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| "Jeevsian in Life; Woosterish in Berlin:" McCrum's Biography of Wodehouse Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 2004, 542 pages How many readers of P. G. Wodehouse's delightful tales of Jeeves, Wooster, Mulliner, Featherstonehaugh-Ukridge ever wonder what the creator of these unforgettable characters was like? I suspect not many. Wodehouse is the English language's greatest comic writer, but in his splendidly written tales of ineffectual and ineligible young men pursuing doll-like women or trying to swindle more money out of severe aunts, there is nothing that inspires the reader to wonder about him, no darkness, no anger, no--to use the contemporary term--agenda. When he was a celebrity--and in the late 1920s "Plum" was the bestselling author in England--he often pretended that he was a real-life Bertie Wooster. However he was anything but a fellow unacquainted with gainful employment. In fact he was a workaholic and his output was many times greater than what is remembered or survives in print. Pelham Grenville Wodehouse began writing in 1886 when he was five years old. He was still writing as a nonagenarian in 1975. His parents lived overseas and left young Wodehouse in the care of blue-book relatives where he "met earls and butlers and younger sons in some profusion" and spent lonely days downstairs in the servants hall. At school, he was a straight-A student, fluent in Latin and Greek. He became a successful writer in his twenties by hunkering down and writing and writing and writing. For decades he commuted from England to the U.S. where, when he wasn't selling short stories and books at astronomical prices, he was helping Jerome Kern and the Gershwin Brothers develop the integral musical comedy. The song Bill was part of Wodehouse's contribution to Showboat. Personally, he was a cheerful fellow whose hobbies were cricket and golf. He was indifferent to God, and, although married, indifferent to sex. His indifference also extended to war and that got him into big trouble in World War Two. A resident of France in May, 1940, he was trapped behind the German invasion. The Germans put him in a prison camp but upon discovering who he was, they put him in hotels and country houses and allowed him to receive income from his writings. They also put him on the radio. There he made an ass of himself saying that the camp had been "great fun." His broadcasts were most likely a clumsy effort to tell the folks at home he was keeping a stiff English upper lip, but what the folks heard was a traitorous Edwardian schoolboy. Wodehouse's silly bitch of a wife who acted as if the war had limited her shopping didn't help. Wodehouse emerged from captivity to eventual forgiveness. He was even knighted (even if it was QEII who knighted him), but he had to live for decades more in a world where publishers wanted "heavy serious stuff about life in the swamps of Carolina and that sort of thing" rather than his storytelling that was unevolved from 1928. That changed in the very last years of Wodehouse's nine decades. Along came public television in the U.S. and with it a viewer demand for English period dramas and comedies. Plum's stuff was just the ticket and his last job was introducing the various Mulliners in Wodehouse Playhouse. Robert McCrum's book Wodehouse: A Life is, typically of Brit biographies, for the reader who wants extensive detail of the subject. |
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| Above: Wodehouse dust jackets from the 1920s |