A short life of the author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975), universally known as P. G. Wodehouse (“Plum” to his friends), was an English-born novelist, short story writer, lyricist, and playwright who produced over ninety books in a career spanning seven decades and who is widely regarded as the greatest comic writer in the English language. His two principal fictional creations — Bertie Wooster and his preternaturally brilliant valet Jeeves, and the ramshackle aristocratic paradise of Blandings Castle — have given more sustained pleasure to more readers than perhaps any other body of fiction in English.
Life
Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, the son of a colonial magistrate. He was educated at Dulwich College, which he loved (unlike the public schools portrayed with misery by Orwell and others), and briefly worked at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in the City of London — an experience so tedious that it drove him to write his way out. He published his first novel, The Pothunters, in 1902, at twenty-one.
He moved to New York in 1909 and spent much of his adult life in America, becoming an American citizen in 1955. He worked on Broadway (writing lyrics with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton for musical comedies including Oh, Boy!, Leave It to Jane, and Anything Goes) and in Hollywood (writing screenplays at MGM). He married Ethel Newton Rowley in 1914, and they remained married for sixty-one years.
During World War II, Wodehouse was interned by the Germans in France and made a series of humorous broadcasts on German radio, describing his internment experience. The broadcasts were naive rather than treasonous — they contained no propaganda — but they provoked a furious reaction in Britain. He was effectively exiled; he never returned to England, living in Remsenburg, Long Island, for the last three decades of his life.
Jeeves and Wooster
The Jeeves stories — beginning with “Extricating Young Gussie” (1917) and continuing through eleven novels and over thirty short stories — follow Bertie Wooster, a wealthy, amiable, dim young man-about-town, and his valet, Jeeves, who is intellectually omnipotent. Bertie gets into scrapes — usually involving aunts, engagements he doesn’t want, or friends who need rescuing — and Jeeves gets him out of them through stratagems of Byzantine ingenuity.
The finest Jeeves novels — Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), The Code of the Woosters (1938), and Joy in the Morning (1946) — are among the funniest books in the language. The Code of the Woosters alone contains Bertie’s confrontation with the fascist Roderick Spode, the theft of a silver cow-creamer, and Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving speech — set-pieces of comic writing that have never been surpassed.
Blandings Castle
The Blandings novels — centred on the Earl of Emsworth, a vague, elderly peer whose principal interest is his prize-winning Berkshire sow, the Empress of Blandings — began with Something Fresh (1915) and continued through eleven novels. The world of Blandings is a pastoral comedy: the English countryside is always sunny, the crises are always trivial (stolen pig, unwanted fiancées, tyrannical sisters), and everything resolves happily.
Other Series
Wodehouse created a vast cast of recurring characters: Psmith (the monocled socialist dandy), Uncle Fred (Lord Ickenham, the benevolent agent of chaos), Mr. Mulliner (the pub raconteur), and the members of the Drones Club. Leave It to Psmith (1923) and Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939) are masterpieces of their respective series.
Style
Wodehouse’s prose is the most purely pleasurable in English. He revises obsessively — polishing every sentence, testing every simile, tuning every rhythm. His similes are legendary: “She came leaping towards me, looking something like a maddened spring lamb and something like a Hooligan in one of those gangster pictures.” “He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.” The style appears effortless, which is the surest sign that it is the product of enormous labour.
Evelyn Waugh called Wodehouse “the greatest living writer of English prose.” Hilaire Belloc said he was “the best living English writer — the head of my profession.” These are not hyperboles.
The Wartime Broadcasts and the Question of Politics
The Berlin broadcasts of 1941 remain the central controversy of Wodehouse’s life. He made five talks on German radio describing his internment — talks that were genuinely funny, entirely unpolitical, and disastrously naive. He seems not to have understood that broadcasting on enemy radio during wartime would be perceived as collaboration. The BBC’s A.P. Herbert attacked him publicly; questions were asked in Parliament; he was investigated by MI5 (which concluded he was foolish but not treasonous). George Orwell defended him in a celebrated 1945 essay, arguing that Wodehouse was a political innocent whose imaginary England bore no relation to the real country and that his broadcasts were simply a comic writer continuing to be funny under absurd circumstances.
The affair reveals something essential about Wodehouse: his fictional world is so hermetically sealed from political reality that its creator could not recognise a political situation when he was living in one. This is both the source of his genius — the creation of a perfect comic universe untouched by historical contingency — and the explanation for his most catastrophic misjudgement.
Collecting Wodehouse
The Man with Two Left Feet (1917, Methuen, containing the first Jeeves story) in first edition brings $1,000–$5,000. Leave It to Psmith (1923, Herbert Jenkins) brings $500–$2,000. Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) brings $300–$1,500. The Code of the Woosters (1938) brings $200–$1,000. The market for Wodehouse first editions is robust and well-established, with American and British editions both collected.