A look at P.G. Wodehouse
Biography unveils the 'comic genius' of Jeeves' creator


Wodehouse
A Life
By Robert McCrum
W.W. Norton
530 pp., $27.95



By Mary Welp
Special to The Courier-Journal

The most reassuring thing about this chunky biography is the photo of its author on the dust jacket. Finally! Someone younger than I am who thinks P.G. Wodehouse the greatest comic genius of all time. Heretofore, I've been forced to turn to aged relatives and retired professors to share my passion.

But Robert McCrum is young! In fact, he appears to be barely out of his teens, yet he is the literary editor of the London Observer,

has written six novels and two other works of non-fiction, so he can't be that young, can he?

In any case, McCrum knows his stuff, backwards and forwards. Though this, like most biographies, is too long, one fails to see where he could have cut it. For Wodehouse, in addition to his prolific career as a novelist (publishing at least one book per year between 1902 and 1974), was a journalist, an essayist, a playwright, a librettist, a poet of light verse, and a traitor to his country.

Wodehouse is known round the world for his two most famous characters: Jeeves and Wooster, Jeeves playing the sartorially demanding and sage butler to Bertie Wooster's upper-crust, dunderheaded-but-articulate playboy. Jeeves and Wooster have had many incarnations: not just in the original novels, but also on stage, screen, television, and, most pleasing of all, in audio book interpretations. Yet Jeeves and Wooster are the mere tips of the iceberg. Other vividly drawn characters, major and minor, abound in these novels and live on in the imagination of the reader. Consider but a few of their names: Gussie Fink-Nottle, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Pongo Twistlelon, Oofy Prosser, and the erstwhile Sir Roderick Glossop, brain specialist.

These characters and the intricate plots they find themselves roiled up in provide not only the purest kind of escapist belly laughter but genuine solace on the darkest nights of the soul. And the dark soul is precisely what Wodehouse himself refused to believe in. The son of a British magistrate posted to Hong Kong, the child Wodehouse, left behind in England, saw his parents hardly at all from birth to age 15. Still, he insisted until his dying day that his childhood "went like a breeze." If it did, it was because of school, particularly his beloved Dulwich College, to which he was sent as a boarder at the age of 13. McCrum shows that Wodehouse remained obsessed with his old school, keeping up with cricket and rugby scores and continuing an odd correspondence with his study mate, a dull writer named Bill Townsend.

McCrum devotes the great bulk of his time and energy to what was the most scandalous moment of Wodehouse's career: his radio broadcasts from Germany during World War II. In 1940 he and his wife were living off the coast of Normandy and were cut off from escape by the speed of the German army advance. Wodehouse was interned in a camp in Upper Silesia (about which he wrote, "If this is Upper Silesia what must Lower Silesia be like?"). During his stay there, he was persuaded to record three broadcasts for the U.S., chiefly to reassure his American readers that he was in good health. In the broadcasts, he turned prison camp life itself into humor. The first of these was picked up by the British monitoring service and turned into a propaganda coup by the Daily Mirror. His "loony act," as he himself later called it, coupled with a seemingly blind refusal to understand the political significance of his actions, ruined him. Though George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh defended him, the great majority of his countrymen denounced, ridiculed, and finally rejected him. He settled in America after the war and never returned to the country that inspired his greatest fiction. He died in 1975 at the age of 93.

Yet, according to every source, there was never a malicious bone in his body. As The New Yorker

critic Anthony Lane has written, "You could argue that Wodehouse did more than any other writer to soothe the citizens of a harried century." We must extend this into the next century. The Wodehousean way of negotiating the world was through the continual comic rendering of a pre-1930s British aristocracy and its shenanigans. Essentially, he told the same story over and over and over and over once again. The story is a love story, but the plot is never genuine romance. It's either a scheme to get two people together or to keep two people apart, and it all takes place in a world of dotty uncles and controlling aunts. The women characters, though not onstage enough, are among his most ingenious inventions. The underlings are always wiser than the overlords. Human interaction and dialogue are the heart of the matter, the means for negotiating the world. Consider this exchange during a moment when Bertie Wooster is plagued by doubts:

"There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?"

"The mood will pass, sir."

The mood will pass with the proper novel in one's hands. "Summer Lightning" will do. Or "Uncle Fred in the Springtime." Then again, there's "Eggs, Beans and Crumpets" and "The Code of the Woosters."

The mood will pass.

The reviewer is a writer and critic who lives in Louisville. Her novel 'The Triangle Pose' will be published this spring.