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Sir P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse (1881-1975) |
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Prolific English comic novelist, short story writer, lyricist and playwright, best known as the creator of Jeeves, the perfect "gentleman's gentleman," Bertie Wooster of the Drones Club, a young bachelor aristocrat, and the absentminded Lord Emsworth of the Blandings Castle. Most of Wodehouse's works gently parodied the British aristocracy of the 1920s and 1930s. After World War II Wodehouse lived in the United States. During the decades, Wodehouse's picture of Edwardian England gradually disengaged from reality, and became an imaginary land which was untouched by time. As a prose stylist Wodehouse praised by such writers as Hilaire Bellock and Evelyn Waugh. One great advantage in being a historian to a man like Jeeves is that his mere personality prevents one selling one's artistic soul for gold. In recent years I have had lucrative offers for his services from theatrical managers, motion-picture magnates, the proprietors of one or two widely advertised commodities, and even the editor of the comic supplement of an American newspaper, who wanted him for a "comic strip". But, tempting though the terms were, it only needed Jeeves deprecating cough and his murmured "I would scarcely advocate it, sir," to put the jack under my better nature. Jeeves knows his place, and it is between the covers of a book. (from Wodehouse's introduction to The World of Jeeves, Harper & Row, 1988, p. xi) Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a British judge in Hong Kong, and Eleanor (Deane) Wodehouse. Within the family, Wodehouse's first name was abbreviated to "Plum" and later also his wife and friends used this name. Until the age of four, Wodehouse lived in Hong Kong with his parents. Returning to England, he spent much of his childhood in the care of various aunts, seeing rarely his parents. Wodehouse attended boarding schools and received his secondary education at Dulwich College, London, which he always remembered with affection. He said once that the years between 1894 and 1900 were like heaven. His first story Wodehouse wrote at the age of seven. The article for which he was paid (10s 6 d) was 'Some Aspects of Game-Captaincy' (1900). Wodehouse wrote it for a competition sponsored by the Public School Magazine. However, Wodehouse's father did not approve of his son's literary aspirations, and after graduating in 1900 Wodehouse worked two years at the London branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Wodehouse entered the literary world first as a free-lance
writer, contributing humorous stories to Punch and the London Globe,
where he had a column called 'By the Way'. Most of his
stories appeared first serialized at the Saturday Evening Post.
After 1909 he lived and worked long periods in the United States and in
France. His novel A Gentleman of Leisure
(1910) was adapted into a play, which premiered on Broadway with
Douglas Fairbanks playing the lead role. When the play was
produced in Chicago, it was renamed A Thief for a Night. John Barrymore played the lead. In 1914 Wodehouse married Ethel Newton, a widow; they had met in New York eight weeks earlier. Christopher Hitchens said in his essay on Wodehouse, that he had "no sex life or love life worth recording, and seemed to reserve his affections primarily for animals." ('P.G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy,' in Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens by Christopher Hitchens, London: Atlantic Books, 2012, p. 266) Ethel had a daughter, Leonora, whom Wodehouse adopted legally. She persuaded him to write Leave It to Psmith (1923), about Rupert Psmith, a monocle-wearing character. In 1926 he dedicated The Heart of a Goof to his daughter "without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half time." Leonora Wodehouse died in 1943; he never recovered from the loss. Wodehouse wrote for musical comedy in New York and for
Hollywood,
but viewed the film industry ironically. "In every studio in Hollywood
there are rows and rows of hutches, each containing an author on a long
contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering
out through the bars. You hear them whining piteously to be taken for a
walk. And does the heart bleed? You bet it bleeds. A visitor has to be
very callous not to be touched by such a spectacle as this." (Wodehouse in Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 1929) Once
he spent a week at William Randolph Hearst's estate and wrote: "I
sat on [Hearst's mistress Marion Davies's] right the first night, the
found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the
extreme end . . . Another day, and I should have been feeding on the
floor." (What Ho!:
The Best of Wodehouse, 2011, p. 490; first published in 2000) Wodehouse's early stories were mainly for schoolboys centering
on a
character known as Ronald (or sometimes Rupert) Eustace Psmith, a "very
tall, very thin, very solemn young man." Following the World War I
Wodehouse gained fame with the novel Piccadilly
Jim (1918).
At the time he married Ethel, he had only $100 in bank, but by the
1920s he was earning $100,000 in a year. Now, touching this business of old Jeeves—my man, you know—how do we stand? Lots of people think I’m much too dependent on him. My Aunt Agatha, in fact, has even gone so far as to call him my keeper. Well, what I say is: Why not? The man’s a genius. From the collar upward he stands alone. I gave up trying to run my own affairs within a week of his coming to me. That was about half a dozen years ago, directly after the rather rummy business of Florence Craye, my Unde Willoughbys book, and Edwin, the Boy Scout. ('Jeeves Takes Charge,' in Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse, Herbert Jenkins, 1960, p. 7; first published in 1925) His major breakthrough
Wodehause made with The Inimitable
Jeeves
(1924). He had introduced Bertie and a valet
named Jeeves in the short story 'Extricating Young Gussie' (1915), but
their first meeting takes place in 'Jeeves Takes Charge' (1916) and
Berties gets his surname in 'Leave It to Jeeves' (1916). When he
started to write about Bertie Woorster and his circle, Wodehouse was
living in the U.S. He thought that they are the kind of English
characters that the American readers would read about. Although the juxtaposition of a clever servant and foolish master had been known since classical times and was famously used by Cervantes in the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza pair, and in Mozart's opera opera The Marriage of Figaro, Wodehouse managed to refresh the old idea and add to it a peculiar British twist. Usually Jeeves saved Bertie from many disasters. Of his relatives the most formidable was Aunt Agatha. C. Northcote Parkinson argued in his Jeeves, A Gentleman's Personal Gentleman (1979) that Bertie was under the impression that he had chosen Jeeves but that is not what happened. The novel Thank You, Jeeves (1934) is considered as one of Wodehouse's best works. In addition to
his humorous novels and stories, Wodehouse collaborated with Guy Bolton
in writing several popular Broadway musicals, notably Sally (1920), Sitting Pretty (1924), Anything Goes (1934), and Bring on the Girls (1954).
Wodehouse's greatest lyrics include 'Bill,' a hit in the musical Show
Boat. "Musical comedy was my dish," he said. "The musical comedy
theatre was my spiritual home. I would rather have written Oklahoma! than Hamlet." (A Brief Guide to Jeeves and Wooster
by Nigel Cawthorne, London: Robinson, 2013, p. 17) Among others, he collaborated with Jerome Kern (Oh, Boy!, 1917; Leave it to Jane,
1917), George Gershwin (Oh, Kay!, 1926), and Cole Porter, who
wrote lyrics and music for Anything Goes. Moreover, Jeeves stories contain long passages of dialogue. Wodehouse spent the remainder of his life in several homes in
the
U.S. and Europe. In Hollywood he helped found the Hollywood Cricket
Club; its members included Boris Karloff, Errol Flynn, and David Niven.
Later, while living in Long Island, he helped set up "Bide-A-Wee" home
for stray and abandoned pets. During World War II Wodehouse was captured by the Germans at Le Touquet, France, where he used to stay when not living in England-partly because tax authorities. At that time the U.S. had not entered the war. After spending about a year in various German camps, he was interned in Berlin. For a period, he stayed at the Adlon hotel, and then spent the summer with friends in the country. Eventually the Wodehouses were dispatched to Paris. The New York Times wrote in September 1942, that Wodehouse had "accepted German hospitality on a luxurious scale." Wodehouse, who was not a Nazi sympathizer, naïvely recorded
five
interviews, depicting humorously his experiences as an internee.
Noteworthy, he was used by the German Foreign Office, not Joseph
Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry. These
interviews were broadcast by German radio to America and England, but
this made Wodehouse liable to charges of treason. On his first chat
(Berlin Broadcast) in June 1941 he
said: "Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, "How can I
become an Internee?" Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy
a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the
Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest
system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest." (Wodehouse at War by
Iain Sproat, London: Milner & Co., 1981, p. 108) Wodehouse was labelled as a quisling in the Daily Mirror
and libraries withdrew his books-the
Battle of Britain was no laughing matter. Following the liberation of
Paris, Wodehouse was arrested by the French, and released in 1945
through the intervention of British officials. For fear of prosecution,
which the British officials had actually dropped, he was not able to
return to his home country. Accusations against him were never proven
correct, but he was never totally cleared. George
Orwell
defended Wodehouse in his essay 'In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse' (1945),
". . . if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his
British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of
ourselves . . . ", but A.A. Milne
broke his friendship with him. Wodehouse admired Milne's work. "He
has always been about my favorite author. I have all his books and
re-read them regularly," he wrote in 1952 to Alastair Wallace, on
hearing that Milne had suffered serious stroke. (A Life in Letters by P. G.
Wodehouse, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, p. 467) The first Wodehouse work to be published in Britain after the war was Money in the Bank, which came out in 1946 and sold 26,000 copies. When the play Don't Listen, Ladies, written in collaboration with Guy Bolton, was produced in London, the playwrights were billed as Guy Bolton and Stephen Powys. Wodehouse settled
in the United States, living in his new home country in near-seclusion.
He bought a ten-acre estate on Long Island in 1952. An American citizen
he became three years later. By this time his political mistakes were
forgotten, and Wodehouse was subsequently awarded a D.Litt. from Oxford
University. Malcolm Muggeridge, who had investigated the author as
a member of military intelligence during the war, asked him
in 1953 to write a regular column for Punch magazine. Though
Wodehouse eventually lived in America longer than in Britain, he
retained his English accent. P.G. Wodehouse died, of a heart attack, in a hospital in
Remsenburg, Long Island, on
February 14, 1975. He had a manuscript atr his bedside. A few weeks
before he died, Wodehouse had
received a knighthood. Ethel Wodehouse died in 1984. Wodehouse wrote nearly 100 novels, about 30 plays and 20
screenplays.
His first book, The Pothunters,
a short story collection, was published
1902. The last, Aunt's Aren't
Gentlemen, appeared 1974. Wodehouse also wrote his memoirs, Performing Flea (1951) and Over Seventy (1957). In the 1960s Wodehouse's stories inspired the television series The World of Wooster and Blandings Castle. Wodehouse Playhouse started in 1975 and in the 1990s Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves, both perfectly casted, appeared in a new television series. "Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be," Fry said in his introduction to What Ho!: The Best of Wodehouse (2000). Piccadilly Jim was made into a film by Robert Z. Leonard in 1936, starring Robert Montgomery, Madge Evans, and Frank Morgan. For further reading: Bibliography and Reader's Guide to the First Editions of P.G. Wodehouse by David Jansen (1971); The World of P.G. Wodehouse by H. W. Wind (1972); P.G. Wodehouse at Work to the End by Richard Usborne (1976); P.G. Wodehouse by Owen Dudley Owens (1977); Jeeves: A Gentleman's personal Gentleman by C. Northcote Parkinson (1979); Wodehouse at War by Iain Sproat (1981); P.G. Wodehouse. A Literary Biography by Benny Green (1981); P.G. Wodehouse by Frances Donaldson (1982); Wodehouse: The Fictionist by M.N. Shama (1982); Who's Who in Wodehouse by Daniel H. Garrison (1990); P. G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth by Barry Phelps (1992); Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum (2004); The Novel Life of P.G. Wodehouse by Roderick Easdale (2004); Middlebrow Wodehouse: P.G. Wodehouse's Work in Context, edited by Ann Rea (2015); The Idler's Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P.G. Wodehouse by Laura Kasson Fiss (2023) Selected books:
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