For Wodehouse, the 1920s were a period of continual movement. As soon as he settled down to write a novel or a short story, he was interrupted to plan a musical with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, or summoned to America to rescue a flagging show. Life was full of partings at Paddington, and parties in Palm Beach, punctuated by frenzied periods of writing on the top deck of ocean liners. Even the Wodehouses’ London residence appeared to change almost annually, as Ethel moved her household around a variety of stylish addresses. It was a time in which Wodehouse could not help but catch something of the atmosphere of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. At times exhilarating, it often felt more like ‘one damned bit of work after another’.1 ‘Everybody’, Wodehouse writes, ‘wanted me to do a play’ – and the demands were hard to refuse.2 Theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld was known to send ten-page telegrams press-ganging his favoured authors into service, while the producer ‘Colonel’ Savage had a reputation for working authors and composers intensely hard – and trying to take more than his fair share of the profits. ‘He walked with a slight limp, having probably in the course of his career been bitten in the leg by some indignant author’, as Wodehouse recalls.3 Wodehouse would find himself frantically trying to keep all demands at bay – attempting to complete one novel, twenty-eight short stories and a musical over the course of just a few months.
Wodehouse’s literary work was energised by his experience of musical theatre. As he writes to Bill Townend, ‘In musical comedy you gain so tremendously in Act One if you can give your principal characters a dramatic entrance instead of just walking on.’4 The theatrical work was, however, particularly time-consuming; weeks were spent not simply writing, but rehearsing the plays, and rewriting them in ‘try-outs’ on tour in America, before the shows hit Broadway. By the end of the 1920s, he claimed that he would do anything to ‘escape musical theatre’.
Wodehouse’s fiction of the time summons the frantic atmosphere of city life, as he conjures ‘New York’s vast body’, with its ‘[h]urrying mortals, released from a thousand offices. […] Candy-selling aliens jostling newsboys’ and men popping ‘in and out of the subway entrances like rabbits’.5 It is not surprising to find him drawn back, nostalgically, to the stability of his Edwardian fictional world.
With the publication of the short-story collections My Man Jeeves in 1919 and The Inimitable Jeeves in 1923, the 1920s could be seen as the point at which Wodehouse’s long-standing relationship with Reginald Jeeves and his negligibly intelligent employer, Bertie Wooster, took a firmer shape. The sources for the character of Jeeves are manifold. Named after a Warwickshire cricket player, the gentleman’s gentleman had made his first appearance in a 1915 short story, taking aspects of his character from manservants that Wodehouse had encountered in art, as well as in life. Bertie was slower to find a definite personality – emerging from the model of the Edwardian ‘knut’ – the younger son of an aristocratic family – ‘he was a trifle on the superfluous side’: blessed with an allowance, a tailor and a club, he flits between dinners at the Savoy Grill, the Goodwood races and the country, the only shadow on the horizon the presence of a match-making aunt, or a debutante with an entrancing profile and a copy of Nietzsche in her hand.6 After all, every aspect of the Woosterian equilibrium depends on the continuation of bachelor life.
Wooster’s ideal might have been an all-male preserve, but the world of Wodehouse was anything but. The 1920s were a period in which Wodehouse created some of his strongest and most likable female characters, marking the appearance of the dauntless Jill Mariner in Jill the Reckless, Sally Nicholas in The Adventures of Sally, and Sue Brown in Summer Lightning. Wodehouse’s fictional world was Edwardian, but his sense of women, influenced by the changes that had come about since both the Suffragist movement and the First World War, was a decidedly emancipated one. Wodehouse encountered numerous beautiful and intelligent actresses during this time, from the dazzling blonde dancer Marilyn Miller, to the devastating Scandinavian, Justine Johnstone. But his ideal model for his fictional heroines came in the shape of his step-daughter, Leonora. Charming, talented and kind, ‘Snorky’ was just sixteen in 1920, and finishing her education first at boarding school in England and then in Paris. In her twenties, she often holidayed with Wodehouse, or kept him company on his travels. She became for Wodehouse part confidante, part muse. Most of all, though, Leonora was his adored daughter, someone on whom he could lavish love and affection, and who would indulge his ‘lingering boyishness’ as they shared the comic supplement of the Sunday papers.7
As Wodehouse worried about lyrics and plot-lines, wayward directors and pressing deadlines, much else was happening on the world’s stage. This was the age of the rise of mass movements – as the forces of communism, fascism and socialism jostled for power. There were strikes on both sides of the Atlantic – and the prohibition of alcohol in America added to the social tension. Wodehouse’s tongue-in-cheek attitude to the political scene appears in the likes of his short story ‘Comrade Bingo’, in which the unfortunate Bingo Little finds himself caught up with the ‘Red Dawn’ communist league, who ‘yearn for the Revolution’ in Marble Arch.8 Wodehouse’s own sense of class unrest in these letters seems less committed. His complaint about the ‘nuisance’ of the national coal strike of 1921 is that of a wearied citizen – ‘if it isn’t something it’s something else or something’.9 For Wodehouse, political events were marginal to his imaginative life – the imperative was to avoid disturbance of any kind.
Indeed, one of the overriding themes of the letters of this period is his attempt to find peace from the world around him, and space and time in which to write. The continual interruptions to his creative flow explain, in part, why this was a period in which he produced so many short stories. ‘You have to live with a novel’, he confided to Bill Townend, ‘if I drop my characters they go cold and I forget what they are like’.10 Nevertheless, this was a period in which Wodehouse produced a series of highly successful novels, culminating in the outstanding Blandings tale Summer Lightning, in 1928. Some of these interruptions were the call of musical work. Others were caused by the frenzy of social activity that inevitably occurred whenever Ethel was around. For Wodehouse, as for many of his henpecked fictional counterparts, home was not necessarily a safe place: ‘intruders lurked behind every door’.11 One visitor, Robert J. Denby, became something of a fixture during the 1920s. A particular friend of Ethel’s, Denby also acted as a literary agent for Wodehouse, sometimes taking more than his fair share. It was for this reason that Wodehouse often took refuge elsewhere – staying as a houseguest at the crumbling Hunstanton Hall in Norfolk, hiding at Emsworth or at Impney Spa Hotel, or holed up in what Ethel referred to as ‘that awful club in Northumberland Avenue’, the Constitutional. ‘I just’, Wodehouse writes wistfully, ‘want to be left alone with my novel.’12
In terms of literature, this was a period that was to mark the appearance of some of the most radical and groundbreaking works of the century. The year 1922 brought not just The Waste Land but Ulysses and Jacob’s Room. Later years saw the publication of The Trial, Crome Yellow and the final volume of à la recherche du temps perdu. Wodehouse’s own literary confidence was at a high during this time, but he kept his contemporary interests more mainstream, praising works by writers such as Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis and Michael Arlen. Wodehouse’s literary circle was small – and his only regular literary correspondence was with the novelists Denis Mackail and William Townend. By 1922, Conrad was beginning to wear thin for Wodehouse, while the plotlessness and ‘intellectual pallor’ of the Bloomsbury novelists find themselves subject to a certain degree of satire.13 Throughout his life, Wodehouse would return, in his reading, to Shakespeare and the Romantic poets.
Wodehouse had his share of personal concerns. There are repeated exchanges with his schoolfriend William Townend, who was struggling as a writer, offering both advice and stealthy transfers of cash. ‘I feel sort of responsible for him, as I egged him on to be a writer’, he confesses to his agent, Paul Reynolds.14 He disliked being apart from Ethel and Leonora, and worried about illness. And there is, among these letters, an air of more existential worry; he writes of his ‘periodical fits of depression’.15 There was, as Wodehouse put it, ‘something dead and depressing about London’ in the 1920s; the Riviera was ‘loathsome’ and New York ‘appalling’.
It was Wodehouse’s contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, who saw those who came of age in the 1920s as a ‘lost generation’ – a generation who were suffering from the aftershocks of the loss of war as well as from a certain loss of direction. Writers in this period – from Evelyn Waugh to Samuel Beckett – touch both on the urge for meaningless escapism and on the wistful spirituality of the age. Individuals toyed with séances, spiritualism and horoscopes, as attempts to both ward off and assuage the gloom. Wodehouse, like many of his contemporaries, made joking references to these practices, and the devotion of his brother Armine to theosophy gains a number of mocking mentions in his fiction of this period. But Wodehouse was not entirely sceptical. He had his own spiritualist leanings: ‘I think it’s the goods’, he wrote to Townend in 1925, after reading H. Dennis Bradley’s introduction to the spirit world, The Wisdom of the Gods.16 Wodehouse had a large collection of spiritualist books in his library, and attended a number of séances with Leonora.
Glimpses of Wodehouse in mystical mood apart, throughout these letters, one sees little of Wodehouse’s emotional side. Even the death of his father in 1929 seemed not to stop his frenzied pace of work. A set of lyrics that he proudly transcribed for Leonora in 1924 – ‘Put all your troubles in a great big box / And lock it with a great big key’ – could stand as the motto for his correspondence at this time.17 For Wodehouse, as for his favourite hero Lord Emsworth, the deepest feelings remain unspoken. Some of the most poignant moments in his fiction at this time – such as the short story in which the East End child, Gladys, steals Lord Emsworth’s heart as she slips ‘a small, hot hand into his’ – have something of the quality of the silent movie about them. Contained and nostalgic, there is a reserve about this ‘mute vote of confidence’ that borders on tragi-comedy.18
In 1925, Wodehouse writes to Leonora of his desire to escape to the sort of rural idyll that his fiction repeatedly describes – a world full of ‘dogs and cats and cows and meadow-land’.19 Such a desire for a familiar landscape is no surprise. His own world was changing almost daily. One of his staples – musical theatre – was finding new competition. Near the close of the 1920s, Wodehouse began negotiations with film producer Sam Goldwyn. The talkies had arrived, and Hollywood beckoned.
1 PGW to William Townend, 16 December 1922 (Wodehouse Archive).
2 PGW to Leonora Wodehouse, 1 May 1921 (Wodehouse Archive).
3 Bring on the Girls, p. 36.
4 PGW to William Townend, 29 December 1922 (Dulwich).
5 Piccadilly Jim (1917), Chapter 8.
6 PGW, ‘Preface’ (1974) to Joy in the Morning (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974).
7 Piccadilly Jim, Chapter 1.
8 ‘Comrade Bingo’, first published in the UK in The Strand and in the US in Cosmopolitan (May 1922). Repr. in The Inimitable Jeeves (1923).
9 PGW to Leonora Cazalet, 1 May 1921 (Wodehouse Archive).
10 PGW to William Townend, 12 November 1924 (Dulwich).
11 Piccadilly Jim, Chapter 1.
12 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis Mackail, 8 October 1931 (Wodehouse Archive); PGW to William Townend, 8 January 1930 (Dulwich).
13 See the description of Blair Eggleston in Hot Water (1932).
14 PGW to Paul Reynolds, 9 September 1920 (Columbia).
15 PGW to William Townend, 23 July 1923 (Dulwich).
16 PGW to William Townend, 14 December 1925 (Dulwich).
17 PGW to Leonora Wodehouse, 23 November 1923 (Wodehouse Archive).
18 ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend’, first published in 1926 in the US in Liberty (January) and in The Strand (February) in the UK. Reprinted in Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935).
19 PGW to Leonora Wodehouse, 30 March 1925 (Wodehouse Archive).