During his long and astoundingly productive life, P.G. Wodehouse cranked out almost 100 novels, hundreds of short stories, lyrics and books many Broadway and London musical comedies, and assorted journalistic non-fiction. It is fair to say that Wodehouse, who loathed his given name of Pelham Grenville and was affectionately known as "Plum", both wrote to live and live to wrote, and more than 25 years after his death at the age of 93, the characters he created--most notably, Bertie Wooster and his unflappable butler, Jeeves--still enjoy cult popularity bordering on the rapturous--along the same lines as other figures of obsessive adoration like Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes.
A new biography by British novelist Robert McCrum details Wodehouse's long and eventful life. It was a life replete with famous characters. Wodehouse, who divided most of his time between England and the U.K., toiled for stage and screen during the Roaring Twenties and not-so-roaring Thirties. He seems to have come in contact with almost everyone in showbiz from that era; from Jerome Kern, with whom he collaborated on several Broadway shows, to George Gershwin, Irving Thallberg, Louis B. Mayer, Florenz Ziegfeld, Marion Davies, Fred Astaire, and many others. He even had a friendship with fellow author F. Scott Fitzgerald when both had homes on Long Island (no mention of if he saw the green light from there, though).
At the height of his career, there was much to-ing and fro-ing across in elegant steamships across the Atlantic, as Wodehouse engaged in a seemingly endless frenzy of activity. At the centre of it all was Plum, a rather colourless, diffident, unemotional character who reserved all his vibrancy and wit for his fiction. The product of absentee parents who were off pursuing their forturne in the British Empire during its height, Wodehouse retracted into himself at an early age--the only way to survive his loveless environment. Later on, he thrived at Dulwich, an English public school, where his love of sports and way with a cricket bat brought him popularity and a sense of cameraderie; and even though Dulwich, like most schools of its type, was not exactly lavish (bad food and spartan, frequently frigid, rooms) it was a formative experience, one which Wodehouse always recalled with great fondness.
Wodehouse had hoped to go on to Oxford, but his father already out-of-pocket for his elder son's tuition, refused to pay. There was no recourse but to take a job with a bank in the city. It turned out to be the luckiest break of his life. He despised the work so much that he was forced to write his way out of it. Luckily, he had a way with words, huge reserves of ambition, and, most crucial to his ultimate success, the stick-to-it-iveness required to sit hour after after endless hour at a typewriter and crank out thousands of words. More tellingly, not only to crank them out--but to derive the greatest enjoyment out of what to many writers would be an ordeal. Wodehouse probably spent most of his life putting words on a page; to him, everything else was merely a way to pass time before he could get down to the business of writing once more.
But endurance alone doesn't explain his success. It was what those words added up to that counted. In book after book, Wodehouse created a madcap Edwardian world populated by dimwitted sportsmen, stiff-upperlippers, innocent young lovers, shady American gangsters and formidable aunts. These characters had names like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stiffy Byng, the Rev. H.P. ("Stinker") Pinker, Esmond Haddock, Freddy Widgeon and Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps. (Just reading that list makes you want to suddenly break out into one of John Cleese's silly walks.) They were always caught up in convoluted and interconnecting plots that always contrived to make them look ridiculous, and as the comical capers and misundertandings piled up, one on top of the other at breakneck speed, there was always the possibility that the entire house of cards could collapse. Readers could always expect by the end, however, that everything would be wrapped up in a nice neat bow, and that, order and peace would prevail once more.
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