Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, ‘as if the Fall of Man had never happened’.
In a letter to some admirers, Wodehouse wrote:
The world I write about, always a small one – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie… would say – is now not even small, it is non-existent. It has gone with the wind… In a word, it has had it. But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival.
Of course, that revival never came, and Plum died aged 93, just six weeks after he was so belatedly knighted.
Although they came to life in 1915, Bertie and Jeeves were – and remained – men of an earlier age
Born in Guildford in 1881, the son of a Hong Kong magistrate, he was the scion of one of Britain’s oldest baronetcies and the Earldom of Kimberley (he was also a great-nephew of the great Victorian, Saint John Henry, Cardinal Newman). Two-year-old Plum was soon back in England with relatives – clergymen uncles and ‘a surging sea of aunts’ (among them Aunt Mary – Mary Bathurst Deane – his least favourite and his inspiration for the ferocious Aunt Agatha), accompanying them on visits to country houses where he often ended up in the servants’ hall.
Then, having pleaded to go, he spent ‘six years of unbroken bliss’ as a border at Dulwich College – popular, clever, and good at games. He was at heart forever the schoolboy.
Family finances denied him a place at Oxford so his father found him a job in the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He was, in his words, ‘the most inefficient clerk whose trouser-seat ever polished the surface of a high stool’. Writing – journalism and school stories – became an escape and, in 1904, allowed him to go to New York : ‘like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.’ He stayed there throughout the first world war, refused enlistment due to poor eyesight.
In 1914, he fell instantly in love – rather like Bingo Little throughout The Inimitable Jeeves but only once. He wed a fellow expat, the twice-widowed, former chorus girl Ethel Rowley, who had an eleven-year-old daughter, Leonora, whom Plum adopted and adored. Ethel was described by the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge as ‘a mixture of Mistress Quickly and Florence Nightingale with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in’. In reviewing Robert McCrum’s consummate biography for this magazine, Michael Vestey added, ‘She was everything Wodehouse wasn’t: highly sexed, sociable, extravagant with money and yet it was an extremely successful partnership that lasted sixty years.’
Interestingly, his own domestic contentment, supported by an endless succession of pets, mainly Pekinese, allowed him to write and was as enduring as that of Bertie and Jeeves’ six-decades together.
He reserved his wit and conversation for the page. When an uncharacteristically starry-eyed Waugh met Wodehouse for the first time, he was disappointed to find their exchanges did not get beyond the inequities of income tax. And when Plum was invited to join the Round Table gang at the Algonquin hotel in New york, he complained, ‘All those three-hour lunches. When did these slackers ever get any work done?’
Although they came to life in 1915, Bertie and Jeeves were – and remained – men of an earlier age. Another Wodehouse devotee, Hugh Massingberd put it, ‘I like to believe that Wodehouse’s Edwardian never-never land was not so far removed from what England might have been like in the 1920s if the apocalyptic Great War had never taken place.’
And all those plots – with all those winning ingredients – a country house, its peppery owner, an icy consort, a glacial Grande Dame, the odd aunt and an odder uncle or two, perhaps a clergyman, and of course a butler; a series of breakfasts, lunches, teas and dinners, a few chums, a fiancée and, of course, the requisite luckless, love-struck young couple. Add a cricket match, a game of golf, or a horse race, a break-in, a concert or fete. And, with Jeeves and Bertie perhaps in disguise, the flawless formula is plumb in place.
But what makes the novels sing is the Master’s musical prose. The love interest with a laugh ‘like a squadron of cavalry galloping over a tin bridge’; the oft-quoted, ‘I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled’; and ‘It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a complete food well in advance of medical thought.’ Vintage Bertie.
The same Bertie who never utters a biblical or literary quote that he can get right. Leaving it, of course, to Jeeves to correct him but never quite finish it. And yet, though ‘mentally negligible’, an unselfconsciously brilliant narrator. Wodehouse wrote in Bertie’s voice more than any other and, although he would say that the absent-minded, hen-pecked, all-for-a-quiet life, Lord Emsworth (of Blandings fame) was his nearest alter ego, one must agree with the Wodehousean scholar, Richard Usborne, that there is much of Plum in Bertie.
Plum’s only brush with scandal was certainly the result of a Bertie moment. In 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans. Ethel recalled his arrest. He had ten minutes to pack. ‘I was nearly insane; couldn’t find the keys to the room for the suitcase, and Plum went off with a copy of Shakespeare, a pair of pyjamas and a mutton chop.’ He was interned for nearly a year, finally in Upper Silesia. (‘If this is Upper Silesia,’ he wrote, ‘what must Lower be like?’).
After his release, he made, at the request of the Nazis, six amusing, apolitical radio broadcasts from Berlin to the United States, which had not yet entered the war. To the British under siege across the Channel this was either treason or collaboration. Enquiries by the British and later the French found no evidence to prosecute Plum; while scholarly examination since has established nothing more than foolish naivety. As his biographer, McCrum, put it, ‘Jeevesian in his professional life, it was his fate to be Woosterish in Berlin.’ Wodehouse would never again set foot on English soil.
Incursions into the real world are rare in Plum’s books. Like politics – and parents, death, dates, and sex are alien. Beds are for nothing but sleeping, convalescing, or short-sheeting. Bertie is stirred of course, but by nothing more carnal than Madeline Bassett’s ‘blonde hair with all the trimmings’ and Florence Craye’s ‘wonderful profile’. Love is a different thing. His fellow Drones were stricken all the time: in the Mating Season (1949), the Master juggled no less than four infatuated couples.
True, Bertie was not as susceptible as Bingo Little, but he fell in love – with Cynthia Wickhammersley, Angelica Briscoe, Pauline Stoker. Although, in Bertie’s case, the state of betrothal does not always (or even usually) equal devotion and he never makes it to the altar. His Aunt Dahlia quipped, if the girls Bertie has been engaged to were placed end to end, they would reach from Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner.
The arcane marks of a gentleman are taken as read. ‘Never trust a man who keeps billiard chalk in his waistcoat pocket.’ And in cricket, ‘a gentleman should not score more than half his team’s total.’ There are, of course, weightier tropes. In The Code of the Woosters, Wodehouse lays down the two commandments upon which most of his Bertie plots hinge: Thou shalt not let down a pal; and Thou shalt not scorn a woman’s love.
Meeting his Maker on Valentine’s Day 1975 – the timing as perfect as his prose – it was invariably love that underpinned his fiction. As Bertie reflected (a rare phenomenon), ‘I wonder if you have observed a rather rummy thing about it – viz. that it is everywhere. You can’t get away from it. Love, I mean. Wherever you go, there it is, buzzing along in every class of life.’
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