P G Wodehouse

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, ( ; 15 October 188114 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. 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. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. He wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies during and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, that played an important part in the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naive revelations of incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furore. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.

In 1934, Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons; in 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After his release he made six broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the war. The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain, and a threat of prosecution. Wodehouse never returned to England. From 1947 until his death he lived in the United States, holding dual British-American citizenship after becoming a U.S. citizen in 1955. He died in 1975, at the age of 93, in Southampton, New York, one month after he was awarded a knighthood of the Order of the British Empire (KBE).

Wodehouse was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career Wodehouse would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. 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. Some critics of Wodehouse have considered his work flippant, but among his fans are former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers.

Life and career

Early years

Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse (1845–1929), a magistrate resident in the British colony of Hong Kong, and his wife, Eleanor (1861–1941), daughter of the Rev John Bathurst Deane. The Wodehouses, who traced their ancestry back to the 13th century, belonged to a cadet branch of the family of the earls of Kimberley. Eleanor Wodehouse was also of ancient aristocratic ancestry. She was visiting her sister in Guildford when Wodehouse was born there prematurely.Donaldson, Frances. (1986
"Wodehouse, Sir Pelham Grenville"
, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' archive, Oxford University Press, retrieved 25 April 2015

The boy was baptised at the Church of St Nicolas, Guildford, and was named after his godfather, Pelham von Donop.Wodehouse and Ratcliffe, p. 30 Wodehouse wrote in 1957, "If you ask me to tell you frankly if I like the name Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, I must confess that I do not.... I was named after a godfather, and not a thing to show for it but a small silver mug which I lost in 1897." The first name was rapidly elided to "Plum", the name by which Wodehouse became known to family and friends.

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 Peveril (1877–1951) and Armine (1879–1936). When he was two, the brothers were brought to England, where they were placed under the care of an English nanny in a house adjoining that of Eleanor's father and mother.

The boys' parents returned to Hong Kong and became virtual strangers to their sons. Such an arrangement was then normal for middle-class families based in the colonies. 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. Wodehouse was more fortunate; his nanny, Emma Roper, was strict but not unkind, and both with her and later at his different schools Wodehouse had a generally happy childhood.Wodehouse, ''Over Seventy'', p. 16 His recollection was that "it went like a breeze from start to finish, with everybody I met understanding me perfectly". 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. 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."

In 1886 the brothers were sent to a dame-school in Croydon, where they spent three years. Peveril was then found to have a "weak chest"; sea air was prescribed, and the three boys were moved to Elizabeth College on the island of Guernsey. In 1891 Wodehouse went on to Malvern House Preparatory School in Kent, which concentrated on preparing its pupils for entry to the Royal Navy. His father had planned a naval career for him, but the boy's eyesight was found to be too poor for it. He was unimpressed by the school's narrow curriculum and zealous discipline; he later parodied it in his novels, with Bertie Wooster recalling his early years as a pupil at a "penitentiary... with the outward guise of a prep school" called Malvern House.

Throughout their school years the brothers were sent to stay during the holidays with various uncles and aunts from both sides of the family. In the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Iain Sproat counts twenty aunts and considers that they played an important part not only in Wodehouse's early life, but, thinly disguised, in his mature novels, as the formidable aunts who dominate the action in the Wooster, Blandings, and other stories. The boys had fifteen uncles, four of whom were clergymen. Sproat writes that they inspired Wodehouse's "pious but fallible curates, vicars, and bishops, of which he wrote with friendly irreverence but without mockery".Sproat, Iain. (2010
"Wodehouse, Sir Pelham Grenville (1881–1975)"
''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, retrieved 24 April 2015

At the age of twelve in 1894, to his great joy, Wodehouse was able to follow his brother Armine to Dulwich College. He was entirely at home there; Donaldson comments that Dulwich gave him, for the first time, "some continuity and a stable and ordered life". He loved the camaraderie, distinguished himself at cricket, rugby and boxing, and was a good, if not consistently diligent, student. The headmaster at the time was A. H. Gilkes, a respected classicist, who was a strong influence on Wodehouse. In a study of Wodehouse's works, Richard Usborne argues that "only a writer who was himself a scholar and had had his face ground into Latin and Greek (especially Thucydides) as a boy" could sustain the complex sequences of subordinate clauses sometimes found in Wodehouse's comic prose.Usborne, p. 26

Wodehouse's six years at Dulwich were among the happiest of his life: "To me the years between 1894 and 1900 were like heaven." In addition to his sporting achievements he was a good singer and enjoyed taking part in school concerts; his literary leanings found an outlet in editing the school magazine, ''The Alleynian''. For the rest of his life he remained devoted to the school. The biographer Barry Phelps writes that Wodehouse "loved the college as much as he loved anything or anybody".

Reluctant banker; budding writer: 1900–1908

Wodehouse expected to follow Armine to the University of Oxford, but the family's finances took a turn for the worse at the crucial moment. Ernest Wodehouse had retired in 1895, and his pension was paid in rupees; fluctuation against the pound reduced its value in Britain. Wodehouse recalled, "The wolf was not actually whining at the door and there was always a little something in the kitty for the butcher and the grocer, but the finances would not run to anything in the nature of a splash". Instead of a university career, in September 1900 Wodehouse was engaged in a junior position in the London office of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He was unsuited to it and found the work baffling and uncongenial. He later wrote a humorous account of his experiences at the bank, but at the time he longed for the end of each working day, when he could return to his rented lodgings in Chelsea and write. At first he concentrated, with some success, on serious articles about school sports for '' Public School Magazine''. In November 1900 his first comic piece, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings", was accepted by ''Tit-Bits''. A new magazine for boys, ''The Captain'', provided further well-paid opportunities, and during his two years at the bank, Wodehouse had eighty pieces published in a total of nine magazines.

In 1901, with the help of a former Dulwich master, William Beach Thomas, Wodehouse secured an appointment—at first temporary and later permanent—writing for '' The Globe''s popular "By the Way" column. He held the post until 1909.Jasen, p. 45 At around the same time his first novel was published—a school story called '' The Pothunters'', serialised incomplete in ''Public School Magazine'' in early 1902, and issued in full in hardback in September. He resigned from the bank that month to devote himself to writing full-time.

Between the publication of ''The Pothunters'' 1902 and that of '' Mike'' in 1909, Wodehouse wrote eight novels and co-wrote another two. The critic R. D. B. French writes that, of Wodehouse's work from this period, almost all that deserves to survive is the school fiction. Looking back in the 1950s Wodehouse viewed these as his apprentice years: "I was practically in swaddling clothes and it is extremely creditable to me that I was able to write at all."

From his boyhood Wodehouse had been fascinated by America, which he conceived of as "a land of romance"; he "yearned" to visit the country, and by 1904 he had earned enough to do so. In April he sailed to New York, which he found greatly to his liking. He noted in his diary: "In New York gathering experience. Worth many guineas in the future but none for the moment." This prediction proved correct: few British writers had first-hand experience of the US, and his articles about life in New York brought him higher than usual fees. He later recalled that "in 1904 anyone in the London writing world who had been to America was regarded with awe and looked upon as an authority on that ''terra incognita''.... After that trip to New York I was a man who counted.... My income rose like a rocketing pheasant."

Wodehouse's other new venture in 1904 was writing for the stage. Towards the end of the year the librettist Owen Hall invited him to contribute an additional lyric for a musical comedy ''Sergeant Brue''. Wodehouse had loved theatre since his first visit, aged thirteen, when Gilbert and Sullivan's ''Patience'' had made him "drunk with ecstasy". 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; it was well received and launched Wodehouse on a career as a theatre writer that spanned three decades.

Although it made little impact on its first publication, the 1906 novel '' Love Among the Chickens'' contained what French calls the author's first original comic creation: Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. The character, an amoral, bungling opportunist, is partly based on Wodehouse's ''Globe'' colleague Herbert Westbrook. The two collaborated between 1907 and 1913 on two books, two music hall sketches, and a play, ''Brother Alfred''. Wodehouse would return to the character in short stories over the next six decades.

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. Hicks had already recruited the young Jerome Kern to write the music for such songs. The first Kern-Wodehouse collaboration, a comic number for '' The Beauty of Bath'' titled "Mr Joseph.html" ;"title="Joseph_Chamberlain.html" ;"title="/nowiki>Joseph Chamberlain">Joseph">Joseph_Chamberlain.html" ;"title="/nowiki>Joseph Chamberlain">Joseph/nowiki> Chamberlain", was a show-stopper and was briefly the most popular song in London.

Psmith, Blandings, Wooster and Jeeves: 1908–1915

Wodehouse's early period as a writer came to an end in 1908 with the serialisation of ''The Lost Lambs'', published the following year in book form as the second half of the novel ''Mike''. The work begins as a conventional school story, but Wodehouse introduces a new and strikingly original character, Psmith, whose creation both Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell regarded as a watershed in Wodehouse's development.McCrum, p. 83 Wodehouse said that he based Psmith on the hotelier and impresario Rupert D'Oyly Carte—"the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it". Wodehouse wrote in the 1970s that a cousin of his who had been at school with Carte told him of the latter's monocle, studied suavity, and stateliness of speech, all of which Wodehouse adopted for his new character.Wodehouse, ''The World of Psmith'', p. v Psmith featured in three more novels: '' Psmith in the City'' (1910), a burlesque of banking; ''Psmith, Journalist'' (1915) set in New York; and ''Leave It to Psmith'' (1923), set at Blandings Castle.

In May 1909 Wodehouse made his second visit to New York, where he sold two short stories to ''Cosmopolitan'' and ''Collier's'' for a total of $500, a much higher fee than he had commanded previously. He resigned from ''The Globe'' and stayed in New York for nearly a year. He sold many more stories, but none of the American publications offered a permanent relationship and guaranteed income. Wodehouse returned to England in late 1910, rejoining ''The Globe'' and also contributing regularly to ''The Strand Magazine''. Between then and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he revisited America frequently.

Wodehouse was in New York when the war began. Ineligible for military service because of his poor eyesight, he remained in the US throughout the war, detached from the conflict in Europe and absorbed in his theatrical and literary concerns. In September 1914 he married Ethel May Wayman, ''née'' Newton (1885–1984), an English widow. The marriage proved happy and lifelong. Ethel's personality was in contrast with her husband's: he was shy and impractical; she was gregarious, decisive and well organised. In Sproat's phrase, she "took charge of Wodehouse's life and made certain that he had the peace and quiet he needed to write". There were no children of the marriage, but Wodehouse came to love Ethel's daughter Leonora (1905–1944) and legally adopted her.

Wodehouse experimented with different genres of fiction in these years; ''Psmith, Journalist'', mixing comedy with social comment on slum landlords and racketeers, was published in 1915. In the same year ''The Saturday Evening Post'' paid $3,500 to serialise '' Something New'', the first of what became a series of novels set at Blandings Castle. It was published in hardback in the US and the UK in the same year (the British edition being retitled ''Something Fresh'').McCrum, p. 504 It was Wodehouse's first farcical novel; it was also his first best-seller, and although his later books included some gentler, lightly sentimental stories, it was as a farceur that he became known. Later in the same year "Extricating Young Gussie", the first story about Bertie and Jeeves, was published. These stories introduced two sets of characters about whom Wodehouse wrote for the rest of his life. The Blandings Castle stories, set in an English stately home, depict the attempts of the placid Lord Emsworth to evade the many distractions around him, which include successive pairs of young lovers, the machinations of his exuberant brother Galahad, the demands of his domineering sisters and super-efficient secretaries, and anything detrimental to his prize sow, the Empress of Blandings. The Bertie and Jeeves stories feature an amiable young man-about-town, regularly rescued from the consequences of his idiocy by the benign interference of his valet.

Broadway: 1915–1919

A third milestone in Wodehouse's life came towards the end of 1915: his old songwriting partner Jerome Kern introduced him to the writer Guy Bolton, who became Wodehouse's closest friend and a regular collaborator. Bolton and Kern had a musical, '' Very Good Eddie'', running at the Princess Theatre in New York. The show was successful, but they thought the song lyrics weak and invited Wodehouse to join them on its successor. This was '' Miss Springtime'' (1916), which ran for 227 performances—a good run by the standards of the day. The team produced several more successes, including ''Leave It to Jane'' (1917), '' Oh, Boy!'' (1917–18) and ''Oh, Lady! Lady!!'' (1918), and Wodehouse and Bolton wrote a few more shows with other composers. In these musicals Wodehouse's lyrics won high praise from critics as well as fellow lyricists such as Ira Gershwin.

Unlike his original model, Gilbert, Wodehouse preferred the music to be written first, fitting his words into the melodies. Donaldson suggests that this is the reason why his lyrics have largely been overlooked in recent years: they fit the music perfectly, but do not stand on their own in verse form as Gilbert's do. 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. In the ''Grove Dictionary of American Music'' Larry Stempel writes, "By presenting naturalistic stories and characters and attempting to integrate the songs and lyrics into the action of the libretto, these works brought a new level of intimacy, cohesion, and sophistication to American musical comedy." The theatre writer Gerald Bordman calls Wodehouse "the most observant, literate, and witty lyricist of his day". The composer Richard Rodgers wrote, "Before Larry Hart, only P.G. Wodehouse had made any real assault on the intelligence of the song-listening public."

1920s

In the years after the war, Wodehouse steadily increased his sales, polished his existing characters and introduced new ones. Bertie and Jeeves, Lord Emsworth and his circle, and Ukridge appeared in novels and short stories; Psmith made his fourth and last appearance; two new characters were the Oldest Member, narrating his series of golfing stories, and Mr Mulliner, telling his particularly tall tales to fellow patrons of the bar at the Angler's Rest. Various other young men-about-town appeared in short stories about members of the Drones Club.

The Wodehouses returned to England, where they had a house in London for some years, but Wodehouse continued to cross the Atlantic frequently, spending substantial periods in New York. He continued to work in the theatre. During the 1920s he collaborated on nine musical comedies produced on Broadway or in the West End, including the long-running ''Sally'' (1920, New York), ''The Cabaret Girl'' (1922, London) and '' Rosalie'' (1928, New York). He also wrote non-musical plays, including ''The Play's the Thing'' (1926), adapted from Ferenc Molnár, and ''A Damsel in Distress'' (1928), a dramatisation of his 1919 novel.

Though never a naturally gregarious man, Wodehouse was more sociable in the 1920s than at other periods. Donaldson lists among those with whom he was on friendly terms writers including A. A. Milne, Ian Hay, Frederick Lonsdale and E. Phillips Oppenheim, and stage performers including George Grossmith Jr., Heather Thatcher and Dorothy Dickson.

Hollywood: 1929–1931

There had been films of Wodehouse stories since 1915, when ''A Gentleman of Leisure'' was based on his 1910 novel of the same name. Further screen adaptations of his books were made between then and 1927, but it was not until 1929 that Wodehouse went to Hollywood where Bolton was working as a highly paid writer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Ethel was taken with both the financial and social aspects of Hollywood life, and she negotiated a contract with MGM on her husband's behalf under which he would be paid $2,000 a week. This large salary was particularly welcome because the couple had lost considerable sums in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

The contract started in May 1930, but the studio found little for Wodehouse to do, and he had spare time to write a novel and nine short stories. He commented, "It's odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one's salary."Wodehouse and Donaldson, Letter of 26 June 1930, p. 125 Even when the studio found a project for him to work on, the interventions of committees and constant rewriting by numerous contract authors meant that his ideas were rarely used. In a 2005 study of Wodehouse in Hollywood, Brian Taves writes that ''Those Three French Girls