Times (?), Sat. 17 October 1992.
Barry Phelps' heart is in the right place. Those who contemplate the boring
title and hideous wrapper of P.G. Wodehouse's sixth biography may have cause
to doubt it. The author tells us that the book began as yet another act of homage
to the master, after the admirable works of Donaldson, Jasen, Usborne and so
on - and that is how it ends up, I am happy to say.
Halfway through the labour if I understand him correctly, he became obsessed by the idea that, since the war, Wodehouse had been pulling the wool over the eyes of all his biographers and all his interviewers. Far from being an amiable cretin about money, politics and all practical matters - like Bertie Wooster, although Phelps begins to have doubts even about Bertie - Wodehouse was a "complex, subtle, paradoxical and phenomenally intelligent intellectual" who was "infinitely more interesting and worthwhile than the image he left us".
Phelps' heart is in the right place, as I say. When he discusses Wodehouse's heroic efforts to avoid paying more tax than he need - trotting from country to country, taking his cases to the high court in England, even to the supreme court in Washington - he does so without any Robespierre intonations, or even the snide, priggish, underdog disapproval of a Stannard.
We are all on Wodehouse's side in his struggle against the taxmen of Britain and America, who are trying to persecute him. But I feel he makes rather heavy weather of his discovery that Wodehouse, far from having the heart of a goof and being hopeless with money, leaving the business side to his wife Ethel, was really "sharp and shrewd in his many financial dealings and obsessively interested in money."
I do not think that any reviewer in this newspaper needs to introduce P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) to its readers, since every half-educated Briton is already familiar with the greatest comic writer of the century; nor is there any particular need to rehearse the circumstances of his distressing wartime debacle, when he was unjustly denounced by the BBC in the most violent and despicable terms for alleged lack of patriotismat the instigation of an unscrupulous Conservative politician called Cooper.
Nothing but sorrow can result from opening these wounds again - Phelps even declines to reprint the disgusting tirade by William Connor ("Cassandra" of the Daily Mirror) which is fair enough, since Connor later repented and made his peace with Wodehouse, something Cooper never did.
But Phelps's claim that Wodehouse played the unworldly innocent who did not understand money as a means of protecting himself against Cooper's vile charge of selling himself to the Germans, strikes me as going too far.
Of course, Wodehouse was a highly intelligent man, but I believe he pushed the episode to the back of his mind, and did not like to be reminded of it even by friends and supporters. It was second nature to him to play the part of the goof, as a means of protecting himself against intruders and bores.
Incidentally, I noticed that Phelps preserves the theory that Wodehouse never returned to England after the Oxford Encaenia of 1939, which made him a doctor of letters. I was told once that he came back several times in great secrecy between 1945 and his death 30 years later, possibly wearing a false moustache to visit his step-grandchildren, but I do not know the truth of the matter.
In any case, whether he was a genuine innocent, as I believe, or a faux-naif, as Phelps would suggest, we must all agree with Muggeridge that Wodehouse was an artist of stature which "entitled [him] to be kept clear of the atrocious buffooneries of power maniacs and their wars", even if not everyone can go so far as to agree that his true offence, in the eyes of politicians, was to be uninterested in their wars and their self-importance.
On the details of his life, I was fascinated to learn that Ethel had been twice married and twice widowed before meeting Plum in New York on the day the Great War broke out. The extreme obscurity of her origins in Norfolk makes her later manifestation as a grand hostess in their palace off Park Lane all the more impressive.
Phelps appears to accept the theory that Wodehouse was made not only sterile but impotent by a severe attack of the mumps in Shropshire during the early summer of 1901. We do not dwell on the matter beyond some innocent critical speculation: " The asexuality of Wodehouse's writing is one of its most striking features. His own sense of good taste stopped him ever including anything salacious…but it's unlikely that he ever had any salacious thoughts to exclude."
Ethel we learn, had several men-friends including Gerard Fairlie, the man who took over from Sapper to continue the rather disgusting Bulldog Drummond series of children's books, but Plum almost certainly never had an affair with a chorus girl, as Guy Bolton maliciously suggested as part of his campaign against Ethel.
The least welcome information that every morning from his late twenties to the end of his days Plum did 15 minutes of serious exercises, based on a 1919 article in Colliers. The oddest information is that at different times Wodehouse was both a spiritualist and a freemason.
Phelps is at his soundest on the subject of Wodehouse's place in the literary Pantheon, quoting Wooster's remark from Aunts Aren't Gentlemen that he felt as much like a toad at Harrow as anyone with an Eton education could. That sentence encapsulates the art, with its pun, its mangled familiar quotation, its double irony contributing to an inspired poetry of nonsense.
It is where Phelps introduces the opposition that I find him most endearing of all - Hugh Walpole's incomprehension at Belloc's description of Wodehouse as "the best writer now alive. The head of my profession"; the humourless incomprehension of F.R. and Q. Leavis, and best of all the fury of the absurd Sean O'Casey when Wodehouse was awarded his honorary doctorate. O'Casey wrote in March 1941: "The civilisation that could let Joyce die in poverty and crown with an [sic] Litt.D. a thing like Wodehouse, deserves fire and brimstone from heaven: and is getting it."
It was brooding about this anomaly, which apparently drove O'Casey mad, convinced that Wodehouse was responsible for Joyce's destitution. In fact O'Casey did not know it, but Joyce, who was not an intimate of his and who died two months earlier in Zurich, had been living in great comfort for many years on the generosity of his American friend, Harriet Weaver.
But the point needs to be made in any case that Wodehouse was a much better writer than Joyce. Before he lost his reason, Joyce had a good talent for parody and a keen sense of the absurd, but he never had the discipline, nor the organisation, the wide reading, the sheer intelligence or wit of wodehouse.
In time, as this confused and rather affected century of ours begins to be
put into perspective by the literary and artistic historians of the next, such
observations will be commonplace. Just at present, they need to be made.
This is a poem by my second favourite writer about my first favourite writer. It was first published in the NY Herald Tribune, 22 May 1946.
Bound to your bookseller, leap to your library,
Deluge your dealer with backshish and bribary,
Lean on the counter and never say when,
Wodehouse and Wooster are with us again.
Flourish the fish-slice, your buttons unloosing,
Prepare for the fabulous browsing and sluicing,
And quote, till you're known as the neighbourhood nuisance,
The gems that illumine the browsance and sluicance.
Oh fondle each gem, and after you quote it,
Kindly inform me just who wrote it.
Which came first, the egg or the rooster,
P. G. Wodehouse or Bertram Wooster?
I know hawk from handsaw and Finn from Fiji,
But I can't entangle Bertram from P. G.
I enquire in the schoolroom, I ask in the roadhouse,
Did Wodehouse write Wooster or Wooster write Wodehouse?
Bertram Wodehouse and P. G. Wooster.
They are linked in my mind like Simon and Schuster.
No matter which fumbled in Forty-One,
Or which the Woebegone figure of fun.
I deduce how the faux-pas came about;
It was clearly Jeeves's afternoon out.
Now Jeeves is back, and my cheeks are crumply
From watching him glide through Steeple Bumpleigh.
(The spell-checker started to glow red-hot when I ran this through it!)