[BITList] What Ho, Jeeves!

[John Feltham]

And excellent article.

"Wodehouse the 'best writer of English.”



ooroo





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Wodehouse, Sir  Pelham Grenville  (1881-1975), writer, was born on 15 October 1881 at 1 Vale Place, 50 Epsom Road, Guildford, Surrey, the third of the four sons of Henry Ernest Wodehouse (1845-1929) and his wife, Eleanor, nee Deane (1861-1941). The Wodehouse family traced its history back to the time of William the Conqueror. They were landed gentry, who had over the years accumulated eighteen knighthoods, a baronetcy, a barony, and an earldom. Henry Wodehouse worked as a magistrate in Hong Kong from 1867 and was invested by Queen Victoria in 1886 as a companion of the order of St Michael and St George. Eleanor Wodehouse was the daughter of the Revd John Bathurst Deane, and the sister of Walter Deane, a colonial secretary in Hong Kong. In 1883 she returned to England with her three sons Peveril, Armine, and Pelham (the fourth son, Richard Lancelot, was not born until 1892) and left them in charge of a governess in Bath while she returned to Hong Kong.

Early life and schooling

Three years later the brothers were sent to a dame-school in Croydon, where they spent a further three years. Then, for reasons of Peveril's health, the brothers were sent to Elizabeth College in Guernsey. In 1891 Pelham-or Plum, as he was known from an early age-attended Malvern House preparatory school in Kent, which specialized in preparing boys for the Royal Navy, the career which his father had chosen for him but which Plum's poor eyesight prevented. From here, in 1894, he won a scholarship to Dulwich College. Wodehouse's six years at Dulwich were among the happiest of his life ('like heaven'; Jasen 18), and he remained in love with the place all his days. William Townend remembered sixty years later that 'Plum was an established figure in the school'-he was a gifted athlete, footballer, cricketer, and boxer, had a fine voice and sang at school concerts, and edited the school magazine, The Alleynian  (ibid.).

Despite the fact that he rarely saw his parents between the ages of two and fifteen (when his father made an early retirement to England), Wodehouse remembered his childhood as a 'very happy one'  (Jasen, 8). During the holidays he lived mainly with aunts and uncles. Aunts, of whom Wodehouse possessed no fewer than twenty, played an important part in his early life, and appeared in his later novels featuring the characters Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves. The schemes and machinations of ruthless aunts are frequently the engines of the plot, schemes which a reluctant Bertie is compelled to carry out. The power that the aunts wield-forcing Bertie to steal a silver cow-creamer from an irascible local magistrate, for instance-was clearly based on Wodehouse's own experiences. Wodehouse also possessed fifteen uncles, four of whom were Church of England clergymen. They provided inspiration for his pious but fallible curates, vicars, and bishops, of which he wrote with friendly irreverence but without mockery.

Early career

Wodehouse's brother Armine had won a classical scholarship to Oxford, and Plum was expected to win one too: he was a good classical scholar, composing Greek and Latin verse as easily as English. But his father's pension was paid in rupees, and when the value of the rupee fell, he could not afford to send Plum to university. On leaving Dulwich, Wodehouse worked for two years in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in London, but was utterly a fish out of water. In the evenings in his rented room, however, he wrote short stories, novels, poems, parodies, humorous articles, song lyrics, and journalism. During this time he had eighty items published in School Magazine, The Captain, Tit-Bits, and Answers; this was only a small part of what he wrote, submitted, and had rejected.

On 9 September 1902, when twenty, Wodehouse gave up his job at the bank and became a full-time writer. Nine days later his first book, The Pothunters, a public-school story, was published. Over the next seven years he produced six more books of school life as well as five other books of apprentice work: William Tell Told Again for young children; Love among the Chickens (1906), a romantic comedy, rewritten in 1921, in which Ukridge-he of the filthy yellow mackintosh, who borrowed his friends' clothes without asking, and who was perennially short of funds-made the first of nineteen appearances in Wodehouse's work; Not George Washington (1907), a novel about a London journalist, partly autobiographical; The Globe 'By the Way' Book (1908), an anthology of trifles from the 'By the Way' column of topical jokes, comment, and humorous verse which Wodehouse edited for four years at The Globe newspaper; and The Swoop! (1909), a parody of the many stories and articles, in the twenty years before the First World War, about a German invasion of Britain.

Each of Wodehouse's school stories is a superior example of the genre, and still readable; but in his last public-school novel, Mike (1909), something extraordinary happened: Wodehouse, as a writer, moved into a higher and dazzling sphere. In its narrative energy, dialogue, characterization, and ability to create sunny laughter, Mike is Wodehouse's first masterpiece. George Orwell called it 'perhaps the best light school story in the English language'. Of his own books it was Wodehouse's favourite. It also introduced one of his most memorable characters, Psmith-the letter 'P' was added by Psmith himself, but was not to be pronounced-who was the central figure in Psmith in the City (1910), Psmith Journalist (1915; originally The Prince and Betty, 1912), and the last Psmith novel, Leave it to Psmith (1923). Psmith was unstoppably talkative, and had a splendid conversational line in mandarin orotundity.

Leave it to Psmith, which was set in Blandings Castle, coincided with another successful Wodehouse series. There are eleven novels in the Blandings sequence, beginning with Something Fresh in 1915, and finishing sixty years later with Sunset at Blandings (1977), which Wodehouse was half-way through when he died, and which was completed by the scholar Richard Usborne. In addition there are nine short stories featuring Blandings: Rudyard Kipling thought 'Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend', 'one of the most perfect short stories I have ever read'.

Something Fresh was Wodehouse's first best-seller, and also the first of his books almost wholly a farce. From then on almost every novel and short story he wrote was a farce. At the heart of the Blandings stories is Lord Emsworth, the ninth earl, chatelain of the castle, a widower, amiable, but bone-headed. His greatest joy is the pig, the zeppelin-shaped Empress of Blandings, outright winner of the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show three years in succession. Lord Emsworth's favourite outdoor activity is leaning over the empress's sty, watching her guzzle her food; and his favourite indoor activity is sitting alone in his library, reading and rereading that epic volume, The Care of the Pig by Whiffle. In his attempts to lead his quiet life, Lord Emsworth is endlessly frustrated by his bossy sister Lady Constance; by his officiously efficient but obnoxious secretary Rupert Baxter (a role held by Psmith for a time); his dour head gardener whose ambition is to turn the elegant Blandings grounds into a public park; and his son Freddie, the 'family curse'. His only reliable ally is Beach, the butler, a stately procession of one, with his pop eyes and his fruity voice, 'like tawny port made audible'. It is always high summer at Blandings. Evelyn Waugh, in his broadcast tribute to Wodehouse on his eightieth birthday, remarked:

The Gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled ... Mr Wodehouse's world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

Fame and success

Wodehouse first visited the United States in 1904, spending seventeen days in New York. In 1909 he sailed again to New York, this time staying for ten months. For the next four years he 'sort of shuttled to and fro across the Atlantic'  (Jasen, 47). In 1914 Wodehouse arrived in New York two days before the First World War began. Aged thirty-three, he had tried to enlist in the armed forces in Britain before he sailed for America, but had been rejected because of his bad eyesight. He tried to enlist in the USA in 1917 but was again rejected. The day after he arrived in America he met an Englishwoman, Ethel May Wayman, nee Newton (1885-1984), already twice widowed and with a daughter, Leonora. On 30 September 1914 Wodehouse and Ethel were married. It proved a successful marriage for sixty years. Ethel was an attractive, lively, strong-minded, gregarious woman, who took charge of Wodehouse's life and made certain that he had the peace and quiet he needed to write. Wodehouse came to love his stepdaughter Leonora and officially adopted her. He never got over her sudden death in 1944. The Wodehouses had no children of their own.

For Wodehouse the most important event of the First World War in professional terms was his work with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern in the American theatre. The trio of Kern (composer), Bolton (playwright and librettist), and Wodehouse (lyricist) revolutionized American musical comedy in, for example, Kissing Time, Sitting Pretty, O! Kay, The Golden Moth, and Cabaret Girl, and moved it away from the tired formulas of Viennese operetta, injecting colloquial wit and vigour, and, in doing so, making fortunes for themselves. The high point was the song 'Bill', with lyrics written by Wodehouse in 1917 and used by Kern in Show Boat. In 1917 they had five shows running simultaneously on New York's Broadway, a feat never achieved before or after.

The best-known of Wodehouse's characters, Bertie Wooster and his factotum Jeeves, first appeared at this time, although in 1917 Jeeves had only two lines in a short story entitled 'Extricating Young Gussie' in the book The Man with Two Left Feet. Their last novel, Aunts aren't Gentlemen, was published in 1974. There were fourteen novels and two short stories in all. The master-servant relationship provided the framework for comedy: Bertie, good-hearted but weak-willed, 'mentally negligible', as Jeeves described him, and almost guaranteed to make a hash of any scheme he takes in hand; and Jeeves, omniscient, superbly efficient, and loyal to Bertie. Their dialogue with each other, and the linking narrative by Bertie, are among the glories of English literature. Wodehouse was a good classical scholar at school, and that early linguistic discipline shows itself in the clarity and precision of his writing. He could also convey comic possibilities in the most banal circumstances. Evelyn Waugh said of Wodehouse that 'One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on every page.' Here are two, both by Bertie: 'I once got engaged to his [Sir Roderick Glossop's] daughter, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche, and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast', and 'Jeeves coughed that soft cough of his, the one that sounds like a sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountainside'.

The plots themselves, strong and beautifully crafted, provide much of the comedy. In the story 'The Great Sermon Handicap', the plot turns on the machinations of Bertie and his friends while laying bets on which local vicar will preach the longest sermon. Within the plots are scores of vivid and varied characters, funny in themselves, and the cause of funniness in others: Bertie's tall, beaky, grey Aunt Agatha, who 'eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin'; Gussie Fink-Nottle, newt-fancier, teetotaller, and orange juice addict, who unknowingly has his juice liberally laced with gin by Bertie with hilarious consequences; Madeleine Bassett, the glutinously soppy girl with whom Gussie is hopelessly in love, who thinks stars are God's daisy chain; Roderick Spode, would-be British dictator, leader of the Black Shorts (sic), whose piercing eyes can open an oyster at ten paces, and whose shameful secret is that he is the proprietor of the ladies' lingerie shop; and the dog Bartholomew, an opinionated and irascible Aberdeen terrier, whose growling and snapping once keep Bertie and Jeeves marooned on top of a wardrobe.

Between the wars Wodehouse's life settled into a happy and prosperous pattern. He commuted regularly between Britain and the United States, and in the 1930s he added France as a country of residence, in order to minimize legally the amount of tax he paid to the British and American governments. His short stories and novels were often serialized, which brought him in extra income. They were then published as books (he wrote a total of ninety-six). Thank you, Jeeves appeared in an American magazine in 1933 for 50,000, and the following year was published as a book selling some 3 million copies during Wodehouse's life, from which he received substantial royalties. His earning power in the 1930s, also generated from song lyrics (he wrote 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies), plays (fifteen in all), and film scripts (a total of forty-four), was considerable. In 1939 Wodehouse was made an honorary doctor of letters by Oxford University.

Controversy

When the Second World War began the Wodehouses were living in Le Touquet in northern France. They, and a small group of neighbours, tried twice to escape from the German advance in May 1940, but on both occasions vehicles in which they were travelling broke down. They were captured. Wodehouse was interned as an enemy alien first at the citadel in Hury, Belgium, and then in a camp at Tost in Upper Silesia, where he wrote most of his novel Money in the Bank. In June 1941, less than four months short of his sixtieth birthday, he was freed (the Germans automatically freed all civilian internees aged sixty or over) and was taken to Berlin. There he was tricked into making five humorous broadcasts on German radio, of wholly innocent content, to the United States, then not at war, about his experiences as a prisoner.

The Wodehouses lived in Germany under supervision for just over two years, in Berlin during the winters, and for the rest of the year with friends in Degenershausen in the Harz Mountains and in Lobnis in Upper Silesia. In September 1943 they were allowed to move to Paris, where they stayed under supervision at the Hotel Bristol. In September 1944, after the liberation of Paris, an investigation into Wodehouse's broadcasts and subsequent actions was carried out by MI5. Wodehouse was reviled in the United Kingdom as a traitor, collaborator, Nazi propagandist, and a coward. It was widely believed that he had agreed to thank the Nazis for his release by broadcasting, and for the rest of the war he had lived in luxury at Nazi expense. Some public libraries removed his books from their shelves. The response in the USA to the broadcasts was equally vicious: a typical newspaper headline was 'Wodehouse plays Jeeves to Nazis'  (P.M., 2 July 1941).

Not a single one of the charges against him was true. The MI5 investigation-tragically for Wodehouse not made public in his lifetime-found no evidence whatsoever of treachery. Further evidence collected after Wodehouse's death from both British and German sources, notably from Jacqueline Grant, secretary to Ethel in 1940, and from the German foreign office official Werner Plack, who organized the making of the broadcasts, wholly confirm his innocence and patriotism  (Sproat, passim). Plack made it clear, beyond doubt, that Wodehouse had never asked to be released from internment; had no idea that he was going to be released until the very hour in which it happened; had never sought and never received any special favours from the Germans; and had never made anti-British or pro-Nazi statements. Indeed, Plack stated that the whole value to the German foreign office of tricking Wodehouse into making the broadcasts was precisely that he was not a Nazi sympathizer. The German authorities had received strong pleas from influential American individuals and organizations to release Wodehouse, and the Germans believed that by acceding to these pleas they would show how sensitive Germany was to American opinion, and thus reinforce American neutrality in the war. Wodehouse personally believed in the first instance that the British and American public would admire him for what he said in his broadcasts, because he showed that throughout his internment he had remained cheerful and, in the words of Bertie Wooster, 'kept a stiff upper lip'  (private information, Lady Wodehouse).

In 1999 the British Public Record Office released papers, previously kept secret, from the files of the Foreign Office and of the Ministry of Defence concerning documents which had been discovered in the German embassy in Paris. These documents contained references to Wodehouse's being paid money by the Germans for what looked like services rendered. These references, widely publicized in the British media, appeared to reopen the case against Wodehouse. Although the various sums of money listed in the files seemed to be new evidence, this was not the case. Wodehouse did not receive any payments from the German embassy. All the sums mentioned in the documents had already been listed and explained in the financial statements given to E. J. P. Cussen, the MI5 investigator, by Wodehouse in September 1944. However, because the money was described in different ways, in different currencies, it was not clear at first that the sums were those already explained as innocent in Wodehouse's statement. The files show that by 1947 the British authorities had concluded that Wodehouse had no case to answer over either the broadcasts or the money, and in the words of the Foreign Office: 'Mr Wodehouse made the celebrated broadcasts in all innocence and without any evil intent.'

Exile and later life

After the Second World War, Wodehouse lived in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1955. He retained British nationality, but never returned to the United Kingdom. He wrote a further thirty-four novels, collections of short stories, and three volumes of a semi-autobiography, Performing Flea (1953), Bring on the Girls (1953), and Over Seventy (1957). He and Ethel lived quietly, watching television, while he attended the annual dinners of old boys of Dulwich College in New York, gave money to stray animals, reread the whole of Shakespeare each year, and did the same daily fifteen-minute exercises he had done since 1919. Physically Wodehouse was tall, broad-shouldered, and athletic. In character he was quiet, modest, polite, affable, steady, straightforward, and generous to friends, particularly those down on their luck, but shy with strangers. He was a kind man and, although he was not someone to be pushed around, his dislike of hurting others occasionally led him to acquiesce where he should not. Although shrewd in personal relations, and in the commercial details of his personal life, he never lost a certain schoolboyish simplicity and innocence. He showed fortitude and strength of character while interned by the Germans during the Second World War, and when doctors informed him-wrongly, as it turned out-that he had a brain tumour. By the standards of the time he was a moderate Conservative in his views. His creative genius as a writer was founded upon a rigorous classical education, wide reading, and unrelaxing discipline and hard work.

P. G. Wodehouse died on 14 February 1975 at Southampton Hospital, Long Island, New York, and was buried at Remsenburg Presbyterian Church, Long Island, four days later. Six weeks earlier he had been knighted, a symbolic honour, just in time. Public Record Office files made public in August 2002 show that the British government had repeatedly denied Wodehouse a knighthood. In 1967 Sir Patrick Dean, British ambassador in the United States, felt that the honour would 'revive the controversy of his wartime behaviour and give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character which the embassy was doing its best to eradicate'  (Daily Telegraph, 16 Aug 2002). In 1971 Lord Cromer, Dean's successor, supported this view. Despite opposition from James Callaghan, Harold Wilson at last ensured that Wodehouse was honoured.

Posthumous reputation

In 1934 Hilaire Belloc, then near the height of his reputation, astonished the literary and academic worlds by calling Wodehouse the 'best writer of English now alive ... The head of my profession'. Wodehouse did not take this seriously. But Max Beerbohm, Kipling, and A. E. Housman-to take three other, disparate, contemporary literary geniuses-also acknowledged Wodehouse's greatness. None the less, when Wodehouse was awarded his doctorate by Oxford it was widely regarded as a piece of donnish eccentricity. Indeed F. R. Leavis, one of the most influential critics of his generation, regarded Wodehouse with contempt, calling his work 'stereotyped humour'. The melancholy affair of Wodehouse's wartime broadcasts did nothing to increase his general standing in the immediate post-war years.

But by the 1960s the tide had turned. To commemorate Wodehouse's birthday in 1961 his American publishers paid for a large and laudatory advertisement in the New York Times signed by many distinguished writers, including Evelyn Waugh who, in 'An act of homage and reparation to P. G. Wodehouse', his radio talk to commemorate Wodehouse's birthday, called him 'the Master'. A wax Wodehouse appeared in Madame Tussaud's. In 1973 Homage to Wodehouse, a book of essays, was published.

At the beginning of the new millennium Wodehouse's reputation was higher than it had ever been. The consensus in the academic world was that Wodehouse was indeed a great writer. The Leavisites had long been routed. His books were also still commercially successful: two leading British publishers, Dent (Everyman) and Penguin, marked the new millennium by embarking on the publication, one in hardback, the other in paperback, of the entire Wodehouse canon. Wodehouse titles were also now included in the Penguin Classics list, and he had been translated into over thirty languages. Jeeves and Wooster, the television series made in the 1990s, with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in the eponymous roles, was one of the most frequently repeated comedies on television. There were also frequent repeats on television of Wodehouse Playhouse, a series of half-hour plays based on Wodehouse stories which had been made in 1974. Electronic publishing of his works in video and audio proliferated. Ten countries around the world had their own Wodehouse society; in Great Britain the prime minister of the day, Tony Blair, declared himself a devotee (as did his predecessor H. H. Asquith), and became a patron of the UK Wodehouse Society. The judgement of the years since his death confirmed that P. G. Wodehouse was a great writer of English prose, and the greatest of all English humorists.

Iain Sproat 

Sources  B. Phelps, P. G. Wodehouse: man and myth (1992) + D. Jasen, P. G. Wodehouse: a portrait of a master, 2nd edn (New York, 1981) + I. Sproat, Wodehouse at war (1981) + private information (2004) [Lady Wodehouse; Jacqueline Powell; Werner Plack; Reinhild Maxtone-Mailer] + P. G. Wodehouse, Performing flea (1953) + F. Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse (1982) + R. Usborne, Wodehouse at work (1961)
Archives Dulwich College, London, corresp. and literary papers | New York, James H. Heineman collection + England, Cazalet Family collection SOUND BL NSA, recorded talk
Likenesses  photographs, 1928-68, Hult. Arch. · Sasha, photograph, 1933, NPG [see illus.] · photograph, photogravure, pubd 1933 (after D. Low), NPG · I. Penn, photograph, gelatin silver print, 1947, NPG · D. Low, caricature, NPG; repro. in The New Statesman and Nation (23 Dec 1933) · photograph (in old age), NPG
Wealth at death  £31,733: probate, 1 Sept 1975, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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