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| P. G. Wodehouse, at 23 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| 1st US edition (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
For many years I have believed that the following
paragraph is probably the greatest
opening paragraph ever to grace an English-language novel:
“While I would not go so far,
perhaps, as to describe the heart as actually leaden, I must confess that on
the eve of starting to do my bit of time at Deverill Hall, I was definitely
short on chirpiness. I shrank from the prospect of being decanted into a
household on chummy terms with a thug like my Aunt Agatha, weakened as I
already was by having had her son Thomas, one of our most prominent fiends in
human shape, on my hands for three days.
“I mentioned
this to Jeeves, and he agreed that the set-up could have been juicier….”
I am brought back to this favourite topic of mine, the
Jeeves and Wooster novels of P.G. Wodehouse, by the absolutely superb biography
of the master written by Robert McCrum under the title A Life of P.G. Wodehouse, published to wide acclaim in 2004, and
picked up by me in excellent condition for a minuscule $10 from The Word bookshop, of whose proprietor Adrian
King-Edwards, someone remarked this week that he is more like the curator of a collection
than a bookseller.
I am sometimes accused of having
gone overboard in my enthusiasm for the Wodehouse prose style. But look at that
first paragraph quoted above: it is amazing. Within the six or seven orthodox
lines of a perfectly straightforward English prose construction lie at least
half a dozen almost unimaginable
syntactical bombs: first, “starting to do my bit of time at….”, an
expression normally reserved for imprisonment; second, “I was definitely short
on chirpiness…” a throw-away semi-slang expression at odds with the formal
setting in which it is found….; third, “being decanted into a household…” an
expression usually used for pouring wine into a carafe; fourth, “ with a thug
like my aunt Agatha…”, an expression almost unimaginable as a description of an
Aunt; fifth, “one of our most prominent fiends in human shape…”, an unheard of
description of a small boy; and sixth, at the beginning of the next para, “the
setup could have been juicier…”, on a surface an expression so ludicrously
inappropriate to the use to which it has been put as to be so funny as to make
one laugh out loud.
This is a perfect example of what
Mr. McCrum on page 253 calls “Wodehouse’s marriage of high farce with the
inverted poetry of his mature comic
style.” Seven pages later McCrum
describes Wodehouse’s reaction to being told that on June 21, 1939, he was to be awarded an
honorary doctorate of literature by Oxford University, an honour that, wrote The Times editorially, weighing into the
considerable debate that had followed the announcement, was unquestionably
deserved, because “everyone knows at least some of his many works and has felt
all the better for the gaiety of his wit and the freshness of his style.” Wodehouse
himself said, “I had no notion that my knockabout comedy entitled me to rank
with the nibs.”
But a page later Mr. McCrum has
discovered among Wodehouse’s vast writings an amusing description of a walk taken by him the day before that
momentous occasion with the famous literary man, Hugh Walpole, who, as they
walked, alluded to Hilaire Belloc’s
recent judgment that Wodehouse was “the best writer of English now alive.”
“He
said to me,” wrote Wodehouse in his memoir Performing
Flea, ‘Did you see what Belloc said about you?’ I said I had. ‘I wonder why he said
that.’ ‘I wonder,’ I said. Long silence.
‘I can’t imagine why he said that,’ said Hugh. I said I couldn’t, either.
Another long silence. ‘It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!’ ‘Most
extraordinary.’ Long silence again. ‘Ah, well,’ said Hugh having apparently
found the solution. ‘the old man’s getting very old.’ ”
This is a perfect example of
how Wodehouse would make everything that he was describing seem like a
comedy. In fact, the description of the ceremony at
which Wodehouse was honoured does sound highly comic, with the university’s
Public Orator presenting Wodehouse to the Vice-Chancellor with “a brilliant and
witty celebration of Wodehouse’s gifts composed in faultless Latin hexameters,”
in which he made ingenious references to Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Mr Mulliner,
Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings, Psmith, and Gussie Fink-Nottle. He
then described Wodehouse in Latin, as
“wittiest of men, most humorous, most charming, most amusing, full of
laughter.” Later, at the culminating dinner of 400 guests, all impeccably
dressed in white ties and waistcoats (except Wodehouse, who wore a dinner
jacket), the undergraduates banged the tables and demanded a speech from
Wodehouse. “The new Oxford man,” records McCrum, “author of some of the funniest
books in memory, rose awkwardly to his feet. If the guests were hoping for a
comic tour de force, they were to be disappointed. Wodehouse simply mumbled,
‘thank you,’ and sat down in confusion.”
A recurring
theme in McCrum’s book is how unmemorable Wodehouse was in person, one person
after another being quoted who found him, frankly, dull. Alec Waugh, for
example, brother of Evelyn, and himself a popular novelist, wrote of meeting
Wodehouse: “He had no peculiarities or manner of expression. He was not funny.
He never repeated jokes. There was no sparkle in his conversation. He did not
indulge in reminiscences. There was a straightforward exchange of talk… ‘It is
an extraordinary thing,’ he would say, ‘Marlborough beat Tonbridge and Tonbridge
beat Uppingham, but Uppingham beat Marlborough. What do you make of that?’ ”
Yet Waugh remarked on how easy he felt in Wodehouse’s company, and how he could
recall “only the pleasure of his company.”
Wodehouse
was one of four sons of one of those incredible British families, raised in the
so-called public (that is, private) schools, especially to administer the
British Empire, who simply drifted off around the world, leaving their children
behind to be looked after by someone else. He records that first the new baby (somewhat
eccentrically named Pelham, like his brothers Armine and Peverill), born in
1881, was looked after in Hong Kong, where is father was a magistrate, by a Chinese
nursemaid, but before he was three he had been brought back to Britain and
deposited with a Miss Roper. He did not see his mother again for three years,
and Mr. McCrum records that between the ages of three and fifteen, the child
spent barely six months in the presence of his parents. “The psychological
impact of this separation on the future writer lies at the heart of his adult
personality,” McCrum writes. Somehow or other the boy survived: “the damage
inflicted on him in childhood was counterbalanced by his exceptional good
nature, and the light, personal sweetness that all those who knew him comment
on.”
The writer
says of his subject: “his childhood made him solitary, but his genius --- the
word is not too strong --- made the solitude bearable and transformed its
fantasies into high comedy.” He also adopted defensive strategies of evasion,
one of them being constant travel. He could seldom settle anywhere, was always
changing houses, made countless trips across the Atlantic (the fare was a mere
ten pounds in those days), where he found editors willing to pay him more than
in England, and got into writing for the stage. Before he finished, he was said
to have contributed to more than 50 musical comedies, usually as a lyric
writer, but also quite often as author of the book. He recorded in his memoirs:
“My father was as normal as rice pudding. My childhood went like a breeze from
start to finish, with everybody I met understanding me perfectly while as for
my schooldays at Dulwich they were just six years of unbroken bliss.” What a
lie!
He became
what is called today a workaholic, always writing, day and night, month after
month, no sooner one work finished than he was busy on another, so that by the
time of his death he had published almost 100 books, in addition to his
extensive work in the theatre. But the nature of those books is what counts. They
described a world that really never existed in actual fact, but that became so
familiar to his readers that they could never get enough of them. Although he
was enough of this world to manage a busy, successful career for more than
seventy years, there was also about him some sort of disconnection with what
most people would call reality. Not long before the Second World War he wrote
that “all this alliance-forming” reminded him of form matches at school. “I can’t
realize this is affecting millions of men. I think of Hitler and Mussolini as
two halves, and Stalin as a useful wing forward….anyway, no war in my lifetime
is my feeling.”
Famous last
words! Wodehouse owned a house in Le
Touquet, just south of Boulogne on the Channel coast of France, close enough to
London that he could indulge his restless nature by moving back and forth
easily. He was staying there as the German armies began their assault on France.
Like most other people he believed he was safe behind the Maginot line, but
eventually he had to face up to the fact the Germans were on their way. Twice
he tried to move, but both times he was stymied by mechanical breakdowns, and
in the event he was captured by the Germans ---
typically, he makes a comic scene of it in his description, quoted in
this book --- but when they placed him in an internment camp, the laughter
stopped. He was moved a couple of times, but when the Germans realized they had
in their captivity a famous British author, they released him from such direct
internment, and moved him to Berlin, where after a slight delay, they asked if
he might be interested in recording some talks for them to broadcast on the
radio. They whistled up two Germans whom Wodehouse had known in Hollywood, to
help make him feel at home, and these men helped inveigle him into doing the
talks. He himself thought he would take the opportunity to pay tribute to the
stiff-upper-lip manner in which British detainees behaved. He had no idea that
just by appearing on the Nazi radio, he was labelling himself a traitor in
English eyes, and almost before his talks --- which were intended originally
for the United States --- had been broadcast, a media onslaught against him had
begun in London.
Foremost
among these was William Connor, the acid columnist Cassandra of The Daily Mirror, whose bitter diatribe on
the BBC against Wodehouse attracted more unfavorable comment than favourable
from listeners. An early defender was George Orwell, whose childhood had been
not dissimilar from Wodehouse’s, but the broadcasts, however innocuous their
subject might have been, were a fatal error of judgment, and their fallout were a blight that hung over
Wodehouse for the rest of his life. For some time he was accommodated by an
anglophile German woman, Baroness Anga von Bodenhausen at her country estate,
where he, typically again, soon became Oncle Plummie to the children, and a
family favourite (although his wife Ethel, a more aggressive, bustling,
self-interested person, one of whose functions in life had been to spend much of
Wodehouse’s hard-earned money, was not a favorite). A revealing anecdote
illustrating his air of being out of
touch with reality is that of a young German journalist who was asked to talk
to Wodehouse. He found the writer wanted to sue some of the perpetrators of the
slanders emitted in England. “I need a lawyer I can talk to here who could then
plead for me in England. Would you know any?” he asked Michael Vermehren. “Mr.
Wodehouse,” said Vermehren. “I do know such lawyers, but do you think it is
likely that they would get a special permit to cross the war zone and the
frontiers and go to England and plead your case?” Wodehouse replied, “Do you
think it would be difficult?” “I said, ‘Actually I think it would be completely
impossible.’”
This man
later became a close friend of the writer, as had the Baroness who had put him
up in her country estate, but both were disappointed when, after the war,
hoping to renew their acquaintance with him, he failed to respond, a curious affirmation
of how much he had been wounded by his German experience, and was determined to
put it behind him.
Later he
was permitted to go to occupied Paris, where he was when the war ended. He then
turned himself in to the British authorities, who sent people to interrogate
him, as was done with other British subjects who had spent the war in Germany.
The first interrogator was Malcolm Muggeridge, who immediately fell under his
spell, and declared the fuss about the broadcasts was nonsense. Later came a
Major Cussen, who was persuaded of Wodehouse’s innocence, but who turned in a report
that, while exonerating him, was no whitewash, as McCrum writes. Cussen
concluded that “a jury would find difficulty in convicting him of an intention
to assist the enemy.” Finally, the French government cleared him, and he was
free to go. He decided to go to the United States, and never set foot in
Britain again.
It
summarizes Wodehouse’s attitude towards the world he found himself in that when
he was arrested by the Germans in 1940 he was within four chapters of finishing
Joy In the Morning which many aficionados of his work regard as
his greatest novel. And while Churchill was warning the British that he could
offer them nothing but blood, sweat and tears, and urging them to fight on the
beaches, landing fields and so on, this dedicated artist, for whom the work
always came first, was engaged in
finishing a narrative of, as he says on page one of the book, “the super-sticky
affair” of Nobby ‘Stilton’Cheesewright, Florence Craye, his Uncle Percy, J.
Chichester Clam, Edwin the Boy Scout and old Boko Fittleworth --- “or, as my
biographers will probably call it, the Steeple Bumpleigh affair.”
By 1942, in
the throes of the worst turmoil of his life, Wodehouse began thinking about the
plot of The Mating Season (my
favourite book), and its dramatis personae of “a surging sea of aunts,” who
occupied Deverill Hall, with Bertie undertaking a task imposed by his Aunt
Agatha (“who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth,”), namely, to
ensure that Catsmeat’s fiancee Gertrude remain true to him, while promoting
among the aunts the idea that Gussie Fink-Nottle (“goofy to the gills, face
like a fish, horn-rimmed spectacles, drank orange juice, collected newts”) was a worthy catch for Madeleine Bassett
(“England’s premier pill.”). The motivating factor for Bertie, the narrator,
was, as usual, that he had previously been engaged to Miss Bassett, and could
consider himself safe only so long as she was affianced to someone else: because the moment she was free of such entanglements, she was poised to make herself available
to Bertie, a helpless victim who she mistakenly believed was pining away for
her.
These two
books are described by Mr. McCrum as the main wartime production of this remarkable writer who allowed nothing to get in the way of his work. Need anything more be
said? The man was a genius, a great writer, an innocent, and as sweet a guy as
ever trod the earth. He was awarded a knighthood at New Year's 1975, a symbol
that all was forgiven at last, and he died within six weeks at the age of 94.
He was found sitting in his armchair with a pipe and tobacco pouch in his
hands, the manuscript of yet another unfinished novel close at hand.
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