By January 1901, the nation was in mourning for Victoria. As the evening lamps were lit, shopkeepers carefully dusted the black and purple banners that hung from their windows, and a young black-suited Wodehouse would have made his way home from work. It was a distance of about five miles through the London streets, tracing the Thames’s curve from the dust of the City centre to the unfashionable end of the King’s Road. The walk must have seemed long to Wodehouse. The beginning of the Edwardian era brought little that was new for him, and life at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was as dull as he had feared. He was, he recalls, ‘the most inefficient clerk whose trouser seat ever polished the surface of a high stool’. Assigned, initially, to the postage department, Wodehouse was moved on to ‘Fixed Deposits’, ‘drifted to Inward Bills […] and then to Outward Bills and to Cash, always with a weak, apologetic smile on my face’, and a ‘total inability to grasp what was going on’.1
Though he detested the work, he enjoyed playing in the bank’s rugby and cricket teams [see plate 6] and life at the bank was, for Wodehouse, not entirely wasted. Within a few years, it was to provide crucial material for his fiction. In 1908, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank reappears in print, thinly disguised as the ‘New Asiatic Bank’ in his 1908 serial, The New Fold. There, at the Asiatic, Wodehouse’s hero Mike sits disconsolately, punching postage stamps and ‘reading a surreptitious novel behind a pile of ledgers’ [see plate 7].2
Mike’s plight would have struck a chord with many readers. He was the sort of young man that The Captain magazine had described: forced to leave school with ‘no capital, no influence […] in a world where he is not much wanted’.3 Wodehouse, like Mike, was just one of thousands of nobodies lost in the maze of early Edwardian bureaucracy. From Grossmith’s Mr Pooter in the late 1880s to Eliot’s ‘young man carbuncular’ in 1922, the writing of this period is full of such figures – anonymous clerks in their ill-fitting frock coats, clutching their bowler hats and dreams. But Wodehouse wanted something more. He wanted to make fiction, not be the stuff of it. As he opened the door to his ‘horrible lodgings’ in Markham Square, he would scan the hall table for replies to the stories and articles that he had written, longhand, and sent out the week before.
The field of opportunity, for Wodehouse, was huge, as the early 1900s saw a further boom in print journalism. Print made its way into everyone’s lives – from the advertisements for Eno’s Fruit Salts on the sides of the horse-drawn omnibuses to the dense small-print weekly newspapers, full of reader’s queries, pictures, prizes and gossip – and everyone wanted to be in print.
There was, for Wodehouse, little to celebrate at the end of the working day. His mail consisted, almost entirely, of rejection slips, which he used, with characteristic creativity, to paste to the walls of his bed-sitting room. ‘I could’, he recalls, ‘have papered the walls of a good-sized banqueting hall.’ Struck down with mumps, and recuperating at his parents’ house in Shropshire in the summer of 1901, he produced no fewer than nineteen short stories – all of which the ‘editors were compelled to decline owing to lack of space’.4 But, gradually, there were successes. Wodehouse drew on what he knew at this period – his schooldays at Dulwich – and his stories of honour, good sportsmanship and derring-do were accepted by a number of national magazines aimed at the schoolboy market. He was also getting ‘an occasional guinea’ for small pieces aimed at the adults, with articles placed in the hugely successful weekly compilation Tit-Bits, and its rival Answers. By 1902, one of his school serials, The Pothunters, was published in book form.
Two crucial things made all the difference to Wodehouse in these early years. The first was the kindness of an established journalist, William Beach Thomas. After a brief spell as a Dulwich schoolmaster, Beach Thomas was now working for the Globe newspaper, an intensive job for a man who hated city life. Whenever he wanted to get away from town for a few days, he asked his former pupil to fill in for him. It was easy enough for Wodehouse to call in sick at the bank, and head over to the Globe offices on the Strand for a spot of moonlighting. Then came Beach Thomas’s annual holiday – he needed cover at the Globe for three weeks. However atrocious a clerk Wodehouse was, someone would notice a three-week absence. There was, for Wodehouse, no contest. With no steady job to go to, he placed his faith in his freelance writing, and decided to ‘chuck the bank’.5 His excitement is reflected in the inscription that he wrote in a copy of The Pothunters given to his friend Bill Townend: ‘these first fruits of a GENIUS at which the WORLD will (shortly) be AMAZED (You see if it won’t)’. It was the right move. By 1903, he was a fully fledged journalist, working on the permanent staff of the Globe on a column named ‘By the Way’ – a humorous round-up of the day’s news, which appeared on its front page.
The second turning-point came a year later, in the shape of another aspiring fellow writer and schoolmaster – Herbert Wotton Westbrook [see plate 9]. Handsome, charismatic, and permanently broke, Westbrook turned up unannounced at Wodehouse’s digs clutching a letter of introduction from a friend. He found the young author hard at it, ‘sitting at a table, a woollen sweater wrapped around his feet, working on a poem for Punch by the light of a green-shaded oil lamp’.6 Westbrook was ambitious but lazy, known to his friends as the ‘King of Slackers’. Westbrook drew on Wodehouse’s advice and encouragement, but also, as time went on, borrowed and pawned Wodehouse’s belongings – and was even prone to pilfering his plots.
But Westbrook was not without his uses. An invitation to visit the small prep school where Westbrook taught was exactly what Wodehouse needed as an escape from London life. Emsworth House School soon became Wodehouse’s rural retreat; he lodged above the school stables, played cricket with the Emsworth boys, and later adopted the name Emsworth for Clarence, the pig-loving 9th Earl and Seigneur of Blandings Castle. Soon Wodehouse was spending most of his time in Hampshire, sharing rooms with Westbrook, and sending his copy up to London by train.
Westbrook provided more than just company. The pair began to work together – both at the offices of the Globe, where Westbrook was appointed as Wodehouse’s deputy – and on various freelance projects and novels. With his entrepreneurial schemes and scams, and state of déshabillé, Westbrook was also ideal raw material for Wodehouse’s fiction, becoming one of the models for his first great fictional character – Ukridge. Indeed, his influence was a lasting one. The spectre of ‘Brook’, or ‘Old Brook’ – a man with talent but without the stamina to see it through – hangs over Wodehouse’s letters, the spirit of unfulfilled potential, goading him to work harder. Wodehouse was also to become good friends with the owner of the school, Baldwin King-Hall, affectionately known as ‘Baldie’, and his sister Ella [see plate 10].
Wodehouse was working feverishly – and beginning to see results. By 1904, his second school novel, A Prefect’s Uncle, had been published, together with a further school story (The Gold Bat) and a book for children. He was turning, by his own joking admission, into ‘something of a capitalist’.7
In 1904 he also realised a long-held ambition – to see New York. He made his first trip to America in April on a budget, travelling ‘second class with three other men in the cabin’ and took the opportunity to get an insider’s view of the American boxing circuit.8 New York was ‘like being in heaven without having to go to all the bother and expense of dying’.9 On his return, Wodehouse found himself appointed as editor of the ‘By the Way’ section of the Globe newspaper, and contributed a lyric to a new West End show. Writing in his notebook on 13 December 1904, Wodehouse ‘set it down’: ‘I have arrived. Letter from Cosmo Hamilton congratulating me on my work and promising commission to write lyrics for his next piece. I have a lyric in Sergeant Brue, a serial in The Captain, 5 books published, I am editing “By the Way”, Pearson’s have two stories and two poems of mine, I have finished the “Kid Brady” stories, and I have a commission to do a weekly poem for Vanity Fair.’10
Back in England, Wodehouse managed to combine fiction and writing lyrics for musicals with a new post as the resident lyricist at the Aldwych Theatre in London. The year 1906 saw success as a novelist on a wider scale, as Ukridge made his first appearance in Wodehouse’s outstanding tale of romance and poultry, Love Among the Chickens. Not George Washington, Wodehouse’s and Westbrook’s autobiographical account of London literary life, was published in 1907. The following year, Wodehouse turned to his friend Townend for help with plotting a potboiler, The Luck Stone, a schoolboy romp with a touch of murder-mystery about it, inspired by Anstey’s colonial tale, Baboo Jabberjee [see plate 11].
With such success, Wodehouse could easily have become quite a man about town, and he was certainly beginning to acquire the trappings. In 1906, he bought (and promptly crashed) a Darracq motor car from his friend the theatrical manager Seymour Hicks. His theatrical connections would place him in the vicinity of a number of attractive young women. But there is, in these early letters, little sign of romance. It is perhaps no coincidence that the entire plot of Not George Washington revolves around ways not to find, but to avoid, a girl. One might imagine that Wodehouse’s sentiments echoed those of his narrator, James Orlebar Cloyster, who finds himself faced with the idea of love and wondering: ‘Did I really want to give up all this? The untidiness, the scratch meals, the nights with [friends].’11 For Wodehouse, as for Cloyster, the answer was no. Indeed, the twenty-something Wodehouse sought out the company of those who allowed him to play out aspects of his younger self. His old Dulwich friend Bill Townend provided cocoa and chats over the footer results. And he often spent time with the daughters of his family friends, the Bowes-Lyons. The Bowes-Lyon sisters remembered Wodehouse as a much-loved guest, who turned up for tea with copies of the latest children’s books and joking proposals of marriage. ‘I think’, Effie wrote, noting the childlike side of the man, ‘he could be friends with us because we were little girls.’12 The girls were also a source of inspiration for Wodehouse. Some of his vignettes – ‘Effie and Teenie are always quoting from the last book they have read. Eg. Effie, after reading Macbeth, calls T. “Young fry of treachery”’ – have an almost Woosterian feel about them [see plate 8].13
The sheet music for Wodehouse’s lyric in the musical Sergeant Brue (1904), with Wodehouse incorrectly billed.
If there is a unifying spirit to these early letters, it is that of a man trying to grow into himself. ‘I am always quite at my ease’, he wrote in his private notebooks ‘(a) with people whose liking I don’t want to win (b) with people who are clever in a way that doesn’t impress.’ ‘We all act through life’, Wodehouse added in another note, ‘and each of us selects the special audience he wishes to impress.’14 And Wodehouse in his twenties wanted to impress just about everyone. Dignified letters to publishers are followed by slangy notes to friends. One sees, in this correspondence, Wodehouse as both adult and adolescent – fiercely independent and ambitious, but still clinging nervously to his Dulwich College roots. Throughout this period, Wodehouse’s professional persona still carries with it a schoolboyish anxiety about doing the right thing. It is this insecurity that makes Wodehouse’s final letter to his illustrious literary agent, J. B. Pinker, all the more remarkable.
In 1909, Wodehouse arrived on his second visit to New York. Love Among the Chickens had been sold to an American publisher, and he set out to find new writing opportunities. Such was Wodehouse’s confidence that he had resigned from his post at the Globe. His previous letters to J. B. Pinker had been respectful, earnest, and self-consciously over-written. But in his final note Wodehouse has an uncharacteristic swagger about him. His tone is almost off-hand – ‘I hadn’t’, he says, ‘had time in the hurry of my departure to call.’ Though staying at a friend’s apartment on East 58th Street, the note is dashed off, longhand, on writing paper swiped from the luxurious Waldorf Astoria hotel. He was entering a world ‘where dollar bills grew on trees and nobody asked or cared who anybody else’s father might be’.15 Wodehouse might not yet have arrived, but he certainly thought he was on his way.
1 Over Seventy, p. 478.
2 The New Fold was published in 1908–9, becoming the 1910 novel Psmith in the City. See Chapter 13.
3 ‘When You Leave School: Something in the City’, The Captain, July 1899, pp. 394–7, at p. 394.
4 Over Seventy, p. 479.
5 PGW to Richard Usborne, 11 January 1952 (Wodehouse Archive).
6 Jasen, p. 29.
7 Over Seventy, p. 481.
8 PGW to William Townend, 11 September 1946 (Dulwich).
9 America, I Like You (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 36.
10 Money Received for Literary Work (Wodehouse Archive). Cosmo Hamilton, a friend, playwright and novelist who worked on many of the musical successes of the day; Sergeant Brue was playing at the Strand Theatre; PGW’s 1904 The Captain serial was The Gold Bat; the ‘Kid Brady’ stories, published in Pearson’s from 1905 to 1907, revolve around a former cowboy turned lightweight boxer.
11 P. G. Wodehouse and Herbert Westbrook, Not George Washington (1907), Chapter 8.
12 N. T. P. Murphy, In Search of Blandings (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), p. 132.
13 Phrases and Notebooks (Wodehouse Archive).
14 Ibid.
15 See Piccadilly Jim (1917), Chapter 6. The novel first appeared as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916.