TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Hotel Astor
New York
Oct 1. 1914
Dear Brad.
Excuse delay in answering letter. Been busy getting married to Ethel Milton! We are here for tonight, then tomorrow to Melrose Grange, Bellport, Long Island.1
I’ll write again from there. This is just a note to tell you of the marriage.
Yours ever,
Chickens
1 Melrose Grange, the Wodehouses’ destination, seemed to be a special place to the couple. The US edition of Vanity Fair for 15 August includes a story entitled ‘The Eighteenth Hole’, written under the pen-name ‘Melrose Grainger’ – a private joke, or tribute, perhaps, to the woman he had just met, and whom he was soon to marry.
Wodehouse and Ethel May Wayman were married on 30 September 1914. In writing to Bradshaw to tell him of their marriage, Wodehouse uses her stage name – Ethel Milton. Bradshaw reports to Olive that the letter was ‘A complete surprise. […] She is the girl we took down to Long Beach about a month ago. She has been married before, I believe. She is rather English, has fair hair, and talks very well. I knew he was keen about her, but didn’t think it went to this length. I didn’t see him this last time because I had seen him so recently and knew he was busy.’ He adds that ‘Ethel Milton is very nice – I don’t mean to imply anything about her – but I can’t picture him married to anyone. He must have found the very person he wanted or he wouldn’t have done it, for he has had about 11 years in which to look over all the girls of his acquaintance. I remember vividly his telling me recently that he thinks the main thing in marriage is to be pals with a girl, rather than to be continually in a fervent passion of love.’
The newlyweds rented a bungalow in Bellport, Long Island – a quiet town by the edge of the ocean.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Box 478
Bellport
Long Island
Oct 10. 1914
Dear Brad.
I’ve been feeling an awful worm not having written to you as I said I would, but really the fevered rush of life has been such down here that I haven’t had a moment, especially as we have not yet been able to get a maid, and have had to do all the house-work ourselves since we arrived! Golly, I don’t know what they mean by saying the country is dull. It’s one long round of excitement. Yesterday I was bitten by a dog!
Can’t you take a day off and come down and see us, when we get settled? You can have your choice of about six spare bedrooms, and there are fifty acres of ground to wander about in. It’s perfect down here at present, but I fear we are going to cop it in the matter of cold later on.
Married life really is the greatest institution that ever was. When I look back and think of the rotten time I have been having all my life, compared with this, it makes me sick. And when I think that I was once actually opposed to the idea of your getting married, I am amazed at myself. My latest and final pronouncement on the Brad–Olive situation is, Get married at once, and don’t care a blow about anyone, because it is borne in on me very strongly that this business of marriage is so exclusively one’s own business that it is ridiculous to let even one’s mother have a say in it. The only point to be considered is finance. Do you feel that you can undertake the contract from a financial point of view? The idea of my talking prudence is pretty thick, seeing that I have at this moment $70 in the bank! But I am hoping for more eftsoones or right speedily. If you can manage it on your salary, as I feel certain you can, I should charge in, if I were you.
Speaking as an old married man (ten days!), I think the main question about marriage is not so much whether you are in love with each other as whether you have the essential points in common which enable you to live with each other without getting on each other’s nerves. I know you and Olive have, so I don’t see what is to keep you apart. It seems to me, brooding on your situation, that you are at present getting all the disadvantages of being married i.e. sickness at headquarters and general civil war, without any of the advantages, and that you can’t make things much worse at home by going the whole thing. It’s a difficult thing to advise anyone about, but in your case it isn’t so much advising as ceasing to advise. You made up your mind long ago on the essentials of the situation, and were only kept from marrying by a sort of tidal wave of advice from all quarters. If you are certain that Mr Lawson will stand by you and continue to weigh out the plunks per week, I think you should go ahead and risk the consequences. It’s a ghastly position for you, with your mater taking this curious stand, but, as the Bible says, a man shall cleave to his wife and all that sort of thing.
I can only argue, of course, taking a line through my own case. All I know is that for the first time in my life I am absolutely happy. It is a curious thing about it that the anxieties seem to add to the happiness. The knowledge that it is up to one to support someone else has a stimulating effect.
You were the first person I told about it, but since then I have notified others – mostly bad men like Billy from whom I hope to get dough. I sent a story to Ainslee’s the other day, and told the editor – whom I have never met – that he should send a check as a wedding-present irrespective of the merits of the story. No answer yet!
Before I forget. Certainly go ahead with ‘Alcala’, if you think you can make anything of it.1
The financial situation continues moderately thick. I sent Billy a peremptory telegram yesterday, and, if the check doesn’t come soon, I shall startle the life out of his greasy body by putting the Authors’ League onto him. One thing married life does for you, – it removes that shyness about savaging people who have worked that ‘friendship in business’ gag on you to the extent of keeping your hard-earned for themselves. I am sorry for Billy, but we need all the Wodehouse money exclusively for the upkeep of the Wodehouse home, and cannot afford to keep the Watt family going as well!
[…]
The peace of this place is wonderful. It is very primitive of course. There is no postal delivery, and one has to walk a mile to get mail. Also at any moment the water supply is apt to fail. Still, we both love it.
Ethel sends her love. She liked you tremendously. She says you must come down when you can manage it, but says not until she has got a maid. However, that only means another day or two. Apparently maids are plentiful in these parts after the middle of this month.
How is the writing going? I didn’t mean to hint that you had cracked under the strain, as Boston didn’t. I know what you have had to go through. Still, I hope you will get going soon. Good luck.
Yours ever
Chickens
1 Bradshaw was planning to dramatise PGW’s ‘In Alcala’.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Box 478
Bellport
Long Island
Oct 14. 1914
Dear Brad.
I took your letter to Friend Wife, who was cooking the family dinner, and, having read it, she laid it absently down on a large sheet of fly-paper, so I shall have to answer it from memory.
First, in the matter of the present. It is tremendously decent of you to want to give us one, and we shall certainly appreciate it. The first ballot resulted in Ethel voting for a bottle of scent and myself for a box of cigars; but the second and final showed us both solid on a photograph-frame to take my photograph. It is a fairly large one, but most of it is margin, so if you can secure something – not too expensive – about the same size as this sheet of type-paper, that will be just what we want, and thanks awfully for thinking of it.
Lots of news. Thank goodness, the ice-pack has at last broken. Ella King-Hall has cabled me over a hundred and nineteen quid, the proceeds of the English rights of some short stories, and Mrs Wilkening writes to say that Doty – Douglas Z.,1 as you rightly remark – has taken the last story McClure’s refused and will make an offer for it directly he returns to town. Also, with a nasty hacking sound which you could hear for miles, Billy coughed up $50 yesterday, and promises another $88 tomorrow. He only parted after I had sent him a frightfully abrupt telegram, and in his letter he is very very stiff and formal, and concludes with a postscript to the effect that he ‘resented the tone of my telegram’. Not a word of congratulation about my marriage! And incidentally I believe he is doing me in for a small sum of money, for The Intrusion of Jimmy is running in the Evening World, and Mrs W. says she didn’t sell it to them, so evidently Billy has and has pouched the proceeds. I shall have to hound him for that. He really is too maddening for words. One has to beg for one’s money as if it were a loan, instead of being one’s rightful earnings long overdue. Never again!
I don’t know why I called Brother Fans, The Man Upstairs.2 Just a slip. I enclose a letter I received from Barry, which looks promising. If it goes well at the Palace, it ought to be a cert for a long booking. We could do with forty weeks at $25 per.
We are still without a maid, and today we are blowing thirty cents on an advertisement in the local paper.
Must stop now and get down to the village for my morning visit to collect mail and buy things. That is the big event in the day here. There might be good news from Mrs Wilkening, as she sent a story of mine to the Saturday Evening Post last week, and they read stuff very quick. But I have a feeling that I shall never land with the Saturday.
So long
Yours ever
Chickens
1 Douglas Zabriskie Doty (1874–1935), editor of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.
2 Brother Fans, a PGW short story about baseball (McClure’s, August 1914) that had been adapted into a one-act vaudeville sketch. In a previous letter, PGW had mistakenly referred to it as The Man Upstairs. It played at the Palace Theatre, New York, opening on 19 October, and Bradshaw reports that it was ‘a success’.
Bradshaw felt that the Wodehouses’ request for a wedding present ‘was too modest, so I sent them the other articles they mentioned; to her a small bottle of Coty’s L’Effleurt Essence, and to him a box of cigars’. The requested photograph frame was, he told Olive, ‘hand-carved wooden, with a dull bronze finish, with a very quiet and unobtrusive Egyptian design on the border’.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Oct 19. 1914
Dear Brad.
Thanks awfully for the cigars and the scent. They are splendid. The cigars came precisely as I had smoked my last. I am afraid they are going to spoil me for the twofers which I usually smoke (at three cents per), but that can’t be helped.
[…]
Mrs Wilkening’s confounded optimism has again caused me a disappointment. Apparently Doty has not taken that story after all, though from the enclosed letter he does not seem absolutely to have rejected it. He appears to have sent it back, though, for Mrs. W. writes that it is under consideration elsewhere. I can’t remember the occasion to which Doty refers. I didn’t know he had ever seen my stuff officially before.
I wish she wouldn’t do this German-official-news stunt. It’s maddening to whoop over a victory and then find that it was only a near-victory after all.
However, it hasn’t made as much difference as it might have done, for the financial situation is pretty good.
[…]
Billy has coughed up $88 more, so, deducting the $275 which I have had to pay as first instalment on the $550, I have about $425 in the bank, besides my London savings, so, living being so cheap down here, I am pretty well ahead.1
[…]
I may have to run up to New York tomorrow. I don’t want to a bit, as it is the dickens of a business getting to the station now that the road is all up. It means a two and a half mile walk. This makes it hard for Ethel to come up with me. On the other hand, if I leave her, I shall have to get back by an early train, for a night alone in this place would give her the Willies. I don’t quite see how I can manage to see the sketch. I suppose it has had its first production by now. I hope it has gone well.
Are you reading the Sherlock Holmes story in the Sunday Tribune? I guessed the solution with ridiculous ease a week ago. I call it a low down trick of Doyle to ring in one of those Part Two acts, like in The Study in Scarlet [sic], where the action is suddenly shoved back twenty years and Holmes put into the background.2
[…]
We are still without a maid, though one is promised for the first of the month. It really is the devil of a business trying to get on without one. You feel it in all sorts of little ways. The washing-up is the worst. It is not so much the labour of it, as the fact that it comes after meals, just when you want to be peaceful and unemployed.
A powerful odour of scent tells me that Ethel is near. She has just come in and sends her love, and thanks you awfully for the scent. She hasn’t been able to write herself so far, as she is always being interrupted, just as she is settling down, by our landlord, who pays at least ten visits a day and drools on about a stove he is going to put in for the winter.
So long
Yours ever
Chickens
1 PGW’s agent, Billy Watt, had placed The Intrusion of Jimmy in the Evening World Magazine, and had not yet passed on the proceeds.
2 Doyle’s The Valley of Fear ran in The Strand from September 1914 to May 1915.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Bellport
Long Island
Oct 24. 1914
Dear Brad.
Thanks most awfully for the photograph frame. It looks splendid in spite of the gargoyle in the middle of it.
Since I wrote to you I have made two hasty dashes up to New York, and, believe me, it takes some doing from here. The first day I walked two and a half miles to Bellport Station to catch the 9.50, and found they had taken it off last Sunday, and had to walk four miles in just under the hour to catch the next train at Patchogue. Coming back, I caught the 5.29, and found that it stopped at Bellport on Saturdays only. So I had to walk out from Patchogue!
Things seem brisking up a bit. I sent a much-refused story to Ainslee’s, and they have taken it for $125, which, down here, means about two months keep.1 Also Lawrence Grossmith has come over from England, and is making himself very busy about Brother Alfred. William Collier wants a play in a hurry, and there is a very good chance that a version of B.A., revised by some big pot, may suit him. It would be corking if we managed to extract some bones from that frost after all.2
[…]
Ethel has come out very strong with three fine plots! I am working on them now. If she can keep this up, the maintenance of the home is a cinch!
I never appreciated married life so much as last night. I came home, tired and hungry, after having walked out from Patchogue and having had nothing to eat for hours, and there was a fine dinner and a blazing fire, and E. fussing over me, and all sorts of good things. It was perfectly ripping. Incidentally there were twelve letters waiting for me. A record!
We are still without a maid, but I have developed a wonderful liking for washing dishes. I find it stimulates thought, and is generally soothing. So I am going to take on that department till we get a maid.
We have two kittens and a puppy now. The puppy kept us awake the night before last from two-thirty onwards.
I haven’t heard yet who is going to do the rest of the Nugget. I hope Frohmann [sic] gets some good man.3
So long
Yours ever
Chickens
1 ‘The Romance of the Ugly Policeman’ appeared in Ainslee’s in April 1915, and earlier in The Strand in January 1915.
2 After PGW’s Brother Alfred had flopped in London in 1913, Grossmith was planning a revival in New York.
3 Arrangements for a theatrical production of The Little Nugget continued, but were never realised. Charles Frohman, an American theatrical producer, died the following year.
Lillian ‘Lily’ Barnett (née Hill) was Wodehouse’s housekeeper at Threepwood and a life-long friend. Wodehouse’s letter shows his desire to keep in touch with Emsworth, and with his English counterparts. By December 1914, coverage of the war in the American press reflected the gravity of the situation, but there was still a sense that the conflict could be ended relatively quickly.
TO LILLIAN BARNETT
Box 478
Bellport
Long Island
U.S.A.
Dec 2. 1914
Dear Lily.
I expect you have heard that I am married, and have been wondering why I did not write and tell you about it. The fact is, things have been in such a rush that, every time I have tried to settle down, I have had to start in and do something else. We have only just been able to get a maid, and for the first six weeks my wife did all the cooking and I washed the dishes and did the house-work. It has increased the admiration I have always had for you! How on earth you managed to look after me and your own home and the two children I can’t understand. I don’t wonder you used to get up at four in the morning or whatever it was. My only wonder is that you were ever able to go to bed at all. What an awful lot there is to do about a house. I also realise more than ever what a lot you used to do for me with the animals. We have two cats, a dog, and a puppy here, and however many of them we turn out of the dining room at meal times, there always seems to be one left, shouting for food. I gather them up in armfuls and hurl them into the kitchen.
I’m afraid I shan’t see Emsworth for another year. We have taken this place for the whole of 1915. But at the end of that time I hope to settle down for good in England. This place rather reminds me of Emsworth. There is the same sort of shallow bay, with an island like Hayling stretched across the mouth of it. I believe it is perfectly splendid in Summer, but the cold is very bad in January and February. I hope by working hard to make enough to spend January at least somewhere where it is warmer. I get frightfully home-sick at times, but the war has cut my English money all to pieces, and I have to stay in America and try and sell some stories here.
[…]
I am sending you a little present, to buy something with at Christmas, and to make up for the fact that I shall have to stop the money from Mant.1
[…]
I wish you would ask somebody who knows about sending things over here, and see if it would be possible to let me have some of my things. What I think you might do is buy a suit-case (get the money from Mant), and pack some of my things in it and send it off to me here. Get a case which doesn’t lock, and then the Customs people will be able to open it.
The things I want particularly are my sweater, my heavy boots, and that woollen waistcoat. I don’t think there’s anything much else, but you might shove in anything that looks worth having. A thing I want, or shall want, very much is my bicycle, but I don’t know whether it would be worth the expense of getting it over. Will you ask about it? If it isn’t too expensive to send, I should like to have it for use in the Spring. You simply can’t get a decent bicycle this side. Hardly any of them have free wheels and none of them have a step at the back. Besides which, they all seem to be built for midgets.
I nearly forgot to say that it didn’t matter a bit about that contract I asked you to find, after all. The whole thing is so tremendously complicated that no one knows what is happening. The whole trouble is that the moving pictures have only just come into popularity. When we drew up that contract, no one thought anything about cinema rights, and so they weren’t mentioned in the contract. The consequence is that it has not been decided yet whether a theatrical contract covers the moving picture production.
[…]
Well, married life is suiting me splendidly. It is certainly the only life, if you’re suited to each other, as we are. My wife is an English woman who has spent several years in America, so she can sympathise with the English and American sides of my life. She is a widow, about five years younger than me, and I have a little step-daughter! I have not seen her yet, but I hear she is delightful.2
Knowing me, you will understand the importance of my marrying somebody who was fond of animals. Thank goodness, she is almost fonder of them than I am. We keep open house for all the dogs in the neighbourhood. She is very anxious to meet Nancy. Our puppy is awfully nice, but no dog will ever be like Nance.
How is the war affecting you all? I get such different accounts of the state of things in England. My mother writes as if Cheltenham were an armed camp, but my friend Bovill, in London, wrote as if there were no war on at all, and Mr King-Hall didn’t seem very disturbed about it.3 Anyhow, it looks very much as if the Germans had shot their bolt. Over here, people are drawing parallels between this war and the American Civil War, and showing that the position of Germany now is very much the same as that of the South after the Battle of Gettysburg. If it is, the war ought to be over by the middle of next year.4 I don’t believe in these Zeppelins.5 If they ever got to London, they couldn’t do so very much damage.
Well, write and tell me all the news,
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 J. R. Mant & Sons was an Emsworth company which had two businesses (a butcher’s and a cycle works). Mant paid Lily a form of retainer on PGW’s behalf, and gained a literary mention in return, in the shape of PGW’s Colonel Horace Mant in Something Fresh.
2 Leonora was being educated in England. The events of the war meant that it was difficult for her to travel to be reunited with her mother and new stepfather, but they were soon to meet.
3 PGW’s parents had moved to Cheltenham in 1902; Charles Bovill, a former colleague at the Globe, lived in Battersea, South London. King-Hall was owner of the Emsworth House School, and Westbrook’s brother-in-law.
4 The defeat of the Confederate troops at the Battle of Gettysburg was often considered a turning point in the American Civil War, so the comparison suggests that Germany was in a position similar to that of the Southern Confederate states – approaching defeat.
5 PGW writes a little over a month before the first Zeppelin airships were sent from Germany to England, when there was much speculation in the press about their potential threat.
Bradshaw had broken off relations with his family, and planned a wedding for 20 February 1915.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Bellport
Dec 15. 1914
Dear Brad.
We shall both be delighted to see you & Olive, if you don’t think the double journey will be too much for her. As a matter of fact, acc’d to my time-table, the Sunday trains, though few, are good. There is a 9.02 which gets here at 11.02, and a 5.15 from here which reaches N.Y. at 6.54. You had better verify them.
On arriving at Bellport, you get into the stage & tell the man to drive to Axtell North Cottage – I think they call it. Another name it has is Melrose Grange.
Of course, you understand that it will practically be camping-out? I know you do, but does Olive? I mean, will she be appalled at our tin salt-cellars? I think you had better see what she thinks about the trip, as it is considerable Arctic exploration at this time of year, and the delicately-nurtured feminine might kick at it.
[…]
Yours,
Chickens
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Bellport
Long Island
January 20. 1915
Dear Brad.
Sorry for delay in writing. I have been trying to get my novel finished before coming to N.Y., which I propose to do next Monday. Address at present uncertain.
[…]
I have been working like a navvy for about two weeks, in which time I must have written very nearly forty thousand of my novel. It seems to me the best long thing I have done, and I have great hopes of landing it somewhere good. I have got about another ten thousand to do, and then there will be some revision. I am divided between the desire to get action on it right away and a wish to keep it back and polish it up to the limit. I have adapted the Boot incident from The Lost Lambs and it fits in splendidly, but of course I shall have to cut it out for England.1 There is some of the funniest knockabout stuff in this book that I have ever written. It is just the sort of book Billy Watt would like, but not a line of it shall he see! I wonder if the conversation turned on me when you dined there?
I found Reynolds a very good sort indeed.2 He was pleasantly different from Seth and Mrs Wilkening, and didn’t make one windy promise of selling my stuff for millions. He just said that he hoped that he would make good on it, and declined to prophesy. I am bound to say, though experience has made me wary of rejoicing prematurely, that he seems to be just the man I need. He is a man of a certain position, thank goodness. What I mean is that he belongs to decent clubs, where he presumably does not get tight, and that is a great thing. One always felt about Seth that at any moment he might disappear into nowhere with a lot of one’s money and never appear again. Reynolds seems to be one of the aristocrats of the profession. The first man we met in the club was Scribner, and his attitude towards Reynolds was a sort of respectful chumminess.3 Horrid Thought: Was it a ‘property’ Scribner, a pal of Reynolds simply engaged to pretend to be Scribner so as to impress me!
[…]
I got the Windsor and the London magazines the other day and was horrified to see the effect the war had had on them. The London had, I think four pages of advertisements and the Windsor about the same. I suppose they are just hanging on and publishing at a loss until better times come. Mrs Westbrook writes to say that the Strand’s advertisements have fallen off a lot, but I expect they are doing better than most of the others. Westbrook expects to be off for the front very soon now.
Have you ever read The Guest of Quesnay by Booth Tarkington? It is one of the best books I have read lately. I thought of writing to congratulate him, but prudence intervened. I want to crib his heroine, and it is imperative that, if denounced, I shall be able to say ‘I never read any Guest of Quesnay. Who is this Booth Tarkington of whom you speak?’4
Thwaites writes that he has been given an extra month’s leave to go to Bath and take the waters for his tummy. I am afraid he will have to go back to the war later on. I don’t think he is a bit keen now, poor chap. I don’t wonder.5
[…]
Mrs Westbrook wrote to say that she has a big deal on with the movie rights of my stories, and a few days ago cabled to ask me to suggest prices as a basis for her to work on, so it really looks as if there were something doing, though I don’t want to be too sanguine after the Wilkening fiasco. But it seems to me that she would hardly have sent a long cable unless there was something practical in the air.
Well, so long. See you early next week.
Regards to Olive
Yours ever
Chickens
1 PGW was working on Something New (published in the UK as Something Fresh). The novel features a scene in which a character finds a paint-splashed lady’s shoe in the library after a theft, and attempts to identify its owner. This scene was omitted from Something Fresh. PGW had previously used the same sub-plot, involving a boot, in the second part of the school novel Mike (The Lost Lambs).
2 Paul Reynolds was the first full-time literary agent in the USA. His clients included William James, Jack London, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill.
3 Charles Scribner II (1854–1930), president of the publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons.
4 Booth Tarkington (1869–1946), Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and dramatist, was among PGW’s favourite writers – and gains a mention in A Damsel in Distress. Tarkington’s The Guest of Quesnay first appeared in 1907.
5 PGW’s friend, the journalist Norman Thwaites (formerly of the New York World), was now a Captain in the Dragoon Guards. He had been fighting on the front in Northern France, and had survived being shot through the neck and chin in November 1914.
TO GEORGE WILSON (A. & C. BLACK)
Bellport
Long Island
USA
March 28. 1915
Dear Mr Wilson.
Splendid. I should be delighted if you would publish Psmith, Journalist on the same terms as the other books.
Go right ahead. I don’t want to add or alter anything. It seems to be one of those masterpieces you can’t alter a comma of.
Yours sincerely,
P. G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse had made a research visit to Bustanoby’s Café on 1845 Broadway – the famous New York restaurant and the place where the high-society public dancing competition craze took off. The result was Wodehouse’s ‘corker’ ‘At Geisenheimer’s’, an O. Henry-style tale of an estranged couple whose troubles are solved by a canny professional dancer.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
June 3. 1915
[…]
Do you remember coming to Bustanoby’s one night, while I took notes for a story? That is the story I have just sold to the Post for $500. It is a corker, quite one of the best I have done, with a touch of the ‘In Alcala’ stuff in it. I wish I could get some more plots like it. The funny thing is that it was refused by the Pictorial Review, and the one I put over with The Ladies’ Home Journal was refused by the Post, so there is no knowing exactly what editors want.
Just at present I am very barren of ideas. I have a few sketchy outlines of plots for serials, but nothing that I can start on yet, and the short-story plant is temporarily out of action. The worst of getting into the $500 class is that one has to be careful what one sends out. I don’t want to slip back again, now that I have at last got up to ten cents a word. It is better to produce nothing for a time than to send out bad stuff.
[…]
The car is going perfectly splendidly now. Ethel is a magnificent driver, and she has to be on the roads round here, the same being the filthiest on record. We went out to East Moriches the other day, and the roads weren’t roads at all, just tracks through the woods, feet deep in sand. They are building state roads all over the place, and you have to make long detours across country to get anywhere.
I have just had a budget of school magazines from England. I revelled in them. Dulwich seem to have had a magnificent football team last year. They beat Bedford and Haileybury by thirty odd points each, an unheard of thing. They have got a freak wing three-quarter, who got into the team two years ago at the age of fourteen, he being then six foot tall and weighing eleven and a half stone. He has two more years at school. He scored four times against Bedford, four against Haileybury, and twice or three times against each of the other schools. In the return match against St Paul’s he scored seven times. I see my way to writing another Mike, with the hero a footballer instead of a cricketer.
[…]
I have just bought Empty Pockets by Rupert Hughes, to try to get a line on what the magazines do want as serials. He writes good safe stuff that would sell anywhere. He seems to know New York pretty thoroughly.1
Well, so long. See you soon, I hope. I suppose I shall be hard at it over this darned play for some weeks to come. I hope it really is going to end in something good.
Yours ever
Chickens
1 Empty Pockets, New York-based 1915 novel by Rupert Hughes (1872–1956). Hughes kept pace with current events, sending his heroine overseas as a war nurse. It had been serialised in The Red Book Magazine.
By 1915, Wodehouse was producing a great deal of non-fiction, alongside his serials. He ‘used to write about half’ of Vanity Fair ‘each month under a number of names – P.G. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville, J. Plum, C.P. West, P. Brooke-Haven and so on […] I also became the V.F. dramatic critic’.
TO LESLIE HAVERGAL BRADSHAW
Bellport
L.I.
June 25. 1915
Dear Brad.
[…]
I was interested to hear that you had met Fairbanks. I was only in town for a short time, & was kept so busy doing Vanity Fair stuff that I couldn’t get round to you. I had to go to Coney, the Eden Musee,1 & the Castles in the Air.2 All very dull except Coney, which I liked.3 Fairbanks is a good sort. I wish I could do another play for him.
Do you know when Watt gets back to N. Y.? The swine owes me $360!
Did I tell you that Mizzie had had kittens? Four of them. They are just beginning to walk.
We are seeing a lot of the Mackenzies down here. They lent us their apartment on 24th St when we went to town.
Fancy Hilder being married. Were you best man?4
Doesn’t the cover of the Saturday Evening Post look good this week! [see plate 18]5
Cheerio. Just off to revise Act 2 of the Nugget. It’s coming out well.
Yours ever
Chickens
P.S. I should like to see the movie scenario.
1 The Eden Musee of waxworks moved from New York City to Coney Island in 1915.
2 ‘Castles in the Air’ was a cabaret on the roof of the 44th Street Theatre, opened by ballroom dancers Vernon and Irene Castle. PGW went on to write a lyric entitled ‘My Castle in the Air’ (1916) for the show Miss Springtime.
3 The results of his visits were published in the August 1915 edition of Vanity Fair: ‘The So-Called Pleasures of Coney Island, with a Few Undignified Sketches by Ethel Plummer’, by P. Brooke-Haven; ‘The Expulsion from Eden, a Long and Sad Farewell to the Many Waxworks at the Eden Musee’, by Pelham Grenville, drawing by Thelma Cudlipp’; and ‘Cabarabian Nights, a Little Tour of Cabarets, by P. G. Wodehouse’ (vol. IV, no. 6), pp. 51, 63, 45.
4 John Chapman (Jack) Hilder, writer, author and former editor. Thwaites, Bradshaw, PGW and Hilder often spent time together in New York, hosting late-night parties.
5 The cover of the Saturday Evening Post for 26 June 1915 billed ‘Something New by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’ on its front cover. Lorimer had bought the story for ‘a hotsy $3500’.
Between 1915 and 1918, PGW’s career took off in many directions. In 1915, Jeeves first made an appearance in the short story ‘Extricating Young Gussie’, published in the Saturday Evening Post. Uneasy Money was published in 1916, and the same year saw him writing Piccadilly Jim. This was also the period when his career as a lyricist was at its height.
The ‘Princess’ musicals toured the eastern states of America, testing their success with the audiences and refining the music and lyrics, before opening in New York. In terms of musical history, these were pioneering works. Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern were the first to ‘move away from the fractured structure of variety, focusing on music that developed out of mood and situation […] to present a coherent world picture on stage’.
At the time of writing the following letter, Wodehouse had just been ‘out on the road’ working with Bolton on a show called See You Later, starring Roy Barnes, Charlie Ruggles and Victor Moore. In fact, the show did not survive the try-outs and folded. He had returned to the new Wodehouse residence, which was just outside the village of Great Neck. ‘Scott Fitzgerald and his crowd lived about three miles from us. There were a lot of actors there. Ed Wynn […] Roy Barnes, Donald Brain and Ernest Truex […] That’s the place where I wrote about the Oldest Member and all my golfing stories.’ Bradshaw’s letters to Olive give regular, slightly envious updates on the increasing luxury of the Wodehouses’ accommodation, noting that in 1916 they possessed three white-tiled bathrooms. By 1918, they had ‘three acres of grounds including a tennis court’ and ‘a Stearns-Knight car with a Victorian top’.
TO LILLIAN BARNETT
Arrandale Road
Great Neck
Long Island
U.S.A.
June 20. 1918
Dear Lily.
I have been meaning to write to you for ages, but something has always interfered. I have been terribly busy for a long while, having been out on the road with a new piece. We tried it out in Baltimore and it was all wrong, so we set to and rewrote the entire play in a week!! We threw away all the music and got a new lot written and then started out again. The piece now looks like a big success. It did very well in Washington and for three weeks in Philadelphia. It will come on in New York in the Autumn.
As you see, we have also been moving again. This time we have bought a house! It is a very nice place, with three acres, including a tennis court and a garage. I only wish you and Bert were here to look after us.1 Why don’t you come out after the war and settle down here? There are splendid schools for the children. This place is about fourteen miles from New York, but is right out in the country and on the seashore. I haven’t done much bathing yet, but I have taken up golf and am having a fine time.
We had a Swiss couple here, looking after us, but the man smashed up our car and the woman took two hours cooking an egg, so we didn’t get on, and a week ago they suddenly announced that they had got another job, so now we are doing our own cooking and so on just as we used to do down at Bellport.
You really must come out here after the war. You and Bert together, he as chauffeur-gardener and you to cook, would get twenty pounds a month at least and probably twenty-five. I know we would give you that to get you. And Hugh would have such a splendid chance in this country. We should have to teach Norah to sing and dance, and then I could give her a part in one of my plays! I suppose the children are getting enormous now? I always forget how old they are, but Hugh must be getting very big.
[…]
I am working away just as hard as ever. I shall have five plays running in New York in the Autumn, possibly six. I find I can do a lot of work here, as it is so quiet, and there are no distractions. I go about all day in flannels, just like at Emsworth. We have three dogs, two parrots, and a canary! Only one of the three dogs really belongs to us. The other two are a French bull-dog and an Irish terrier. The bull-dog is rather a responsibility. It belonged to a friend of ours who lives in New York and wanted a country home for the dog. It is a prize dog, and they have refused a hundred pounds for him! So you can imagine how we feel when he rushes out and attacks motor-cars in the road. It is like seeing a bank-note fluttering away on the wind. I must say I prefer dogs that aren’t quite so valuable. These high-bred dogs never seem to have any sense. Of course, I shall never have a dog that I can love as much as Nancy. When you write, tell me if old Pat is still going strong. I’m afraid it is a hard time for dogs nowadays in England. I don’t see how anyone can manage to keep them.
Are things very bad? Of course everything is terribly expensive. It’s like that over here. I’m told that in a week or two we shan’t be able to buy a chicken. Everything has gone up to about three times its usual price.
[…]
I am sending you three pounds, which I hope will come in useful. Would you mind doing something for me. Write to the Editor, The Alleynian, Dulwich College, Dulwich, S.E. and ask him to send you copies of The Alleynian from 1915 onwards. Then will you send them on to me. It will be safer than telling him to send them direct to me. It’s the school magazine, and I haven’t seen a copy for three years. Oh, and ask him to send a copy of the Register of Old Alleynians at the Front. I don’t know how much this will all come to, but I should think something under a pound.
Well, goodbye for the present.
Do write soon and tell me all the news. Nothing is too small to be interesting. Love to Bert and the children.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Lily was married to the local postman in Emsworth, Bert Barnett.