‘This, I need scarcely point out to you, is jolly old Fame’
In 1920, Wodehouse renewed his correspondence with his old Dulwich school friend, William Townend, who had been demobilised from the army the previous year. Wodehouse’s joking discussion of wartime activities reveals some self-consciousness about the fact that he had been unable to see active service.
Though the Wodehouses had just taken a house on Walton Street as their London base, Wodehouse was soon to set off for a visit to Palm Beach to discuss a new show with Florenz Ziegfeld. Wodehouse found life in America exhausting. To escape from the constant socialising of the theatrical scene, he took up golf at the Sound View Golf Club, Long Island. Golf was, he wrote, ‘the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.’
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Great Neck
Feb 28. 1920
Dear Bill.
Thanks awfully for your letters and the clippings. The Jenkins advertisement took my breath away.1 I’ve been waiting all these years for a publisher who didn’t shove my book down among the ‘and other readable stories’ in small print at the foot of the column! That is something like what you might call a gentlemanly advertisement.
I say, before I forget. By every post these days I get piteous letters from Comrade Hoffman,2 of which I enclose samples. What about all this pessimism? Your letters read fine. Not a care in the world and all that sort of thing. [...] I didn’t see where he could say that a story like ‘Missing’ was gloomy. But perhaps you’ve been firing in others that I haven’t seen. I see you announced for next month, and I am going to rush and get it.
I suppose, as a matter of fact, that it was humanly impossible to go through the war as you did and not come out feeling that things were a bit off. I have been seeing something of a chap called Hamilton Gibbs,3 brother of Philip Gibbs and author of The Grey Wave (I think it’s called. It’s called Gun Fodder over here. A corking book. Do get it.), and he says it’s the hardest thing in the world for him to write a story that’s cheerful.
I’ll buck you up when I get home. That’s to say, if I’m not arrested and shoved in chokey for not helping to slug Honble Kaiser. How does the law stand in that respect? I registered in the draft over here – age sixty-three, sole support of wife and nine children, totally blind, and all the rest of it, but ought I to have done anything as regards registering in England? I thought not, as I was out the country when the war started, and anyway wouldn’t have been a dam bit of good, as my only pair of spectacles would have bust in the first charge.
Ethel and I are looking forward to seeing you both tremendously. I don’t suppose you are either of you much altered since the day we met. I am much the same, except that the trousers I was wearing then have at last given out and had to be chucked away.
Business of looking up your letter to see what questions you asked.
(1) I now write short stories at a terrific speed. I’ve started a habit of rushing them through and then copying them out carefully, instead of trying to get the first draft exactly right. I have just finished an eight thousand word golf story in two days!!4 Darned good, too. It just came pouring out. I think this is a record that will stand for a long time, though. It nearly slew me. As a rule, I find the inside of a week long enough, if I have got the plot well thought out.
(2) On a novel I generally average about eight pages a day, i.e. about 2500 words. On the other hand, I’ve just done 100,000 words of a new novel5 in exactly two months. But I don’t know what’s come over me lately. I’ve been simply churning out the stuff. I think it was due to knocking off stories for a year or so and doing plays.
(3) Lately I have had a great time with my work. We have been snowed up here, and nobody has been able to get at us for over two months. As a rule I like to start work in the mornings, knock off for a breather, and do a bit before dinner. I hate working after dinner. Yet in the old days that was my only time for work. I don’t know why I’ve changed.
(4) Plots. Dam hard to get, but they’ve been coming along fine of late. Sometimes I run absolutely dry.
(5) I think a good agent is the finest invention in the world. I use Paul Reynolds, an excellent man. […]
(6) There’s no moral or legal necessity to inform an agent you want to work for yourself. You just go and do it. Unless, of course, you have signed anything. I got had that way. I was working in 1914 with a hopeless incompetent called Mrs Wilkening (she sued Mary Pickford the other day for alleged commission and tried to get $100,000)6. I had signed a paper making her my agent, and two years afterwards, when I sold the Post Something New off my own bat, she swooped down and sued me for 10 per cent commish, and I had to give her 5% to avoid a lawsuit.
(7) I am doing quite a lot now with the picture people. Not original stuff, but selling them my novels. There’s a lot of money in it. I got $8000 for Piccadilly Jim, – only to have to disgorge 6000 of it to Comstock,7 who claimed that it belonged to him because he had commissioned a play on the novel.8
(8) Yes, I drive my own car. Very hot stuff. In all sorts of traffic.
(9) I play nothing but golf. Greatest game on earth. You must take it up. It beats everything else.
[…]
I got a letter from Greenwood the other day. He says he is very busy. He’s a chartered accountant. Did you know that Tid Lowe was in partnership with Cumberlege (old Cambridge scrum half) in a motor garage?9
[…] Oh, by the way, you asked me about Armine. Married surreptitiously a year ago and is now about to have a baby. At least, Mrs Armine is. He’s living at Bexhill, and my father says he is as keen on Theosophy as ever, but devours vast quantities of meat and all the drink he can get! Bang against the rules, of course.10
Old Brook11 has been out in India. He is not yet demobbed, but is returning to England shortly. He has been sub-editing the Pioneer out there. Mrs Westbrook is doing well with the agency. Why don’t you send her your stuff? She handles all mine in England, and does awfully well with it. She is very keen, and gives you individual attention which these blighters like Watt don’t, they being on too large a scale.
I must get hold of Waugh’s book.12 I have heard a lot about it. He must be a pretty warm writer to be able to do anything at seventeen.
The serial ought to start in about a month in Collier’s. I’ll send you copies. We sail on the Adriatic on April 24, as follows: – Ethel, carrying black kitten, followed by self, with parrot in cage, and Loretta our maid with any other animals we may acquire in the meantime. We shall have to leave the bull-dog behind, worse luck, owing to the quarantine laws.
Well, so long. Do write again. I read all your letters a dozen times. l’ve got a large budget of them which you wrote in 1915.
Love to Rene from us both
Yours ever
P.G.W.
1 Wodehouse had a close relationship with his British publisher, Herbert Jenkins, which would continue until Jenkins’ death.
2 Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, chief editor of Adventure magazine, which featured Townend’s writing.
3 Hamilton Gibbs also wrote for Munsey’s Magazine. His war memoir, The Grey Wave, or Gun Fodder, was published in 1920. PGW had worked with his brother, Cosmo, in musical theatre.
4 The 8,000-word golf story was ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’, published in The Strand in 1921 and Elk’s Magazine in the US in 1922, repr. in The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922).
5 His ‘new novel’ was published in the UK as a serial in Woman’s Home Companion in 1921, in book form the following year under the title The Girl on the Boat in the UK, and as Three Men and a Maid in the USA. The ‘new serial’ would be become The Little Warrior, first published in serial and book form in America in 1920, and in the UK as Jill the Reckless the following year.
6 The suit remained contested, and Wilkening renewed it in 1920.
7 Ray Comstock (1880–1949), manager of the Princess Theatre, had produced the musical comedies Oh, Boy! (1917), Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918) and Oh, My Dear! (1919), for which Wodehouse wrote the lyrics. Comstock was ‘a thin, rangy individual’, who spent his time ‘perpetually telephoning’ and calling everyone ‘honey’ (Bring on the Girls, p. 45).
8 The film of Piccadilly Jim was made in 1919, featuring Owen Moore.
9 Old Alleynians. John Eric Greenwood left Dulwich in 1910 and went on to captain Cambridge University at rugby, and played for England in 1919–20. Cyril Nelson (Tid) Lowe left Dulwich in 1911, was a Cambridge rugby Blue, capped twenty-five times for England, and a British flying ace. Lowe, who had featured in an early PGW poem, became the inspiration for W. E. Johns’ character Biggles. Barry Cumberlege was not a Dulwich boy, but played rugby at Cambridge alongside Lowe.
10 Wodehouse’s brother Armine had returned from India. He had become interested in theosophy, a doctrine of religious teaching and mysticism, founded by Helena Blavatsky and others, and had been teaching at the college of a prominent theosophist, Annie Besant, in India.
11 ‘Old Brook’ – Herbert Wotton Westbrook – who was working for The Pioneer, an Indian newspaper founded in 1865.
12 PGW refers to Alec Waugh’s controversial account of boarding school life, The Loom of Youth, written in 1917, when he was only seventeen. Alec was the elder brother of Evelyn.
After the whirl of American social life, the Wodehouses were spending a summer break on the Suffolk coast, enabling them to be closer to Leonora, who was now at boarding school.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Quinton Farm
Felixstowe
Aug 7. 1920
My darling angel Snorkles.
At last I’m able to write to you! I finished the novel yesterday,1 and I wish you were here to read it, as I think it’s the best comic one I’ve done. It’s not meant to be in the same class as The Little Warrior, but as a farce I think it’s pretty well all to the mustard. I’ve done it in such a hurry, though, that there may be things wrong with it. Still, I’m going to keep it by me for at least two weeks before sending it off to America, so perhaps you’ll be able to see it after all before it goes. If not, you can read the original M.S.
[…]
I really am becoming rather a blood these days. In a review of Wedding Bells2 at the Playhouse, the critic says ‘So-and-so is good as a sort of P. G. Wodehouse character.’ And in a review of a book in the Times, they say ‘The author at times reverts to the P. G. Wodehouse manner.’ This, I need scarcely point out to you, is jolly old Fame. Once they begin to refer to you in that casual way as if everybody must know who you are all is well. It does my old heart good.
[…]
I’m glad you liked The Little White Bird. One of my favourite books.3
Georgie O’Ramey is singing ‘Galahad’ in Cochran’s new revue.4 Isn’t it darned cheek! I want heavy damages and all that sort of thing. What scares me is that she has probably pinched ‘Cleopatra’, ‘Very Good Girl On Sunday’, and ‘Blood’ from Springtime as well. It begins to look like a pretty thin sort of world if tons of hams unfit for human consumption are going to lift one’s best things out of shows and use them themselves without even a kind smile.5
Well, pip pip and good-bye-ee and so forth
Your loving
Plummie
1 The Girl on the Boat.
2 Wedding Bells, a comedy by Edward Salisbury Field.
3 The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie.
4 Charles B. Cochran, the British theatrical manager, staged many revues in London in the 1920s, and was often referred to as ‘the British Ziegfeld’.
5 ‘Sir Galahad’ and ‘Cleopatterer’ were lyrics that PGW wrote for Leave It to Jane. ‘A Very Good Girl on Sunday’ and ‘Melodrama Burlesque (The Old Fashioned Drama)’ shortened to ‘Blood’) came from Miss Springtime, Bolton and Wodehouse’s 1917 musical comedy.
Though business-related, Wodehouse’s correspondence with his agent, Paul Reynolds, is often revealing. In the following letter, he mentions the physical exercises that remained crucial to him throughout his life. Any Wodehouse character found doing physical jerks (especially in the morning) usually turns out to be a hero. See, for example, the discussion that surrounds Ashe Marson in Something New: ‘A gentleman named Lieutenant Larsen, of the Danish Army, as the result of much study of the human anatomy, some time ago evolved a series of Exercises. All over the world at the present moment his apostles are twisting themselves into knots in accordance with the dotted lines in the illustrative plates of his admirable book. From Peebles to Baffin’s Bay arms and legs are being swung in daily thousands from point A to point B, and flaccid muscles are gaining the consistency of India-rubber. Larsen’s Exercises are the last word in exercises. They bring into play every sinew of the body. They promote a brisk circulation. They enable you, if you persevere, to fell oxen, if desired, with a single blow.’ Larsen was fictitious, but Wodehouse probably drew his inspiration for Marson’s daily regime from the popular daily systematic exercises of the Swede Pehr Ling, or those of Lieutenant Muller of the Danish Army.
TO PAUL REYNOLDS
Constitutional Club
London W.C.
Sept 9. 1920
Dear Reynolds.
I finished the novel two or three days ago, and I think it is good.1 It is certainly full enough of situations, and if we were selling it to the Post, I would say it was one of the best I’d done. Whether it’s not a little too farcical for a woman’s magazine I don’t know. Still, the editress told me to forget I was writing for women and just do my usual stuff. The story is rather on the lines of Something New, the first one you sold of mine. Not in plot, but in tone. Anyway, it’s darned funny. I’ll inform the universe!
[…]
I’m awfully bucked that you will handle the Townend story. I know from experience what being handled by you means! I am keeping a rigid eye on Townend and getting him to write the sort of story I sent you, with a real plot and a punch at the end, instead of the gloomy studies he has done lately. […] He is an awfully good chap, and I would rather see him land in some big market than sell my next serial for forty thousand. We were at school together and have been friends since 1897. I feel sort of responsible for him, as I egged him on to be a writer. He used to be an artist before that.
[…]
Did you read that article in Collier’s by Walter Camp the other day, giving a new set of physical exercises warranted to cure all ills? I have been doing them for a month and they are simply terrific. […] They really are the most marvellous things. You get out of bed feeling a wreck, and you do these exercises and feel as if you were in training for the Olympic Games.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 The Girl on the Boat.
Walter Camp’s ‘Daily Dozen’, Collier’s Magazine, 17 July 1920.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Constitutional Club
Northumberland Avenue
London W.C.
Sept 27. 1920
My precious darling Snorky.
Here is a letter from one of the Ely Court nibs which Mummie gave me to send on to you. Opened in error and all that sort of thing.1
I’ve been living at the club for the last two weeks, trying to do some work. Mummie has been at Chingford, which isn’t a bad place in itself but is too near the East End of London to be really nice. I was out there yesterday, and the place was overrun with motor buses and picnic parties. Still, in another few days we move into the house, thank goodness. I am so sick of having my meals in restaurants and at the club that I don’t know what to do.
[…]
The novel is being typed, and must also be finished by now, I should think.2 I’ll send you on the original manuscript, and you can read it in the train. I am now trying to get a central idea for a new serial for Collier’s. The editor keeps writing to me to say that The Little Warrior was the best thing that ever happened, so I feel I must do something special next shot. The trouble is, unless I write a sequel and bring Freddie Rooke in again, I don’t see how I can introduce a dude character, and without a dude character where am I? Among the ribstons.
I’ve just had a letter from a man in California who wants me to buy an interest in a gold mine for five hundred pounds. He says ‘I happened to pick up the Sept Cosmopolitan and on one of the front pages I see a list of authors and artists and I said to myself that bunch could put this over and I have a hunch they will and your name is in the list and I’m writing you along with the others to send me your check for twenty-five hundred dollars and write on the check that it is for a one-thirtieth interest in the eight-year lease of the Kid Gold Mine and then after a while I will send you a check for your share of a million or a letter of regret telling you I have spent the money digging through the mountain and my hunch was a bum one, but anyway I expect your check.’ Sanguine sort of johnny, what? I’m going to put the letter in a story.3
Well, cheerio, old bean.
Lots of love
From Plummie.
P.S. Oh, by the way, you must stop pinching Mummie’s clothes. It worries her frightfully, and you know how nervous she is.
1 Leonora’s school, Ely Court.
2 The Girl on the Boat.
3 Wodehouse went on to use the anecdote about the gold mine speculator in Big Money (1931).
After a family stay in the area, the Wodehouses decided to send Leonora to a new boarding school in Felixstowe. Wodehouse was also busy turning his stories about the Drone, Archie Moffam, into a novel, The Indiscretions of Archie (1921).
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
16 Walton St
London S.W.
Nov 24. 1920
Darling Snorkles.
We were so glad to get your letters and to hear that you are having a good time. I thought you would like Felixstowe. I’m so glad you’ve started riding.
The Haileybury match was a disaster, darn it. We were without Addison, and with him we should have won easily, but still they had a couple of good men away. Still, we ought to have won anyhow, only the blighters started the game scared, because Haileybury had beaten Bedford so easily, and they let them score twice in the first five minutes. It wasn’t till after half time that we woke up, and then we simply put it all over them. But it was too late then, and we couldn’t catch up. They scored four times and we scored three. We ought to have scored half a dozen times. Murtrie played a splendid game, and your little friend Mills, the fly-half, was brilliant at times, only he spoiled it by making one or two bad mistakes. He made one splendid run nearly the whole length of the field. On Saturday we finish up by playing Sherborne.
Great excitement last night. Mummie came into my room at half-past two and woke me out of the dreamless to say that mice had been snootering her. She said one had run across her bed. To soothe her I went to her room to spend the rest of the night, thinking that there may have been mice in the room but that she had simply imagined that they had got on the bed. We had hardly turned off the light when — zip! one ran right across the pillow!!! So then we hoofed it back to my room and tried to sleep there, but the bed was too small, so I gave up my room to Mummie and went back to the mice room. And for some reason or other Mister Mouse made no further demonstration, and I wasn’t disturbed. But the result is that we are both very sleepy today. I have been trying to work, but can’t rouse the old bean.
I am at present moulding the Archie stories into a book. The publisher very wisely says that short stories don’t sell, so I am hacking the things about, putting the first half of one story at the beginning of the book and putting the finish of it about a hundred pages later, and the result looks very good. For instance, I blend the Sausage Chappie Story and ‘Paving the Way for Mabel’ rather cunningly. You remember that the blow-out of the latter takes place in the grill-room. Well, directly it has happened there is a row at the other end of the grill-room, which is the Sausage Chappie having the finish of his story. Rather ingenious, what!
[…]
Mummie came out of the nursing home rather tired, as it was one of those places where they wake you up for breakfast at seven-thirty. She has been resting a lot since coming out, and seems much better now. We have got Ian Hay1 coming to dinner tonight.
The house is very still and quiet without our Snorky.
[…]
I have to go for my walks by myself.
We listened to the Palladium on the electrophone the night before last.2 The chap who sings ‘Smith, Jones, Robinson, and Brown’ had another good song, as a naval officer. […]
It sounds wonderful when I sing it. You must hear me some time.
Well, cheerio, old fright. Write again soon.
Your loving
Plummie
1 Ian Hay (John Hay Beith) (1876–1952), a Scottish novelist and playwright, who later collaborated with PGW, dramatising A Damsel in Distress.
2 A precursor to the wireless, the ‘electrophone’ was an audio system, licensed through the Post Office, which relayed live concerts and church sermons to individual homes, via specialised head-sets. Around 2,000 Londoners were subscribing to its services in the early 1920s.
Wodehouse now began work on another Ziegfeld production – Sally – although the news that Ziegfeld had hired further lyricists prompted a long-distance row.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
16 Walton Street
London S.W.
Nov 28. 1920
Darling Snorkles.
[…]
We1 beat Sherborne yesterday after a very hot game, so that we have wound up the season with five wins and one defeat. Pretty hot!
I forgot to tell you in my last letter the tale of the laughable imbroglio – or mix-up – which has occurred with Jerry Kern.You remember I sent my lyrics over, and then read in Variety that some other cove was doing the lyrics and wrote to everybody in New York to retrieve my lyrics. Then that cable came asking me if I would let them have ‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘Church Round Corner’, which, after a family council, I answered in the affir.2 Well, just after I had cabled saying all right, I got a furious cable from Jerry – the sort of cable the Kaiser might have sent to an underling – saying my letter withdrawing the lyrics was ‘extremely offensive’ and ending ‘You have offended me for the last time’! Upon which, the manly spirit of the Wodehouses (descended from the sister of Anne Boleyn)3 boiled in my veins – when you get back I’ll show you the very veins it boiled in – and I cabled over ‘Cancel permission to use lyrics’. I now hear that Jerry is bringing an action against me for royalties on Miss Springtime and Riviera Girl, to which he contributed tunes. The loony seems to think that a lyrist is responsible for the composer’s royalties. Of course, he hasn’t an earthly, and I don’t suppose the action will ever come to anything, but doesn’t it show how blighted some blighters can be when they decide to be blighters.
[…]
Well, cheerio.
Mummie sends her love. She is washing her hair or something this morning.
Your loving
Plummie
1 Dulwich College rugby team.
2 ‘Joan of Arc’ – aka ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down’ – and ‘Church Round the Corner’, lyrics for Sally.
3 Wodehouse’s claim to illustrious ancestry was true – he was descended from Lady Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn.
Wodehouse made his peace with Ziegfeld and Kern, his lyrics were kept, and Sally was a smash hit in New York, opening in December 1920. By March 1921, he was heading to America to investigate options for musical shows. He was also working on a number of contracts: The Golden Moth, with music by Ivor Novello, on which he was to collaborate with English playwright Fred Thompson, and also a follow-up to Sally called The Cabaret Girl. Thompson, the ‘cheery old bean’, worked occasionally with Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, and makes an appearance in Chapter 5 of The Inimitable Jeeves.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
S.S. Adriatic
Southampton
March 23. 1921
Darling precious angel Snorklet.
I have written to mother about your going down. You might drop a line, too.
I think the jolly old boat is just starting. I shall mail this at Cherbourg. It begins to look like a jolly voyage, if we don’t cop any rough weather. This cabin is a snorter. About the size of my den, with a lounge, a chair, two windows, and a closet and a chest of drawers. In fact, if only there was that bit of lawn and shrubbery we discussed the other day, I would settle down here for life and grow honey-coloured whiskers. As it is, I shall probably keep fowls during the voyage.
Only blot is, the table they have given me is one of those ones that sway in the breeze and wobble violently if you touch them. What it will be like out in the open ocean heaven knows. If all goes well, I ought to be able to do quite a chunk of work.
I have already been interviewed by the representative of the White Star Publicity for publication in N.Y., and Mummie is running round in circles breathing smoke because I didn’t lug her into it. I tell her that I will feature her when the reporters arrive at N.Y.
We had a very jolly journey down, talking of this and that. (First this, then that.) Thompson is going to be a very cheery old bean to have around on the trip, and altogether everything looks pretty well all right. But I haven’t managed yet to get into the George Drexel Steel class, if you know what I mean, and it’s generally felt throughout the ship that I shan’t work it till tomorrow.1
It’s wonderful what a difference it makes having a decent cabin. This one is more like a room than a cabin. All very jolly.
Mummie was saying such sweet things about you in the cab. We wept in company on each other’s shoulders at the thought that we had to leave you.
The engines have just started going pretty hard, so I can now tell what it will be like trying to work during the voyage. All right, I think.
I’ll write and tell you how New York looks. Goodbye, my queen of all possible Snorkles.
Lots of love
Your
Plummie
1 George Drexel Steel was a New York socialite and financier.
The Wodehouses arrived in New York and settled themselves into the Hotel Biltmore on Madison Avenue, between 43rd and 44th Streets. Built in 1912, the huge twenty-storey building was considered to be the last word in modern hotel construction. The Astor Hotel, which made the Wodehouses ‘sick to look at’, was a more architecturally elaborate building, with a selection of decorative features from Chinese to German Volk to Native American. Wodehouse’s comment is surprising, not least because the Astor had been the site of their two-day honeymoon in 1914.
New York in the early twenties was subject to Prohibition. Since April 1920, the consumption of alcohol had been illegal in most states. The ‘noble experiment’, Wodehouse recalls, created the ‘“Hooch Age”, and the same spirit that made bath-tub gin […] was the same devil may care quality that accounted for flagpole sitters, marathon dancing, and the bull market’.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Hotel Biltmore
New York
April 2. 1921
Prcious (or, rather, precious) angel Snork.
Well, we blew in yesterday morning and are all feeling rather wrecks after a strenuous day yesterday. In their usual blighted fussy way they got us up at six when there was no earthly need to get up before nine or ten, and it seemed hours before we could get past the passport people. It bucked us up a bit when the photographers buzzed round us and took all sorts of pictures including some movies. The only trouble is that I can’t find that any paper has printed them. Maybe they’ll be in the Sunday papers. One was supposed to be for Town and Country, a weekly paper.
Mummie hunted all round New York for a hotel. The Astor made us sick to look at it, and we very soon gave that the go-by, after having a very bad lunch there. We finally settled on this at fourteen seeds a day, which won’t do a thing to the old bank-balance. Fortunately, this morning I got a good idea for a short story, and hope to write it while I’m here. We’ve got a very nice room, looking down onto the roof garden and three pigeons (which are thrown in free).
Our first act was to summon a bell-boy and give him the Sinister Whisper, to which he replied with a conspiratorial nod and buzzed off, returning later with a bottle of whisky – at the nominal price of seventeen dollars!!! I suppose if you tried to get champagne here you would have to throw in your Sunday trousers as well. Apparently you can still get the stuff, but you have to be darned rich.
Mummie was frightfully tired. Our cabin was on the promenade deck, and we were kept awake most of the last night by the row made by lugging trunks out of the hold just outside our window. Still, we got – or climbed – into our respective evening suits and went off to Mary, not being able to get seats for Sally, which was sold out.1
They are bringing Mary to London, where it will die the death, I predict (or prognosticate). It is a weird show. Imagine a typical rowdy American musical comedy like Listen Lester, with everything in it exaggerated a dozen times. Every number was plugged with dances and stunts, and the chorus men were too frightful for words. Fred Thompson, who had never seen anything like them before, sat and goggled at them. They came on number after number flapping their hands in front of them like seals. I sent round word to the management that they could have ’em, as I didn’t want them.
Today we rang up all sorts of people, and I had lunch with Paul Reynolds, who talked of this and that. Mummie wandered off to Rickson’s, and is now lying down, very worn out.2 I am going to make her go to bed and dine in bed. This is a ripping hostelry, and we have a very nice waiter on our floor.
One of the first things I did was to get a Journal and cut out a Crazy Cat [sic] for you.3 And another today. Both good.
[…]
We both keep saying what chumps we were not to have brought our Snorky with us. You must certainly come next time.
We had an awfully nice trip. Fred Thompson was a wonderful chap to have with us. Full of funny stories and a most awfully good sort. We are all tremendous pals. The journey didn’t seem a bit long, though it took nine days. I sweated like blazes at the novel, and wrote and revised another 12,000 words, so that I now have about 70,000 words of good stuff, and am going to shoot it in without waiting to finish the thing.4 I shall finish it bit by bit while I am here. I’ll keep a copy for you. The scene at the boxer’s training-camp came out splendidly, though it was very hard to write. I had a wobbly table, which I had to prop up with trunks, and writing wasn’t easy. I generally worked every afternoon from three to half-past six. I did a good scene for Sally and Ginger.5 There are some fairly difficult bits still to do, but I hope I shall polish them off all right. It ought to be easier doing them in New York.
I hope you are getting on all right. This darned coal-strike is a nuisance.6 Did you have much trouble clearing up and getting out of Walton Street?
Mummie sends her love and hopes everything is all right – or all correct-o, if you prefer it.
We haven’t got in touch with Loretta or Sammy yet.7 I find that ocean-travelling dogs go with the ship’s butcher, and live in dark rooms lighted with electric light some of the time. I don’t suppose old Sam will mind it much, as he will be asleep all the time, but it must be rotten for a lively dog. One of the passengers brought over a Sealyham puppy. We saw it at the dock, and it looked very subdued, but that may have been just because he found everything strange.
Well, cheerio, old scream. We’re thinking of you all the time.
Oceans of love
Your loving
Plummie
1 PGW’s references to 1920s musical comedy include Mary by Harbach and Mandel, the ‘rollocking’ New York smash Listen Lester, and Sally, written by Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, with two lyrics by PGW.
2 Rickson’s was a gentleman’s outfitters.
3 George Herriman’s ‘Krazy Kat’ daily cartoon strip appeared in the New York Evening Journal.
4 PGW refers to The Adventures of Sally, published in the UK in 1922. It first appeared in the US as a serial in Collier’s Weekly from October to December 1921, and in Grand magazine in England. It was published in America under the title Mostly Sally in 1923.
5 The hero and heroine of The Adventures of Sally.
6 A state of emergency had been declared in England on 31 March due to a coal miners’ strike.
7 Sammy the bulldog had been a gift from one of the girls who performed in PGW’s revue Miss 1917 (Performing Flea, p. 16).
With The Cabaret Girl over, Wodehouse returned to England and spent time at his beloved Emsworth, and at his club in London. Wodehouse’s letter to the younger writer Denis Mackail [see plate 19] marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship and correspondence.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Constitutional Club,
Northumberland Avenue
W.C.2.
May 13. 1921
Dear Mr Mackail,
I feel I must write a line to say how much I enjoyed your What Next. It is simply terrific. If it is your first book, as I believe I read somewhere, I call it a marvellous effort.
Hoping you will produce something of the same sort every few months,
Yours sincerely
P. G. Wodehouse
In 1921, Leonora was sent to a new school, the Old Palace in Bromley, Kent. A school friend remembered that it consisted of ‘about thirty girls […] taught by completely unqualified teachers. The owner was Belgian, and the school professed to specialise in French. The girls were instructed to speak French to each other all day long, which led to a good deal of “Passez-moi the salt, s’il vous plaît”. When Wodehouse visited Leonora he hid in the shrubbery on the drive and she went out to meet him because he was frightened of meeting the headmistress.’ Wodehouse’s letter here offers a rare mention of his immediate family. Philip Peveril John Wodehouse (or ‘Pev’), Wodehouse’s eldest brother (1877–1951), was then Deputy Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police, and had been made Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1919. Wodehouse’s youngest brother, ‘Dick’, was Richard Lancelot Deane Wodehouse (1892–1940).
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
8 Launceston Place
Gloucester Road
W.8
May 20. 1921
Darling precious angel Snorkles.
You will be thinking me a f.i.h.s. (fiend in human shape) for not having written to you before, but, gosh ding it, four separate jobs collided and I was sunk in the whirlpool. Old Savage1 arrived and I had to buckle to on the Lehar piece; Fred Thompson came back and I had to pop onto the Adelphi piece; Reynolds cabled and I had to revise The Girl on the Boat; and he also said that Collier’s wanted the rest of Sally. My impulse in these circumstances was to go to bed with a hot-water bottle and a book, but I decided to have a dash at tackling the jobs, so I started by cutting twenty thousand words out of The Girl on the Boat, after which I wrote a scene of the Lehar piece and a scene of the Adelphi piece. I haven’t touched Sally yet. They will have to wait a bit for that.
On Wednesday afternoon I had an interview with Savage, who read and liked my lyrics and then calmly told me that, for purposes of copyright, he would have to have the remaining two lyrics by today (Friday) at four!!! I hadn’t even got ideas for them. By great good luck I managed to get two good ideas, and now – at 2 o’clock – I have just finished them both. So I have now done all the lyrics, thank goodness. He wants the book completed by two weeks from tomorrow. I think I can manage it all right, but it will be a sweat, and I would like to be out in this fine weather. Still, if I am so much in demand it can’t be helped.
[…]
Mummie has biffed off to Lingfield,2 previously touching me for two pounds.
I am so glad that you like the jolly old school. It sounds ripping – or, as you would say now, épatant. How do you like talking French all the time?
I say, Snorky, old Pev blew in from Hong-Kong two weeks ago, and, though it sounds like exaggeration, he’s a worse ass than Dick. (Now don’t go leaving this letter about or letting the family see it!). But a singular and sinister thing has happened. Mother passed through town on the Friday, and Mummie and I asked Pev and his wife to lunch. Pev turned up but the wife not, on the plea that she was tired. This would be nothing in itself, but we have seen neither of them since then!!! It looks as if we had got the go-by, what?
[…]
Must stop now as the bell is ringing.*
Lots of love
Your
Plummie
* telephone-bell next door.
1 Henry Wilson Savage, theatrical producer. Wodehouse was working for Savage on The Blue Mazurka. Music was originally to be by Jerome Kern and Franz Lehár, but it opened in London in 1927 with music by Lehár alone.
2 A racecourse in Surrey.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
9 Launceston Place
Gloucester Road
W.8
June 15. 1921
My poor precious angel,
We were frightfully sorry to hear of your accident, you poor old thing. What an awful shame having this happen to you right in the middle of the summer term when you want to be playing tennis and swimming. You do have the most rotten luck. Never mind, we shall have to make up for it in the holidays.
Does it hurt very much? I hope not. Do you remember when you came such a smash bicycling near the bungalow at Bellport?
I will come down and see you the very first moment I can manage. I simply must take a day to clean up the Savage play, as he wants it by Saturday. But after that down I come with bells on.
[…]
Father came up yesterday, and he is downstairs now waiting for his bites. He looks very fit.
All sorts of exciting things have been happening. Courtneidge wants to put on the Archie play – to my acute disgust as I think it’s rotten.1 I am trying to double-cross the gang and get him to put on Piccadilly Jim instead. Also Dillingham2 has cabled to Guy asking him to rush through the play which he and I and Vecsey3 are doing, so I have promised, as Guy is busy, to dialogue it. More work! If I can stall off this Adelphi piece, I shall win through, but I am losing weight. Quite the jolly old sylph these days, and getting sylphier all the time.
Bobby Denby has gone off to Ascot, and we have undertaken to pay one-tenth of his losses or take one-tenth of his winnings. I hope the lad bets wisely! He’s got a nice day for it, anyway.4
Father wants to know if you would like to do a bit of Cheltenham in the holidays. How about it? If you think well of the schema we might put in a week there together. But something more in the nature of the vast rolling prairie was my idea, or the little cottage by the sea.
[…]
Jolly old Armine writes from India hinting that he is tired of his job before he has started it, and rather thinks of branching out on his own as an advertising specialist – or, presumably, anything else that requires no work. One of the things that buoys me up when I am toiling away on these hot afternoons is the thought that I am putting by money for Armine to touch me for later on. I wonder when he will next have the hateful task of asking me for a thousand quid to buy a collar-stud.
[…]
I am persping violently as I write. I envy you that garden of yours.
Guy Bolton has just come back from staying with the Carylls at Deauville.5 They have a house twice as large as their one at Great Neck, with stables and, I think, a private race-course and polo ground. Old Felix has eaten himself into such a state that he trembles, Guy tells me, like a jelly and his eyes are popping out of his head. He said they used to gorge a vast lunch and then sit around talking of what they were going to have for dinner.
Well, cheerio, old scream. You mustn’t let this arm-breaking become a habit and take up time which might be devoted to the more serious issues of life.
Oceans of love
From your
Plummie
P.S. Darling thing, your letter has just come. I’m heartbroken that you’re having such pain. I’ll be right down and darn the Savage play. He’ll have to wait.
1 Robert Courtneidge, father of the musical comedy actress Cicely Courtneidge, was one of the last London actor-managers. Neither the ‘Archie’ play, nor a play of Piccadilly Jim, was produced.
2 PGW had worked with the manager Charlie Dillingham for many years. He recalls that Dillingham ‘alone was capable – for there never was a more genial man – of luring an author into anything’ (Bring on the Girls, p. 74).
3 The composer Armand Vecsey. The show was The Hotel Mouse, which eventually opened without contributions from Wodehouse.
4 R. J. B. (‘Bobby’) Denby was ‘a charming, recently demobbed US Army Captain […] became an acknowledged part of the household for the next few years’. He socialised and stayed with the Wodehouses, and conducted literary business deals for PGW (McCrum, p. 148).
5 Ivan Caryll (Felix Tilkin), composer of The Pink Lady.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
9, Launceston Place,
Gloucester Road
W.8.
July 3. 1921
Darling angel Snork,
How I have neglected you! I’ve been in a state of coma since I saw you last, unable to get up enough energy to do anything, even write a letter. The old bean went right back on me, but I’m all right again now.
I hope the arm is getting better. I wonder if you’ll be able to do any swimming in August. We are still undecided where to go. Mummie speaks of Le Touquet (in France), but I have an idea it’s an overcrowded sort of place, and I’d rather go somewhere where we could biff about in old clothes.
[…]
Mother writes to say that Pev is going to pay Nella’s fare over to India, but strikes a jarring note when she adds something to the effect of his not being quite sure he can manage all of it.1 Does or does not this look as if the old dad were going to get it right in the ribs again? Now if it were a question of paying Pev’s fare to India or some other distant spot. . . However, these are idle dreams.
[…]
Mummie gets back from Folkestone tomorrow, and I shall be darned glad to see her again. I have been very sad and lonesome since she went away. But I think the change will have done her good.
I went down to Dulwich yesterday to see the Sherborne match. It was thrilling. We just won when there were only three more minutes to play. I never thought we should do it. I very nearly went about the place scattering pound-notes to the lads. Wiser counsels, however, fortunately prevailed, and I still retain doubloons in the left trouser-pocket.
Love Among the Chickens is out in the cheap edition. I’ll send you a copy. Townend told me it was on sale at the Charing Cross bookstall, so I rolled round and found they had sold out. Thence to Piccadilly Circus bookstall. Sold out again. Pretty good in the first two days. Both men offered to sell me ‘other Wodehouse books’, but I smiled gently on them and legged it.
I have got four new freckles on the top of my head. Where will this end? I think I shall buy a parasol.
[…]
Well cheerio. I’ll pop down and see you pretty soon.
Your loving
Plummie
1 Nella (Helen) Wodehouse was Armine’s wife.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
11 King St
St James’ S.W.
December 21. 1921
Darling angel Snork.
The Wodehouse home is en fête and considerably above itself this p.m. Deep-throated cheers ring out in Flat 43, and every now and then I have to go out on the balcony to address the seething crowds in St James Street. And why? I’ll tell you. (I’m glad you asked me).1 This afternoon at Hurst Park dear jolly old Front Line romped home in the Hurdle Handicap in spite of having to carry about three tons weight. The handicappers crammed an extra ten pounds on him after his last win, so he had to carry thirteen stone three pounds, and it seemed so impossible that he could win that I went off and played golf instead of going to Hurst Park. It is an absolute record, – the Evening Standard says there has never been a case before of a horse winning a good race under such a weight.
We get four hundred quid in stakes – minus fifty quid which we have to cough up to the second horse and twenty-five to the third. Rot, I call it, having to pay them, and I am in favour of seeing if they won’t be satisfied with seats for The Golden Moth or copies of my books, but apparently it can’t be done. We also have to give the trainer a present of fifty quid, and a few extra tips to various varlets and lackeys, not omitting one or two scurvy knaves. Still, with what Mummie (The well-known gambler) got on at six to one, we clear five hundred quid on the afternoon, which, as you justly remark, is not so worse.
In addition to this, Mummie’s judgement in buying the horse is boosted to the skies, and everybody looks on her now as the wisest guy in town. If we sold the horse today we could make a profit of a thousand pounds probably, – certainly seven hundred.* But we aren’t going to sell.
My first remark on hearing the news was ‘Snork will expect something out of this!’ It seemed to me that the thing must infallibly bring on a severe attack of the gimmes in the little darling one. Mummie says that when you come back you shall collect in the shape of a rich present. (Box of candy or a fountain-pen or something lavish like that. Or maybe a string of pearls. Maybe, on the other hand, not.)
Well, that’s that. So Mummie has started her career as the Curse of the Turf in great style.
I have been spending the last two days in a rush of ideas for a new novel. It will be on the lines of Something New and Piccadilly Jim, and it is coming out amazingly.2
I have also played golf today and yesterday, swinging a mean spoon.
Cheerio, old cake
Oceans of love
Your Plummie
* P. S. No. Wrong. It would fetch two thousand more now than when we bought it.
1 See The Girl on the Boat: ‘Was this Mrs Hignett the Mrs Hignett […] I’m glad you asked me’ (Chapter 1).
2 PGW had begun Leave It to Psmith (1923), his second Blandings novel.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Constitutional Club,
Northumberland Avenue,
W.C.2.
Jan 24. 1922
Darling Snorky.
How’s everything? Darned cold, what? So ’m I.
I say, I’ve got out the plot of a Jeeves story where Bertie visits a girls’ school & is very shy and snootered by the girls & the head-mistress. Can you give me any useful details? What would be likely to happen to a chap who was seeing over a school? Do you remember – was it at Ely? – the girls used to sing a song of welcome. Can you give me the words of the song & when it would be sung? And anything else of that sort that would be likely to rattle Bertie.1
[…]
Must stop now, as I don’t hear the bell ringing.
Love
from Plummie
1 The story that Wodehouse refers to was to become ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’, in Carry On, Jeeves (1925) – the only Jeeves and Wooster story narrated by Jeeves – first published in The Strand and Cosmopolitan in August 1922.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
4, Onslow Square,
S.W.7.
June 27. 1922
Dear Bill.
Sorry I haven’t written before. I went away of Thursday for a motor-tour, Ethel and Nora being in France. I took in Stonehenge and finished up at Emsworth for the sports, – a ghastly ordeal. The only time I can stand Emsworth now is when Bud is there alone.1 All sorts of terrible creatures buttonholed me, who were kids there in the eighties. I find that Ella K-H (or rather W.) is more than I can manage unless I’m feeling very strong. She gasses about old Brook all the time, as if we were bosom friends.
I’ve just wired to say that I think the story is great. […] Listen, laddie. Any more humorous plots you can think out will be heartily welcomed. I’ve got to start another dam series in the Strand Feb number, and haven’t got any ideas except that I think I’ll do a series about Ukridge this time. I have one good plot, where he steals a chap’s trousers in order to go to a garden party and all that sort of thing. At the date of the series he is still unmarried and you can make him always in love with girls, like Bingo, if necessary. The keynote of the series is that he and all his pals are devilish hard-up – sort of Leonard Merrick Bohemian stuff, only London2 – and a plot which has as a punch Ukridge just missing touching a man for two bob would be quite in order.
[…]
Am off to Dinard on July 15.3 Probably only for a fortnight or three weeks, as rehearsals of Winter Garden show begin in Aug.4
I am now contracted to finish a novel, 28 short stories, and a musical show by the end of October. I have no ideas and don’t expect to get any. All right, what!
Love to Rene.
Yours ever
Plum
1 Baldwin King-Hall (‘Bud’), proprietor and headmaster of Emsworth House School.
2 Leonard Merrick’s stylistically dense short stories focused on the fate of artists in the bohemian quarter of Paris.
3 Dinard, a popular holiday resort in Brittany, which provided the inspiration for St Roque, the setting for Hot Water (1932).
4 The ‘Winter Garden’ show was The Cabaret Girl, with music by Kern and lyrics by Wodehouse and George Grossmith Jr, a rags to riches showbusiness tale which played on the same formula as Sally.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
4, Onslow Square,
S.W.7.
Sept 20. 1922
Darling angel Snorky.
Well, Bill, maybe we didn’t do a thing to the customers last p.m. Wake me up in the night and ask me! Honestly, old egg, you never saw such a first night. The audience were enthusiastic all through the first and second acts, and they never stopped applauding during the cabaret scene in act three, – you know, the scene with no dialogue but all music and spectacle. I knew that scene would go big, because the same thing happened at the dress rehearsal.1
I take it from your wire this morning […] that you have seen the notices. They are all very good, but I’m a bit sick that they don’t even refer to the lyrics! I haven’t seen the evening papers yet. I hope they will continue the good work.
Leslie Henson was up in the gallery through the show!!! It must have been rotten for him, for Griffin made a tremendous hit and there wasn’t a moment when the show dropped because of him. Grossmith was immense, so was Heather Thatcher. As for Dorothy Dickson, she came right out and knocked ’em cold.2
This morning Mummie and I are not our usual bright selves, as we didn’t get to bed till six and woke up at nine! William Boosey gave a party at the Metropole and we didn’t leave till 5.30. It was rather funny, – we had the Oppenheims, Justine and Walter, and Beith with us at the show, so they (the Opps) gave us supper at Ciro’s, then went on to the Metropole at one o’clock and sat right down to another supper. Even I began to feel as if I had tasted food recently when they brought on oysters and grouse just after I had surrounded a mess of lobster and lamb (with veg.).3
[…] There isn’t any doubt that we’ve got an enormous hit. The libraries have taken a lot of seats for three months, the same number they took for Sally, and everybody I met last night said the show was splendid. Jerry’s music was magnificent. Every number went wonderfully, especially ‘Dancing Time’.
Snorky darling, isn’t it a nuisance, I’ve got to sail for New York on Saturday. I hope I shan’t be away more than about three months, but I hate being away from Mummie and you. This year I seem to have been separated from you all the time. I do hope Mummie will be able to come over and join me very soon, as I know I shall be lonely. But this Ziegfeld show is sure to be a big thing and I mustn’t miss it as I missed Sally. All these dramas go to help buy the baby new footwear.
[…]
Your loving
Plummie
PS Do write Bobby a line, precious. He wrote you such a long letter and must be feeling blue all alone at Dinard.
1 Though The Cabaret Girl was a great hit, running for nearly a year, the run-up to the first production had not gone smoothly. The original star, Leslie Henson, had been taken ill on the morning of the opening. The show was postponed for five days, then opened with Norman Griffin as the lead.
2 A former Follies star, Dorothy Dickson had played the lead in the first London production of Sally.
3 PGW’s dinner companions included bestselling novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim and Justine Johnstone, one of the Ziegfeld Follies girls who had initially been ‘brought on’ by PGW and Guy Bolton to appear in Oh, Boy!. Johnstone, PGW recalls, was a Norwegian beauty, with the looks and carriage likely to ‘provoke the long, low whistle’ (Bring on the Girls, p. 56). She was married to the film producer Walter Wanger. The other dinner guest, Beith, was the author Ian Hay, who would later collaborate with PGW on three plays.
After the success of The Cabaret Girl, Wodehouse headed to the USA (under Ziegfeld’s urgent instructions) to work on the musical Pat, another attempt to work the same Cinderella formula that had been so successful with Sally and The Cabaret Girl. Wodehouse was also developing a musical called Sitting Pretty for two vaudeville comediennes, the Duncan Sisters: ‘two small girls who created the impression of being about twelve years old.’ – ‘They looked like something left over from a defunct kindergarten. […] Their names were Rosetta and Vivian. […] Their forte was the delivery of numbers […] in close harmony, and they were – there is no other word – terrific’.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
17 North Drive
Kensington, Great Neck
Long Island N.Y.
U.S.A.
Dec 16. 1922
Dear Bill.
[…]
Life has been one damned bit of work after another ever since I landed. First, Bolton and I settled down and wrote a musical comedy in two weeks for Ziegfeld. (It has been lying in a drawer ever since. Ziegfeld has been busy over another play, and this one doesn’t look like getting put on this year! This, I should mention, is the play Ziegfeld was cabling about with such boyish excitement, – the one I came over to do. You never heard the fuss they made when I announced that I couldn’t make the Wednesday boat but would sail on the Saturday. They gave me to understand that my loitering would ruin everything.)
I then sat down to finish Leave It to Psmith, for the Saturday Evening Post. I wrote 40,000 words in three weeks.
Since then I have been working with Bolton on a musical comedy for the Duncan Sisters, music by Irving Berlin. This is complicated by the fact that Bolton’s new comedy has just started rehearsals and he is up to his neck in it. So the work is proceeding by jerks. We were supposed to go into rehearsal tomorrow, but shall not till tomorrow fortnight. All in all, it looks as if I should be here till the Spring.
The good old Satevepost have done me proud. Although they never commission anything, they liked the first 60,000 words of my serial so much that they announced it in the papers before I sent in the remainder.1 I mailed them the last part on a Wednesday and got a cheque for $18,000 (my record) on the following Tuesday!!! That’s the way to do business.
[…]
Well, I must ship this screed off now or I shall miss the mail.
Cheerio
Yours ever
Plum
1 Leave It to Psmith.
By May, Ethel had joined Wodehouse in Easthampton, where he had been ‘working like a beaver’ to finish his latest novel, Leave It to Psmith.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Easthampton
Long Island
USA
May 20. 1923
Dear Denis.
I am bathed in confusion and remorse. Goodness knows why I haven’t written to you all this time. […] I came over here on Sept 23 in response to an urgent cable saying that my presence was needed to put on a show. I have been here ever since, but no show yet! […] Still, I have had a good time and have improved my golf beyond my wildest dreams. You will scarcely credit it, but I now go round almost habitually in the 80s – generally 85 – and once did a 79. This was at Aiken, down in what is technically known as Dear Old Dixie-Land, where I spent three months of the winter and played eighteen holes every day. […] We are now down by the sea for the summer and I am getting a taste of seaside links in the wind.1
[…]
I think I shall be over in England in August, for the rehearsals of the new Winter Garden piece.2 George Grossmith is coming here the week after next to work on it with me. He is going to quail when he sees the only bed we have to offer him. As hard as nails and full of small mountains. This is a typical American seashore furnished house, and we have only just got all the china dogs and other horrors hidden away. Still, we Wodehouses can rough it.
[…]
Yours ever
P.G.
1 PGW and Ethel had spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where PGW won his first and only golfing trophy. ‘Playing to a handicap of sixteen’, he recalls, ‘I went through a field consisting of some of the fattest retired business-men in America like a devouring flame’ (‘Preface’, The Heart of a Goof (1926)).
2 The musical The Beauty Prize, with music by Jerome Kern, which opened in September 1923.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Easthampton
Long Island, USA
July 23. 1923
Dear Bill.
Have you ever been knocked over by a car? If not, don’t. There’s nothing in it. I was strolling along yesterday evening to meet Nora who had gone down to the station in our Buick, and half way to the village she sighted me and pulled in to the pavement. The roads here are cement, with a sort of No-Man’s Land of dirt between pavement and road. I had just got onto this when I saw a Ford behind our car. Naturally I thought it would pull up when it saw that Nora had stopped, but it must have been going about forty miles an hour, for I suddenly observed with interest that it couldn’t stop and was swinging in straight for me on the wrong side of the road to avoid colliding with the Buick. I gave one gazelle-like spring sideways and the dam thing’s right wheel caught my left leg squarely and I thought the world had ended. I took the most awful toss and came down on the side of my face. Broke honble glasses and skinned my nose, my left leg, and right arm. Otherwise pretty sound. This morning all sort of unsuspected muscles and bones are aching, and I can hardly move my right arm. But, my gosh, doesn’t it just show that we are here today and gone tomorrow! If I had been a trifle less fit and active I should have got the entire car in the wishbone. Oh well, it’s all in a lifetime.
Last night I went to bed early and read Peter the Greek.1 For the first half I thought it was the best thing you had ever done, full of action and suspense. But, honestly, as you seem to think yourself from your letter, it does drop a bit after that. […] Mogger, whom you have established as a sinister menace, gets his teeth drawn too quickly. In the first place he is weakened by that scene with Teame where Teame swats him. Error, I think, ever to have your villain manhandled by a minor character. Just imagine Doctor Moriarty punched by Watson.
A villain ought, until the very end of the story, to be a sort of scarcely human invulnerable figure. The reader ought to be in a constant state of panic, saying to himself ‘How the devil is this superman to be foiled?’. The only person capable of hurting him should be the hero. […] Taking Moriarty as the pattern villain, don’t you see how much stronger he is by being an inscrutable figure and how much he would have been weakened if old Conan had switched off to a chapter showing his thoughts?
[…]
I say, laddie, you’ll never guess. Reconciliation with Old Brook!!!! I came to the conclusion that it was silly to let a quarrel go on for ten years, so I wrote him an amiable letter, in reply to which I got enclosed!!!2 He doesn’t seem to have altered much, what? The only difficulty is that I don’t in the least want to see him again, and now I suppose I shall have to.
[…]
Jenkins’ death was a great shock to me. I was very fond of him. I always had an idea that he would not last very long. He simply worked himself to death. He was just a fragile thing with a terrific driving mind and no physique at all, one of those fellows who look transparent and seem always tired. I actually had a clause in my contract that, if he should die, the contract lapsed. One used to wonder how long he could possibly last. He shirked his meals and exercise and concentrated entirely on work. You can’t do it.
[…] I’ve given Conrad one more trial and find he is not for me.3 His leisureliness gets on my nerves. […]
I wish I could have a couple of hours with you now. I am undergoing one of my periodical fits of depression about my work. I don’t seem to have the vim I used to have. But it’s probably due to the hot summer and the fact that I have just been working rather hard on a musical comedy which didn’t interest me.
So long. Love to Rene. I hope she is getting better every day and that you’ll soon be able to come back to England. Do write me a line at the Constitutional.
Yours ever
Plum
1 Townend’s story, later published in Adventure, April 1924.
2 No ‘enclosure’ survives.
3 PGW had earlier questioned why ‘this bird’ (Conrad) ‘is such a wonder. Granted, I’ve only read about three lines he has written! Is he a marvel? I hate his way of telling a story, when you have to think back and add up to see who is speaking’ (PGW to William Townend, 28 May 1923 (Dulwich)).
Wodehouse had sailed back to London for three weeks, to rehearse the Winter Garden show, The Beauty Prize. Although he managed to meet up with Denis Mackail for a curry at the Prince’s Grill Room, he never managed to see Townend. Wodehouse refers, in this letter, to the Prince of Wales, who was then twenty-nine years old and was the centre of attention of the British Press. Every new item of clothing he wore became the fashion overnight, and the Embassy Club in Bond Street, which the Prince attended, had become the smartest night-spot in London. The Prince was attracted to the stage and was often to be seen in Adele Astaire’s dressing room, when she and her brother Fred were appearing in London. In the following letter, it appears that one of the leading ladies in The Beauty Prize had caught the Prince’s eye.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
11 King St
St James’
London S.W.
Aug 24. 1923
Dear Bill.
[…]
You’ve no notion what a ruddy blank London is without you. What a difference it would make if only you were here to yarn with me. I arrived on Aug 6 for the rehearsals of the new Winter Garden piece, and ever since have been in a perfect agony of boredom. What is the matter with London and England generally? A year ago, when I was at Onslow Square and you were just round the corner, I liked being here, but now I am counting the days till I can get away and have decided from now on to live in America. I suppose a lot of this is due to Ethel not being here. I miss her terribly. But, even apart from that, there seems something dead and depressing about London. I don’t know what it is. I’ve suddenly discovered that I don’t care any more for watching first-class cricket, and of course that knocks the scheme of things endways, as last year I used to spend all my spare time at the Oval. Oh well, there it is, anyway. […]
[…]
Bill, my lad, I’m thoroughly fed up with the British aristocracy – don’t know why – and also with our old pal the Prince of Wales. He seems to spend all his time hanging round the stage-door of the Winter Garden. I think the press-campaign people have overdone their boosting of him, don’t you?
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
Despite the letterhead, Wodehouse writes from Guy Bolton’s house in Great Neck.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
c/o Guaranty Trust Co
44th St and 5th Ave
New York
November 4. 1923
Dear Bill.
What a shame that we missed each other by a day! Never mind. I have completely given up my idea of settling in America and intend to return to England directly I have cleared up things here.
[…]
Ethel is in Paris, putting Nora at a finishing school. She cables that she likes the place, so maybe we shall give Paris a shot next. I think I would like to potter around Europe a bit. I’m afraid America is only for visits. New York is appalling. All noise and smell. Bracing for an occasional day, but no good for living in.
[…]
I have been meaning to write to you for some time about ‘The Talking Doll’. I was awfully sorry when I got Hoffman’s letter saying he couldn’t use it.
[…]
I seemed to see […] a story of the same genre as Kipling’s ‘At the End of the Passage’. It should have ended with a real creepy situation.
[…]
I think you have made a mistake in starting interesting stuff and then dropping it. The beachcomber in chapter one is so intriguing and novel that it is a dull shock to find that he only makes that one appearance.
[…]
The principle I always go on in writing a long story is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, when I invent a good character for an early scene, ‘If this were a play, we should have to get somebody darned good to play this part, and if he found he had only a short scene in act one he would walk out. How therefore can I twist the story about so as to give him more to do and keep him alive till the fall of the curtain?’
This generally works well and improves the story. A good instance of this was Baxter in Leave It to Psmith. It became plain to me as I constructed the story that Baxter was such an important character that he simply had to have a good scene somewhere in what would correspond to the latter part of act two.
I was hoping, till you killed him off, that the beachcomber was going to have a big share in the plot. He was such a new and arresting figure. Did you ever read Ian Hay’s A Knight on Wheels? He made the same mistake there. He created a wonderful figure, the uncle of a hero, who wrote begging-letters for charitable purposes, and dropped him out of the story one-third of the way through the book. Killing off that beachcomber is almost as bad as if in Love Among the Chickens I had dropped Ukridge after chapter one.
[…]
Cheerio,
Yours ever
Plum
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
17 Beverly Road
Great Neck
L.I.
Nov 14. 1923
Well, ma belle, how goes it? You like the – how is it you Americans say? – the Gay City, hein?
Over here, figure to yourself how it is triste. One gets through the time somehow, but we miss the delicately nurtured. Life has lost its savour. The world is dull and grey. The only bright spot is Jack, the Cat Supreme.
[…]
Did Mummie tell you I was working on the new novel1 in a new way, – viz. making a very elaborate scenario, so that when the time came to write the story it would be more like copying out and revising than actual composition. It is panning out splendidly, but is, of course, the dickens of a sweat, because I can’t persuade myself that I am really accomplishing any actual work besides just mapping the story out. I have reached about half-way now, and it has taken 30 pages, – each containing 600 words as they are typed close like this letter. That is to say, I have written 18,000 words of scenario, the equivalent of about three short stories!
I must say I think, when it is all finished, I shall be surprised at the speed at which I shall be able to polish off the story. There are whole scenes practically complete with dialogue and everything, and I am getting the beginnings of each chapter right, which is what always holds me up. I often spend a whole morning trying to think of the best way of starting a chapter, and now I shall be able to go right ahead.
I wish you were here to discuss the plot with. I think it is a corker. Certainly it is as good as Psmith up to the point where I have got to, and I think the rest will hold up. I have got the plot more or less complete, and am cleaning it up bit by bit.
We are anxiously awaiting letters from our Byng [sic] Girls In Paris.2 Mummie’s first one arrived about a week ago. What a rotten time you must have had at first. C’est toujours ça, what?
Since you left I have met a lot of people you would have liked. Donald Ogden Stewart is about the best candidate for your hand that we have dug up as yet. A very cheery bird. Very ugly, but what of that? We have also seen quite a lot of Elsie Ferguson, who is very nice. Mummie would like her.3 Guy is doing a play for her, and she lives about two hundred yards away in North Drive.
[…]
I am wondering if you and Mummie have decided that Paris is a good spot for the family to take up its headquarters. I must say I shouldn’t mind trying it for a bit. I have got very tired of America. Great Neck seems quite different this year. Last winter, with the good old loved ones around me, I enjoyed it tremendously, but it makes me restless now. I suppose it is simply because I miss you and Mummie. This bachelor life is no good for me at all.
Oh yes, I was forgetting. I have also met Scott Fitzgerald.4 In fact, I met him again this morning. He was off to New York with Truex, who is doing his play, The Vegetable.5 I believe those stories you hear about his drinking are exaggerated. He seems quite normal, and is a very nice chap indeed. You would like him. The only thing is, he goes into New York with a scrubby chin, looking perfectly foul. I suppose he gets a shave when he arrives there, but it doesn’t show him at his best in Great Neck. I would like to see more of him.
[…]
Denis Mackail has a splendid story in the Strand this month.6 I wish you were here. I should like to discuss him with you. Is he a menace or simply a young fellow trying to get along? I’ll tell you one thing, his mind either runs on very similar lines to mine or else he pinches my stuff. The plot of this story is based on an idea exactly like ‘The Man with Two Left Feet’.
Well, cheerio, old sort. Je vous Embrasse.
Your
Plummie
1 Bill the Conqueror (1924).
2 Wodehouse alludes to The Bing Boys Are Here – the hugely successful London show of 1916 featuring the hit song ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.
3 Donald Ogden Stewart was a noted 1920s playwright; Elsie Ferguson, a famous Broadway and silent movie actress.
4 The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald had become famous with This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922).
5 Ernest Truex (1889–1973), Broadway actor, and PGW’s Long Island acquaintance.
6 Mackail’s new story was ‘At Mr Besley’s’.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
17 Beverly Rd
Great Neck,
L.I.
U.S.A.
December 23. 1923
[…]
Tonight we are all going to the opening of Oscar Hammerstein’s play Mary Jane McKane. He is doing a terrific amount of work now. […] Mrs Hammerstein is coming to lunch today. We are having our dinner in the middle of the day.
Oh, by the way. Mummie tells me that you have taken to wine in your old age. I wish you wouldn’t. I have always pointed with pride to you as the one female in the world who can subsist on water. I should preserve the record, if I were you.
We had quite a scare at the Customs when Mummie returned. The poor boobs knew that she had brought in a lot of jewelry, and they thought we still had a residence at Great Neck, especially as all her baggage was labelled for there. So a detective stopped us as we were leaving and wanted to know where we thought we got off. I told him we had sold our house in 1920, and he retired, bathed in confusion.
Jack the cat has got a red ribbon round his neck today. Looks an awful ass.
That’s all. Cheerio.
Bolton and Wodehouse were at Bolton’s house, working on the lyrics for Sitting Pretty. Irving Berlin and his partner, Sam Harris, had lost interest in the piece, as the Duncan sisters no longer wished to star in the musical. It was rescued by Ray Comstock, who had been the producer of Wodehouse, Bolton and Kern’s ‘Princess’ musicals.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
17 Beverly Rd
Great Neck, L.I.
U.S.A.
Christmas Morning
(or, putting it another way,
Dec 25. 1923)
My precious angel Snorky.
Your lovely letter (billet le plus charmant) arrived this morning while I was at breakfast (déjeuner) champing (filling le visage avec) about half a pound of sausages (saussisons) [sic]. It caused great fun and laughter among both young and old.
I have been working so darned hard these last few weeks that I hadn’t even time for a letter to you. Did Mummie tell you I had sold the novel to the Sat Eve Post for $20,000?1 (Of course, they haven’t actually accepted it in so many words, but they read the scenario and said it was just what they wanted and agreed to the price, so it is all o.k.). I have now had a cable from England saying the Strand will publish it in England and pay twelve hundred and fifty quid. So it looks like a white Christmas, what?
I am enclosing the original scenario. I can’t send one of the typed copies, as two are out and I have to keep the third to work with. Still, you’ll be able to read this one all right. I want you to tell me frankly if it isn’t a pippin. It seems to me quite as good a story as Psmith, though of course I shall miss Psmith when it comes to dialogue, – though I think Judson will be a good comedian.2
[…]
Thanks awfully for the handkerchiefs. As nifty a lot as I have ever had. Dashed good of you to send them. Mummie is having them marked, and I shall treasure them.
[…]
Well, Snorky, old lad, a million blessings. (‘Peace on thy head!’ ‘Two pieces on yours!’) I’ll write again very anon.
Your loving
Plummie
1 Bill the Conqueror.
2 The novel’s hero, Bill, is required to keep an eye on his best friend Judson Coker, a ‘devout drinker’. Judson consequently causes much trouble for Bill.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
17 Beverly Road
Great Neck
Long Island, U.S.A.
(Permanent address till I leave America)
Jan 26. 1924
Dear Bill.
I’m awfully sorry I haven’t written for so long. I have had a great drive of work against time, having completed 55,000 words of a new novel in a month!
[…]
I say, listen, old horse. Is this a crazy idea? ‘The Haunting of the Hyacinth’ or some such title. I suddenly thought the other day, there are always rats on board ship, so why shouldn’t one rat, starting by being a bit bigger than the others, gradually grow and grow, feeding on his little playmates, till he became about the size of an Airedale terrier. Then there begin to be mysterious happenings on the ship. Men are found dead etc. End with big scene where your hero discovers and is attacked by Honble Rat in the dark of the hold or somewhere. Big fight and so on.
Is this any good to you? It certainly isn’t to me. I should have to put the rat in an eyeglass and have the hero trip over a tub of potatoes. But you might see something in it. Anyway, I give it you with my blessing.
[…] At present, it seems to me that your stuff is too psychological for the low-brow magazines. It’s good because you make one interested in your people. But can’t you do something that would be interesting absolutely independent of who it happened to, – e.g. a fight with a giant rat. (I defy anyone not to be interested in a fight with a giant rat. Personally I would run a mile to avoid unpleasantness with a small one).1
[…]
Cheerio. Must stop now. Write again soon.
Yours ever
Plum
1 Townend did indeed use the idea that PGW suggested here in a 1934 Harper’s magazine story, forgetting that PGW had given it to him (Performing Flea, p. 24).
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
17 Beverly Road
Great Neck
U.S.A.
Feb 4. 1924
Darling angel Snorky.
Your long letter made a big hit in the home. We weren’t so keen, though, on this fainting business. Where do you get that stuff? I hope your cold is all right again now, and that you are once more settled down to the gaieties of that dear Paris.
Well, say, listen, kid, lemme tell ya sum’fin. I sent the first 70,000 words of Bill the Conqueror off to the typist (la sténographie) yesterday, and believe me or believe me not, it’s good. I’m taking a day off today and tomorrow [to] plunge into the remaining 25,000, which ought to be pie. This is certainly one swell story, as good as the old man has ever done, and, thank God, I have been able to work in that line about ‘I know it’s paraffin, but what have they put in it?’. Judson has worked out immense, and Flick, the heroine, is so like you that the cognoscenti cannot help but be charmed.
[…]
I’ve never worked so well on a novel before. I must have done over 50,000 words in a month. Oh yes, and I forgot to say that Ray has now gone cold on Pat, so we shall have to try and place it elsewhere. Ziegfeld wired from Palm Beach asking if it would do for Leon Errol, but that only evoked from us a faint, sad smile. We know these Ziegfeld commissions.
Talking of Palm Beach, this place has closely resembled it this winter. Thermometer never below forty, and last Sunday up to fifty-six. Gorgeous Spring weather, in which I have revelled.
Mummie is going great guns. She has developed into a regular athlete. She comes out for long walks with me and runs half the way. She is the nearest thing to the untamed jack-rabbit of the Californian prairie you ever saw.
[…]
We loved the photographs. You looked very beautiful. Though, while on the subject of looking beautiful, you ought to see the Light of the Home in her Paris dresses. A pip, believe me. She flashed the blue one with the white fur collar on me the other day and I keeled over. Nor is the beige to be despised. Mummie simply is sylph-like now, as slim as anything.
[…]
Well, cheerio. Will write again very soon, if I can take an hour off from finishing Bill. I must get it finished this month, as the Post won’t start it till it is complete and they have to have the stuff six weeks in advance.
Your loving
Plummie
Wodehouse travelled from America to Paris (where Ethel bought a new wardrobe) before moving on to London, then Emsworth, and finally Harrogate, with the aim of sampling the spa waters. Wodehouse used his visits to Harrogate (and later Droitwich) to inform the background of a number of short stories – most notably his 1937 story ‘Romance at Droitgate Spa’.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Sept 12. 1924
Darling Snorky.
We are so awfully worried about your cold, darling. You simply must make a real business of taking care of yourself, because you are evidently not any too strong – good opening for joke here, but I can hear you saying ‘Obvious!’. Do please wrap up warmly, especially when you come back to England, as the climate is so rotten.
[…]
Harrogate isn’t such a bad old spot. I played golf today for the first time and feel fine. The waters taste quite ordinary now, though the first two times I took them it was too awful for words. Exactly like rotten eggs.
[…]
Mummie is the belle of the hotel, and dances like a breeze. Oh, by the way, there’s no holding her now. A woman wrote to the Tatler, asking the editor to settle a bet by telling her which was Mrs Wodehouse and which Miss Wodehouse in that photo of us [see plate 22]. The side Mummie has been sticking on ever since has been something awful, – only equalled by mine when a letter turned up the other day addressed to ‘P. G. Wodehouse, London’. I am going to write to myself and address it ‘P. G. Wodehouse, England’ and see if it arrives. The next step will be to send one addressed simply ‘P. G. Wodehouse’.
I do a lot of reading here, and have added three new Edgar Wallaces to my collection! Unfortunately, the last, which I got this morning, is a dud and not worth reading.
The Winter Garden show opened last night (unless it was postponed).1 We have heard no news of it. The morning papers never contain the notices, as I suppose they start from London too early. There will be something in the Sunday papers, though.
Cheerio.
Your
Plummie
1 Primrose, book by Bolton and Grossmith, music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Desmond Carter and Ira Gershwin.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Grand Hotel
Harrogate
Yorks
Sept 23. 1924
Dear Bill.
Awfully sorry I haven’t written for long. I’ve been dashed busy. I’ve done a couple of short stories since I got here and also practically completed scenario of a new novel.
By the way, can you possibly let me use that idea of yours about a fellow getting engaged to three girls, two of them in Cardiff? It would be a godsend. I just want it to establish a character.
[…]
I say, do you like the title: – SAM IN THE SUBURBS
I have got a good central idea. Hero takes semi-detached house at Dulwich next door to heroine, who has told him she never wants to see him again, and they scrap across the wall. Hero’s dog assaults heroine’s kitten and so on. Meanwhile, crooks are trying to get at stolen bonds which a former crook has buried somewhere in hero’s house. See? It’s working out fine.
[…]
Did I ever tell you I met Brook again? !!!! Went to dinner at his house. He’s awful! All his old affectations increased to the nth power. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.
[…]
Cheerio. Love to Rene.
Yours ever
Plum
While in Harrogate, Wodehouse reported a ‘rather odd’ experience in which he ‘got the idea for a short story, “Honeysuckle Cottage”, absolutely complete one morning […] and wrote it practically at a sitting. Some time after I went out to a séance and a spirit spoke, saying among other things that he had been with me at Harrogate and had helped me. Curious, wasn’t it. That was the séance where Leonora and I, who were sitting well apart from each other, heard a voice say “Loretta Wodehouse”. Loretta was the name of a little girl who worked for us at Great Neck when Snorky was a kid, and she and Snorky were inseparable. She was devoted to us and died a few years later. Her surname was Ninesling, but both Snorky and I heard the words “Loretta Wodehouse”. I have never known what to make of it.’
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Harrogate
Oct 1. 1924
Dear Bill.
[…]
Thanks awfully about the three men and girl. Also about the atmosphere stuff for the ship. I haven’t been able to give a thought to my novel for ten days, having in that time written two short stories, both dam good. This may not be much of a place to live one’s life in, but it’s a great spot for work. I leave here on Friday and settle down for nine months at 23 Gilbert St, Grosvenor Square, where we have a butler who is a V.C. (Either that or a D.S.O.) What does one say to a V.C. butler if one wasn’t in the war oneself? I think I shall start, ‘Well, Meadowes, and what is that medal for? Saving life at sea?’.1
The short story I have just finished, entitled ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’, is the damnedest funniest idea I’ve ever had.2 A young writer of detective stories gets left five thousand quid and a house by his aunt, who was Leila May Pinckney, the famous writer of sentimental stories. He finds that her vibrations have set up a sort of miasma of sentimentalism in the place, so that all who come within its radius get soppy and maudlin. He then finds to his horror that he is ... but it will be simpler to send you the story, so I am doing so. I polished it up a good bit in typing it out.
[…]
How splendid that Rene is getting better. Talking of getting better, there was no earthly need for us to come to Harrogate at all. Ethel did not drink the waters, and only had massage treatment which she could have got equally well in London. I, on the other hand, who thought I had nothing the matter with me was ordered sulphur water twice a day.
[…]
Did you read Wells’ The Dream? Pretty good. But what asses his Utopians are.3
Well, cheerio. I do hope we can meet soon.
Yours ever
Plum
1 The reference to ‘Meadowes’ relates to Jeeves’s predecessor as Bertie Wooster’s valet, who was fired for stealing Bertie’s silk socks in ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ (1916), repr. in Carry On, Jeeves (1925). The name would later be used for Archibald Mulliner’s valet in ‘The Reverent Wooing of Archibald’ (1928, repr. in Mr Mulliner Speaking, 1929), and ‘Archibald and the Masses’ (1935, repr. in Young Men in Spats, 1936). By way of contrast, in The Mating Season (1949), Bertie Wooster (using the pseudonym Gussie Fink-Nottle) pretends to have a valet named Meadowes, who is actually his friend, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright.
2 PGW’s ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ (1925, repr. in Mr Mulliner Speaking, 1927), a brilliant parody of the 1920s romantic novelette, also sheds light on his interest at this time in matters occult. This was a period in which he attended at least three séances at the home of H. Dennis Bradley, a popular writer on spiritualist matters (see McCrum, p. 163).
3 H. G. Wells’ The Dream, a novel about a man from a utopian future who dreams the life of a twentieth-century man, was published in 1924.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
23 Gilbert St.
Mayfair, W.
Nov 12. 1924
Dear Bill.
[…]
I enclose a sheet of questions, which you will save my life by answering. They come in chapter three,1 the chapter I ought to be working on now. Owing to lack of technical atmosphere I have had to skip and start writing chapter twelve!
[…]
Chapter Three starts as follows:
Sam Shotter stood outside the galley of the tramp steamer Araminta in pleasant conversation with Clarence – (‘Soup’) Todhunter, – the vessel’s popular and energetic cook.
Now then:
(A) How was Sam dressed? (All his luggage had come over on the Mauretania and he had sea-clothes on. This is very important, as in next chapter it is essential that Sam shall look like a dead-beat and be taken for a burglar.)
(B) What did Sam see, hear and smell, as he stood outside the galley?
(C) Sam is the stepson of a millionaire and has a penchant for travelling on tramps. He must have had at least one voyage on the Araminta before, because it is essential that he knows the skipper well. Therefore, in what capacity did he sail? Would it be ship’s etiquette for him to chum up with the skipper as well as the cook?
(D) On the voyage the only thing Sam has to look at has been a photograph of a girl cut out of the Tatler. Could he have a cabin to himself? And do you call it a cabin or a state-room?
(E) The Araminta is sailing from America to England. How long would the voyage take? Also, where would she start from, and where dock? Could she dock at Port of London, and be going on to Cardiff?
(F) I particularly want Sam to be in London when Chapter starts so that he has an easy trip to the West End, which is the setting of the next chapter. Please give me some atmosphere for Port of London, or wherever it is, i.e. something for Sam to see from the deck of the ship.
(G) Can you possibly write me a description of Soup Todhunter from your knowledge of ship’s cooks? It is immaterial what he looks like, of course, but it will help.
[…]
Well, that’s all I can think of at present… I do hope you’re not busy on anything just now, as I don’t want to interrupt you… I can skip the sea stuff and go on working on the shore scenes till you are ready.
1 Sam the Sudden (1925) – US title Sam in the Suburbs . Townend replied in detail, but in the end few of his suggestions were used.
In 1925, Wodehouse spent some time on the French Riviera, having his ‘usual struggle’ to get new ideas. A letter written to Townend in April mentions ‘a luncheon with old Sir Coning’ (Conan Doyle). ‘He has written a spiritualistic novel (!!).’
In early December, the Times Literary Supplement published a brief and fairly cursory review of Wodehouse’s latest novel, Bill the Conqueror: ‘Bill West, the nephew of Mr Paradene, an American millionaire, though he knows nothing whatever about his uncle’s business is sent over to investigate a marked falling-off in the profits of the London branch. In a midnight escapade he comes across pretty Flick Sheridan just as she is running away from home rather than marry a weak-kneed son of a newspaper peer. Bill and a friend take her under their wing, and she obtains a stenographer’s situation with Slingsby, Mr. Paradene’s London manager. True, she only stays there one morning, but that suffices for her to discover that Slingsby is a crook, so that when, after a great many more equally improbable episodes, Bill and Flick are at last married and Mr. Paradene appears on the scene, Bill is able to inform him that he has succeeded in his mission and is thereupon made manager himself, though he still knows nothing whatever about the business, at any salary he cares to name.’
TO DENIS MACKAIL
23 Gilbert Street
Mayfair
Dec 4. 1924
Dear Denis.
Your letter was like the well-known balm in Gilead. I was sitting in a corner, muttering to myself and licking my wounds, when it arrived, and it cheered me up.
The bitter part of the whole affair is that, while I usually read the Times Lit Sup at the club, this time I went out and bought a copy, so that in addition to having my finest feelings gashed I am threepence out of pocket, with no hope in sight of getting back at them.
I have been analysing my feelings towards reviews, and my position is this. I don’t mind the review which says ‘Why the devil this ass sells a single copy, we cannot understand, but there is no getting away from the fact that he sells thousands’, but a notice like this, which might have been that of the first book of an amateur, cuts deep. It is particularly maddening because in a sense it is all perfectly true. She – I agree with you that it was written by a governess – simply omits to mention that I have gone to great pains to cover each of the points she raises, so that in the book they are quite plausible. But what’s the use? I feel as if someone had flung an egg at me from a bomb-proof shelter. But your letter has made me feel ever so much better, and I am holding my head up again.
I should love to see Patricia next week.1 The only thing is that the Boss insists on seeing it, too, which rather dishes the Athenaeum dinner.2 I think the best plan would be for you to come and dine here. We can then discuss all sorts of matters before going on. By this system you get a glass (or more) of the Wodehouse port, which you would otherwise miss.
Cheerio. Death to the Times.
Yours ever
Plum
1 A comedy in three acts by Denis Mackail, Arthur Stanley and Austin Melford, with music by Geoffrey Gwyther.
2 Though he dined there from time to time, Wodehouse was not a member of the Athenaeum (a club known as ‘that morgue’ by Wodehouse’s Galahad Threepwood).
Wodehouse, Ethel and Leonora were frequent visitors to Hunstanton Hall in Norfolk, both together and separately [see plate 23]. Hunstanton was, Wodehouse wrote, ‘one of those enormous houses, about two-thirds of which are derelict. There is a whole wing which has not been lived in for half a century […] thousands of acres, park, gardens, moat, etc., and priceless heirlooms, but not a penny of ready money.’ In practical terms, Hunstanton provided a writing refuge away from the constant socialising of Mayfair life. The house, an eclectic mix of rambling carrstone and pebble, with its surrounding grounds, also acted as an imagined stage set for much of his fiction, providing rose-gardens in which to find romance, stout downspouts by which to escape it, and moats into which characters might fall and be duly rescued. Its atmosphere of genteel poverty, with its dusty heirlooms and brooding butlers, informs so much of his fiction. Aunt Agatha’s house at Woollam Chertsey, with its ‘miles of what they call rolling parkland, trees in considerable profusion well provided with doves and what-not cooing in no uncertain voice’ has its roots in Hunstanton, along with the crumbling Rudge Hall in Money for Nothing. The owner of Hunstanton, Charles Le Strange, was a ‘keen breeder of jersey cows’, and Wodehouse bestowed elements of his host’s interest in livestock on his hero Lord Emsworth. As Norman Murphy notes, Hunstanton’s pig-sty was likely to have been the inspiration for the most impressive of all Wodehouse’s characters, the Empress of Blandings.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
23 Gilbert St.
Mayfair, W.
December 22. 1924
Dear Bill.
[…]
We are off to Norfolk for Christmas. Back in about a week, I imagine. Hunstanton Hall, Hunstanton is the address, c/o Charles L’Estrange. (Who is, between ourselves, a weird bird, but he has the most wonderful house.)
I’m awfully glad you liked Sally. I don’t remember the Times review of it, but they seem to loathe my stuff. They gave Bill the Conqueror a rotten notice. However, it doesn’t seem to make much difference.1
Do you find you work easily these days? I’ve been having a deuce of a job on my new story. The stuff, when I’ve done it, is all right but I don’t seem able to write more than about three or four pages a day. I found that over Sally, which I wrote in London, so I suppose it’s something to do with being in London. Of course, I have had a lot of interruptions in the shape of dinners and things. I don’t know why it should affect my work if I am going out to dinner, but it does. It always makes me stop an hour before I need.
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
P.S. Merry Christmas and all that. Though I’m always glad when it’s over, aren’t you?
1 Despite ‘rotten notices’, Bill the Conqueror ‘sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication. Hot stuff’ (PGW to Townend, 17 November 1924 (Dulwich)).
Missing the American sunshine, the Wodehouses set off for the South of France.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Gallia Hotel,
Cannes*
(*Famous Pleasure Resort – Ha, ha!)
March 30. 1925
Darling Snorkles.
I am now at last in a position to give you the low-down on the Riviera, as based on the observations of self and egg-scrambler. Two days ago, I was gloomy and pessimistic on the subject of the entire Cote D’Azur, especially featuring Cannes, and Mummie reproached me, saying that Cannes was really a delightful spot. Next day, I was all chirpiness and joie de vivre and went about pointing out villas which we could buy and live in for the rest of our lives, while Mummie maintained a strange silence. Today, suddenly, we both exclaimed together that we thought Cannes the most loathly hole in the known world and that, once we got out of this damned Riviera, nothing short of armed troops would induce us to return.
Of all the poisonous, foul, ghastly places, Cannes takes the biscuit with absurd ease. Until we came here, I was thinking Monte Carlo not all it might be, but now I look back to those dear old Monte Carlo days with an absolute pang.
Mummie says in her letter that we have done nothing here but stay in the hotel and walk on the front, but this, with the exception of going to the Casino, is all there is to do. The only tolerable thing about Cannes is the hotel garden, which contains ornamental water with ducks, water-rats etc, and forms an oasis in this bloodsome desert. Mummie and I have come to the conclusion that we loathe foreign countries. We hate their ways, their architecture, their looks, their language and their food. So we must simply buckle to and get a house for you in England somewhere. I am all for the Chippenham neighbourhood. We both want dogs and cats and cows and meadow-land. Directly you get out of England you get nothing but spiky palms and other beastly shrubs. I asked someone yesterday who was recommending St Juan les Pins as a spot where you might obtain rustic comfort within reach of the gay (Ha!) Cannes life if we could buy plenty of ground there. She said Oo yes! Certainly enough for a tennis lawn. That’s their idea of a rolling estate, these poor damned souls out here. If they have a stucco villa with another stucco villa adjoining it and two more stucco villas on each side and a back yard with a potted cactus, they expand their chests and say ‘Gosh! This rural solitude is the stuff!’. Blast, if I may use the expression, them.
Of course, in many ways Cannes is most delightful. (I mention this because I am leaving this letter on the machine while I go down to dinner, and I think the maid can read English.)
To resume. March 31st.
Good news today. Cable from America saying that the script of Sam in the Suburbs has arrived safely.
On the other hand, ghastly shock. The editor of the Newnes magazine which is running Sam serially wants to change the title and have [sic] decided on SUNSHINE SAM!!!!! I have written anguished letters of protest to Mrs Westbrook and also to E. V. Lucas of Methuen. Can you imagine such a foul title? Isn’t it pure Ruby M. Ayres? The only thing it could be except Ruby M. Ayres is Harold Bell Wright, in which case Sunshine Sam would be a quaint, drawling old Westerner, who cheers up the other cowboys with his homely philosophy, showing that you can be happy though poor, provided you do as the good book says.1
I thought that terrific about the Nevada accident and Thank God this wasn’t you. Also the nifty about April.
Mummie’s cold doesn’t seem to get any better. How can it in this plague-spot?
We are now dickering with the idea of a little flat in Paris as our official address and a country house in England for you. How long ago it seems that I was writing home roasting Paris. I hadn’t seen the Riviera then.
Do you know anything about Chantilly? That might be a solution. Near Paris and on a golf-links. I went there once, and thought it fairly decent, but don’t remember it very well.
[...]
I’ve been sitting out in the garden all afternoon, and, by Jove, Cannes doesn’t seem so bad after all. I think the solution is never to go into it. I propose to spend all my time in the garden from now on.
Cheerio
Your
Plummie
P.S. April 1. Not such a bad place, Cannes! We went to the Casino last night & I won 500 francs, which makes me feel a bit benevolent. Also, Italian musicians have been singing under our window this morning, all very jolly.
1 Wodehouse’s alarm about the branding of his current novel was unwarranted. In the end, the UK edition bore the title Sam the Sudden. The romantic novelist Ruby M. Ayres (1883–1955) gains a sneer from Wodehouse here, but she was not without her uses. Ayres is often seen as the model for Wodehouse’s fictional character Rosie M. Banks, author of works such as Madcap Myrtle and Only a Factory Girl, who marries Bingo Little. Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944) was a bestselling American writer who outsold any other writer in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
23 Gilbert Street, Mayfair, W.
June 18. 1925
Dear Denis.
I started the sale of Greenery Street off with a bang this afternoon by rushing into Hatchard’s and insisting on a copy.1 They pretended it wasn’t out. I said I had seen it mentioned among ‘Books Received’ in my morning paper. They said in a superior sort of way that the papers got their copies early. I then began to scream and kick, and they at once produced it.
When I had got to page 42, I had to break off to write this letter. No longer able to hold enthusiasm in check. It is simply terrific, miles the best thing you have ever done – or anyone else, for that matter. It’s so good that it makes one feel that it’s the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader about them. It’s the sort of book one wishes would go on for ever. That scene where Ian comes to dinner is pure genius.
The only possible criticism I would make is that it is not the sort of book which should be put into the hands of one who ought to be working on a short story. Ethel got skinned to the bone at Ascot yesterday – myself present, incidentally, in a grey tophat and white spats – and I promised her I would work all day today at something that would put us square. So far I have done nothing but read Greenery Street.
[…]
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Greenery Street, a tale of domestic life in Chelsea, was based on Mackail’s early experiences of married life on Walpole Street – which, coincidentally, was Wodehouse’s address for much of 1901 to 1908.
Wodehouse had planned to spend the summer of 1925 at Hunstanton Hall, but instead accepted what he referred to as a ‘ghastly task’ – to work on The Nightingale, a musical about the life of the Victorian artiste Jenny Lind – and ended up spending the latter part of 1925 in America, including a few weeks on Ziegfeld’s yacht. Wodehouse had also been making a few new publication deals, and switched his American serial publication allegiance from the Saturday Evening Post to Liberty magazine. Liberty would be publishing his latest novel, The Small Bachelor, in the autumn of 1926. Reynolds discovered that the editor of the Post, Mr Lorimer, ‘was rather angry about Wodehouse […] but he thought at the end of next year he would be ready to take him back’.
In the summer of 1926, Wodehouse spent a dutiful fortnight with his parents at their home in Bexhill-on-Sea, on the Sussex coast. ‘The spot which God forgot’ was to become the model for many of Wodehouse’s ‘bracing’ fictional seaside resorts, disguised, variously, as ‘Bramley’ or ‘Bingley-on-Sea’.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Hunstanton Hall
Norfolk
June 26. 1926
[…]
I have been spending two weeks at Bexhill, the spot which God forgot, but am now in my beloved Hunstanton and am writing this sitting in a punt on the moat with my typewriter on a bed-table balanced on one of the seats. There is a duck close by which makes occasional quacks that sound just like a man with an unpleasant voice saying nasty things in an undertone.
When I was at Bexhill, I thought to myself ‘I’ll just pop round the corner and see old Bill’, having got a sort of idea that Cliftonville was just beyond Hastings. I then looked at a map and found that the journey was about a hundred miles, so that was off.
I am trembling on the verge of making another trip to America. I have had a cable from Guy Bolton asking me to sail on July 8th and do a show with him.1 I am trying to put it off till the 24th. I am torn between a loathing of leaving Ethel for a couple of months and a desire not to let a good thing get by me.
[…]
1 Guy Bolton’s planned show was to become the hit musical Oh, Kay!, featuring Gertrude Lawrence. Wodehouse had drawn on a 1923 anecdote from his Easthampton days for this ‘light-hearted Prohibition frolic’, recalling one of Ethel’s more unusual evenings out, when she, Leonora and George Grossmith found themselves driven, in full evening dress, from the dinner table to the shore, to unload a stash of rum.
Wodehouse sailed back to America on 24 July, and recalls spending the summer in the American heat: ‘it is not too much to say that I played like one of those fountains at Versailles, taking off some fourteen pounds in weight. […] Gertie was angelic to work with’. The following fan letter suggests that Wodehouse considered working in Hollywood at this point, but there is no record as to whether any film work took place.
TO MR DAVIES
17 North Drive
Great Neck N.Y.
USA
August 17. 1926
[…]
In November I am going to California to write some moving-pictures. It ought to be very interesting seeing them made and meeting all the picture stars. I have known Douglas Fairbanks for a good many years & like him very much. I suppose I shall meet Charlie Chaplin this time.
The man I am going to write pictures for is Raymond Griffith. Have you ever seen him on the screen? I haven’t, but they tell me he is very good.
[…]
Back in London after the success of Oh, Kay!, Wodehouse left Bobby Denby to organise some of his business matters. In early January, Denby negotiated a settlement with the Famous Players film company to cancel one of Wodehouse’s contracts, earning Wodehouse the settlement sum of $7,500. Denby cabled Wodehouse that he had settled for $5,500, regarding the rest as commission. Denby’s letter of explanation to Wodehouse, which crossed with the outraged telegram below, stated that ‘your $5,500, of course, is absolutely pure velvet which comes to you, to a great extent, through our initiative in suggesting the business. Is that all right old man?’
TO R. J. B. DENBY
Western Union Cablegram,
Received at 40 Broad Street,
New York
Jan 22. 1927
CANNOT UNDERSTAND YOU CABLING THAT YOU HAVE SETTLED FOR FIVE-THOUSAND FIVEHUNDRED DOLLARS WHEN THE SUM WAS REALLY SEVENTHOUSAND FIVEHUNDRED DOLLARS STOP I WILL NOT CONSENT FOR A MOMENT TO YOU AND PUTNEY [sic] TAKING ONE THOUSAND APIECE AS COMMISSION AND YOU MUST HAVE KNOWN IT WHEN YOU SENT YOUR CABLE STOP PLEASE DEPOSIT THE FULL SUM MINUS TEN PERCENT COMMISSION IN GUARANTY TRUST
WODEHOUSE.
In 1927, Wodehouse had just completed arguably his finest work to date, Summer Lightning. Reynolds was negotiating for a $40,000 serialisation with Collier’s Weekly. Wodehouse writes from a new rented sixteen-room house, just off Park Lane in Mayfair, which seemed to match the scale of his latest success. ‘The […] running of the establishment called for a retinue of servants such as the Wodehouses had never before required. There was a morning secretary to keep the household-expenses books, an afternoon secretary […] a cook, a butler, a kitchen maid, two housemaids, one lady’s maid, one odd-job man, and a chauffeur for the new Rolls Royce.’
TO PAUL REYNOLDS
17, Norfolk Street,
Park Lane. W.1.
Feb 5. 1927
Dear Reynolds.
Thanks very much for the Vanity Fair articles, which arrived safely.
[…]
In re Denby. I am rather at the outs with that man of wrath. He cabled me that the Famous Players wanted to cancel that contract of mine and would I leave it to him to make the best terms. I said yes, and he then cabled ‘Have settled for $5500’.
Naturally, thinking the money so much velvet, I cabled back Yes. I then get a letter from him saying that the price the F.P. actually paid was $7500, but, in consideration of the trouble they had taken, he assumed I would have no objection to him and Putnam taking $1000 each commission, as I had already cabled that $5500 was satisfactory to me!!!
[…] I cabled back to him at great expense that I wanted the entire sum minus the customary 10%, and I have also written to Putnam to that effect.
Denby has paid in $5500 to my account, and there is another $1250 to come. If there is any hesitation on his part in paying this in, will you send me the 5% you pay him on my stories till the sum is made up?
Don’t let this make any difference to you in your dealings with Denby. I think he is a very useful man provided you keep a sharp eye on him and don’t let him have the handling of the money. I should be quite willing for him to handle movie deals for me through you, but never again through Putnam.
The whole thing reminds me of the time when Abe Baerman asked me if I would take $75 for the first story he sold for me, to which I agreed eagerly and then found that the editor had paid $100. Considering that Denby owes me nearly two thousand five hundred pounds, I think the thing was a bit thick.
Mind you, I don’t suppose he deliberately thought he was doing anything dishonest. Like all those smart, hustling devils, his mind works in a peculiar way. He argued ‘Wodehouse will be pleased with $5500, therefore why give him more?’. It is just the same as if you have told me that Collier’s would give me $32,500 for this next serial. I should have said to myself ‘Ah! A nice advance in price. Grab it.’
But doesn’t it make your mouth water, as an agent, – this idea of scooping in $2000 on a $7500 deal!!!
I am in great shape with the writing these days. I have finished two more short stories and am three parts of the way though two more, with about ten plots up my sleeve in addition to the plot of a serial. I am going to try and work off half a dozen short stories before starting the serial.
I have just been asked to write the next show for the Astaires, so I shall be over in New York again towards the middle of July.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
17. Norfolk Street,
Park Lane. W.1.
Feb 12. 1927
Dear Bill.
A long time since we communicated, laddie. How is everything with you? I hope old Hoffer is doing his bit.
I have been sweating away with incredible vim since I saw you last. I had a cable from Gilbert Miller asking me to rush through an adaptation of a French piece, which I had thought was a November job.1 I got this shipped off, and now I read in the papers that his play The Captive in New York has been pulled by the police and everybody connected with it arrested!2 I’m afraid this is liable to take his mind off my piece. His last cable said that they were going into rehearsal last Monday. Since then I have heard nothing.
I have also written three short stories since I got back from Hunstanton on Jan 8.
It is an infernal nuisance your being so far away. I wish you could settle for awhile in London. I miss our walks and talks. Isn’t it curious how few peop1e there are in the world whom one wants to see. Yesterday, I looked in at the Garrick at lunch time, took one glance of loathing at the mob, and went off to lunch by myself at the Cheshire Cheese.
This house is still in an awful mess, with workmen all over the place, and Ethel says she loathes it. As a matter of fact, when it is finished I think she will like it. It’s going to be pretty hot. My library is magnificent, if a bit too much like ‘Mr Wodehouse among his books’. It is lined from floor to ceiling with old books and it is only on closer inspection that you find that these are absolutely unreadable. They are what is known in the trade as ‘book furniture’, – i.e. old encyclopaedias etc, bunged in to act as background. To think that I, who always swore that I would never have a book in the house which was not one of my favourites, should have sunk to this!3
[…]
I have now achieved the ambition of a lifetime and, possess two typewriters! Both Monarchs. One I keep in the library, the other in my bedroom. It is a darned good investment, as my work can now be continuous. While one is being fixed, I work on the other.
Did you see Fust on the films? V.g. Or, rather, Faust.4
[...]
Cheerio
Yours ever
Plum
1 Wodehouse’s French piece was The Cardboard Lover, an adaptation by Valerie Wyngate of an original play by Jacques Deval. Set to star Laurette Taylor and Leslie Howard, the play looked promising, and was to be produced by Gilbert Miller and Al Woods, who had produced PGW’s smash hit, The Play’s the Thing, earlier that year, but it needed to be completely rewritten. As it was due to open on Broadway on 21 March, PGW had fewer than eight weeks to turn it around.
2 The Captive, a pioneering three-act drama about lesbianism, adapted from Bourdet’s French, was produced by Charles Frohman and staged by Gilbert Miller. It was closed by the New York Police Department as part of a New York ‘morality campaign’.
3 Wodehouse did not embrace his new study, and ended up working on a small deal table and chair in his bedroom (Jasen, p. 107).
4 Murnau’s silent film Faust had been produced the previous year.
Wodehouse was familiar with The Hotel Impney at Droitwich, as he had spent time there with Guy Bolton, pacing the terraces as they worked on Oh, Kay! He now returned, so that Ethel could sample the brine baths. The hotel was an extremely grand Victorian building, which was based on the style of a French chateau, set in 155 acres of parkland, lakes and tropical gardens. It was also, Wodehouse wrote, ‘the quietest place under the sun’. Wodehouse’s letters from the Impney are written on the architecturally resplendent hotel stationery. As Norman Murphy notes, the images of the building have a strong resemblance to Buckstone Abbott’s ‘Victorian monstrosity’, Walsingford Hall, in Summer Moonshine: ‘a vast edifice constructed of glazed red brick, in some respects resembling a French château, but, on the whole, perhaps, having more the appearance of one of those model dwellings in which a certain number of working-class families are assured of a certain number of cubic feet of air. It had a huge leaden roof, tapering to a point and topped by a weathervane, and from one side of it, like some unpleasant growth, there protruded a large conservatory. There were also a dome and some minarets.’
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Hotel Impney,
Droitwich,
Worcestershire
March 15. 1927
Dear Bill.
Ripping getting your letter. I didn’t go to Cannes after all, as Ethel, who had been talking of going to Droitwich for years, at last decided to come here. It has been a great success. She has a long way to go yet before she is right, but the treatment is doing her good, I think, and I am feeling fine as a result of the brine swimming-bath and Phospherine!!
I felt so damned run down and stale in London that I thought I would try the stuff. It has picked me up wonderfully, and I am now full of beans. You ought to try it. Very easy to take and just gives the brain that flick which it needs when one is stale.
[…]
That was rather queer about the planchette and Kate Overy.1 Do you remember she and her brother both committed suicide. I knew her fairly well. Have you had any more results?
We have got a new Peke, not as nice as Dinah but quite all right. She had a bad home before she came to us and is very timid except with us.
Must stop now. Will write again soon.
Love to Rene. Yours ever
Plum
1 Wodehouse’s long-standing interest in spiritualism again shows here. A planchette, otherwise known as a ouija board, moves to spell out messages in a séance.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Hotel Impney,
Droitwich,
Worcestershire.
May 5. 1927
Dear Bill.
Returning to London today.
[...]
Isn’t that publicity stuff the devil. You ought to let me write yours and you write mine. I simply can’t put the arty thing they want down on paper. What they want is ‘When you meet Mr Townend, you are struck at once by a look in his eyes – it is the look of a man who has communed with his soul in the teeth of nor’-eastern. The writer not many years ago, on a tramp steamer in the Atlantic – etc.’
It’s hopeless to try to do that sort of thing yourself. If I were you, I’d just give a suitable record of your war-service voyage etc.
(Why do they show the picture here, and at top of page?!)1
Fancy anyone turning down ‘Distinguished Service’. I really believe the S.E.P. have hit it when they say ‘the dialect is too weighty’. You know, in the ‘Disting. Service’ one does rather have to dig the story out of a difficult mass of dialect. Scotch is particularly hard for the ordinary reader. I believe you would do better to go through every story of this kind after it’s written and take out every bit of dialect you can manage without hurting the atmosphere. I know in some of your stories which you’ve shown me you have people saying ‘yuh’ for ‘you’ every time they speak. I don’t think this is necessary. You might say, of course, if this bird says ‘yuh’ here why should he say ‘you’ elsewhere?, but in practice it doesn’t work out that way, as the reader doesn’t notice. Whereas each ‘yuh’ you put in trips up the eye for an instant.
P. G. Wodehouse to William Townend, 5 May 1927.
(Note: just read your letter again, and see that you have arrived at this decision already. Consider all last page washed out!)
I have stopped eating meat, not for hygienic reasons but because I saw a lamb being killed in a field! I vowed I wouldn’t touch another bite and I haven’t. It’s making me quite slim. Its remarkable how little one misses meat. I find so long as I can get a drink at dinner I don’t care what I eat.2
(On the right you have the Impney once more →)
[…]
Well, cheerio. Write to me soon at Norfolk St.
Yours ever
Plum
1 PGW refers to the illustrated writing paper, decorated with pictures of the hotel.
2 Vegetarianism was increasingly popular in the 1920s, but Wodehouse’s own attempt at it was short-lived. Any sort of dietary limitation in his fiction is usually seen as a cruel and unusual form of torture – see, for example, Madeline Bassett’s unsuccessful attempt to convert Gussie Fink-Nottle to vegetarian ideals in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963), which results in his eloping with the cook.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Hunstanton Hall,
Norfolk
July 27. 1927
Dear Bill.
I am here till Friday, then London for a few days, and then back here, I think. Send me your address, if you leave Fairlight as you were going to do.
I’ve just read your story in the Strand. It’s perfectly magnificent, – in its way as good a thing as you have ever done. You have the most extraordinary knack of making your minor characters live – e.g. Rhoda and the kid. But listen, laddie, you were saying you wished you could find a character to write about. Well, why on earth not Captain Crupper? You could make a second Captain Kettle out of him. He is absolutely alive, and I could sit right down and think out half a dozen adventures for him.
[…] Already I can see that he has the finest stamp collection on the Western Ocean and will go anywhere and brave any perils to get a new rare stamp (Chance of working off that old stamp story of yours). Also he would like to be taller and is apt to try patent medicines which he thinks may make him grow. He is very respectable at heart and has a rowdy, drinking brother of whom he is much ashamed but whose life he saves in order to keep his name out of some provincial paper for getting tight and assaulting the Mayor. Gosh! There’s a million stories in him.
Listen, laddie. Have you read ‘Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey’? I have a sort of idea you once wrote a story constructed on those lines – i.e. some perfectly trivial thing which is important to a man and the story is apparently about how he gets it. But in the process of getting it he gets entangled in somebody else’s love story and all sorts of things happen but he pays no attention to them, being wholly concentrated on his small thing. If you never did a yarn on these lines, try one with Cap Crupper. It’s an awfully good formula.
Lord Emsworth is wholly indifferent to the fact that the happiness of two lives is at stake. The important thing to him is that his pig starts feeding again. Can’t you see a Crupper story on these lines?
Anyway, bung-oh! I’m sweating blood over a novel, and have just finished 53,000 of it. Meanwhile, I have to Anglicize Oh, Kay! (our American mus. comedy) by Aug 9, attend rehearsals, adapt a French play, write a new musical comedy and do the rest of this novel – all, as far as I can see, by about Sept 1.
Love to Rene. Any more planchette news.
Yours ever
Plum
Wodehouse recalls that in the period 1926 to 1928 ‘every day seems to have been given to either writing or rehearsing. The protracted tours of the ‘Princess’ days had given place to a more or less standard two weeks try-out. This was a period of intensive effort, of re-writing, or early and late rehearsals […]. The chief intervals of rest were those spent on an ocean liner – though even there you would most likely have found the team, rug-wrapped in adjoining deck-chairs, busy with pad and pencil.’ In late 1927, Wodehouse had rushed over to America with George Grossmith, at Ziegfeld’s request, to work on the lyrics for the new musical, The Three Musketeers, as they travelled. As he describes to Townend, he had also been co-opted into working on a number of other shows, including Ziegfeld’s musical Rosalie – a vehicle for Ziegfeld’s mistress, Marilyn Miller. Although Wodehouse did not like Rosalie, the musical was to continue to haunt him, as he was later commissioned to turn it into a motion picture.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
14 East 60 St.
New York
Nov 28. 1927
[…]
I would have written to you long before this, but ever since I landed Hell’s foundations have been quivering like a jelly. I came over here to do the Musketeers for Ziegfeld, and we finished a rough version on the boat. But like all work that is done quickly it needed a terrible lot of fixing, which was left to me, as Grossmith went home. […] I was working gaily on it when a fuse blew in the Marilyn Miller show […] ever since then have been sweating away [...]. Meanwhile Gilbert Miller wanted a show in a hurry for Irene Bordoni, so I started on that, too, – fixing the Musketeers with my left hand the while. By writing the entire second act in one day I managed to deliver the Gilbert Miller show on time and I have now finished the lyrics and the Musketeers, and all is well till Ziegfeld wants all the lyrics rewritten as I believe he is sure to do.
[…]
Just at present I feel as if I would never get another idea for a story. I suppose I shall eventually. But this theatrical work certainly saps one’s energies.
[…]
New York is noisier than ever. I found my only way of getting any work done was to take a room out at the Great Neck golf club and work there. So I am the only man on record who commutes the wrong way. I catch the twelve o’clock train from New York most days and return after dinner.
[…]
Cheerio
Yours ever
Plum.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Impney
Droitwich
April 30. 1928
Dear Bill.
So sorry not to have written before. I have been much tied up with a very difficult story.1 I wish to goodness you were here to help me with it. It’s one of those maddening yarns where you’ve got beginning and end and only want a bit in middle. The idea is that Lord Emsworth has been landed with a niece at the castle, niece having got engaged to man her family disapproves of. Freddie has seen a film where the same thing happened and the man disguised himself with false whiskers, went and sucked up to the family, and then, when they all loved him, tore off the whiskers and asked for their blessing.
So he sends this young man to stay at Blandings, telling Lord E. he is a pal of his named Robinson. He tells the young man to strain every nerve to ingratiate himself with Lord E.
Now, you see what happens. The young man spends his whole time hanging round Lord E. helping him up out of chairs, asking him questions about the garden etc etc, and it simply maddens Lord E., who feels he has never loathed a young man more.
See the idea? Well, what is bothering me is the getting of the cumulative details which lead up to Lord E. loathing the young man. Can you think of any? What would a young man in that position do, thinking he was making a big hit with the old man and really driving him off his head? It all leads up to my big scene, where Lord E., having at last, as he thinks, eluded the young man, goes and bathes in the lake and is so delighted at being away from him that he starts to sing and kick his feet from sheer joy. Which causes the young man, who is lurking in the bushes, to think he is drowning and dive in and save him.
[…]
I’ve done the first 2500 words, up to the moment of the young man’s arrival at the castle, and it is great stuff. I now have to think of some detailed stuff to fill in before the big scene. Gosh, I wish you were here. It’s lovely down here, but rather lonely all by myself. I am hoping Ethel will be fit enough to come down on Saturday. Then I shall spend another week here before returning. If you are in London at all, do let me know, as I will run up for the night. I have endless things to talk about.
Love to Rene
Yours ever
Plum
1 ‘Company for Gertrude’, The Strand, September 1928, was included in the collection Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935; US title, Blandings Castle).
This is Wodehouse’s earliest surviving letter to Ira Gershwin, by now a hugely successful lyricist, living in New York and married to Leonore (Lee). This letter hints that Wodehouse was to provide the impetus for one of the Gershwins’ next hit shows, a stage version of Show Girl.
TO IRA GERSHWIN
17 Norfolk Street,
Park Lane, W.1.
Nov 8. 1928
Dear Ira.
Your letter with the checks just arrived. Thanks ever so much. I don’t feel as if I had any right to them but they will come in very useful.
I was most awfully sorry to miss you when you were on this side. I only heard quite casually that you were in London two days before you sailed, and those two days I was absolutely tied up. I was frightfully sick about it, as there’s no-one I would leap more nimbly to buy a fat lunch for than you and Lee. I always look back wistfully to those meals of ours at Boston. What a shame it is that there’s always something to worry one on the road and prevent one enjoying the cheery side of a tour. Every time we had dinner together, a voice seemed to be saying in my ear all the while ‘Sa-a-y! How about that Ex-Kings number?’. Still, even taking those blasted ex-kings into account, we did have a great time.
Is there any chance of your coming over to see Funnyface?1 Everything points to a record-breaking success. Not an empty seat on the road – I know, because I was staying near Birmingham and made three unsuccessful tries to get in. […] You really ought to come over and enjoy it.
Have you read Show Girl? Gosh! What a story! I wish I knew McEvoy. He must be a great chap. I never read anything better in my life. If you haven’t read it, get it and read the account of the dress rehearsal at Atlantic City.2
I take it you have another hit with the Gertie Lawrence show. It seems to be gooling them in Phila.3
[…]
I have just signed a contract with the Cosmopolitan for eighteen short stories at $6500 each (including English rights).4 Also a serial for Collier’s for $40,000.5 So I am on velvet as regards my story work, except a ghastly difficulty in getting plots. If you come across anybody with a funny plot for a story, make him sell it to me.
[…]
So long. I’ll send you a cable about Funnyface when it opens. I am told Henson is wonderful and the other comedian, Howard, almost as good.
Love to Lee and George
Yours ever
Plum
1 Funnyface, with George Gershwin’s music and Ira’s lyrics, was a New York hit in 1927, moving to London in 1928 – ‘the best produced in London for many years’ (Gramophone, February 1929). Both casts featured Fred and Adele Astaire.
2 The novel Show Girl, by American writer Joseph Patrick McEvoy, revolves around Dixie Dugan, ‘an aspiring eighteen-year-old singer whose involvements with four suitors […] catapult her, through a madcap sequence of events, to stardom on the Broadway stage’, Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (London: UCP, 2006), p. 451.
3 The ‘Gertie Lawrence show’ was Treasure Girl, a 1928 musical with book by Fred Thompson and Vincent Lawrence, music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and, when it opened, starring Gertrude Lawrence. Treasure Girl had its try-out in Philadelphia, beginning on 15 October 1928, and the musical opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre on 8 November 1928, the date of PGW’s letter.
4 Wodehouse’s eighteen short stories included ‘Jeeves and the Song of Songs’, ‘The Indian Summer of an Uncle’, ‘The Ordeal of Young Tuppy’ and ‘Gala Night’.
5 Summer Lightning.
TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE
Feb 10. 1929
Darling Poots.
Thanks awfully for your letter. It cheered me up. I had been feeling very weak and feeble. Have you ever had flu? It leaves you a terrible wreck. Today for the first time I am feeling pretty good again.
Mummie has gone off for the week-end to Loxwood. I drove down with her yesterday, and came back in the car. What a nice place it is. But what exactly do you feel about old Pop Frankland? I love Ma Zouche, but he seems to me rather a facetious old son of a Bishop, a good deal too full of small jokes. I rather think somebody must have told him as a boy that he was bright.1
[…]
I haven’t read Gen. Crack yet.2 But when I was in bed I read The Ugly Duchess, and liked it very much. I am now heading for Jew Suss.3
Mummie is very busy interviewing an architect who seems about fifteen years old. She is planning all sorts of improvements in the house. She thinks you ought to come back and join in the discussions.
We miss you at every turn. I had to send off the serial without your seeing it. But I can make any changes you want for book form. I am not quite satisfied with it, but I don’t know just what is wrong. It gets by all right on its situations, but I feel it is too hurried and needs some more stuff shoved in. Did Mummie tell you of the bad time we had, when Collier’s threatened to cancel their contract if the story started in the Pall Mall before they could use it? After a lot of anxiety and cabling, everything was settled, but things looked very black for a while.
[…]
Must end now darling, as I am off to dine with Ian.
Your loving
Plummie
P.S. I lost ten pounds in the five days I was in bed! I am quite slim and willowy now. I liked your bed. It was nice being so near to Mummie. We had the doors open occasionally and chatted.
1 Loxwood Hall, a Georgian mansion in West Sussex, which was built for the King family, then passed to the ownership of Baroness Zouche. The 17th Baroness Zouche (1875–1965), Mary Cecil Frankland, is the ‘Ma Zouche’ to whom PGW refers (her husband, Sir Frederick W. F. G. Frankland, would have been the ‘Pop Frankland’ of the letter).
2 General Crack, a 1928 novel by the British author Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long (née Campbell), writing under the pseudonym George R. Preedy.
3 PGW’s reading offers some insight into his political views at the time – he seems to have been focusing on historical fiction with an anti-Nazi bent. The Ugly Duchess and Jew Suss were both written by the German-Jewish novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (pseudonym J. L. Wetcheek; 1884–1958). Feuchtwanger was a fierce critic of the Nazi Party years before it assumed power, and he became a target of persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Jew Suss (Jud Süß) (1925) tells the story of Jewish businessman Joseph Süß Oppenheimer’s rise and fall. Feuchtwanger’s story was cruelly distorted and made into a Nazi propaganda film in 1940.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Hunstanton Hall
Norfolk
May 12. 1929
Dear Bill.
I would have written before but I have had a hell of a week. On Sunday I had to condense Good Morning, Bill into a sketch for Heather Thatcher (She opens at Coliseum on Whit Monday).
[…]
I’m here till after Whitsun. Isn’t it a gorgeous place. I spend all my time in a boat on the moat. This is the place where the scene of Money for Nothing is laid. Things are not so frightfully cheery just at the moment, as host has had a row with butler, who has given notice. The butler is a cheery soul who used to join in the conversation at meals and laugh heartily if one made a joke, but now he hovers like a spectre. Still, I’m hoping peace will be declared soon.
[…]
Cheerio
Yours ever
Plum.
Wodehouse’s father Ernest died on 27 May 1929, leaving Eleanor a widow. There is no reference to his death in any of Wodehouse’s surviving correspondence.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Hunstanton Hall
Norfolk
July 26. 1929
Dear Bill.
[…]
I’ve come to the conclusion that what I want for my next novel is a real Ruby M. Ayres basis – you know, the sort of plot that, treated seriously, would be a mushy love story. Then I can turn it into a comedy.
[…]
I’ll tell you something I have discovered.
[...]
The actual core of a story must be intelligible to the reader. That is to say, there are some things, for instance, which everybody knows are valuable and haven’t merely a value for the occasional crank, – e.g. jewels, pictures, and in this case china. Make the thing stamps and you are in the position of having to convince the reader that it is really valuable. That is why the absolutely primitive things like hunger and death – as in ‘Bolshevik’ – are sure fire. I don’t believe I’m making this a bit clear, but what I mean is that even in my stuff the basis has to be solid. That is why Leave It to Psmith, where there was a necklace at stake, was so much easier to write than Summer Lightning, where I had to try to convince the reader that a man could get all worked up about a pig.
(Re-reading this, it seems to me a bit delirious. But do you see what I mean?)
Must end now. Got a lot of letters to write.
See you soon. Love to Rene.
Yours ever
Plum
In the letter that follows, Wodehouse is sketching a description of a rugby match, through the eyes of Bertie Wooster, which resulted in the following passage in his 1930 story ‘The Ordeal of Young Tuppy’: ‘I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end, and that, in order to squelch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in fourteen days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench.’
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Nov 11. 1929
[…]
I’m longing to come down and see you all, but I’m in the middle of a story, which I must finish before I can make any move. I’ve gone and let myself in for one of those stories which lead up to a big comic scene and now I’m faced with writing the scene and it looks as if it is going to be hard to make it funny. It’s a village Rugger match, where everybody tries to slay everybody else, described by Bertie Wooster who, of course, knows nothing about Rugger. It’s damned hard to describe a game you know backwards through the eyes of somebody who doesn’t know it. However, I suppose it will come. These things always do. But it isn’t easy to get the comic high spots.
[…]
TO PAUL REYNOLDS
Constitutional Club
Northumberland Avenue
Nov 11. 1929
[…]
I’m afraid it’s going to be difficult to work that Townend story on the lines we laid out. I don’t mean the writing of the story, which I’ll start soon, but the payment end of it. My wife is very jumpy about money just now, as she was rather badly caught in that slump, and if I suggest that I give Townend $5000 for helping me with a story she will have a fit. The only plan is for you to detach the money on the side somehow. There is such a lot coming in these days that it should not be hard.
[…]
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Park Lane W.1.
Jan 8. 1930
Dear Bill.
What do you mean? This story is absolutely all right. I think you have got it running nicely now, and I’m sure it will sell. I have made one or two suggestions for cuts. Not important.
[…]
My novel is coming out terrifically so far.1 I am very nearly half way through. The aunt has been eliminated altogether, and so has the hero’s father – after four distinct and separate versions scrapped. I may be able to get in that stuff you sent me, but at present it looks as if detective stuff would suit the story better, as the hero pretends to be a secret service man.
My main trouble is that my heroine refuses to come alive, and, what makes it worse is that the second girl is a pippin. I’m afraid the reader will skip all the stuff dealing with the hero and heroine and concentrate on the scenes between the dude and the second girl.
It looks as if Hollywood was off. I had some nerve-racking sessions with Goldwyn, but he wouldn’t meet my price. The poor chump seemed to think he was doing me a favour offering about half what I get for a serial for doing a job which would be a most ghastly sweat. My one ambition is to get out of ever doing a musical piece again. He said, when he sailed today, that he would think things over and let me know, but I’m hoping I have made the price too stiff for him. I don’t want to go to Hollywood just now a bit. Later on, in the Spring, I should like it. But I feel now that I just want to be left alone with my novel.
Isn’t it great to think that Christmas is over! I am resolved to spend next Christmas on a liner. I came in for the New Year festivities at Hunstanton, and had to wear a white waistcoat every night.
Susan and Winks are both well. I hope the pups are flourishing.
What a ripping atmosphere the suburbs is to write about. I feel very much at home with this novel. I’ve just written the chapter where Lord Hoddesdon goes down to Dulwich in a grey top hat, which excites the citizenry a good deal. I’ve got one good line. He asks a loafer outside the Alleyn’s Head the way to Mulberry Grove. ‘I want to go to Mulberry Grove.’ he says. The man gives him a look and nods curtly. ‘Awright.’ he says. ‘Don’t be long’.
Cheerio
Yours ever
Plum
1 Big Money (1931) was serialised in Collier’s in 1930 and The Strand in 1930–1.