BiographyThe English, it is frequently asserted, don't trust brains, an overly brainy chap being regarded as all too likely to lack that much more solid quality of "character". So perhaps it is fitting that the country's most popular comic writer should have been the creator of such a splendid gallery of chumps, asses and nincompoops and that they should be loved with such simple passion by Anglos and anglophiles everywhere.
And yet a nation which quite recently snaffled up half the world cannot surely be quite as artless as they would have us - or indeed themselves - believe. There is some loot being made, you can be sure, out of all this seeming innocence, and a nifty operator pulling the strings.
P.G. Wodehouse first made his name as a writer of sentimental and humorous school sports stories for an audience of public schoolboys, ex-public schoolboys and London clerks who, it must be assumed, wanted to be public schoolboys. In due course the boyish heroes became young gents, aimlessly adrift in Piccadilly and Mayfair with little on their minds but parties, cricket, girls and the beastly insufficiency of their allowance from pater.
Wodehouse's comic dispatches from this Edwardian paradise, where the greatest possible disaster that could befall his young heroes was an unsuitable engagement or an embarrassing "temporary financial difficulty", proved popular with the expanding reading public and increasingly profitable for their creator, who had hit on a formula he was to change only minimally over a writing career of 70 years.
In 1914 world war arrived, followed by Bolshevism, mass unemployment, fascism and even more destructive war and genocide, but in the Wodehouse world the sun still shone down on Blandings Castle, policemen's helmets were nicked on boat race night, good old Jeeves magicked away those obstacles strewn in the path of love and for Bertie and Bingo, Tuppy and Gussie the dividends just kept on gloriously flowing in. Middle England had found its arcadia of choice and it bloody well wasn't letting go of it.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford in 1881, the third son of Eleanor and Ernest, a judge in the Hong Kong colonial service. His childhood was a normal one for a boy of his class, which is to say he almost never saw his parents, being brought up by his nanny, various schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and, most fruitfully for his later fiction, a swarm of country-dwelling aunts, each with her own retinue of friendly butlers, footmen, cooks and under-parlourmaids.
The Wodehouse corpus is notably free of any positive models of the parent-child relationship and it may well be significant that his most celebrated comic pairing - that of Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves - features a hopelessly innocent, not to say imbecilic, man-child and a protecting surrogate father from a lower social class.
Wodehouse himself always vigorously pooh-poohed any psychological interpretations of his work, as indeed he pooh-poohed anything he considered high-falutin' or "modern". But his lifelong prescription for dealing with what the English call unpleasantness - "one has deliberately to school oneself to think of something else quick" - may well have had its origins in this period of childhood abandonment.
Whatever his earlier troubles, Wodehouse's public school years were a time of achievement and happiness. Dulwich College gave him security and an arena in which to shine both at sports and studies. It also provided throughout adulthood a warm memory of japes, scrapes and innocent good fellowship whose essence he was endlessly to redistil into comic fiction.
Denied an Oxford education by his parents' straitening circumstances, he went instead to a job in the city but left after two years to pursue freelance writing full-time. Almost from the beginning he was a notable success and a high earner and the quest for adventure and even greater financial reward soon brought him to America, where he was to spend lengthy periods polishing off new novels and stories and winning increasingly lucrative commissions for the Broadway stage.
It was in New York in 1914 that he met the actress Ethel Wayman, a twice-married "angel in human form" who was to become his lifelong partner. Ethel, McCrum writes, found in her new husband's "tolerance, affability and dedicated breadwinning the kind of comfort she had never known". And he found in her someone willing to take charge, organise things, spend his money and throw lavish parties for any handsome young men who happened to be passing through. Arguably Wodehouse's famous tolerance on occasions shaded into complaisance, but if there was any threat of unpleasantness he could be relied on to "think of something else quick", normally through immediate recourse to the study and the always dependable pleasures of writing and earning.
Even on the sunniest of lives, however, a drop of rain must fall. For the wholly apolitical Wodehouse the drop came from the quite unexpected quarter of European fascism when in 1940 the German army invaded France, where he and Ethel were living as tax exiles, and carted him off to a Silesian internment camp. And it was here, flattered by the Germans into recording a series of lightly humorous radio sketches for his American readers, that Wodehouse made the mistake of his life, landing himself, as his hero Bertie might have said, up to his neck in the bouillon.
It is well known that public school men stick together, but there is a certain irony in the fact that it was the ascetic socialist George Orwell (Eton 1921) who was to mount the most effective defence of this chronicler of the lives of the parasitic rich as patriotic England worked itself into a lather over his supposed treason. In a 1945 essay on the affair, Orwell argued that Wodehouse could not in fact be convicted of anything worse than stupidity. His only real sin, he added, had been to "present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are". As for the "fascist tendencies" some found in his novels, Orwell plausibly suggested these contained "no post-1918 tendencies at all".
Such voices of reason were not listened to, however, and though Wodehouse was never prosecuted for his wartime escapade, equally he was never told he would not be prosecuted. In 1947 he and Ethel steamed out of Cherbourg for New York. He died there in 1975 at the age of 93, having never returned to Britain. Robert McCrum's affectionate, fluent and thorough biography, which will surely become the standard work, is particularly fascinating on Wodehouse's American years, his now forgotten work for the stage and his collaborations with the songwriting geniuses Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin.
But while he is a staunch defender of Wodehouse's reputation both as man and writer he is too scrupulous a biographer to ignore the odder or less attractive aspects of his subject's character. As Orwell for one pointed out, in all of Wodehouse's enormous body of work there is not so much as a single sex joke, a considerable sacrifice for a comic writer. Strange as it may seem, it appears he was simply "not interested in that sort of thing".
The Wodehouse libido seems, however, to have always been fully engaged elsewhere, in the making of ever greater piles of money and in keeping as much of it as possible out of the hands of the taxman. While generous to close friends, he could be childishly mean. In America we see him, at the height of his early fame and wealth, trying to wheedle a free box of cigars from a manufacturer in exchange for a product mention in a short story. Though he assiduously cultivated his fan base, he privately admitted to a "scornful loathing" of the reading public and grumbled of "strewing one's pearls before swine". The other side of his engaging old fogey act was a deep hatred for the modern world and its unpleasant art, full of "incest and homosexualism".
As for his writing, certainly it is excellent in parts. His standard comic trick is facetiousness, and this can quickly become wearing for the adult reader. But he was also a master of the absurdly ingenious simile and a fluent stylist.
Summing up his achievement, McCrum hesitates to place Wodehouse alongside the greatest English writers, Shakespeare or Dickens, settling instead on a comparison with Austen. But this too is somewhat over-generous. Sean O'Casey dubbed him a "performing flea", a remark which, though typically spiteful, does capture the ultimate inconsequentiality of the Wodehouse oeuvre. But what more do we really want from a comic writer than that he should make us laugh? On a good day, and he had many, our fatuous performing flea still does that in full measure.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
Wodehouse: A Life By Robert McCrum Viking, 530pp. £20