P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters

Katherine A. Powers tracks the creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves through his correspondence.

February 9, 2013

P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters Edited by Sophie Ratcliffe Norton, W.W. & Company 640 pp.

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Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers for Barnes & Noble Review

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I was over a hundred pages into P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters before I could square the author of these letters with the person who was England's greatest comic writer, the man with the golden ear and onlie begetter of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Fred, Lord Emsworth, the Duchess of Blandings, and a monstrous regiment of aunts. The continuous "feast of reason and flow of the soul" I had expected from the founder of the Drones Club is on show only now and again in this three-quarters-of-a-century epistolary journey. But what is revealingly and disconcertingly present, and what becomes increasingly engrossing, is the down-to-earth, strangely unfrisky human being in which that genius dwelled.

Like most people who earn their bread by the ink of their pens, P. G. Wodehouse took a great interest in money and words produced per day, week, and month, but unlike most scribblers, the figures he ran up in all cases are truly arresting. "Finished yesterday," he writes in 1933 to his friend the novelist Denis Mackail, "making three novels and 10 short stories in 18 months, which as Variety would say, is nice sugar." Elsewhere he reports, variously, an 8,000-word story in two days, 40,000 words in three weeks, 55,000 words in one month, and 100,000 words of a novel in two. The pleasure he takes in these numbers is palpable, as is his pride in reporting his earnings, his most lucrative venue being the Saturday Evening Post. Boasting of a serial he had just finished, he tells his old school chum and confidant, Bill Townend, "The good old Satevpost have done me proud... I mailed them the last part on a Wednesday and got a cheque for $18,000 (my record) on the following Tuesday!!! That's the way to do business." This is 1922, when $18,000 was the farthest thing from peanuts, as was the next year's $20,000 for another serial -- which sums made up only a portion of each year's income.

It is hard to feel happy about one's hero going on in this way ? and there is evidence that his friends felt the same. On the other hand, Wodehouse was no "exponent of the one-way pocket," as one of his bespatted young men has put it. His sense of responsibility and generosity is very much evident throughout. Writing to a friend about his marriage to the twice-widowed Ethel, he says that "for the first time in my life I am absolutely happy. It is a curious thing about it that the anxieties seem to add to the happiness. The knowledge that it is up to me to support someone else has a stimulating effect." Beyond that, he sent untold amounts of cash to the struggling Bill Townend ? gifts kept secret from Ethel, who had, as she did in all matters, strong views on the subject. These financial infusions were not motivated by charity alone but by the obligation the immensely successful Wodehouse felt for having encouraged this friend of his youth to take up what turned out to be a depressingly uncelebrated and unremunerative career as a writer.

Wodehouse's letters may not be the heady brew that his fiction is, but in them his kindness, modesty (in matters nonmonetary), and overall decency shine through, as does his invincible ignorance of the way of the world, a world he seemed to believe had as much aversion to "unpleasantness" as he did. Here we have him writing to Townend in April 1939 (a little over a month after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia): "Do you know, a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present. It has just dawned on the civilians of all countries that the good old days of seeing the boys off in the troop ship are over and that the elderly statesmen who used to talk about giving sons to the country will now jolly well have to give themselves. I think if Hitler really thought there was any chance of a war, he would have nervous prostration."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/RhgW7JwOzCw/P.G.-Wodehouse-A-Life-in-Letters

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