P. G. Wodehouse
His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr. Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life.
He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy.
[6] Mother and son sailed for Hong Kong, where for his first two years Wodehouse was raised by a Chinese amah (nurse), alongside his elder brothers Philip Peveril John (1877–1951) and Ernest Armine (1879–1936).
[9] The lack of parental contact, and the harsh regime of some of those in loco parentis, left permanent emotional scars on many children from similar backgrounds, including the writers Thackeray, Saki, Kipling and Walpole.
[12] The biographer Robert McCrum suggests that nonetheless Wodehouse's isolation from his parents left a psychological mark, causing him to avoid emotional engagement both in life and in his works.
[13] Another biographer, Frances Donaldson, writes, "Deprived so early, not merely of maternal love, but of home life and even a stable background, Wodehouse consoled himself from the youngest age in an imaginary world of his own.
[49] His lyric for Hall, "Put Me in My Little Cell", was a Gilbertian number for a trio of comic crooks, with music by Frederick Rosse;[50] it was well received and launched Wodehouse on a career as a theatre writer that spanned three decades.
[55] In early 1906 the actor-manager Seymour Hicks invited Wodehouse to become resident lyricist at the Aldwych Theatre, to add topical verses to newly imported or long-running shows.
[76] Nonetheless, Donaldson adds, the book and lyrics for the Princess Theatre shows made the collaborators an enormous fortune and played an important part in the development of the American musical.
Wodehouse was described by Herbert Warren Wind as "politically naive [and] fundamentally unworldly",[94] and he caused a sensation by saying publicly what he had already told his friends privately about Hollywood's inefficiency, arbitrary decision-making, and waste of expensive talent.
[95] Many writers have considered that the interview precipitated a radical overhaul of the studio system,[96] but Taves believes it to have been "a storm in a teacup", and Donaldson comments that, in the straitened post-crash era, the reforms would have been inevitable.
[n 19] The matter was settled after lengthy negotiations, but the Wodehouses decided to change their residential status beyond doubt by moving to France, where they bought a house near Le Touquet in the north.
In 1935 Wodehouse created the last of his regular cast of principal characters, Lord Ickenham, otherwise known as Uncle Fred, who, in Usborne's words, "leads the dance in four novels and a short story ... a whirring dynamo of misrule".
[110] His other books from the decade include Right Ho, Jeeves, which Donaldson judged his best work, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, which the writer Bernard Levin considered the best, and Blandings Castle, which contains "Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend", which Rudyard Kipling thought "one of the most perfect short stories I have ever read".
[117] With the advance of the Germans, the nearby Royal Air Force base withdrew; Wodehouse was offered the sole spare seat in one of the fighter aircraft, but he turned down the opportunity as it would have meant leaving behind Ethel and their dog.
[118] After two months of occupation the Germans interned all male enemy nationals under 60, and Wodehouse was sent to a former prison in Loos, a suburb of Lille, on 21 July; Ethel remained in Le Touquet.
[125][n 22] Wodehouse's family and friends had not had any news of his location after the fall of France, but an article from an Associated Press reporter who had visited Tost in December 1940 led to pressure on the German authorities to release the novelist.
[133] The reaction in Britain to Wodehouse's broadcasts was hostile, and he was "reviled ... as a traitor, collaborator, Nazi propagandist, and a coward",[21] although, Phelps observes, many of those who decried his actions had not heard the content of the programmes.
[136] Wodehouse's biographer, Joseph Connolly, thinks the broadcast "inaccurate, spiteful and slanderous";[137] Phelps calls it "probably the most vituperative attack on an individual ever heard on British radio".
[144] When Wodehouse heard of the furore the broadcasts had caused, he contacted the Foreign Office—through the Swiss embassy in Berlin—to explain his actions, and attempted to return home via neutral countries, but the German authorities refused to let him leave.
"[147] The reaction in America was mixed: the left-leaning publication PM accused Wodehouse of "play[ing] Jeeves to the Nazis", but the Department of War used the interviews as an ideal representation of anti-Nazi propaganda.
[150] The young officer quickly came to like Wodehouse and considered the question of treasonable behaviour as "ludicrous"; he summed up the writer as "ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict".
When Muggeridge tracked them down later, he managed to get Ethel released straight away and, four days later, ensured that the French authorities declared Wodehouse unwell and put him in a nearby hospital, which was more comfortable than where they had been detained.
He was sounded out about writing for Broadway, but he was not at home in the post-war theatre;[n 28] he had money problems, with large sums temporarily tied up in Britain,[167] and for the first time in his career he had no ideas for a new novel.
[173] The biographers Benny Green and Robert McCrum both take the view that this exile benefited Wodehouse's writing, helping him to go on depicting an idealised England seen in his mind's eye, rather than as it actually was in the post-war decades.
[209] Wodehouse received great praise from many of his contemporaries, including Max Beerbohm, Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman[21] and Evelyn Waugh—the last of whom opines, "One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page.
The writer Alan Bennett thinks that "inspired though his language is, I can never take more than ten pages of the novels at a time, their relentless flippancy wearing and tedious",[211] while the literary critic Q. D. Leavis writes that Wodehouse had a "stereotyped humour ... of ingenious variations on a laugh in one place".
[217] The proposed nominations of Wodehouse for a knighthood in 1967 and 1971 were blocked for fear that such an award would "revive the controversy of his wartime behaviour and give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character which the embassy was doing its best to eradicate".
[178] When Wodehouse was awarded the knighthood, only four years later, the journalist Dennis Barker wrote in The Guardian that the writer was "the solitary surviving English literary comic genius".
