Wodehouse as divine writer

I’m something of a Wodehouse fan. I’ve read all three of his autobiographies—he lived a long time and wrote a lot of books—Bring On the Girls, Performing Flea, and Over Seventy—and I also read a biography by another writer. There’s a funny story about him accidentally causing a major upheaval in Hollywood.

Wodehouse was incredibly laborious when it came to plotting his novels. He would do an “outline” of 30,000 words—a small book itself—before he even started writing. And he would be working on several things at once. But Hollywood treated him, this divine scribe, as a disposable, dime-a-dozen talent. They sent him scripts and said, “Can you bang up the dialogue here and there,” but didn’t really make use of him at all. So he was writing his own books, getting paid $3,000 a week, a fortune in those days.

A gossip columnist interviewed him, and before the interview proper started, as initial chit-chat, the journalist asked how he liked Hollywood. “Oh it’s great,” Wodehouse said, “My only regret is that I’ve been paid so much to do so little.” The comments caused umbrage on the east coast, and ended the gravy train for some people, apparently. Wodehouse was great with plots, dialogue, he could work under any circumstances. It’s a shame they didn’t make better use of him.

And the English ran him out of the country. Wodehouse was renting a house in Belgium, in the countryside, and all of a sudden there’s Nazis on his front step. He had been working, not paying attention to the world, and was totally taken by surprise, he didn’t know the Nazis were rolling up on him.

So they put him in a camp, and he was even able to write a book in the camp—I can’t remember which one, but it’s good. He did some radio broadcasts, and this upset the English so much that they drove him out of the country after the war. He meant no offense, of course, no one was freer of malice than Wodehouse. But I think maybe professional jealousy played a part. He spent the rest of his days on Long Island, except for going back to get an honorary doctorate from Oxford. The English were not nice to Francis Bacon or Wodehouse, notably, and nobody did more for the English than them. My rule is, anything said in an English accent, take it with a grain of salt.

Hilaire Belloc, a historian, called Wodehouse “the head of my profession,” even though Wodehouse was a humorist. An interesting story, H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer, rented a villa next door to Wodehouse on the French Riviera. Wodehouse wrote to his friend Bill Townend,

“I like Wells. An odd bird, though. He said, apropos of nothing, ‘My father was a professional cricketer.’ If there’s an answer to that, you tell me. I said, ‘Mine had white whiskers.’”

True story, in Amsterdam, one afternoon I stopped at a pub with a Pilsner Urquell sign, being a fan, and behind the bar there was a small shelf of books, and they were Wodehouse books. I asked the bartender, “Are those your books?” and he said yes. It turned out to be the meeting place of the Amsterdam Wodehouse society. He let me read a story, it was the first time I read a Battling Billson story, and I was in stitches. Francis Bacon coined that term “in stitches” by the way, for laughing uncontrollably.

Wodehouse was funny but not mean, sophisticated but not a snob, he put the best face on the British Empire. He lived a saintly life, too, no faults or vices to speak of.

T.S. Eliot was another divine scribe in the 20th century, and Kafka.