America

Wodehouse first visited America in 1904, when he took his five weeks’ annual holiday from The Globe and went to stay in New York with a friend from his banking days. He also visited the training camp of the middleweight boxer ‘Kid’ McCoy, who was preparing for a title fight with ‘Philadelphia’ Jack O’Brien. In his reminiscences, Wodehouse claimed that boxing was the lure which took him across to America. So, too, would have been the knowledge that America had a flourishing English-language publishing industry, attractive to any freelancer.

Jerry’s got vision. He realised that the only way for a writer to make a packet nowadays is to muscle in on the American market, so he took time off and dashed over there to study it. [Pigs Have Wings]

He sold a series of stories about the boxer Kid Brady, which appeared from September 1905 onwards, and brought him $50 an episode, £10 under the then dollar-sterling exchange rate. His American jaunt also helped him become more marketable to English publishers. Now he could sell his expertise on, and understanding of, matters in America. In August Punch published his article ‘Society Whispers From The States’. As Lady Malvern explains in Jeeves And The Unbidden Guest:

No doubt you have read India and the Indians? My publishers are anxious for me to write a companion volume on the United States. I shall not be able to spend more than a month in the country, as I have to get back for the season, but a month should be ample. I was less than a month in India, and my dear friend Sir Roger Cremore wrote his America from Within after a stay of only two weeks.

Lady Malvern, indeed, might be been seen as a rather slow and over-fussy researcher when compared with her peer group:

He had been introduced to an elderly and adhesive baronet, who had recently spent ten days in New York, and escape had not been without a struggle. The baronet, on his return to England, had published a book entitled ‘Modern America and its People’ and it was with regard to the opinions expressed in this volume that he wanted Jimmy’s views. [A Gentleman of Leisure]

Wodehouse’s second visit to America was in 1909. He had had Love Among The Chickens published in May of that year, but the money from the man appointed to be his agent was not forthcoming and this provided strong motivation for returning. Shortly after arriving, Wodehouse sold a short story for $200 and another for $300. These were fees well beyond his English experience, so he wired his resignation to The Globe and settled down in America to make his fortune. Or so he hoped.

In New York one may find every class of paper which the imagination can conceive. [Psmith, Journalist]

Despite his industry, Wodehouse was unable to establish any writing contacts as strong as he had with some of his English publishers, and so returned to England in 1910 and took up with The Globe again.

That year A Gentleman Of Leisure was published. It was a significant stage in Wodehouse’s development as a writer as it was his thirteenth book to be published, but only his second in America. American readers actually got the book five months earlier than the British. For the first time Wodehouse combines English and American characters and English and American settings. He was aiming fair square at marketing his book on both sides of the Atlantic.

The story sought to capitalise on the fashion for gentleman burglars of the Raffles type. American Jimmy Pitt, the gentleman of leisure of the title, bets someone at his New York club that he can break into any house as Raffles does. He chooses, by accident, the house of a crooked New York policeman, John McEachern, an Englishman called Forest who took on an Irish moniker and made a successful career in the New York police force by corrupt means.

But Wodehouse is at pains to point out that McEachern is merely working his way through a corrupt system. McEachern is not censured by the author from taking a cut of the criminal activity of those whose actions he is supposed to curtail. He did not invent the system, he merely works it. He wants money so as to re-establish himself in English society through his daughter, whom he wants to marry into it. He is, however, made to repent, and to confess his deeds to the daughter he loves and worships, and who returns this affection. He finishes the book having achieved his aim of getting deeply embedded into the society of his homeland. He had a place in this originally, through birth, but forfeited it by getting expelled from Eton for stealing. The satirist in Wodehouse then shipped this thief off to America to become a successful policeman, a success built on physical strength and bribery.

The book closes with Spike Mullins, a burglar who is not inclined to forego his criminal intentions, setting sail back to his homeland of America. But he is to abandon his career of housebreaker in favour of one in politics. Jimmy Pitt foresees that he will become ‘a thundering success’ in this new career as he has ‘all the necessary qualities.’

Wodehouse sees the true corruption not in the policeman on the make but in the politicians who run a crooked political system. Crooks are allowed to flourish because of the favours they do for the politicians. It was an argument he was to develop in Psmith, Journalist. Here the author explains why criminal gangs are happily tolerated by the lawmakers:

The New York gangs, and especially the Groome Street gang, have brought to a fine art the gentle practice of ‘repeating’, which, broadly speaking, is the art of voting a number of different times at different polling stations on election days. A man who can vote, say, ten times in a single day for you, and who controls a great number of followers who are also prepared, if they like you, to vote ten times in a single day for you, is worth cultivating. So the politicians passed the word to the police, and the police left the Groome Street gang unmolested and they waxed and flourished.

Psmith is investigating a politician called Waring, who used to be Commissioner for Buildings:

‘What exactly did that let him in for?’

‘It let him in for a lot of graft.’

‘How was that?’

‘Oh, he took it off the contractors. Shut his eyes and held out his hands when they ran up rotten buildings that a strong breeze would have knocked down, and places like that Pleasant Street hole without any ventilation.’

‘Why did he throw up the job?’

‘His trouble was that he stood in with a contractor who was putting up a music hall, and the contractor put it up with material about as strong as a heap of meringues, and it collapsed on the third night and killed half the audience.’

McEachern is a keen disciple of the practice of ‘grafting’. He grafts so as to earn the money to buy his next promotion. Though he did not like having to pay this money, he saw it as an investment, and knew that to accumulate he had to speculate. Each stage further up the ladder increases the opportunity to accept bribes.

McEachern is the first of many Englishmen who find that America transforms them either materially or personally. Freddie Threepwood moves to America and is transformed from a useless drone to a go-getting businessman. Once looked down upon by his father, Lord Emsworth, for being nothing but a wastrel, Freddie now looks down upon his father for his lack of get up and go. Lord Ickenham is also married to an American and credits America with the making of him, and presumes that it will do the same for Pongo. In the world Wodehouse was to carve out in his books America is where the money is, and England is where social standing is to be obtained. Many of his plots were about the marrying of the two.

It is in search of social respectability that McEachern comes over to Dreever Castle, with his daughter whom he hopes will marry the 12th Earl of Dreever. It would be a loveless marriage, based on her money and his title. The plan fails as young love wins through, each party marrying the one they love instead.

Many of the features which were to become part of a typical Wodehouse novel had been assembled in A Gentleman Of Leisure: opening scene is in a club; hero is a good boxer; an unexpected inheritance; a private detective masquerades as a valet; love at first sight is followed by the briefest of courtships; young love triumphs over the machinations of the older generation; English and American characters mix together on both sides of the Atlantic; coincidences which strain at the bounds of believability; the theft of a necklace; unflattering portraits of members of the aristocracy; English scenes are set at a stately home; America is shown to be where the money is and England is where people head for when they want to turn this money into something less tangible to do with class.

The novel also takes a few strides towards comedy. At this stage Wodehouse was still reluctant to give in to his natural desire to aim for comedy, but the character Spike Mullins is there for comic interludes. The hero, Jimmy Pitt, has traces of Psmith: he is self-confident, at ease with words and determined. He has a hardness when it comes to ensuring that he will be alright which Psmith also possesses. The best of Wodehouse’s early heroes were to have traces of Psmith in them in respect of their coolness and love of words. In time, though, the hardness of these characters was to dissipate.

A Gentleman Of Leisure is thus recognisable as a ‘typical Wodehouse product’. It was not to be long before he re-used the template he had formed with this book. This was Something Fresh, the first of the Blandings series.

At this early stage of his career Wodehouse was reluctant to speak with his own voice. Later, when he was more successful and so more assured of his place, he was to sculpt a style of writing that was highly individual; he was also to be increasingly a comic novelist. But at this stage of his career Wodehouse was a ‘slanter’. Writing an introduction for a new edition of The Man With Two Left Feet, a collection of 13 short stories which was originally published in 1917, a 90-year old Wodehouse reflected:

There seems to me now something synthetic about them, and there probably was, for when I wrote them I had become a slanter. A slanter is a writer who studies what editors want. He reads magazines carefully and turns out stories as like the ones they are publishing as he can manage without actual plagiarism. It is a deadly practice.

Shortly after my arrival in New York an editor who had apparently seen signs of promise in the little thing of mine he was rejecting told me he thought I would eventually amount to something. ‘But,’ he added, ‘don’t try to write like everyone else.’

I did not take his advice. I knew better... I was mistaken.

The other short-story collection to be published in this period was The Man Upstairs. They include The Good Angel, which gives a leading role to a butler, and another where a girl conducts a feud with a policeman, and asks her fiancé to pull the copper’s helmet down over his eyes, an idea he was to recycle for Stiffy Byng in The Code Of The Woosters. The Romance Of An Ugly Policeman features a husband whose wife controls the purse strings. But they are an odd collection when viewed from the distance of a modern reader. In subject matter alone these collections would not be immediately recognisable as a Wodehouse product. They are about the struggles of the petit bourgeois. They are about some of the types of people Wodehouse moved among, people struggling to make their way in life. Indeed, In Alcala, Wodehouse weaves details of his own life into his portrait of Rutherford Maxwell:

Rutherford Maxwell was an Englishman and the younger son of an Englishman; and his lot was the lot of the younger sons all the world over. He was by profession one of the numerous employees of the New Asiatic Bank, which has its branches all over the world. It is a sound, trustworthy institution, and steady-going relatives would assure Rutherford that he was lucky to have a berth in it. Rutherford did not agree with them. However sound and trustworthy, it was not exactly romantic. Nor did it err on the side of over-lavishness to those who served it. Rutherford’s salary was small. So were his prospects - if he remained in the bank. At a very early date he had registered a vow that he would not. And the road that led out of it for him was the uphill road of literature.

He was thankful for small mercies. Fate had not been over-kind up to the present, but at least she had dispatched him to New York, the centre of things, where he would have the chance to try, instead of to some spot off the map. Whether he won or lost, at any rate he was in the ring, and could fight. So every night he sat in Alcala, and wrote. Sometimes he would only try to write, and that was torture.

If you picked up this book by an author who you had only met through, say, Mike, The Code Of The Woosters or Heavy Weather, you would be surprised. It is a sombre collection. It is Wodehouse trying to be an American writer, doing what American writers did. When he decided to be an English author, writing what Americans might expect an Englishman to write about, he was more successful and wrote much better work.

Wodehouse did not, as at least one commentator has hinted, ‘improve’ himself, then try to bury his past, and start writing about the activities of earls and their butlers because that was the society into which his financial rewards from writing had propelled him. Wodehouse started married life without any domestic staff, but by the mid-thirties his retinue ran to butler, footman, cook, two housemaids, a parlour maid, a scullery maid and a chauffeur who drove the Rolls. Wodehouse was born into the upper-middle class, and was never a member of the struggling petit bourgeoisie. His struggles consisted of a failure to get to university and to persuade his father that he could make a career as a freelance writer; he had a respected and decently paid job in a bank while earning an equally respectable income from his extra-curricular activities while receiving an allowance from his father of a sum greater than some families’ income. These are not the typical struggles of the petit bourgeoisie. Wodehouse was born of high social standing, and did not rise through the social strata through his writing. All he did was rise though the financial pecking order.

Wodehouse turned to writing about the English upper classes as a result of his geographical situation. What, he realised, the American public wanted from him was not pastiches of work they were already receiving in abundance from their home-grown writers but something different, something fresh even. So Wodehouse instead started writing stories of a section of English society that the Americans did not have - aristocracy. A Gentleman Of Leisure had been a success in America, and was turned into a play of the same name by Wodehouse in collaboration with John Stapleton and ran for 76 performances at The Playhouse in New York in the autumn of 1911, and gave a first starring role to Douglas Fairbanks. Later, renamed A Thief For A Night, it was performed in Chicago, where John Barrymore played the lead.

But the aim of any writer was publication in the Saturday Evening Post. The editor of this journal was George Horace Lorimer and he was to be a leading influence on Wodehouse’s career. Lorimer was an editor with a message. He set about creating, through the pages of his magazine, a vision of the America he wanted, one proud of its past achievements and positive as to its commercial future. The magazine’s editorial character reflected its editor’s vision. He wanted stories in praise of business success, romantic stories and tales about public matters. These categories could be mixed together. Thus a romance story entwined with the demonstration of the virtues of good business sense would fit the bill nicely.

Lorimer was the son of a preacher who was busy with a large debt-ridden Walnut Street Baptist Church. His father turned around the church’s finances. After spending a year at Yale University, Lorimer left to go into business in the meat-packing firm of one of his father’s parishioners. Within five years Lorimer was head of the canning department, but he canned the job to go Colby College in Maine. During the last years of the 19th century he worked on several Boston newspapers before he got a job as literary editor of the Saturday Evening Post, which, bankrupt, had been acquired by Cyrus Curtis in 1897. In 1899 the editor left and Lorimer took over on, initially, a temporary basis while a more qualified candidate was sought.

Lorimer rapidly transformed the financial fortunes of the Post. His vision of America made the magazine popular with the young, aspiring middle classes. He aimed to entertain first, but he also sought to challenge his readership. He admired hard work and men of business. His Letters Of A Self Made Man To His Son was a humorous series with the serious purpose of preparing young men to be a success in business - as Lorimer was. When Curtis had bought the SEP in 1897 circulation was 2,000; three years after Lorimer took over it had risen to 350,000. By 1908 it had reached 1 million, and it had doubled to 2 million by 1919; when Lorimer retired in 1936 its circulation stood at 3 million.

Under Lorimer’s encouragement and guidance Wodehouse’s career blossomed. Lorimer required high standards for his writers, and paid accordingly. He read each submission on the quality of the work not the power of the name. He had no need for big names, the Saturday Evening Post was always going to be biggest name in his magazine. If the Post published you, you were good, was his simple philosophy. Thus he had no need of name writers, nor of commissioning work: there were always plenty of people eagerly submitting manuscripts.

Partly through Lorimer’s influence, the standard Wodehouse hero became established as a young man of spirit, eager to progress through hard work. Many of these characters would be reformed drones, who gave up a life sponging off the family name or money to strike out for themselves.

Piccadilly Jim, the third novel which Wodehouse sold to the SEP for serialisation, was a very Lorimer-friendly work. There is a successful businessman, Peter Pett, of whom it was written:

It was the tapping of the typewriter that he heard, and he listened to it with an air of benevolent approval. He loved to hear the sound of a typewriter; it made home so like the office.

Jimmy Crocker becomes a reformed drone after he decides that leading a wild life by spending his inheritance is not the way to fulfilment and happiness and that the route to this instead involves joining Mr Pett’s firm and carving out a career in business. Willie Partridge, also previously content to live off his father’s achievements, follows Jimmy into Mr Pett’s company. This book is in the adventure story tradition of Wodehouse’s early works as it includes kidnap, burglary, gun play, explosives and the secret service.

Something Fresh is the poorest of the Blandings saga. Indeed, it was not conceived as part of a series, which really began with another book which was not set at Blandings. The best part by far is the introduction of Lord Emsworth, which happens in a club, and the long scene he plays with the waiter, Adams, of which this is the finest section:

‘Tell me, Adams, have I eaten my cheese?’

‘Not yet, your lordship. I was about to send the waiter for it.’

‘Never mind. Tell him to bring the bill instead. I remember that I have an appointment. I must not be late.’

‘Shall I take the fork your lordship?’

‘The fork?’

‘Your lordship has inadvertently put a fork in your coat-pocket.’

Lord Emsworth felt in the pocket indicated, and, with the air of an inexpert conjuror whose trick has succeeded contrary to his expectations, produced a silver-plated fork.

This episode is also notable as being the first of only two funny scenes in the book. It is a stodgy work. At this stage of his career Wodehouse had a tendency to write long introductions to his chapters, often going on for paragraph after paragraph. The ratio of dialogue to description was to increase as the books progressed. Wodehouse upped the dialogue of his books as his theatrical influences deepened.

At this stage of his career it was the stage where he had most success. At one time there were five shows running on Broadway for which Wodehouse had written. As Wodehouse was also dramatic critic of Vanity Fair, he was an important figure in the world of New York theatre. Indeed, he often ended up reviewing his own shows. Wodehouse’s success in the theatre and the role he played in the development of the musical is largely ignored by modern readers and commentators. I intend to do the same, except in so far as it influenced his novel-writing.

Wodehouse’s most successful period in musical comedy was when he teamed up with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern. Guy Bolton, a short, dapper man whom Gally Threepwood was to take after in appearance, became a close and lifelong friend and his working relationship with Wodehouse lasted long after their collaboration with the temperamental Kern, who wrote the music, had ended. Bolton and Wodehouse looked after the words; the book was normally Bolton’s main concern while Wodehouse busied himself with the lyrics.

Wodehouse could not read music, so he would listen to the tune, write a dummy lyric based on the rhythm, and then write a proper lyric to fit this. He claimed that knowing the music in advance meant he knew where the stresses of various words had to go. As ever, he preferred having something to work from. He needed that template.

The musicals the trio put on at the Princess Theatre nudged the musical theatre towards a more modern phase. A typical musical of that period was a foreign import, with a huge cast, ever-changing sets, glittering costumes, and improbable and disjointed plots which were suspended while the musical numbers were played out. Wodehouse disliked this type of piece:

The plot of The Girl From Brighton had by then reached a critical stage. The situation was as follows: the hero, having been disinherited by his wealthy and titled father for falling in love with the heroine, a poor shop-girl, has disguised himself (by wearing a different-coloured necktie), and has come in pursuit of her to a well-known seaside resort, where, having disguised herself by changing her dress, she is serving as a waitress in the Rotunda, on the Esplanade. The family butler, disguised as a Bath-chair man, has followed the hero, and the wealthy and titled father, disguised as an Italian opera singer, has come to the place for a reason which, though entirely sound, for the moment eludes the memory. Anyhow, he is there, and they all meet on the Esplanade. Each recognises the other, but thinks himself is unrecognised. Exeunt all, hurriedly, leaving the heroine alone on stage. It is a crisis in the heroine’s life. She meets it bravely. She sings a song entitled ‘My Honolulu Queen’, with a chorus of Japanese girls and Bulgarian officers. [Bill The Bloodhound]

In passing it might be noted that by wearing a different-coloured necktie at least the impostor has shown more imagination than many of Wodehouse’s charlatans. Psmith, for example, masquerades as a Canadian poet without bothering to adopt a Canadian accent, nor find out about his life and work. In a Wodehouse novel, all an impostor needs to do is change his name and that will be disguise enough.

The Princess Theatre could only hold 299, which was a deliberate policy as the fire regulations only applied to auditoria of at least 300 seats. However the limit on the audience numbers restricted the production budget. Princess shows had to have a small cast and orchestra and no more than two sets. Thus was born a new type of musical: an intimate show written with comedy and a strong narrative where the song lyrics were designed to move the plot on.

Wodehouse was involved with 51 dramatic works, either through writing the lyrics or book, or bits of both for musicals, or from collaborating with others on adaptations, either of his own works or others. Although Wodehouse is now viewed, perhaps unfairly, as a novelist who dabbled in the theatre; had he died in, say, 1920, the obituaries would have been about a lyricist not a novelist.

It is impossible to separate Wodehouse’s theatre work from a critical look at his novels for the skills learnt in one field were transferred to another. Extracts from Performing Flea show how Wodehouse did this:

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

In writing a novel, I always imagine I am writing for a cast of actors. Some actors are natural minor actors and some are natural major ones. It is a matter of personality. Same in a book. Psmith, for instance, is a major character. If I am going to have Psmith in a story, it must be in the big situations.

This philosophy lead to Baxter being given the flowerpot scene in Leave It To Psmith. Wodehouse realised that Baxter’s was a more major part than the draft plot had allowed for, so he wrote this scene to boost his part. Sometimes, though, Wodehouse could fail to follow his own advice. Spode is given only a small role in Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit. A major character in The Code Of The Woosters, he is wasted here.

Wodehouse’s work for the theatre also taught him the importance of dialogue and action. As he began to find his own voice as a novelist, he moved away from some of the introspective writing, where he would, often rather cack-handedly, describe what his characters were thinking. His theatrical influence told him that you had to deduce what a character thought by how he acted and what he said so his novels increasingly came to be mainly dialogue. However he preferred writing novels to playwriting because novels allowed him to write some author narrative. It is these passages which raise his work as a novelist above his work as a playwright. But it was the playwright in him which made them increasingly pithy and concise, rather than the rather rambling reams of paragraphs he could sometimes stumble into when not on prime form. Part of Bertie Wooster’s memorability as a character is his summations of characters and situations. The Wooster line ‘she fitted into my largest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight rounds the hips this season’ [Jeeves And The Unbidden Guest], would become merely a stage direction in a play.

Wodehouse began to structure his novels as a series of scenes. Sometimes the playwright influence becomes very evident when, for instance, something exciting happens off stage and is only told to the reader in reported speech. Though this is often necessary in a play, where only a limited number of scenes and settings are possible, a novelist can go where he wants and watch what he wants. Wodehouse could sometimes be reluctant to take this opportunity. A blatant example of this technique is in The Old Reliable in which virtually all the action takes place in the Garden Room and any action which happens anywhere else is reported. The Old Reliable is based upon a play and Wodehouse persists in treating his readers just as if they were a play audience. Thus, when a drunken butler fails to carry out a safe-blow, which has the makings of a big comic scene, we do not see it, but merely get a brief résumé of what happens from a character who enters the Garden Room and tells the players there what has been happening.

Something Fresh, although a disappointing work when viewed alongside what was to come from Blandings Castle, established Wodehouse a notch higher up the scale as a novelist on its acceptance by the Saturday Evening Post, and its fee of $3,500 was far more than any work had previously brought him. However, few of the characters in the book have any marked personality. Lord Emsworth makes a brilliant entrance, but he fades away from then on. Indeed, it could be argued that the best prolonged piece of writing about Lord Emsworth is the first scene Wodehouse wrote for him, and that nothing reached this level during the following six decades.

One of the best books Wodehouse wrote, and one often overlooked, is A Damsel In Distress, which came out four years after Something Fresh. It is notable in two main ways. The first is that it contains an oddity in Wodehouse literature in that the scene between Maud and George Bevan on the terrace is atmospheric and serious. The quality of the writing is not unusual; that Wodehouse should produce such a fine piece of writing from the type of scene he normally stumbles through is. Wodehouse recognised his strengths and weaknesses and was to shun this type of scene later on. But here he shows that he could pull it off.

The main significance of the novel, however, is that it sets the template for the Blandings saga. It is not, as has been claimed, that A Damsel In Distress copies the Blandings books, but the opposite. A Damsel In Distress is set at Belpher Castle, the seat of Lord Marshmoreton. His lordship is a more rounded character and gets a much fatter part than Lord Emsworth in Something Fresh. A widower, he is bullied by his sister and his family, but he does retain some of his old character, which resurfaces when he defies the family and allows his daughter Maud to marry into musical theatre, in the form of the wealthy composer George Bevan. Previously he had been keen to forbid the marriage, even though he liked George, so as to preserve a quiet life for himself, as the union is opposed by his sister and son. Yet Lord Marshmoreton’s change of mind is not motivated by the nobility of his character but from self-interest, as he himself marries a girl from the chorus.

Marriage in Wodehouse normally equals retirement and so this is the last we see of his lordship. When Wodehouse came to plot his fourth novel to be set at a country house, rather than invent a fourth country house he reverted to Blandings Castle. The Lord Emsworth of the second Blandings Castle is different from the one in the first. Like Lord Marshmoreton, in the first novel he is a keen gardener and a widower. Unlike Lord Marshmoreton, he was not bullied by a sister. The sister who plays hostess in Something Fresh is Lady Ann Warblington, a quiet character given to headaches and avoiding her guests by staying in her room either feeling unwell or writing letters. She is never to appear again in the Blandings chronicles; in her place come a succession of fierce sisters to bully Lord Emsworth and obstruct the path of young love. Lady Constance was run off from the template established with the creation of the snobbish Lady Caroline of Belpher Castle. Despite Something Fresh involving the descent of Lord Emsworth’s relatives upon Blandings to mark Freddie’s engagement, there are no sisters mentioned other than the feeble Lady Ann. Belpher Castle has set up camp at Blandings Castle.

Blandings Castle is not brought out again to provide a Blandings story as such, but to provide a backdrop for Psmith’s manoeuvres. Indeed, the Blandings series of books are a mix of the self-sufficient, where the family provide the characters and the plot, and those where the facilities of the castle are hired out to others. Psmith has a novel set there, and Lord Ickenham two. When Lord Ickenham first invades the castle, Lord Emsworth is almost booted off stage, so small a part does he get, and Gally does not make it onto the cast list at all and neither does he feature when Lord Ickehnam returns to the castle in Service With A Smile. Wodehouse also planned to set a Wooster novel there, but could not settle on the exact plot or treatment. Blandings will provide the supporting cast, but the leads are normally brought in from outside. Only two characters are common to all the Blandings stories: Lord Emsworth and Beach. Gally and the Empress of Blandings first make their appearances in the third novel of the series.

During the writing of Something Fresh Wodehouse had become a married man. Like the characters in his books, the courtship was brief and the marriage ceremony a simple one. His bride was a widow twice over, with a daughter from her first marriage. This showed a consistency of choice, for Wodehouse had already had one proposal of marriage turned down by another widow with a daughter.

On 3 August 1914 Ethel Rowley first met her third husband-to-be when she was asked by a girlfriend to make up a fourth in a party which included two men. Wodehouse was the second man and he proposed to her within days and they were married on 30 September. He was to remain married for the rest of his life, as he predeceased his wife after 60 years together.

Many of his works written when he was single talked of loneliness in a way that suggests it was a personal experience:

New York is a better city than London to be alone in, but it is never pleasant to be alone in a big city. [Psmith, Journalist]

He wrote to a friend after his marriage saying that for the first time he was happy. This letter slightly questions the traditional view of his time at Dulwich, which it was generally considered that he enjoyed. Perhaps it merely suggests that the happiness of his Dulwich schooldays was by then a distant memory.

What Ethel was doing in America has generally been ignored by biographers. However it seems that she was on the stage there, in the chorus. One of the stock Wodehouse heroines is a girl who has taken to the stage to provide for herself. In the case of Ethel, it would to be provide for herself and her daughter, left behind in England in the care of her grandparents. Ethel was of the lower middle classes, the daughter of a farmer. She professed to hate her mother, who she said was an alcoholic, and was mainly brought up by her grandmother on her father’s side.

The picture which has been allowed to develop is of Ethel as a dominating, bossy woman and Wodehouse an unworldly recluse happy to let his wife cope with the everyday details of life which he found so daunting. Stories which back up this point of view include the one in which, when Ethel was about to set off to find a flat for them to live in, her husband made a plaintive plea that she find one on the ground floor as he could never think of anything to say to the lift attendant. This picture of the Wodehouse version of domestic bliss suited both of them. Malcolm Muggeridge, who got to know the Wodehouses well and liked them both, wrote of Ethel Wodehouse as being ‘A high-spirited and energetic lady trying as hard to be as worldly wise as Wodehouse himself to be innocent.’ [Chronicles of Wasted Time]. Ethel Wodehouse was gregarious and a keen hostess. This contrasted with her husband who preferred human conduct to be on a one-to-one basis. One of the advantages of this was that he could control the subject matter of the conversation in a way not possible with a group. Wodehouse’s favourite topic of conversation was writing, both his own and others. He was equally as avid a reader as writer. Not only was he a prolific writer in a professional sense, he was also a keen correspondent. Many of those to whom he would write regularly he might not have seen for years, decades even. Some he had not met.

Ethel was not the dictator she has often been painted as. The family’s life was based around Plum. They moved around the world according to what suited him best for his career, which was the dominating force of their life. The organisation of their day-to-day existence he was happy to leave to Ethel. She organised and ran the household, and would set about alterations to the decor - or sometimes even the whole building - of the places they lived in, while he was left to get on with his writing. Increasingly their lifestyle came to be rooted in his interests and work rather than in her preferences and tastes.

Wodehouse was a man happy in his own company or, perhaps that should be, happy in the company of a typewriter. Wodehouse made few really close friends, though he was liked by many. The closest of his friends was Ethel. Theirs appears to be a marriage based on comfort and companionship. Writing to a friend shortly after his marriage, Wodehouse argued that marriage was not so much about love as finding someone with whom you shared enough points in common to enable you to live happily together without getting on each other’s nerves. It is believed that Wodehouse’s bout of mumps meant he was never going to have children himself, but he adored his step-daughter, Leonora, and was devastated when she died in 1944, aged 40, after a routine operation.

As everything for Wodehouse fed into, or was centred on, his writing, where did his close family fit in? Ethel it is said is the role model for Lady Constance Keeble with Lord Emsworth playing the PG Wodehouse role, happy to be left alone with his own preoccupations, while the dominant female in his life forces him into taking an interest in outside matters and to dress up and be sociable.

Ethel is also cited as a possible influence in the creation of the Wooster aunt. But is it too fanciful to say that it might not be to Agatha that attention should be turned, but to Aunt Julia, whose only appearance is in the first Bertie story, where faint traces of Ethel’s situation may be found:

Nobody ever mentions it, and the family have been trying to forget it for twenty-five years, but it’s a known fact that my Aunt Julia, Gussie’s mother, was a vaudeville artist once, and very good one, too, I’m told. She was playing in pantomime at Drury Lane when Uncle Cuthbert saw her first. It was before my time, of course, and long before I was old enough to take notice the family had made the best of it, and Aunt Agatha had put in a lot of educative work and with a microscope you couldn’t tell Aunt Julia from a genuine dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat. Women adapt themselves so quickly!

Leonora’s influence can be seen in the fact that, after Wodehouse had met her, his female heroines because more robust, rounded characters. Frances Donaldson, a family friend and a Wodehouse biographer, claimed that every heroine looked like his step-daughter. Leonora became a published author herself, under the name Leol Yeo, and Wodehouse came to rely upon her judgement and, whenever possible, would to get her to read his completed manuscripts before they were submitted to publishers.

Wodehouse loved to write anything and everything. He had success on Broadway both in musicals and straight theatre, and by the 1930s he was an accomplished and successful novelist and short-story writer. Keen to try his hand at anything within his compass in the writing field, he set out for Hollywood to write screenplays. In the autumn of 1929 he visited Hollywood, having had, like every other successful writer of the time, approaches to work as a screenwriter there. He spent three days there, liked what he saw and expected to take up a contract to work there from the next summer following three offers of a year’s work. Wodehouse originally turned down an offer to work for MGM as the money was not good enough, but in May 1930 he arrived in Hollywood, having agreed to a six-month contract with MGM at $2,000 a week, with an option of a further six months.

As a screenwriter his career is almost entirely forgettable. Mainly because he thought the studio who had hired him had forgotten about him. Used to hard and intensive work, Wodehouse found the studio had little for him to do. On those projects he got to work on, he was only one of a team of writers, with no guarantee that the screenplay would ever be shot. Many were not and the trade journal Variety made pointed comments about an ‘English playwright and author who has been collecting $2,500 a week for eleven months without contributing anything really worthwhile to the screen.’ The figure was wrong, but there was no doubt that it was to Wodehouse that they referred.

MGM did not renew his contract and in June Wodehouse gave an interview to Alma Whitaker of the Los Angeles Times at MGM’s request. She opened her piece with some casual remarks Wodehouse had made before the interview had begun:

‘They paid me $2,000 a week, - $104,000 - and I cannot see what they engaged me for,’ he said wonderingly as we sat beneath the coconut palms beside his glistening swimming pool in Benedict Canyon. ‘The motion picture business dazes me. They were extremely nice to me - oh, extremely - but I feel as if I cheated them. It’s all so unreasonable.

‘You see, I understood I was engaged to write stories for the screen. After all, I have twenty novels, a score of successful plays, and countless magazine stories to my credit.

‘Yet apparently they had the greatest difficulty in finding anything for me to do. Twice during the year they brought completed scenarios of other people’s stories to me and asked me to do some dialogue. Fifteen or sixteen people had tinkered with these stories. The dialogue was really quite adequate. All I did was touch it up here and there - very slight improvements.

Then they set me to work on a story called Rosalie which was to have some musical numbers. No, it wasn’t my story. But it was a pleasant little thing, and I put in three months’ work on it. No one wanted me to hurry. When it was finished they thanked me politely and remarked that as musicals didn’t seem to be going so well they would not use it. That about sums up what I was called upon to do for my $104,000.’

According to legend, this interview rocked Hollywood and caused the financiers to descend upon Tinsletown and pore through the books demanding swingeing cuts to the budget and rationalisations in the way the place worked. In fact, though the interview did cause ripples, its effect was less marked. Some of the film papers ignored the interview altogether, though the New York Herald Tribune carried an editorial on the subject. The myth of the interview was partly created by Wodehouse himself as part of ‘his silly old me, look what a fool I’ve been now’ act. He was often the butt of his own jokes, but rarely of anyone else’s. He was not the simpleton he often liked to make out he was. The imagined repercussions of his interview made a good story and Wodehouse always liked a good story.

Far from becoming a moral leper at Hollywood, he received further offers of work, turning them down because at the time he was in conflict with the American tax authorities and was doubtful of how much of his salary he would ever see. He eventually returned in 1936 for a six-month stint with MGM and after that worked on some films on a single-picture only basis. When he returned in 1936, the first project he was given to work on was Rosalie which was an old - and regular - acquaintance by then, as he had also worked on the original Broadway version.

Hollywood, though giving him little in the way of screenwriting, was to give him inspiration in his other work. When an American magazine commissioned him to write six stories with the proviso that they were about Americans in American settings, he set to work on stories about Hollywood. These are the most satirical of his work once he had become established as an author. In The Castaways, Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer, President of the Perfecto-Zizzbaum Picture Corp, has taken Bulstrode Mulliner’s hat by mistake and Bulstrode goes to retrieve it:

The motion-picture magnate took a quick look at Bulstrode and thrust a paper and a fountain pen towards him.

‘Sign here,’ he said.

A receipt for the hat, no doubt, thought Bulstrode. He scribbled his name at the bottom of the document and Mr Schnellenhamer pressed the bell.

‘Miss Stern,’ he said, addressing his secretary, ‘what vacant offices have we on the lot?’

‘There is Room 40 in the Leper Colony.’

‘I thought there was a song-writer there.’

‘He passed away last Tuesday.’

‘Has the body been removed?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Then Mr Mulliner will occupy the room, starting from to-day. He has just signed a contract to write dialogue for us.’

Bulstrode would have spoken, but Mr Schnellenhamer silenced him with a gesture.

‘Who are working on ‘Scented Sinners’ now?’ he asked.

The secretary consulted a list.

Mr Doakes, Mr Noakes, Miss Faversham, Miss Wilson, Mr Fotheringay, Mr Mendelson, Mr Murkey, Mrs Cooper, Mr Lennox and Mr Dabney.’

‘That all?’

‘There was a missionary who came in Thursday, wanting to convert the extra girls. He started a treatment, but he has escaped to Canada.

‘Tcah!’ said Schnellenhamer, annoyed. ‘We must have more vigilance, more vigilance. Give Mr Mulliner a script of ‘Scented Sinners’ before he goes.’

Other aspects of Hollywood were sent up by Wodehouse. That the moguls were greatly interested in money but not in literature or the English language is a point many of Hollywood’s commentators and satirists have noted. Producing quotes by Samuel Goldwyn, famous for his inability with the English language, became a veritable cottage industry, with comments such as ‘a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on’. Goldwyn reportedly demanded that Shakespeare be sent for to tidy up the dialogue in Othello, and in The Luck Of The Bodkins Ambrose Tennyson is to work for Superba-Llewellyn, as its chief, Ivor Llewellyn, thinks he is the famous writer Tennyson he has heard about.

In The Juice of An Orange, Mr Schnellenhamer is in conference with his fellow magnate, Mr Levitsky:

‘Every time I said anything, its seemed to me that he did something funny with the side of his mouth. Drew it up in a twisted way that looked kind of...what’s that word beginning with an ‘s’?’

‘Cynical?’

‘No, a snickle is a thing you cut corn with. Ah, I’ve got it, sardinic. Every time I spoke he looked sardinic.’

Mr Levitsky was out of his depth.

‘Like a sardine, do you mean?’

Studio chiefs, as well as being ignorant of the finer points of world literature, and often the blunter points as well, were often generous toward their families when drawing up the company pay rolls. Harry Cohn found a place for twenty-nine of his relatives on the pay roll of Columbia when he was its chief. Willmot Mulliner finds himself promoted to executive status ‘with brevet rank as brother-in-law.’

What Wodehouse was doing in Hollywood the second time around is hard to say. He had one try at it, found little to do, and had not greatly enjoyed that which he did do. The second time around he wrote to a friend saying how he hated screenwriting. Guy Bolton made the point that Wodehouse struggled to appreciate the fact that the camera could follow the characters around. Wodehouse was too stuck on the theatrical concept of there being one set, whereby when a character walks out of a room you can no longer see them. This makes sense as criticism, as it applies to his novels as well, so one would expect to find it hindering his screenplay work, where the construction is closer to that of a theatrical piece.

But just as those mountaineers who know of a large mountain and decide they have to climb it ‘as it is there’, so Wodehouse, a professional writer, had to try Hollywood simply because it was there. He was well paid for being there, Ethel had a fine time as a hostess, and Wodehouse got plots and ideas for novels and short stories. Also, he got one of the best lines in all his work in the Hollywood story, Monkey Business, when it is decided that a gorilla will be allowed to escape so as to garner publicity for a forthcoming film.

‘The stars have all been notified and are off the lot. Also the executives, all except Mr Schnellenhamer, who is clearing up some work in his office. He will be quite safe there, of course. Nobody ever got into Mr Schellenhamer’s office without waiting four hours in the ante room.