TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
The Earle
103 Waverly Place
One door from Washington Sq. North
New York
Sept 7. 1909
Dear Bradshaw.
Here I am. As Wilkie Bard was singing when I left England, ‘I’m here if I’m wanted’.1
I am in most of the day. Why not drop in on your way home?
Yrs
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Wilkie Bard’s ‘The Policeman’ (‘I’m there if I’m wanted’) was a popular hit song in 1908.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
The Earle
103 Waverly Place
One door from Washington Sq. North
NEW YORK
November 9. 1909
Tuesday.
Dear Bradshaw.
Thanks awfully for your letter. It’s ripping of you wanting to give me a leg-up, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do. So far from wanting to get my boys’ books published this side, I look on them as a guilty past which I must hush up. I want to start here with a clean sheet as a writer of grown-up stories. The Captain books are all right in their way, but their point of view is too immature. They would kill my chances of doing anything big. I don’t want people here to know me as a writer of school-stories. I want to butt into the big league. It wouldn’t do me much good people saying I was better than Andrew Home when I want them to say I’m better than O. Henry.1 The school stories have served their time, and it could hurt my chances to have them bobbing up when I’m trying to do bigger work. I have given up boys stories absolutely.
I think I saw the Pilgrims in Broadway today. At least there was a group of apparent Britons, with one man on crutches.2
I hope the serial is going strong. I return the synopsis.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Andrew Home, writer of school stories, with titles including From Fag to Monitor (1896), By a School Boy’s Hand (1904) and Bravo Bob (1909). See Bradshaw’s 1910 Captain interview, which claims that ‘[t]he best magazines such as the Cosmopolitan, Collier’s Weekly, &c., are printing [Wodehouse’s] stories. The former, in fact, calls him “A second O. Henry” (O. Henry is considered to be the greatest short-story writer in America today).’
2 ‘The Pilgrims of England’, an English football team, were touring the USA in late 1909. A match report in the 3 November 1909 edition of the Inquirer noted that, by this point in the tour, a number of the British players ‘were in a more or less crippled condition’. They were, nevertheless, victorious in most of their matches, gaining much press attention.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Dear Bradshaw,
Thanks awfully for mags. Use any public school stuff you like in accompanying notebooks but don’t swipe me other notes!1
Yours ever
PGW
P.S. I’m getting in a piano. You must come & play it.
1 PGW’s notebooks, which he had been keeping since he had left Dulwich College. Entitled Phrases and Notes, they include conversations with a London bus driver and a policeman, as well as accounts of football, cricket matches and incidents at his old school. Many of the notes formed the basis of his later short stories.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Hotel Earle
103 Waverly Place
One door from Washington Sq. North
NEW YORK
April 29. 1910
Dear Bradshaw.
The announcement in the Argosy looks great.1 You certainly are going strong. I’m not certain about next week. I’ll write if it can be managed, but I shall probably be pretty busy with Psmith, which is giving me trouble.2
The fight was awfully good. Ketchel finished up in great style, & had a clear lead on points at the end.3
Yours ever
P.G.W.
1 The ‘announcement’ in The Argosy refers to Bradshaw’s forthcoming story ‘Mrs Allison’s Day of Excitement’, which ran in the July issue.
2 PGW’s reference to Psmith may refer to what eventually became the US version of The Prince and Betty, which incorporated part of the plot of Psmith, Journalist.
3 PGW wrote about boxing for the Daily Express in England. Polish-American boxer Stanislaw Kiecal (1886–1910), better known as Stanley Ketchel, fought six times in 1910 before his murder in October of that year.
Bradshaw was temporarily on the staff of Success magazine, a mass-market monthly, which espoused the virtue of self-reliance. Wodehouse often used him, and other friends, as informal literary agents, attempting to get them to negotiate publication of his stories. Wodehouse remembers needing money, but loving his time at the Earle Hotel, where he was staying. ‘I was very hard up in my Greenwich Village days, but was always very happy. There were trees and grass and, if you wanted to celebrate the sale of a story, two wonderful old restaurants, the Bevoort and the Lafayette […] everything such as food and hotel bills was inexpensive: one could live on practically nothing, which was fortunate for me because I had to.’
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Hotel Earle
103 WAVERLY PLACE
NEW YORK
May 5. 1910
Dear Bradshaw.
Thanks awfully for your letter. You are a bear-cat. Whether the story goes through or not, I shall be equally grateful. Nobody could have done more than you have. I think it’s ripping of you.
Just had a letter from England, to say that I have sold two more stories to the Strand for £50. That makes 6 they have taken altogether.1
[…]
I’ve just discovered a hole in my trousers. These are Life’s Tragedies.
Billy Watt2 promised me 6 copies of Jimmy today.3 If they arrive I’ll send one up to you. Do you mind if I keep the vol of the Captain for a day or two? I may need it. I’m sending May Captain with this in case you haven’t seen it. I like ‘Sanctuary’, though I guessed the end. did you?4
The Express don’t want me to go to the Jeffries–Johnson fight,5 so I shall almost certainly be in England when you are. Great stuff.
Yours ever
P.G.W.
Ps. I won’t come up & see you, as I must avoid office till story is decided on.
1 In 1910, The Strand published PGW’s ‘The Good Angel’ (February); ‘The Man Upstairs’ (March); ‘Archibald’s Benefit’ (April), ‘Rough-Hew Them How We Will’ (April); ‘Deep Waters’ (June)’ and ‘Love Me, Love My Dog’ (July).
2 Billy Watt, a maverick New York publisher, founder of W. J. Watt & Co.
3 PGW’s latest novel, The Intrusion of Jimmy, drew on his growing knowledge of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, as well as English country life. Following its publication in England, it was published in book form in America in May 1910 as A Gentleman of Leisure. The book had numerous variant titles in stage, serial and book versions, including The Gem Collector and A Thief for a Night.
4 R. S. Warren Bell’s short story in the May 1910 Captain, ‘Sanctuary’, tells ‘Of a Greyhouse Half-Back and of How his nimbleness helped him at a Certain Crisis in his “old boy” Days’.
5 A match had been scheduled for 4 July 1910, between James J. Jeffries and Jack Johnson. Jeffries, the former undefeated heavyweight boxing champion, had come out of retirement, declaring his motive to be that of ‘proving that a white man is better than a Negro’. Johnson won the fight, silencing Jeffries, but triggering race riots.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Hotel Earle
103 Waverly Place
New York
Monday
Dear Bradshaw.
Are you game to put a little snaky work for me? As follows. Will you show enclosed to Brubaker, just saying that I sent it to you to read & that everyone who has read it says it is my strongest story.1 If he says (a) ‘I don’t think much of it’, bow & retire gracefully but if (b) he says ‘this is hot stuff’, then say casually ‘Wodehouse wants $600 for it. He told me he was going to keep it by him till he could get that for it.’
Now, at dese crool woids, Brubaker will either say (a) ‘Let him wait’ or (b) ‘My God, we must have this if it breaks the firm.’2
Everybody tells me I mustn’t let this story go at my usual rates, so I’m out to get something big for it. You catch the idea, don’t you? I don’t actually offer the MS to Success. They merely see it by accident, & if they want to buy at $600, all right.
I’ve decided to abandon Psmith for the time being, but I shall be full up with the play, I think all this week, so let’s have our meeting later. Thinking things over, I doubt if you’d better bring the phonograph when you come. There’s a woman next door who has been kicking at the piano. She’ll turn fits at the ’graph. Send down serial (inst today, can you? I should like to read it).
I’ve got a short story in May Captain.3
Yrs
P.G.W.
P.S. Great idea. Tell Brubaker I’ve particularly asked you to send story back tomorrow as I want to send it to Collier’s, though I have told Collier’s nothing about it. Thus will he give it quick reading & we shall win through. Add that I have just sold Collier’s another for $300. (I did this last Monday. Did I tell you? Baseball story.)4
1 Howard Brubaker, editor of Success and Liberator magazine, among the many magazines for which Bradshaw worked.
2 PGW’s phrase ‘dese crool woids’ is taken from his own fictional character, Spike, the Brooklyn housebreaker in The Intrusion of Jimmy, which was published that month in America.
3 PGW’s tale of a schoolboy caught smoking, and attempting to avoid being punished, appeared in the ‘School Yarns’ section of The Captain (May 1910), under the title ‘Stone and the Weed’.
4 The baseball story ‘The Pitcher and the Plutocrat’ (Collier’s Weekly, 24 September 1910), rewritten as ‘The Goalkeeper and the Plutocrat’ for The Strand in January 1912.
Wodehouse returned to London at the end of 1910, renewed the lease on his cottage at Emsworth, and began work again at the Globe.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Constit. Club
WC.
January 19. 1911
Dear Bradshaw.
Thanks for the very timely tip about Seth!1 I shall certainly be out of town. I wonder what brings him this side.
[…]
By the way, I have started my new novel, which merges about ½ way into the plot (with variations) of Psmith, Journalist.2 (Psmith doesn’t appear). It’s going to be a corker – good love interest – rapid action from first chapter – length about 100,000 words. Watt is bringing it out in the Fall. Will you be spying out the land meanwhile for serial publication. How about Success? I know you would place it for me for nothing, but I hope you will take 10%. I could get it done by the middle of February, I think, as the last half will come easy. The people you might sound (after Success) are Billy Taylor, of the Associated Sundays; Stone, of the Metropolitan; and the Cosmo; & any others you can think of. All the characters are Americans. The scene is laid for the first 7 chapters on an island in the Mediterranean, after that in New York. The title is A Prince at Large.
[…]
My next Black’s book is on rather different lines.3 It is a serial I wrote for Chums 3 years ago rather in the Andrew Home vein! But there is such a lot of good stuff in it that I have decided to let it go through with the others. I am v. pleased with the sales of my Black’s books. The royalties come to over £60 this year.
[…]
Yrs.
P.G.W.
1 Seth Moyle, PGW’s second literary agent in the USA, had, PGW recalls, ‘this extraordinary knack of fast-talking an editor into taking a story’ (Jasen, p. 44).
2 PGW’s ‘new novel’ referred to as The Prince at Large was to become The Prince and Betty (1912).
3 PGW’s ‘next Black’s book’ was meant to be the Chums serial The Luck Stone. This never appeared, and The Luck Stone found posthumous publication in 1997.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Emsworth, Hants
May 21. 1912
Dear Bradshaw.
I haven’t had a moment to write before. A million congratulations on the serial.1 It is perfectly wonderful to have placed one at your age. This has certainly been a big year for you so far. At the rate you work you’ll probably have another ready before the winter. Considering how you have been worked at the office, it’s simply wonderful your having done a long story so quickly. I am plugging away at mine. I reached ½ way a few days ago. It is giving me a lot of trouble, but the results are good so far.2
[…]
I am having a great time now the The Pink Lady is over here. I have met nearly all the principals except Hazel Dawn. Louise Kelley, the girl who plays the Countess, is a very good sort, & Alice Dovey, of course, is the nicest girl I ever met.3
Tell friend Chas Buck that I’m writing to him very soon.4 I had a friendly letter from Douglas Fairbanks yesterday in answer to mine of July last!5 American hustle!
Westbrook is going to be married on the 28th!!! Ella King-Hall. I don’t think you ever met her.6
Good notices of Betty this side. I don’t know how it’s selling. Its shortness is rather against it.
Well, so long,
Yours ever
P.G.W. (Chickens)
1 Bradshaw’s five-part serial Before the Dark had been placed in The Argosy – America’s first ‘pulp fiction’ magazine – running in December 1912.
2 PGW’s ‘long story’, probably The Little Nugget, published as a one-shot by Munsey’s Magazine in August 1913, and in three parts, with the love story excluded, in The Captain in January to March 1913.
3 Alice Dovey, one of the leading ladies in Ivan Caryll’s Broadway musical The Pink Lady. Born in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, the Dovey sisters (Alice and Ethel) had been well-known child stars, renowned for their precocious talent.
4 Charles Neville Buck (1879–1930), short story writer, whose work appeared alongside PGW’s The White Hope in Munsey’s Magazine in May 1914.
5 Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), later famous for his roles in silent movies such as Robin Hood and The Mask of Zorro, played the hero, Jimmy Pitt, in the Broadway theatrical adaptation of PGW’s novel. The Intrusion of Jimmy, entitled A Gentleman of Leisure.
6 Ella’s brother recorded that the couple had ‘been devoted for 10 years and were married in Paris […] they will live in a small flat near the Temple’ (The Diary of George King-Hall, 17 June 1912) (private archive).
Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle had often played cricket together in matches such as the Authors v. Actors, alongside other literary men of the time, such as E. W. Hornung and A. A. Milne. Both also played for J. M. Barrie’s cricket team, the ‘Allahakbarries’. In 1912, Wodehouse was playing regularly throughout the season, including at Lord’s. When not playing cricket, Wodehouse was busy finishing his latest novel. The Little Nugget drew on his knowledge of Emsworth House School, mixing the English school story with an American gangster plot.
TO SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Constitutional Club
Northumberland Avenue, W.C.
Aug 9. 1912
Dear Comrade Doyle.1
Will you stand by me in a crisis? A New York lady journalist, a friend of mine, is over here gunning for you. She said ‘You know Conan Doyle, don’t you?’. I said, ‘I do. It is my only claim to fame’. She then insisted on my taking her to see you at Crowborough, and mentioned next Sunday, the 11th. Can you stand this invasion? If so, we will arrive in the afternoon. (Rather like Malone going to see Challenger!)2 I enclose a telegraph-form and hope that all will be well. (I have traded so much in America on my friendship with you that my reputation will get a severe jolt if you refuse it!)
I am absorbed in The Lost World! I have just finished a novel of my own for an American magazine, but I had to write it so quick that I am afraid it is pretty bad. I shall revise it later.3
I was glad to see you on form with the bat the other day. I hope we shall smash the publishers.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 PGW’s joking, notionally socialist mode of address – ‘Comrade’ – echoes that of his character Psmith.
2 PGW refers to characters in Doyle’s serial The Lost World, in which the journalist Edward Malone sets out to interview the fearsome Professor Challenger as part of his quest to impress the woman he loves, and ends up on an expedition to the Amazon basin. The tale, which featured dinosaurs and vicious ape-like creatures, was serialised in The Strand Magazine, alongside Wodehouse’s The Prince and Betty, from 1912 to 1913.
3 The Little Nugget (1913).
Bradshaw was having a degree of success as a writer of school stories. His latest book, The Right Sort, was dedicated to Wodehouse. Bradshaw needed Wodehouse’s encouragement. He was moving locations frequently, working as an editor on various magazines, and as a private secretary to wealthy men, all the time desperately trying to make a living. At the point of writing, he had just landed a job working for Thomas W. Lawson, a broker and author. This was especially fortuitous as Bradshaw, despite familial disapproval, had fallen in love and was trying to establish himself so that he might be in a position to marry.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Emsworth
September 9. 1912
Dear Brad.
I am afraid I have left your letter a long time unanswered. Congratulations on the Lawson business. You seem to go ahead every day. It’s wonderful.
I have just heard from Seth that Bob Davis likes The Little Nugget! Thank goodness.1
I am coming over on the Olympic, either Oct 9 or 30. I hope the bally boat doesn’t go down.2 The uncertainty as to date is because I am coming with my friend Thwaites, of the N.Y. World, & I don’t quite know when he can get away.
[…]
The weather here has been simply infernal. I made 27 in 7 minutes for the Authors at Lord’s before being stumped, & then rain stopped play. Last Sat’y I got 50 for our village & took 7 wickets. We had to run everything out & it nearly killed me. With boundaries I should have made a century.
Are you back in N.Y. yet? If so, go & pal up with The Pink Lady crowd, espec’y Alice Dovey, the Hegemans & Louise Kelley. You’ll like them.
Tell me all about Olive when you write.3
So long
Yours ever
Chickens.
1 Bob Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, was seen by many writers as the ‘literary godfather’. See Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 221. PGW described him as ‘a fellow who would give you a plot and then buy the story you had written for his magazine’, Jasen, p. 50.
2 PGW’s reference to the ‘bally boat’ going ‘down’ alludes to the sinking of RMS Titanic on 14 April 1912.
3 Bradshaw’s girlfriend, Olive Marie Barrows, from Philadelphia.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Hotel Algonquin
59 to 65 West Forty-Fourth Street
New York
May 6. 1913
Dear Brad.
Yes, here I am, & sorry not to find you in N.Y. I didn’t expect to, as I knew your visits now were rare. When can we meet? Can’t you get Lawson to send you in here?
I have started in already on a new novel for Bob Davis. I haven’t mapped it out properly yet, but it is coming, I think. He asked me if I could have it finished by July 1. I said ‘Oh, yes.’ I don’t know how many thousand words a day these guys think I can write!
This place suits me a lot better than the Earle. Owing to Fairbanks & Megrue both recommending me, the management can’t do enough for me.1 I asked for a chair, & they gave me so many that I haven’t room to move about!
[…]
Brother Alfred alas was a ghastly frost!! Grossmith made me write & re-write ’till all the punch was lost, & it ran just a fortnight to empty houses. I never saw such notices, all thoroughly well deserved.2
[…]
Alice Dovey & Louise Kelley welcomed me with open arms. I have got over my little trouble re first-named & we are the best of friends. She is too devoted to Hamilton King for me to form a wedge & break up the combination, so I gracefully retire.3
Isn’t it hot! I sweat off a pound a day. They are building a sky-scraper next door, & that keeps me on the jump. How New York has blossomed out since I was here last. It’s quite a city now.
Well, so long
Come here soon
Yours ever
Chickens
1 Roi Cooper Megrue (1883–1927), popular Broadway playwright during the years 1912–21. PGW alludes to Megrue’s 1914 farce It Pays to Advertise in A Damsel in Distress (1919).
2 British actor, Lawrence Grossmith (1887–1944), son of comedian and writer George Grossmith Sr and brother of George Grossmith Jr, had commissioned PGW to write Brother Alfred, a one-act play, based on his Reggie Pepper story, ‘Rallying round Old George’. It was co-written with Herbert Westbrook. It limped through fourteen performances at the Savoy Theatre, before folding.
3 Hamilton King (1871–1952), American illustrator famous for his pictures of ‘cigarette girls’. King had probably met Alice Dovey while working on the publicity posters for The Pink Lady.
Back in London in the spring of 1914, Wodehouse ‘was engaged to write a revue [Nuts and Wine] (at £7 a week) for the Empire Theatre’, in collaboration with his friend, C. H. Bovill. ‘We spent some of the time’, he recalls, ‘working out the plots of the Bleke stories’, which appeared in The Strand and the Pictorial Review. A few months later, he was packing to return to New York. Wodehouse found some comfort in London after Alice Dovey’s refusal. Lillian Armstrong, a London widow, claimed his affections. Wodehouse visited Mrs Armstrong frequently when in London, and was fond of her daughter, Olive (known as ‘Bubbles’). His proposals of marriage to Mrs Armstrong were not accepted.
TO OLIVE ARMSTRONG
Emsworth
Hants.
July 13. 1914
My darling Bubbles.
I am dreadfully sorry, but I cannot possibly come & see you before I sail. I shall be so busy packing and getting ready. I will come and see you directly I get back.
Mind you have learned to swim by then. I want you to be a really good swimmer, and then we will go away together to the sea-side and swim all day.
I am sending you a little present. It doesn’t look very nice, but it means quite a lot of money. It will buy you all sorts of nice things. Give it to Mrs Pennington and tell her what you specially want to buy, and she will get it for you. Let me know some of the things you buy. You might get another doll if you wanted one.
Love and kisses
from
P.G.
A few weeks after the declaration of the First World War, Wodehouse was back in New York, and once again staying in his friend Norman Thwaites’ New York apartment.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
43 East 27th Street
New York
Sept 1. 1914
Dear Brad.
Thanks very much for the clippings and the story. I liked the latter very much, but what a little there is in it, when you come to analyse it. That is what I’ve always wanted to be able to do, to interest the reader for about five thousand words without having any real story. At present, I have to have an author-proof plot, or I’m no good. I expect one has to be about ten years older than I am to do it properly.
[…]
This is in a way a crucial week, for I have a story out with the Metropolitan and another with the Saturday Evening Post. If either of them lands, I shall ask a big price, and then we’ll see what Honble Ruddy Mackenzie has got to say about getting first refusal on all stuff at $300 per!1 I feel it in my bones that the Post will take that yarn. It is really one of the very best I have ever done. Of course, it will mean that they will refuse the next dozen or so as not up to the same standard, but that can’t be helped. I want to get into the Post – we are asking $500 for the story – in order to beat hell out of these other guys. Mackenzie at present is far too much the Heavy Editor to please me. The whole purport of my campaign is to shift the burden of obligation, and make it jolly decent of me to let McClure’s have my stuff, instead of jolly decent of them to want it.
My position is fine and strong now, for Mrs Wilkening has sold the Man Upstairs book of short stories to the Famous Players Movie people.2 I don’t know how much they are giving, but it can’t be less than $100 a story, and as there are nineteen stories, I ought to clear in the neighbourhood of $2000. This will put me in shape to treat editors like so many tripe-hounds, especially with the Nugget coming on. My ambition is to inaugurate a regular reign of terror. I hope nothing goes wrong with the works!
Meanwhile, I simply can’t get another idea for a short story. My record till now has been great, – three in just over a month; but I never can keep it up. It will probably be another six weeks before I get going again.
In this crisis I am trying to get the ‘Squidge’ going again, but the enthusiasm has gone.3 This war and everything makes me feel too jumpy for steady work on a serial. I am in the mood when I want to turn out short story after short story and get quick results. Besides, I am just at the most infernal part of the book, when I am introducing the characters and don’t feel certain of them yet.
[…]
The state of the War is as follows. I have driven Seth back and I think annihilated him. Billy Watt, however, has taken the offensive in the centre, and is threatening my communications.
I had an agitated phone call from Mrs Wilkening the other day, asking me to come up. It seems that Billy had been calling her down good and hard about me. He said that he ought to have been informed of all that she was doing. What was more sinister was that he was claiming 25% of all movie rights on some stuff which Thompson Buchanan had published with him!4 His ground was that he had introduced Thompson to Mrs Wilkening!! Aren’t these men perfect death-traps over here. I’m getting scared whenever anyone – except you – gives me a pleasant word. It seems to follow almost automatically that they claim ten per cent on some of one’s money.
[…]
[H]is behaviour has been so sinister that I have signed all sorts of papers making Mrs Wilkening my sole agent. I bank on her. If she lets me down, my faith in human nature is done for. She is the only professional agent I have met yet who seems honest. I like her, too, which is an enormous asset.
Billy has not sent the check yet! It is now twenty-two days since he promised to send it in ten days. I suppose he wants me to write to him again, and then he can denounce me […] I shall just let him take his time, – up to a month or so, that is to say. Then I shall mobilise the legal brigade.
You would think I was the most quarrelsome chap in the world to look at my list of enemies! My real trouble with all these people is that I don’t really like them. We are only bound together by business, and when anything goes wrong with that everything snaps.
Which reminds me of Pinkie! Not a word from her yet! The other day I was hurrying down 34th street, and I passed her and Peggy. We passed within four feet of each other, but she didn’t make a sign.5 Whether it was a deliberate cut I don’t know. It’s quite possible, if you’re thinking of something else, to brush past a person without seeing him, but it looks suspicious. The funny part is that I hardly miss her at all. I really believe that, unless you’re in love with her, you can dispense with any woman, – in other words one’s real friendships are never with them. Pink was pleasant to have around, but, if she’s not there, I don’t notice it.
My kick against life at present is that it’s so infernally monotonous. I get up, try to work, feed, and go to bed again day after day. As long as I’m working I feel all right, but in between stories it’s rotten. That’s why I have always enjoyed Emsworth. There was never a day without something breaking loose, if it was only the dog rolling or one of the kids breaking a window.
[…]
My brother passes through tomorrow on his way to Hong-Kong. It will be nice seeing him.6 I wish you could get to town again soon.
Well, so long. Do you want those clippings back?
Yours ever
Chickens
1 Cameron MacKenzie, editor of McClure’s, a monthly periodical with a 600,000 circulation, specialising in ‘strong clean stories, vital and well told’.
2 PGW was still struggling to find a good literary agent. His relationship with Cora Wilkening did not last long, and he later refers to her as a ‘hopeless incompetent’. Wilkening made a habit of suing her clients for large sums if deals were made without her consultation. The Famous Players film company (eventually Paramount Pictures) was one of the new companies formed in 1912.
3 ‘Squidge’ – probably a reference to Something Fresh, the serial PGW published in 1915.
4 Thompson Buchanan (1837–1937), writer and director.
5 PGW’s spat with ‘Pinkie’, the actress and silent movie star Hazel Dawn, famous for her role in The Pink Lady, seems to have had no further repercussions. Hazel Dawn’s younger sister, Margaret Romaine (‘Peggy’), was also in New York, starring in musical comedies.
6 PGW’s brother Peveril was on his way to join the Hong Kong police.
The following letter survives as an extract transcribed by Bradshaw and sent to his fiancée, Olive. Bradshaw and Olive Barrows were engaged, and the wedding had been set for a month earlier – 22 August. Bradshaw’s family were strongly opposed to the marriage. His father threatened to kill him, and his mother claimed to be dangerously ill just before the date. The wedding was postponed, leading to a tempestuous correspondence between the couple and Bradshaw’s family. Bradshaw notes that ‘if my mother had her choice I would not be married until I was 30’. Tension was increased by Bradshaw’s peripatetic existence – he divided his time between Boston, where he worked as a private secretary for Thomas W. Lawson, a stock-broker and author, and New York, where he stayed with Wodehouse and freelanced for various magazines, including Everybody’s and The Delineator.
Bradshaw reports that Wodehouse was in good spirits at this time, treating his friends to champagne at his flat. Wodehouse ‘had a date’ on 23 September, the day before he wrote this letter. His companion was called Ethel May Wayman.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
September 24. 1914
[…]
I really meant what I said about your writing. I know it must be deadly dull for you all alone in Boston. But you ought to buckle to and try and do something in the writing line. Why don’t you write about something which has to do with your present life? You are in a position most writers would love to get. You can surely work out something connected with the unique Lawson atmosphere.
You tell those anecdotes of Lawson’s mannerisms so vividly that you must be able to make fiction out of him.1
I think myself that you would be perfectly justified in marrying now, if you want to. The present state of things is idiotic and absolutely unfair to you. Nobody would blame you if you refused to endure it.
Well cheerio.
Yours ever,
Chickens
1 Lawson kept a 1,000-acre estate in Scituate, Massachusetts, called ‘Dreamwold’, where he bred and raised spaniels. Bradshaw had given a spaniel to Olive as a token and proof of his love. It seems that Bradshaw’s ‘unique Lawson atmosphere’, along with many aspects of his life, finds its way into Wodehouse’s fiction, in the shape of wealthy eccentric Americans, henpecked British secretaries, and canine love-tokens. Lawson specialised in shares in the copper-mining industry, and seems to have provided the inspiration for Wodehouse’s T. Patterson Frisby, the dyspeptic millionaire in Big Money (1931).