P.G. Wodehouse

The truth behind the fiction

Benny Green

On the day after the death of P. G. Wodehouse, I was practising one of my favourite hobbies, which is getting comfortably lost in the back lanes of rustic south Hertfordshire, when it struck me, as we passed the ginger tom drowsing in the forecourt of The Cricketers' and the trusting donkey nibbling the ragged fringe of the hedgerow just beyond, that the England which Wodehouse must have remembered has changed rather less than in despondent moments we sometimes assume. We cruised through a valley overlooked by the turreted hauteur of just such a greystone country house whose corridors once echoed to the maladroit skitter of Gussy Fink-Nottle, while up on the roof, where the flag was still flying this very aftern000n, Madeline Bassett gazed up into thenightskycontemplating God's daisy-chain. In one village the eyes of china elephant book-ends peeped out from behind the front room curtains of a house called 'Mon Repos,' which reminded me of Sam the Sudden, whose entire plot hinges on the issues of where 'Mon Repos' ends and 'San Raphael' begins.

I have noticed one peculiar thing about the reactions of those who number themselves among the dedicated Wodehouseans. They always assume that the lovely world which Wodehouse described in his novels could never be found on any map nor its inhabitants on any electoral roll. Indeed, the tenacity with which people cling to this conception of the world-that-never-was is as impressive as it is surprising. I should have thought that so far from being dismayed by the thought that Wodehouse's never-never land might be linked to the one we know, people would be utterly enchanted by the news that it is after all not quite the insuperable distance we thought between, say Battling Billson and whoever happens at the moment to be the leading contender for the Southern Area' heavyweight championship. But no; on the contrary, people become incensed the moment you suggest it, almost as though in even broaching the subject of possible Wodehouse sources you were polluting the dream. Some time ago in these columns, it seems that in indulging in the mildest of speculations about the genesis of the odious Spode, I was being too temerarious for my own good, for the ink was hardly dry on the page before that hypothetical colonel from Cheltenham came down on me like a ton of retired majors from Tunbridge Wells.

Admittedly one of my most promising theories, that Psmith, who embraced communism because he was cheated out of a place in the Eton side to play Harrow at Lord's, was based on Henry Hyndman, who embraced socialism because he was cheated out of a place in the Cambridge side to play Oxford at Lord's (see Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower) has since been smashed, but only in a way which proves my case. The refutation comes from Wodehouse himself, in one of the last prefaces he ever wrote, to the 1974 omnibus edition of The World of Psmith. The monocled Marxist may not have derived from the real-life Hyndman, but he certainly derived from somebody:

Jeeves and the rest of my dramatis personae had to be built up from their foundations, but Psmith came to me ready-made. A cousin of mine, who had been at Winchester, happened to tell me one night of Rupert D'Oyly Carte, the son of the Savoy operas D'Oyly Carte, a schoolmate of his. Rupert was long, slender, always beautifully dressed and very dignified. His speech was what is known as orotund, and he wore a monocle. He habitually addressed his fellow Wykehamists as "Comrade", and if one of the masters chanced to inquire as to his health, would reply, "Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah".

Despite the destruction of my Hyndman theory, can I be blamed for respectfully questioning Wodehouse's claim that the rest of his characters had to "build up from their foundations"? My evidence is simple enough Here is Barbara Tuchman's description of the ninth Duke of Devonshire:

He liked old baggy, casual clothes, never took the slightest trouble with his guests, deliberately ignored those who might prove tiresome, and once, when a speaker in the House of Lords was declaiming on 'the greatest moment in life', the Duke opened his eyes long enough to remark to his neighbour, "My greatest moment was when my pig won first prize at Skipton Fair".

There is no need to pursue that Wodehousean parallel very far, and I suppose it could be pure coincidence — except that when pure coincidences keep cropping up, they begin to look like coincidences no more.

That Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic masters of English prose of all time is self-evident to all except those without a literary sense of humour, a group which comically enough has devoted a considerable amount of energy to discussing the significance of Wodehouse. However, instead of falling into the Euclidean trap of attempting to prove the truth of a truism, I will merely append two quotations from among literally millions:

Peacehaven was a two-storey structure in the Neo-Suburbo-Gothic style of architecture, constructed of bricks which appeared to be making a slow recovery from a recent attack of jaundice.

-Here's your rat. A little the worse for wear, this rat is, I'm afraid, sir. A gentleman happened to step on it.

You can step on a nat, not without hurting it. That tat is not the yat it was".

But perhaps after all I must indulge in the luxury of one more quotation, if only because it shows how much Wodehouse must have been aware of the literary arguments raging over him, and how little importance he attached to any of them. In The Clicking of Cuthbert we are introduced to the Russian novelist Brusiloff, who eventually delivers his verdict on modern creative writing:

No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoy not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

The idea that Wodehouse was "not good, not bad" would surely have applied to that fastidious snake in the Edwardian grass, Sir Max Beerbohm, who once pretended to pay Wodehouse a compliment by comparing him to Cinquevalli, no doubt because in drawing the parallel with a professional juggler instead o. with a professional writer the Incorrigible Max thought he was observing his own golden rule of never quite taking any of his contemporaries seriously. The irony is that of all the English writers of the last eighty years, it is the creator of Zuleika Dobson more than any of them who has something to tell us about the begetter of Bertie Wooster. For each man adopted the identical strategy, switching the location of his life in order to preserve intact the location of his art. No doubt Beerbohm's motives in settling for the Mediterranean were very different from Wodehouse's reasons for ch000sing Long Island, but it is not cause but effect which will interest posterity. Max seems to have elected for the Italian riviera as an act of renunciation, while Wodehouse eventually became committed to America because that was the place where he could best use his great talents as a Gilbertian rhymer in the musical theatre. And yet, as Rapallo is to Beerbohm, so Remsenburg is to Wodehouse, a sanctuary in which the emotion of Edwardian London could be recollected in the tranquillity of self-imposed exile.

Of course.,there are differences between the two case histories. For one thing, while Max swanned about the town, a Celebrity almost before he had done anything celebrated, Wodehouse, contrary to the popular impression, lived in total obscurity, the ambience of Edwardian London's glamorous facade virtually unknown to him. In an unpublished interview less than a year before his death, Wodehouse was asked what it was like to have a night out on the town at the turn of the century. This was his reply:

Well, as I remember it, they used to turn out the lights at a place like the Savoy pretty early, about twelve o'clock or something. I think night-life was very mild in those days. And of course I had no money. I couldn't go in for it much.

A much more important difference is that Beerbohm came home for the war, while Wodehouse was interned by the Germans and drifted into the muddle which encouraged a great shoal of intellectual tiddlers to snap at him for the next fifteen years. If only his denigrators had read their Wodehouse they night have thought again, or rather, they might have begun to think. One of those who appears to have enjoyed analysing Wodehouse without having read enough of him to know, Was Orwell, who arrived at the apocolyptic discovery that "there were no post-1918 tendencies in Wodehouse." And that, with respect, is the sort of conclusion which Bertie Wooster would describe as barmy to the back teeth. For it has always seemed curious to me that neither Duff Cooper, nor Cassandra, nor any of the other distinguished creative artists who made such a spectacular display of virtue outraged, never mentioned, in the context of political loyalties, the novel The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938, in which the character of Roderick Spode is a joke at the expense of totalitarianism

so broad that surely even Orwell could have seen it. Here is Wodehouse on Spode: He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breathtaking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about SIX feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

It is interesting to measure the levity of that Passage against another description of an embryo despot written in ;he same year: Close to, what you noticed more was his face, which was square and powerful and slightly moustached towards the centre. His gaze was keen and piercing. I don't know if you.have ever seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words, but that was what he reminded me of.

Perhaps it is pressing Wodehouse's claims as a democrat too hard to attempt any comparative assessments of the blatant facetiousness of the first extract and the carefully observed detail giving rise to apprehension in the second. The two passages are in fact one and the same, linked in The Code of the Woosters by a single sentence, and it might have some bearing on the issue of Wodehouse's loyalties that very nearly the only occasion in a hundred published works on which the glint of anger is discernible. behind the harlequin's costume is in reference to a political reactionary.

My argument may be refuted, of course, simply by rejecting the proposition that Wodehouse ever based any character on any real person, or any amalgam of real persons. At Which point I produce my proof, for I would surely not be unworldly enough to have embarked 'on so contentious a campaign Without the certitude that up my sleeve there lay in wait a whole pack of aces to provide irrefutable, irresistible, cast-iron, watertight, copper-bottomed proof. My case is simple to the brink of Ronnie Fish and yet cannot be denied. Here it is, in its entirety: The other day I had tea with Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. As a matter of fact we have taken tea together several times over the last few years, although not as often as we might, for Ukridge IS ninety two years old ,now and not as inclined as he once was to cut a social dash. Of couse he has no suspicion that I know he is Ukridge, even though the evidence is blatantly laid out in one of the most famous and distinguished autobiographies to be published in England in the last fifty years. When first we met I had no idea he was Ukridge, but once I stumbled on the paragraph which told me the truth, I awaited signs of authentic Ukridgean behaviour, and sure enough, there eventually wafted into range the unmistakable bouquet of true Ukridgery, faint yet ineffable, composed of ancient socks sequestering in a fish basket, fermenting pears and what Wodehouse once defined as the smell of muddy shoes in a locker room.

Ukridge telephoned me one day to insist I read a volume of poems which he had come across on his bookshelves. Having no desire to

• read these poems, I hedged for some weeks, but was finally badgered into calling on him to collect the book. When I arrived it was to find that Ukridge had drafted an elaborate legal document which we were both to sign in the presence of a witness, himself, to the effect that

had borrowed the said volume. Overjoyed at this sudden intrusion into my workaday life of

at so many obituarists have been describing a,s a world-that-never-was, I signed the uocuirient and took the book away, hoping that wihen I returned it, a certain event would take kae C, to which Ukridge, if he were the true ,,_ ridge, would surely be a party. Sure enough, Lbnat event took place. When I brought the book e,ack, its owner denied all knowledge of the ..t.terice of any document of any kind, for cw ich reason I await hourly the arrival of a co reason

Court summons. Ukridge lives.