08.11.2009

PG Wodehouse in brief

A BRIEF HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGY OF PG WODEHOUSE

PG Wodehouse was born on the 15th October 1881 in Guildford, Surrey, England. He was educated at Dulwich College between 1894 & 1900. In 1900 he entered the employ of the Hong Kong & Shanghai bank at £80 per year! He began writing articles for various newspapers & periodicals. In 1902 he resigned from the bank. In the same year his 1st novel The Pothunters was published.

On the 25th April 1904 Plum arrived in New York for the first time. This was the beginning of Plum's career in musicals and editorships. As the money starts to come in Plum buys a car (a Darracq Auto). After one lesson he crashes the car into a hedge and never drives again!

Plum then wrote many highly successful novels as well as musicals. In 1929 he signed a contract to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He complains of being paid far too much money for far too little work! This causes a mini public relations storm in the US press

In 1932 Plum returned to England for a short time before settling in France In 1940 Germany occupied France and Plum was interned Wodehouse made a series of radio broadcasts which were widely misconstrued He was vilified and persecuted by the BBC and the English press. Confidential records now released show that Wodehouse was totally innocent of the accusations. Guilty perhaps only of a little naivety

In 1947 Plum moved back to the USA In 1955 he became a US citizen In 1967 British Prime Minister James Callaghan blocked a Knighthood, read the government report. In 1974 his last complete novel Aunts aren't Gentlemen was published In 1975 he was finally knighted by the Queen Plum's health was so poor his Doctor forbade the trip to England. It is believed that the Queen Mother felt so strongly for Wodehouse and at the appalling treatment he had received that she wanted to travel to the US and Knight him herself! However once again Government interference unjustly stopped this

On the 14th Feb 1975 Plum sadly died in hospital "after a good morning's work on his latest novel"

Wodehouse was the quintessential British author who only now receives the full credit he deserves.

Tony Blair Recommends P.G. Wodehouse

Letter to Penguin books following re-release of Wodehouse books

Someone once wrote that the world was divisible into people who liked PG Wodehouse's stuff, and those who didn't. New Labour is, of course, more inclusive than that. But I know what they meant.

To remember reading my first Wodehouse is the work of a moment. A Jeeves short story, as it happens, and no doubt a Penguin paperback. Even at this distance, what stabs at the memory is simply how funny it was. How well-written, and how inventive, too. But just how funny: almost every sentence, pretty well every page, and over many, many years for PG Wodehouse, close on every book. I re-read Wodehouse whenever the work pressure gets hard.

Wodehouse has kept himself in print because of his appeal - in Britain, and widely abroad, though I often wonder how on earth he is translatable into other languages. But 80 years after Jeeves and Bertie first appeared, the idea of presenting PG Wodehouse to new audiences and new readers is a good one. I envy those who've never read him before - the prospect of reams of unread Wodehouse stretching out in front of you is, to long-standing admirers and readers like me and millions of others, something which is enticing to contemplate.

Reissuing all the Jeeves and Wooster titles is a pretty good second. I welcome new and not-so-new readers to the Wodehouse fold.

Tony Blair

John Mortimer on PG WodehouseRelated Pages

The Sunday Times 29.08.04

Bertie Wooster's friend — a certain Claude Cattennole Pirbright — was in low spirits, so P G Wodehouse wrote that "his brow was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and his air was that of a man who, if he said 'allo girls' would have said it like someone in a Russian drama announcing that grandpapa had hanged himself in the barn".

This passage tells us a lot about Wodehouse — that he was writing for a large audience, for instance, who had a working knowledge of Hamlet and had at least heard of Chekhov (matters that can no longer be taken for granted). It also tells us about his wonderful talent for reducing all the most serious moments of life to a kind of cheerful absurdity. As Robert McCrum reveals in his excellent new biography, the brilliant novelist, whom Evelyn Waugh called the best writer of the first half of the 20th century, remained a chirpy schoolboy at heart. Wodehouse went to Dulwich College in London, a school that also produced such writers as Raymond Chandler and C S Forester (the author of the Hornblower books). It was at Dulwich that Wodehouse learnt to love Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning, and there, too, that he read Virgil and Aeschylus. Also, as McCrum points out, Wodehouse grew up to admire the stiff-upper-lipped heroes of die Boy's Own Paper, and the novels of G A Henty and H Rider Haggard, in which the heroes faced any disaster with a jaunty smile and a throwaway joke.

It was this that made Wodehouse so attractive as a character, but it also led him to think of the worst European dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, as the comic members of Sir Roderick Spode's movement (the Black Shorts described in the Jeeves stories). Wodehouse's immortal characters, Bertie Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Uck-ridge and Psmith ("the p is silent, as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan"), were created before the war, in the piping days of peace, when young men wore spats and even monocles, the worst tyrants were aunts and the servants hatched their devious plots behind the green baize door. In this period, when scintillating novels poured out of Wodehouse in an endless stream, McCrum also reminds us of his achievements as a lyricist. He grew up as a great admirer of W S Gilbert, who also inspired the Gershwins. He worked with Ziegfeld and Jerome Kern and contributed the lyrics of Bill to the musical Show Boat (he drew royalties from it for the rest of his life). But as Wodehouse himself said, it happens often that when a man feels particularly braced with things in general, fate comes up behind him and hits him with a bit S of lead piping. This time, the lead | piping was the second world war, 5 an event that led him to temporary and ill-deserved disgrace.

While the Germans were advancing through France, the Wodehouses stayed on in their house near Le Touquet, apparently oblivious to the imminent danger. The happenings that followed made a tragicomedy that he treated as though it was an entertaining event in one of his books. On one occasion when the Wodehouses tried to leave for the south of France, they and their accompanying parrot were stopped by a German officer, who was bitten by the bird (this caused great hilarity). On another occasion, the car broke down and Wodehouse was arrested. His wife Ethel had to pack him a case that contained a mutton chop and a large bar of chocolate. He was taken to prison where he shared a cell with two large men and slept on a thin mattress on the floor. Later, he had to collect dirty straw for his bed. In these conditions, he continued to write a novel. When he was finally interned he said that it was quite a good thing as it kept you out of the saloons and you could catch up on your reading.

America had not yet entered the war, so he was able to send his work to his American publisher. In these circumstances, he was released on the understanding from the Gestapo that he would broadcast to America, which was neutral at the time. Clearly, the Gestapo hoped for pro-German propaganda but they must have been sadly disappointed, although Wodehouse did say that the German officers he found in his garden in France wore "pretty green uniforms". Otherwise the broadcasts appeared perfectly harmless. However, the fact that he made them and was released to a suite in Berlin's Adlon Hotel (where he paid the bills from his German royalties) led Bill Connor, writing as "Cassandra" in the Daily Mirror, to denounce Wodehouse as a traitor to his country. This led to attacks in the British and American press and the unhappiest period of a singularly sunny life.

The story has a refreshingly happy ending, and one which shows both men to advantage. After the war, Cassandra wrote a piece in which he complained about Wodehouse's grand first names Pelham and Granville, to which Wodehouse replied by suggesting that W D Connor stood for Walpurgis Diarmid. to which Cassandra replied that the Walpurgis idea "was a corker". As a consequence, the two men enjoyed a friendly lunch together. To Wodehouse even his deadliest enemy was a bit of a joker. After the war he reflected that the world he was born into had vanished "like Nineveh and Tyre". Upper lips were no longer stiff and the world was full of people bleating on about their health, broken marriages and the unfairness of life. Young men no longer wore spats and gentlemen's gentlemen didn't give marvellous advice with brains enlarged by the consumption of much fish.

None of this, however, really matters. As McCrum says, like Dickens (and, I would add, like Trollope and Evelyn Waugh), Wodehouse created his own universe peopled by remarkable characters, which will live on even when the Drones Club has been pulled down and turned into a centre for pilates and yoga classes.

Nothing will ever dim the brilliance of Wodehouse's world or flatten his ever-sprightly and always entertaining prose. Today, literary pundits tell you that nothing matters except the text and that a writer's personal life is irrelevant. But those who delight in Wodehouse will also delight in McCrum's biography. Wodehouse is a pleasure to follow from his schooldays to his sudden death in the act of filling his pipe and reading yet another manuscript in his hospital bedroom.

At the start of his book, McCrum can't resist quoting a passage that once again shows how beautifully Wodehouse can puncture sententious and over-serious opinions. I can't resist it either. It goes like this. " 'I wonder if I might draw your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said: "Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web."'

I breathed a bit stertorously. 'He said that, did he?'

'Yes, sir/

'Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass.' "

Text © John Mortimer - The Times Layout © R.D. Collins 2004

Stephen Fry on PG WodehouseRelated Pages

Had his only contribution to literature been Lord Emsworth and Blandings Castle, his place in history would have been assured. Had he written of none but Mike and Psmith, he would be cherished today as the best and brightest of our comic authors. If Jeeves and Wooster had been his solitary theme, still he would be hailed as the Master.

If he had given us only Ukridge, or nothing but recollections of the Mulliner family, or a pure diet of golfing stories, Doctor Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse would nonetheless be considered immortal. That he gave us all those - and more - is our good fortune and a testament to the most industrious, prolific and beneficent author ever to have sat down, scratched his head and banged out a sentence.

If I were to say that the defining characteristic of PG Wodehouse, the man, was his professionalism, that might make him sound rather dull. We look for eccentricity, sexual weirdness, family trauma and personal demons in our great men. Wodehouse, who knew just what was expected of authors, was used to having to apologise for a childhood that was "as normal as rice-pudding" and a life that consisted of little more than "sitting in front of the typewriter and cursing a bit".

The only really controversial episode of that life, namely Wodehouse's broadcasts to friends from Berlin while an internee of the Germans in France and Belgium during the Second World War, is dug up from time to time by mischief-makers and the ignorant.

It would not be worth mentioning now if it had not been unearthed yet again recently, together with headlines in the British newspapers linking the name Wodehouse with words such as "Nazi", "Fascist" and "traitor". Anyone who has examined the affair closely will agree with the Foreign Office official who wrote in 1947 that it was unlikely

... that anyone would seriously deny that "l'Affaire Wodehouse" was very much a storm in a teacup. It is perfectly plain to any unbiased outsider that Mr Wodehouse made the celebrated broadcasts in all innocence and without any evil intent. He is reported to be of an entirely apolitical cast of mind; much of the furore of course was the result of literary jealousies.

For Wodehouse's view on Fascists, one need only consult the descriptions of Sir Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters to see how a political innocent may still be capable of scorching satire. Enough of all that. If the episode reveals anything, it is Wodehouse's other-worldliness, a quality that shines through his work and a quality that in our muddied and benighted times ought in fact to be celebrated from the hilltops.

Many have sought to "explain" Wodehouse, to psychoanalyse his world, to place his creations under the microscope of modern literary criticism. Such a project, as an article in Punch observed, is like "taking a spade to a soufflé". His world of sniffily disapproving aunts, stern and gooseberry-eyed butlers, impatient uncles, sporty young girls, natty young men who throw bread rolls in club dining-rooms yet blush and stammer in the presence of the opposite sex - all may be taken as evidence of a man stuck in a permanently pre-pubescent childhood, were it not for the extraordinary, magical and blessed miracle of Wodehouse's prose, a prose that dispels doubt much as sunlight dispels shadows, a prose that renders any criticism, positive or negative, absolutely powerless and, frankly, silly.

When Hugh Laurie and I had the extreme honour and terrifying responsibility of being asked to play Bertie Wooster and Jeeves in a series of television adaptations, we were aware of one huge problem. Wodehouse's three great achievements are plot, character and language, and the greatest of these, by far, is language. If we were reasonably competent, then all of us concerned in the television version could go some way towards conveying a fair sense of the narrative of the stories and revealing, too, a good deal of the nature of their characters. The language, however, lives and breathes in its written, printed form. Let me use an example, taken at random. I flip open a book of stories and happen on Bertie and Jeeves discussing a young man called Cyril Bassington-Bassington.

"I've never heard of him. Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?"

"I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family - the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent Bassington-Bassingtons."

"England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons."

"Tolerably so, sir."

"No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?"

Well, try as hard as actors might, such an exchange will always work best on the page. It may still be amusing when delivered as dramatic dialogue, but no actors are as good as the actors we each of us carry in our head. And that is the point, really: one of the gorgeous privileges of reading PG Wodehouse is that he makes us feel better about ourselves because we derive a sense of personal satisfaction from the laughter mutually created. Every comma, every "sir", every "what?" is something we make work in the act of reading.

"The greatest living writer of prose", "the Master", "the head of my profession", "akin to Shakespeare", "a master of the language"... If you had never read Wodehouse and only knew about the world his books inhabit, you might be forgiven for blinking in bewilderment at the praise that has been lavished on a "mere" comic author by writers such as Compton Mackenzie, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, Bernard Levin and Susan Hill. But once you dive into the soufflé, once you engage with all those miraculous verbal felicities, such adulation begins to make sense.

Example serves better than description. Let me throw up some more random nuggets. Particular to Wodehouse are the transferred epithets: "I lit a rather pleased cigarette", or, "I pronged a moody forkful of eggs and b". Characteristic, too, are the sublimely hyperbolic similes: "Roderick Spode. Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces", or, "The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass". Here is an example that certainly vindicates my point about his prose working best on the page. Reading this aloud is not much use:

"Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?" said Wilfred.

"ffinch-ffarrowmere," corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.

Then there is a passage such as this, Lord Emsworth musing on his feckless younger son, Freddie Threepwood.

Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse's favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless.

Chronology, with Wodehouse, is not necessarily reliable or relevant, but it seems sensible to describe his creations in a more or less historical order - an order compromised by his tendency to introduce a character in a short story and only later pick up and, as it were, run with the ball. He started writing at the end of the 19th century and continued until his death, manuscript on lap, on 14 February 1975 at the age of 93.

It can be clearly stated that Wodehouse's first great creation, and for some his finest, was Psmith (the "P" is silent). Said to have been drawn from life (one Rupert D'Oyley Carte, of the Savoy Opera family), Psmith is a startling sophisticate, an expelled old Etonian whose delicately attuned nervous system can be shocked by loud colours, celluloid cuffs and the mere mention of an inadequately pressed trouser crease. He has adopted his own brand of "practical socialism" and retains to the end the habit of referring to everyone as "Comrade". Much as Jeeves was to extricate Bertie time and time again from the soup, so Psmith is the eternal saviour of stolid, dependable Mike Jackson - the Doctor Watson to Psmith's Sherlock Holmes.

There is in fact a little thread of autobiography in the second Psmith novel, Psmith in the City. Mike, whose only real ambition is to play cricket, at which he excels to the point of genius, is denied by family ill fortune his chance of going to Cambridge University and is forced instead to earn his crust at the New Asiatic Bank. The young Wodehouse, too, was obliged to work for some years at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in the City, until the time came when he realised that he was earning more from his writing than from his weekly stipend.

The second Wodehouse immortal to come along at this time (pre-First World War) was Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge (pronounced Stanley Fanshawe Ewkridge). Ukridge keeps his pince-nez together by means of ginger-beer wire, wears pyjamas under a mackintosh, calls his friends "old horse", uses exclamations such as "Upon my Sam" and is eternally in search of funds. The master of the scam, he forever embroils his chief biographer, Corky, in a series of terrible money-making schemes. It is not yet the age of cocktails and nightclubs and sporty two-seaters. But Ukridge is, for all that, deeply loveable; his amorality and blithe disregard of others do not irritate. Imperishable optimism and a great spaciousness of outlook inform the spirit of these stories. He is capable, when occasion demands, of splendid speech:

"Alf Todd," said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, "has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle."

Wodehouse never lost his affection for Ukridge and continued writing about him until 1966, always setting the stories back in a pre-Wooster epoch.

In 1915 Wodehouse published Something Fresh, the first of the Blandings novels. I think he knew what he was doing when he chose that title, for with the creation of Blandings Castle, he hit upon something original, something different. He was beginning his stride into mid-season form.

Wherever lovers of Wodehouse cluster together, they fall into debate about whether it is the Jeeves stories or the Blandings stories that take the trophy as Wodehouse's greatest achievements. The group will, of course, dispel, muttering embarrassedly, for they know that such questions are as pointless as wondering whether God did a better job with the Alps or the Rockies. The question is bound to be asked, however, because each time you read another Blandings story, the sublime nature of that world is such as to make you gasp.

The cast of resident characters here is greater than that of the Wooster canon. There is Lord Emsworth himself, the amiable and dreamy peer, whose first love - pumpkins - is soon supplanted by the truest and greatest love of his life, the Empress of Blandings, that peerless Black Berkshire sow, thrice winner of the silver medal for the fattest pig in Shropshire; Emsworth's sister, Connie, who, when sorely tried, which was often, would retire upstairs to bathe her temples in eau-de-Cologne; the Efficient Baxter, Emsworth's secretary and a hound from hell; Emsworth's brother, Galahad, the last of the Pelicans (that breed of silk-hatted men about town who lived high and were forever getting thrown out of the Criterion bar in theEighties and Nineties); the younger son, Freddie, the bane of his father's life... The cast list goes on and is frequently supplemented by young men we will have met elsewhere, Ronnie Fish, Pongo Twistleton and even Psmith himself.

Blandings comes, in the Wodehouse canon, to stand for the absolute ideal in country houses. Its serenity and beauty are enough to calm the most turbulent breast. It is an entire world unto itself and, one senses, Wodehouse pours into it his deepest feelings for England. Once you have drunk from its healing spring, you will return again and again. Blandings is like that: it enters a man's soul.

The young men I mention as visiting Blandings are all members of Wodehouse's great fictional institution the Drones Club, in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. There are dozens of individual stories about members of the Drones, and two principal collections, Eggs Beans and Crumpets and Young Men in Spats. The title of the first derives from the Drones' habit of referring to each other as "old egg", "old bean", "my dear old crumpet" and so on. The Drones Club is a refuge for the idle young man about town. Such beings are for the most part entirely dependent on allowances from fat uncles. Indeed the name Drones is a reference to the drone bee, which toils not, neither does it spin, unlike its industrious cousin, the worker. An archetypal member would be Freddie Widgeon, intensely amiable, not very bright up top and always falling in love. The only Drone who is distinctly unlikeable is Oofy Prosser, the richest and meanest member. He sports pimples, Lobb shoes and the tightest wallet in London.

The second-richest member of the club is the most likeable. He is Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, descendant of the Sieur de Wooster who did his bit in the Crusades, and young Bertram retains the strict code of honour handed down from his ancestor, the code of the preux chevalier, the gentil parfit knight. Bertie Wooster is, of course, the employer of Jeeves, the supreme gentleman's personal gentleman.

Jeeves made his first appearance in 1917 in the short story "Extricating Young Gussie". Wodehouse liked to mock himself for not seeing straight away that he had hit a rich seam with Jeeves, but in fact it was only two years later that he wrote four more stories. From then on he gave the world Jeeves and Wooster right up until his last complete novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974). Much has been written about Jeeves. His imperturbability, his omniscience, his unruffled insight, his orotund speech, his infallible way with a quotation... in short, his perfection. It would be a pity, however, to overlook the character of Bertie Wooster, who is himself a great deal more than the silly ass or chinless wonder that people often imagine. That he is loyal, kind, chivalrous, resolute and magnificently sweet-natured is apparent. But is he stupid? Jeeves is overheard describing him once as "mentally negligible". Perhaps that isn't quite fair. While not intelligent within the meaning of the act, Bertie is desperate to learn, keen to assimilate the wisdom of his incomparable teacher. He may only half-know the quotations and allusions with which he peppers his speech, but proximity to the great brain has made him aware of the possibilities of exerting the cerebellum.

Wodehouse's genius in the Jeeves and Wooster canon lies in his complete realisation of Bertie as first-person narrator. Almost all the other stories depend upon standard, impersonal narration. The particular joy of a Jeeves story comes from the delicious feeling one derives from being completely in Bertie's hands. His apparently confused way of expressing him- self both reveals character and manages, somehow, to develop narrative with extraordinary economy and life. Since the Jeeves stories often lead one from the other, he will often need to repeat himself, which he manages to do with great ingenuity. He is called upon more than once, for example, to remind the reader about the dread daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop. The first example shows Bertie's way with Victorian poetry:

I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.

Another description of precisely the same characteristics in Honoria give us a very Woosteresque mixture of simile:

Honoria... is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging on a tin bridge.

Sometimes Bertie's speech moves towards a form of comic imagery so perfect that one could honestly call it poetic:

As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps... the clan has a tendency to ignore me.

The masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school is frequently included in collections of great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language. I would urge you, however, to head straight for a library or bookshop and get hold of the complete novel Right Ho, Jeeves, where you will encounter it fully in context and find that it leaps even more magnificently to life.

I think I should end on a personal note. I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today - whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

He mocked himself sometimes because he knew that a great proportion of his readers came from prisons and hospitals. At the risk of being sententious, isn't it true that we are all of us, for a great part of our lives, sick or imprisoned, all of us in need of this remarkable healing spirit, this balm for hurt minds?

Copyright Stephen Fry Esq 2000 - taken from The independent Newspaper

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