Despite the excitement of the New York hustle, Wodehouse must have sorely missed his friends – the regular Sunday cocoa nights in Bill Townend’s Clapham digs where they talked about plots over hot buttered toast; cricket and dirty jokes with the dilettante Westbrook; comforting chats with Lily, the Emsworth housekeeper [see plate 13]. There was no shortage of companions in New York. Wodehouse soon tired of his slippery agent, Abe Baerman, but Norman Thwaites, from the New York World, lent him an apartment and gave him introductions into journalism, while Baerman’s replacement, the hard-drinking, hard-boiled Seth Moyle, offered a glimpse of the edgier side of Manhattan life. It was, however, a few months before he found his true confidant – the seventeen-year-old British-born New Yorker, Leslie Havergal Bradshaw [see plate 14].
An aspiring fellow writer, Bradshaw was a hardworking dreamer. With a demanding employer, an impossible family and – in due course – a fearsome fiancée, he came to be, for Wodehouse, a Bingo Little and a Jimmy Pitt rolled into one. Bradshaw had moved to New York three years earlier. Like Wodehouse, he wrote for The Captain – and the pair met when Bradshaw was sent to write a feature article for the boys’ magazine. The result is part feature article, part eulogy:
He is just what I imagined: tall, big and strong; a young man, with dark hair, rather light blue eyes, a healthy colour, and the most friendly, genial, likeable manner in the world […] He has a big hand and shakes with you vigorously. […] I had an awfully hard job to tear myself away. I finally did go. But first he gave me a cheery promise to look me up at my home a few days later. Since then, I have seen him frequently and have been the recipient of much kindness from him.1
This was a writing partnership as well as a friendship. Wodehouse helped Bradshaw with his plots; Bradshaw used his literary contacts to act as Wodehouse’s unofficial agent.
Wodehouse soon moved out of Thwaites’ apartment and into the bohemian Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village, where he worked feverishly at his novel, which was to be published in America as A Gentleman of Leisure.2 During this period, the restlessness that was to mark Wodehouse’s life for the next twenty years began to emerge. Soon after selling a number of stories, he returned to England and showed signs of settling down, buying a cottage next to Emsworth House School. He even started working back at the Globe with Westbrook, and enjoyed the summer cricket season, playing alongside writers such as Conan Doyle and J. M. Barrie. But just as life was beginning to seem established, Wodehouse received a request concerning the dramatisation of A Gentleman of Leisure for the American stage, and booked another passage back to New York.
These years, in which Wodehouse ‘sort of shuttled to and fro across the Atlantic’, were made possible by the efficiency of the transatlantic ocean-liner.3 This was the age of ocean travel, and the sea was – for Wodehouse – a source of inspiration. Many of his early novels draw on the maritime atmosphere, from the frenzied bustle of the Paddington boat-train, to the heft and sway of the sea; the tremor of the engines in the dining saloon, and ‘that faint, but well-defined, smell of cooked meats’ that pervades the floating vessel.4
Wodehouse made the most of his peripatetic existence. The ‘first truly Anglo-American author’, many of his articles during this period were placed in both American publications (such as Cosmopolitan and McClure’s) and British periodicals (such as The Strand).5 One of Wodehouse’s gifts was his ability to capture a nation’s characteristics – and to exaggerate them. He offered his American audiences classic scenes of English tearooms and top hats, while his English readers enjoyed the excitement of Times Square, Brooklyn housebreakers and ‘magnificently aloof’ taxi-chauffeurs.6
Around this time, Wodehouse began work on a new set of stories with a distinctive protagonist – Reggie Pepper. The prototype for Bertie Wooster, Pepper was modelled on the English ‘dude’ parts that Wodehouse had seen on the New York stage – and the stock Edwardian aristocrat roles that he had seen played by the comedian George Grossmith Jr [see plate 12].7
In the end, Wodehouse was to make – at least for a while – a home in America. But this was an accidental act of homemaking. By October 1914, the ‘slight friction threatening in the Balkans’ had turned into full-blown conflict.8 At the point war was declared, Wodehouse found himself on, of all places, a German ocean liner. He was travelling back to America on the same boat as the actor John Barrymore and was attempting to score a feature interview.
Wodehouse was never to see active service. As he told his biographer, ‘I was rejected for service because of my eyes.’ After the call for conscription was introduced in America he ‘tried to enlist again […] but was rejected once more’.9 In many ways, his geographical location provided shelter from the realities of war. Indeed, his only on-the-record comment was in an interview in The New York Times in which he declares that – paradoxically – the ‘tragedy of war’ is ‘going to have a great effect on the attitude towards humour of the British public. People will become so depressed that they will become less critical of the methods used to cheer them up.’10
Wodehouse’s personal ‘war’ was dominated by his attempts to break into the American market. By 1915, he had had numerous pieces printed in the American ‘pulps’ – such as Argosy, Munsey’s and People’s. These magazines were cheap and widely circulated, but they also bought their stories from authors at cheaper rates. Wodehouse was still chasing that elusive prize – to land a serialised novel in one of what were known as the ‘slick papers’.
Wodehouse’s life in Manhattan was a highly social one. Parties began in the small hours, when Thwaites returned from the New York World offices; nights were spent playing records on Bradshaw’s gramophone, and entertaining glamorous New York actresses. But by 1913 most of Wodehouse’s friends had started to pair off. Thwaites had a girlfriend. Westbrook had unexpectedly married Wodehouse’s Emsworth friend, Ella King-Hall. Bradshaw was particularly preoccupied, engaging in an almost daily tempestuous correspondence with his fiancée, Olive. Wodehouse’s own romantic forays were more short-lived. He would remember his first real attachment, to the actress and singer Alice Dovey, all his life [see plate 15]. ‘I shall never forget how wonderful she was, with her charm, and her sense of comedy, and her beautiful voice’. ‘All the heroines in my books are more or less drawn from her’, he later wrote, and his nickname for Alice, ‘Billie’, was given to the irrepressible Billie Dore in A Damsel in Distress.11 Wodehouse immortalises his feelings for Alice in his unusually sentimental short story ‘In Alcala’. Set in a bleak boarding house, and featuring an awkward British writer and an attractive American actress, the story has many biographical resonances. But given that Wodehouse’s proposal of marriage to Alice Dovey was turned down, one suspects the moment in which the hero ‘shower[s]’ his lover’s ‘upturned face with kisses’ was wishful thinking.12
There are mentions of other women. A relationship with a London widow is intriguingly filtered through a correspondence with her eleven-year-old daughter; a dinner engagement with another widow – this time a well-known actress – and a meeting with a London lady journalist apparently came to nothing.13 Loneliness began to set in. ‘Solitude had not hurt him till now’, Wodehouse wrote.14 A letter to Bradshaw complains of life’s infernal monotony.15 By the end of the year, the realities of bachelor life were beginning to pall.
1 ‘Impressions of P. G. Wodehouse’, The Captain, March 1910, vol. XXII, no. 132, pp. 500–1.
2 The book had numerous variant titles in stage, serial and book versions, in the US and UK, including The Gem Collector, A Gentleman of Leisure and A Thief for a Night.
3 Jasen, p. 47.
4 The Girl on the Boat (1922), Chapter 6.
5 Barry Phelps, P. G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth (Constable: London, 1992), p. 99.
6 The Intrusion of Jimmy (1910), Chapter 6.
7 See Murphy, pp. 125–6.
8 The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), Chapter 1.
9 These are PGW’s own words. See Jasen, p. 53. Other biographers give conflicting and sometimes conjectural accounts of PGW’s attempts to enlist. See Frances Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 107, and Phelps, p. 101. The only concrete record is that of his registration in America in September 1918. See Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life (London: Viking, 2004), pp. 108 and 439.
10 Joyce Kilmer, ‘War Will Restore England’s Sense of Humour’, The New York Times, 7 November 1915.
11 PGW to Ann Garland, 12 February 1969 (private archive).
12 ‘In Alcala’ (1911), repr. in The Man Upstairs and Other Stories (1914).
13 In a letter to Bradshaw, PGW notes that he is ‘going to ask Daisy Wood to dinner’. Wood was a recently widowed British music hall artiste, and sister of the music hall comedienne Marie Lloyd, PGW to L. H. Bradshaw, 22 November 1912 (private archive).
14 ‘In Alcala’.
15 PGW to L. H. Bradshaw, 1 September 1914 (private archive).