has few, if any, compensatory characteristics to make us like him. Corky’s landlord, Bowles, approves of him and that he is good with dogs is about all you can say in his defence. It is not nearly enough. Putting the case for Ukridge might involve pointing out that, although he sets out to double-cross people, he often ends as the one who is double crossed instead. However, this does not make us feel sympathy for him; ‘getting his just deserts’, is a more likely reaction. It is easy to admire some of the Ukridge stories, harder to enjoy them.
Wodehouse’s final school story was set at Emsworth, and called The Eighteen Carat Kid. With a love interest added, it came out in book form as The Little Nugget. Some commentators have classified this as his final school story, but, although set at a school, it is written from an adult perspective and is an adventure rather than a school story. Again, the plotting has some holes in it. There are the odd daft premises, such as how White the butler exposes the schoolmaster Burns as a kidnapper, when Burns could as easily expose White as Smooth Sam Fisher, the head of a criminal gang, and also at the school as a kidnapper. The set-up and the action are artificial, and why is Miss Sheridan, whose job is to look after the Little Nugget, still at the school when he had been kidnapped days before? It is this book which sets one of the standard patterns of Wodehouse: there is the country house and its grounds where the majority of the action takes place, and there is London. No other places exist. So when the Little Nugget has gone, it is taken as read that it is to London he has ventured.
Between 1903 and 1914 Wodehouse spent a lot of time at Emsworth. He moved from above the stables into a house called Threepwood in 1904. In the autumn of 1904 Beach-Thomas resigned from his position as assistant editor of the By The Way column and Wodehouse became his replacement. The holiday relief cover job Wodehouse gave to Westbrook. A year later the editor resigned and Wodehouse took on his job. Westbrook became his assistant and William Townend became the holiday cover.
With Westbrook, Wodehouse collaborated on a novel which was published as Not George Washington. The plot concerns a young man trying to establish himself in London as a successful writer. The man is James Orlebar Cloyster who lives at 23 Walpole Street in Chelsea, where Wodehouse had digs, and works for a London evening paper The Orb where he writes the ‘On Your Way’ column. As with Wodehouse, the first humorous article he had published was called ‘Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings’. Wodehouse was employed by the actor-manager Seymour Hicks and worked on The Beauty of Bath at the Hicks Theatre; Cloyster is employed by the actor-manager Stanley Briggs to work on The Belle of Wells at the Briggs Theatre.
Cloyster’s fiancée lives in Guernsey, where Wodehouse was schooled. Cloyster will marry her when he becomes a success and to hide his achievements he writes articles under a friend’s name. This is a tactic Wodehouse himself used, presumably recognising that magazines did not want too many Wodehouse bylines in any one issue. Later, when he worked on Vanity Fair, he would write great chunks of the magazine himself, but many of these articles would appear under nom de plumes, some of them rather transparent, such as Pelham Grenville and J. Plum. Not George Washington was divided into thirds with a different narrator for each; the first narrator was the fiancée. Although he experimented with female narrators in some of his earliest work, he was happier speaking with a male voice about male attitudes and would always employ a male character when he used a narrator in his later work.
Another collaboration was with Charles Bovill on A Man of Means, about the adventures of a man who comes in to a great deal of money, which ran in The Strand from April to September 1914. The pair had devised the plots together, and Wodehouse had written them up. The series stopped when war left Wodehouse stranded in America and his collaborator in England.
America
Wodehouse first visited America in 1904, when he took his five weeks’ annual holiday from The Globe and went to stay in New York with a friend from his banking days. He also visited the training camp of the middleweight boxer ‘Kid’ McCoy, who was preparing for a title fight with ‘Philadelphia’ Jack O’Brien. In his reminiscences, Wodehouse claimed that boxing was the lure which took him across to America. So, too, would have been the knowledge that America had a flourishing English-language publishing industry, attractive to any freelancer.
Jerry’s got vision. He realised that the only way for a writer to make a packet nowadays is to muscle in on the American market, so he took time off and dashed over there to study it. [Pigs Have Wings]
He sold a series of stories about the boxer Kid Brady, which appeared from September 1905 onwards, and brought him $50 an episode, £10 under the then dollar-sterling exchange rate. His American jaunt also helped him become more marketable to English publishers. Now he could sell his expertise on, and understanding of, matters in America. In August Punch published his article ‘Society Whispers From The States’. As Lady Malvern explains in Jeeves And The Unbidden Guest:
No doubt you have read India and the Indians? My publishers are anxious for me to write a companion volume on the United States. I shall not be able to spend more than a month in the country, as I have to get back for the season, but a month should be ample. I was less than a month in India, and my dear friend Sir Roger Cremore wrote his America from Within after a stay of only two weeks.
Lady Malvern, indeed, might be been seen as a rather slow and over-fussy researcher when compared with her peer group:
He had been introduced to an elderly and adhesive baronet, who had recently spent ten days in New York, and escape had not been without a struggle. The baronet, on his return to England, had published a book entitled ‘Modern America and its People’ and it was with regard to the opinions expressed in this volume that he wanted Jimmy’s views. [A Gentleman of Leisure]
Wodehouse’s second visit to America was in 1909. He had had Love Among The Chickens published in May of that year, but the money from the man appointed to be his agent was not forthcoming and this provided strong motivation for returning. Shortly after arriving, Wodehouse sold a short story for $200 and another for $300. These were fees well beyond his English experience, so he wired his resignation to The Globe and settled down in America to make his fortune. Or so he hoped.
In New York one may find every class of paper which the imagination can conceive. [Psmith, Journalist]
