P. G . Wodehouse

1932–1940:

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau

Alpes Maritimes

March 6. 1932

Dear Bill.

The above is our new address. We move in on Thursday. We have taken it for a year. It is a sort of Provencal country-house, with a hundred acres of hillside and large grounds and a huge swimming-pool. It ought to be lovely in summer. Just at the moment it is a bit bleak.

[…]

I have been having rather a rotten time with my work. The American Magazine editor did not like my last two stories, and played me rather a dirty trick by going and seeing Ethel in N.Y. and asking her to make me change them.¹ The result is that she keeps after me about them, and I can’t change the damn things – it means inventing entirely different plots. So whenever I try to start a new story Ethel comes up and asks me what I have done about these two, which puts me right off my stroke.

[…]

You’re absolutely right about Kip. Gosh, what a rotten story that pig story was.² As a matter of fact, Kip was the outstanding case of the Infant Prodigy. His stuff done in the early twenties was great, but he lost that terrific zest and got married and settled down and made his stuff too long and it’s only the remnants of the old fire that make his later work readable.

[…]

I bought Aldous Huxley’s book, but simply can’t read it. Aren’t these stories of the future a bore. The whole point of Huxley is that he can write better about modern life than anybody else, so of course he goes and writes about the future.³

[…]

I’m wondering a little if this move of living in the south of France is going to work. Cannes itself is a most demoralising place. One wants to be at the Casino all the time. But this place we have taken is twenty minutes away in a car, so perhaps one will be out of the temptation zone. But the atmosphere of the Riviera – the moral atmosphere, I mean, – is very unhealthy.

There is one advantage about living here. One can get to England very easily. I doubt if I shall be able to be over much this summer, but I shall certainly take in next year’s footer. We must see the Bedford match together. At Bedford next year, isn’t it? We ought to have a good team.

[…]

We all dined at the Casino last night. I played chemmy after dinner, won four thousand francs, and legged it home with the loot at half past one. Ethel stayed on till 8 a.m. and lost about as much!! I can’t understand women. I mean, their vitality. Ethel is always complaining of not being fit, but she can stay up all night without suffering from it. I collapse hours before she has begun feeling tired.

[…]

Cheerio

Yours ever

Plum

1 The stories that Wodehouse had published in The American in 1932 were the Mulliner stories: ‘The Bishop’s Cat’ (February), ‘The Bishop’s Folly’ (March), ‘Open House’ (April). The editor’s dissatisfaction presumably arose over Wodehouse’s ‘Hollywood’ stories, published in late 1932 and 1933, which included ‘A Cagey Gorilla’ (December), ‘Love Birds’ (January), ‘Love on a Diet’ (February), and ‘A Star Is Born’ (March).

2 Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Beauty Spots’, a story which features an enormous semi-tame white sow, was published in The Strand Magazine in January 1932.

3 Huxley’s Brave New World had been published earlier that year.

The Wodehouses’ companions on the Riviera included the writers Michael Arlen, E. Phillips Oppenheim and H. G. Wells. Wodehouse found Wells ‘an odd bird’.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

[u.d.] 1932

[…]

I like Wells, but the trouble with him is that you can never see him alone. He is accompanied wherever he goes by the woman he’s living with. When they came to lunch, we were all set to listen to his brilliant table talk, and she wouldn’t let him get a word in edgeways, monopolizing the conversation while he sat looking like a crushed rabbit. I did manage to get him away in a corner after lunch long enough for him to tell me that he had an arrangement with her that when he went to London, he went by himself, and he added, his face lighting up, that he was going to London next week. Then she yelled for him, and he trotted off.

By the way, when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.

Her idea, I imagine. I can’t believe Wells would have thought of that himself.¹

[…]

1 H. G. Wells and his lover, Odette Keun, had designed their own villa, Lou Pidou, in Malbosc, on the French Riviera. PGW adapts this real-life anecdote for The Code of the Woosters (1938): Bertie recalls that he ‘once stayed at the residence of a newly married pal of mine, and his bride had had carved in large letters over the fireplace in the drawing-room, where it was impossible to miss it, the legend “Two Lovers Built This Nest”, and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch’s eyes every time he came in and saw it’ (Chapter 3).

In the following letter, Wodehouse shows the genesis of the plot for Thank You, Jeeves, in which Bertie disguises himself as a banjo-playing minstrel [see plate 26]. Wodehouse was writing this novel when ‘blackface’ performers were the height of fashion. Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple were among many actors who performed blacked up during this period.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau

Alpes Maritimes

France

April 1. 1932

Dear Bill.

Thanks for long letter. Good, selling that story. Also thanks for the material for the short story. I haven’t had time to brood on it yet, but I think it will be a great help.

Now, one other S.O.S., if you have time. Don’t bother if you haven’t.

Do you remember, when I was writing my last novel, I asked you for comic stuff about a chap burgling a house, and you came back with a magnificent wad. It didn’t fit in to that novel, but it will come in fine in the one I am writing now, a Jeeves novel where Bertie, who is blacked up like a nigger minstrel, is scouring the countryside for butter to remove his blacking. To get it, he breaks into a house.

Your stuff, you remember, was as follows: – House is owned by animal breeder. Burglar falls foul of monkey in red coat, sixteen Pekes (puppies), an older Peke, and a quantity of white mice. Can you think of anything else?

The house is a country house. It can have anything you like in it, and anything you like can happen to Bertie in it. Incidentally, I wonder if it would be funnier to scrap the animals – or keep only a few of them – and have it [in] a girls’ school? Can you see Bertie chivvied by a Games Mistress? […] Of course, he cannot be arrested. He gets away. But I can see dimly a scene where he hides in a dormitory, the kids welcoming him enthusiastically because he seems to be a nigger minstrel.

NOTE: I see a way to keep your stuff in toto, as well. With Bertie on this occasion is Sir Roderick Glossop, also blacked up. They could break into different houses and compare notes on meeting again. Sir R. could do the animal house stuff.

I really think this would be better, as for the Bertie scene one would be able to have a dialogue scene, – B. under bed, mistress coming in and questioning the girls etc. Will you give it a moment’s thought some time, but don’t let it interfere with your own work. But you have a genius for thinking of comic details, and I feel you might dig up some with luck. Anyway, if you brood, brood on the girls’ school idea.

[…]

The scenery here is marvellous. But I haven’t yet got used to being away from England or America. I can’t see any stuff for stories in this locality, though you would probably get a dozen out of the Cannes crowd.

We have a German butler, an Alsatian footman, a Serbian cook, a French chauffeur, an Italian maid, and an English odd-job man. Good material for the next war. But they all seem to get on well together.

Well, so long.

Yours ever

Plum

TO DENIS MACKAIL

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau

Alpes-Maritimes

April 8. 1932

[…]

I’m so glad you liked Snorky’s story. I thought it was marvellous.¹ It’s such a pity that she writes with such difficulty. Have you ever seen a Snorky MS.? She sits in bed with a very thin-paper pad and one of those pencils that make the faintest possible mark, and in about four hours produces a page. Then she writes another page next day and puts ring round it and a hieroglyphic on page one, – that is to show that part of page two goes on page one, then you read the rest of page one and go back to page two, in the meantime inserting a bit of page four. All in that filthy, obscene handwriting of hers. Still, the results are good. Do egg her on to writing some more. I’m so afraid this beastly dress business of hers will absorb her.

[…]

Yours ever

Plum

1 Leonora had published a short story – ‘Inquest’ – under the pseudonym Loel Yeo, in the April issue of The Strand. It was highly rated and republished in a 1991 Oxford University Press anthology of detective fiction.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau

Alpes-Maritimes

Aug 13. 1932

Dear Bill.

[…]

I am hoping that this rise in the American stock market means the beginning of better times out there. There is no doubt that the magazines are in awful straits in New York […]

Hell’s foundations are quivering a bit at the moment on account of vast sums to be paid out soon for both English and American income tax. The trouble about this income tax business is that if you simply pay you get soaked much too much, while if you engage a hired bravo to fight them on every point and contest every claim, you save a lot in the end but it means that you are suddenly informed that your income tax affairs dating from the year 1896 are now settled and will you kindly forward a cheque for about three thousand quid.

In America it’s even worse. God knows how much I shall be made to pay there. Fortunately, in America you can keep a thing like that dragging on for ever and pay in installments.

It wouldn’t matter, of course, only I can’t sell any of my stocks to pay taxes, as I bought Honble stocks at about 260 and they now stand at around 27!

However, thank Gawd I have now eight short stories in my drawer, besides the serial which Cosmop have started to pay for.¹ So no need to sell Miss Winks.

[…]

We have been seeing a lot of Maurice Chevalier.² Not a bad chap, but rather a ham. I can’t ever really like actors, can you?

We now have Mrs. Barney in our midst! I haven’t seen her, but I am told she haunts low bars in red pyjamas and talks to everybody at the top of her voice. I can’t see what it matters whether she actually slew the young drug fiend or not, – they ought to have hung a woman like that on principle.³

Well, cheerio. Dashed hot here, but I see it is in England, too. I’m writing like blazes. A novel and eight short stories in seven and a half months.

Yours ever

Plum

1 The serial was Thank You, Jeeves, which was not published as a serial until 1934. The short stories include ‘The Amazing Hat Mystery’ (Cosmpolitan, August 1933, and The Strand, June 1934), ‘The Luck of the Stiffhams’ (The Strand, March 1934,
and Cosmopolitan, November 1935) and ‘The Fiery Wooing of Mordred’ (Cosmopolitan, December 1934, and The Strand, February 1935).

2 French actor, singer and vaudeville performer, now best known for his later role in Gigi (1958).

3 Mrs Elvira Dolores Barney, married to an American singer, was accused of murdering her lover, after a cocktail party, in her London flat. In 1932, she was fully acquitted and moved to the Auribeau region of France.

TO DENIS MACKAIL

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau

Alpes-Maritimes

Oct 9. 1932

Dear Denis.

I’m awfully glad you liked Hot Water. Wonderful reviews from everybody except a blighter named Frank Kendon in John O’ London’s Weekly, of all papers, and a moderate stinker from someone called Dilys Powell. I must say I thought the editor of J O’ L might have restrained Frankie, considering that the offices of the paper are on the same floor as the Strand and blood is supposed to be thicker than water.

Priestley, however, was the worst of all, because he analysed me, blast him, and called attention to the thing I try to hush up, – viz. that I have only got one plot and produce it once a year with variations. I wish to goodness novelists wouldn’t review novels.

In re. Ian and F. I ordered it weeks ago, but from sheer kindheartedness, not wishing our local postman to have to lug a parcel up all these hills, I did it through the Cannes Library.¹ [...]

I always envy you being able to hold the reader with real life stuff. I have to have jewels, comic lovers, and about a dozen American crooks before I can move. My great trouble is that I have to have rapid action for serial purposes, and how can one get rapid action without there being something at least half the characters want to steal.

[…]

I have now got out a sequel to Summer Lightning,² but I am very dubious about it. I can’t kid myself that it’s as good as S.L., – principally because the hero and heroine are already engaged, which deprives me of the good old light comedy love scenes. Also, I can’t get a decent part for Galahad, who was the best character in Summer Lightning. Altogether, I am glad that I am so far ahead with my work, because this one will want a lot of thinking over.

According to present plans, Ethel and I dash over to London at the end of the month for a week or two. This, of course, involves leaving Miss Winks here, and I doubt if, when the time comes, we shall be capable of it. What a curse that quarantine law is. It seems so damned silly to extend it to Pekes, who couldn’t possibly give rabies to anyone. Oh, by the way. Charlotte. Masterly. The best Peke in fiction.

After visiting England, there is some idea of a trip to New York. Ethel wants to open Norfolk Street again, and I am all for it. But once more one comes up against the Winks problem. Our latest scheme is to buy her a cat-skin and bring her in disguised as a cat.

[…]

Yours ever

Plum

1 Mackail’s latest novel was Ian and Felicity, or Peninsula Place, which featured a Peke called Charlotte.

2 Heavy Weather (1933).

TO LEONORA WODEHOUSE

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau. AM. France

Nov 6. 1932

Darling Snorky.

You may well imagine (pens bien figurer) the excitement your letter caused in the house. Mummie was having a bath when she got it and rushed out with a towel round her shrieking for me. Winks barked, I shouted, and a scene of indescribable confusion eventuated.

It certainly was wonderful news. You know me on the subject of Peter. Thumbs up, old boy. Not only a sound egg but probably the only sound egg left in this beastly era of young Bloomsbury novelists and Denis Freemans. He really has got everything. It is wonderful that you should be marrying a man who is not only the nicest chap I know but likes exactly the sort of life you like. You’re bound to be happy.

And isn’t it marvellous that you’re so fond of Molly & such a friend of Thelma’s, so that there’s no awkwardness of taking on a strange family.¹ I mean, if you were marrying – say, the Prince of Wales, there would be all that business of getting acquainted with the rest of them. Personally, I think any girl would be wise in marrying Peter simply to get Molly for a mother-in-law.

Peter really is ideal. What a ripper. Have you ever met anyone who didn’t like him? I don’t suppose there is anybody who doesn’t. He’s the most charming, unaffected fellow in the world, and he will make the most wonderful husband.

What fun you’re going to have! You never could have been really happy with a London life. You need the country, and I can’t imagine the country under more perfect conditions. Peter, apart from being Peter, has got such an interesting job. You’ll love it.

The only flaw in the whole thing is that we can’t go yelling the news all over the place. I’m so happy about it that I want to tell everyone I meet. I want to stop French peasants on the road and say ‘Figurez-vous, mon brave, ma fille est fiancée à M. Pierre Cazalet, le jeune homme le plus admirable de l’Angleterre!’

Well, you will have gathered from all this that you have sold the idea to the old folks.

All my love, darling, and tell Peter that he is just as lucky as you are, because there’s no one like my Snorky.

Your

P.S. Winks and Boo must be bridesmaids, carrying your train in their mouths.

1 Leonora’s future mother-in-law, ‘Molly’, was Maud Lucia Cazalet (née Heron-Maxwell).

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Dorchester Hotel

Park Lane

W.1.

Dec. 1. 1932

Dear Bill.

Thanks for your letter. I have been hoping that I could get down to see you, but it has been impossible. Hell’s foundations have been quivering, and I have been tied up all the time with income tax agents.

A very nasty wallop has recently hit the home. Denby wrote to us some months ago from America saying that the income tax authorities there had started to make enquiries and told us that the only thing to do was to put everything in the hands of a firm who would manage things for us. Then we were told that the head of this firm must come over – at our expense! – to confer with our English man.

Well, he arrived […] and the first thing he did was to inform us that we owed the dear old Amer. Govt. $187,000!!!

After this shock he rather gave us to hope that he could reduce this to about $70,000.

Anyway, the devil of it is that we have had to sell at an average of about 30 all those shares we bought for about $300. When the smoke has cleared away, I shall have lost around a hundred and fifty thousand quid since 1929.

The position now seems to be that we shall have a capital of forty thousand quick, plus whatever we can save from the wreck in America. […]

Anyway, we always did have too much money, and a nest egg of about fifty thousand quid in gilt edged securities is as much as anybody could want. […]

[…]

As a matter of fact, in some ways I am not sorry this income tax business has happened. Everything was so easy for me before that I was getting a bit bored. I now can spit on my hands and start sweating again, feeling that it really matters when I make a bit of money.

[…]

Snorky seems to be on velvet. She is very much in love with Peter, and he is one of the few decent chaps left nowadays. The financial end of the thing is a bit muddled […] what Peter actually gets, I don’t know, but he and Snorky will be pretty rich.

Don’t you find, as you get on in life, that the actual things you really want cost about two hundred a year? I have examined my soul, and I find that my needs are a Times Library subscription and tobacco money, plus an extra bit for holidays. If only you were making a couple of thousand a year steady, I shouldn’t have a worry in the world.

[…]

Well cheerio. Don’t refer to any of this in your next letter.

Yours ever

Plum.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau. AM. France

Jan 4. 1933

Dear Bill.

Happy New Year and what not.

I was frightfully sorry not to be able to come down and see you while I was in London. It simply wasn’t possible. Every day we had conferences with our English income tax man, and I couldn’t get away. It ended in our sending him over to America! (Incidentally, he travelled on the Majestic and ran into the worst storm on record, and must be cursing us.)

The final score is as follows:– I have had to sell out at about twenty a million stocks. I bought at 250 and higher. The money has been transferred from America to England and is now in an English bank, where the American authorities can’t touch it. It amounts to about seventy thousand quid. A nice sum in itself, but the American income-tax people at present are demanding about fifty thousand!

My scheme is to imitate dear old France – the only sensible country on earth – and sit tight. If they will settle at a reasonable figure, o.k. If not, not a penny do they touch. A jolly strong position. I am hoping they will settle for about six thousand quid.

Anyway, there it is.

Meanwhile, am getting on splendidly with a new novel. I hope to have it finished before I return to England. If I put off my return till March, that is to say. At present, we plan to come back at end of Jan and open Norfolk St.

I shall be glad to be settled in England again. This country is fine, but we are too far away from everything. And if one lives in Cannes, there is the constant temptation of the Casino. London is the best spot, all round.

How have you been doing? Any luck? I’m afraid it is still a bad time for the magazines. I wish America would buck up and get itself in hand.

[…]

The wedding went off splendidly and is turning out an enormous success. Snorky reports that she has never been happier. They had a three days honeymoon in Paris and then legged it back! It’s wonderful that she loves just the sort of life she will have to lead, – quiet country existence. At present they are at Fairlawne with Mrs. Cazalet, whom Snorky loves, but I’m afraid Fairlawne is too big to be kept up after those death duties.

Did you see the photograph of me in topper? [See plate 28.] V. hot stuff.

[…]

Yours ever

Plum

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Domaine de la Frayère

Auribeau, A.M.

Feb 9. 1933

Dear Bill.

[…]

These last four days have been rather trying. I am alone in the house with the caretaker and his wife, who cooks for me. I take my meals on trays. It’s funny, I used to think it the ideal life. I remember when Ethel left me in America when she went to fetch Snorky and I was at our shack at Bellport without even a servant, doing my own cooking and working on Something New, I had the time of my life. But then I had the village to go to and American papers to get, and that filled the day. Up here I am absolutely isolated.

[…]

I remember Grinlinton at school. He was just before your time. (In case you’ve forgotten, I mean the chap Jimmy George wrote to you about.) He created a terrific sensation by having a fight with Jack Treadgold and beating him up badly. Grinlinton was coming out of Gilkes’ room, where he had just been whacked for smoking, and Jack Treadgold kidded him and G. flew at him and half killed him.¹

Isn’t Life rummy. I mean, the effect of time. Evidently he is now a typical ex-soldier crank. I really believe you and I and Slacker are the only people who have remained like they were at school.² I sometimes feel as if I were a case of infantilism. I seem mentally so exactly as I was then. I haven’t developed mentally at all since my last year at school. All my ideas and ideals are the same. I still think the Bedford match the most important thing in the world.

I want to have a talk with you about money matters when I return. The outlook is dashed good. Even after a disastrous visit to the Casino last Saturday, I am two thousand quid ahead on my year’s gambling, so I’ll be able to ease the situation a bit at Fairlawn. My idea is to guarantee an overdraft, so that you will feel safe. If you don’t need it, then it’s still there. But if you want to take six months off to write a novel, that will be at the back of you. […]

[…]

Cheerio

Yours ever

Plum

P.S. Better not write to me here, unless I let you know that I am staying on. In any case, of course, no mention of money.

1 Jack Treadgold was the son of Wodehouse’s housemaster at Dulwich. Grinlinton, another Dulwich boy, left the school in 1897.

2 McCulloch ‘Slacker’ Christison, a former Dulwich College boy.

TO PAUL REYNOLDS

NA111 25 CABLE VIA FRENCH

GRASSE NFT FEB 15 1933

LCD CARBONATO

SEVENTY THOUSAND WORDS OF NOVEL WRITTEN WILL MAIL DIRECTLY TYPED IDEAL SATURDAY POST SERIAL TELL COSTAIN BEST I HAVE EVER DONE¹

WODEHOUSE.

1 Heavy Weather, Wodehouse’s latest Blandings novel, was published in the Saturday Evening Post from May to July 1933. Thomas B. Costain was the Post’s fiction editor.

On April 11, Reynolds sent the following telegram to Wodehouse: ‘FEDERAL TAX AUDITOR IN ANNUAL AUDIT OUR BOOKS FOUND LARGE PAYMENTS TO YOU AND LATER INFORMED US YOU HAD PAID NO TAXES HERE […] SITUATION VERY SERIOUS ALL FUTURE INCOME IN JEOPARDY’

TO PAUL REYNOLDS

1 Norfolk Street

Park Lane W.1.

April 12. 1933

Dear Reynolds.

Your cable was a bombshell. I simply cannot understand what it means. You speak of the authorities informing you of our non-payment of taxes as if it were a new discovery. Surely the whole point of all this trouble we have been to for the last year or so – sending Wiltshire over to N. Y. etc. – has been due to the fact that we knew we had not paid taxes & the authorities knew we had not paid taxes and that we wanted to pay them & get the thing settled.

[…]

Do write & explain fully.

[…]

With best wishes

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse

TO PAUL REYNOLDS

Constitutional Club

London W.C.

April 18. 1933

Dear Reynolds.

[…]

My wife is frightfully worried about this Income Tax thing, but, personally, I can’t see that it will be so bad, as my Stock Exchange losses were so big that, if – as is presumably the case – I am allowed to deduct these, there should be very little tax to pay. And, anyway, surely I can make an arrangement to work it off by giving the Tax people – say half of whatever I make in America till further notice.

[…]

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse

TO DENIS MACKAIL

Hunstanton Hall

Norfolk *

*(till Sept 30)

Sept 10. 1933

Dear Denis. (Bluff old Squire Mackail, we used to call him, and many is the time I have seen him striding over the fields in his gaiters, chewing a straw.)

Sorry I haven’t written before. You know how it is. One’s Art. I was on the last chapters and couldn’t leave them. Finished yesterday, making three novels and 10 short stories in 18 months, which, as Variety would say, is nice sugar.

[…]

Burglary o.k. Nothing of importance taken. In her childhood Snorky – in her imbecile way – used to collect empty jewel cases. These were stacked in a cupboard and must have made the burglars feel they were on to something hot. […]

They pinched my field glasses and some of my winter underclothing. Also a packet of shares in a company which went bust in 1915.

They seem to have had a good time otherwise, playing the gramophone and so on. The police, presumably, listening outside and occasionally going in to ask them to play ‘Stormy Weather’ again.

We are getting thoroughly fed up with rural life and are counting the days till we can get back to Norfolk St. What a dull place the country is, really. And, oh my God, these county families. They turn up in gangs of twenty for tea, and talk about somebody who was a Wapping and whose mother married a Sigabee.

[…]

See you soon.

[…]

Yours ever

Plum

Leonora’s first child, a daughter, Sheran Cazalet, was born on 31 March 1934.

TO OLIVE GRILLS (NÉE ARMSTRONG)

Carlton Hotel, Cannes

April 26. 1934

Dear Bubbles,

You will think me crazy, addressing the envelope like this, but I’ve clean forgotten your married name! I have it down in a book, & of course I lost the book in my removal to Cannes. Sorry!

The Leonora baby arrived in scenes of terrific excitement. We went down to spend Easter with her, & on Good Friday night there were symptoms which made my wife send for the doctor. He said no prospect of anything happening for two weeks. And at 4.30 that morning it all started. She was hurried in an ambulance from Tonbridge to a London nursing home and the baby was born at 8 a.m. on March 31. I slept through the whole thing & woke to find everyone gone, & then the telephone rang & I was told!

The baby is sweet – A girl.

By the way, did you think your baby was hideous when it was born? Leonora did. She was expecting something with curly golden hair. But she is devoted to it now.

I am so glad it is all over.

I am down here for a few more days, when I go to Paris. If you write to me here, it will be forwarded.

I have to be out of England for a year, owing to some income tax technicality. It’s a great nuisance, but can’t be helped.

I am working hard on a new novel, which is coming out splendidly. But I shall be glad to see my wife & Pekingese again. I join them in Paris.

Best wishes

Yours ever

P. G.

Wodehouse was now working simultaneously on his novel, The Luck of the Bodkins, and, with Guy Bolton and composer Cole Porter, on the book of what was eventually to become the musical Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman. Porter’s extravagant party-going lifestyle meant that he was not the most reliable colleague. Bolton found it impossible to work in Paris, so Le Touquet was chosen as a writing base.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Royal Picardy

Le Touquet-Paris-Plage

Aug 2. 1934

Dear Bill.

Thanks for yours. I’m glad the novel is coming out well. What a sweat all that sea stuff must be.

[…]

I’m having a devil of a time with this musical comedy Guy Bolton and I are writing. I can’t get hold of Guy or the composer, so have been plugging along by myself. Still, Guy says he will be here on Saturday. What has become of the composer, heaven knows. Last heard of at Heidelberg and probably one of the unnamed three hundred shot by Hitler.¹

Bill, do you realize that in 1914 just about a tenth of what has been happening in Austria would have caused a world war? I think the world’s reaction to the Dolfuss [sic] thing is a very healthy sign.² It seems quite evident that nobody wants war nowadays. I would much rather have all this modern unrest than that sort of feeling of swollen simmering of 1914. The great thing nowadays is that you can’t just say to the populace ‘Hoy! The Peruvians have invaded Antigua. Pitch in and attack France.’ They want to be told exactly what is in it for them before they start.

[…]

Yours ever

Plum.

1 The key to this rather morbid aside is the fact that Cole Porter was a known homosexual. Wodehouse had presumably been reading, throughout July 1934, of Hitler’s coup, in which a number of prominent Nazi SA leaders (‘Brownshirts’) were arrested and shot; the SA leaders were accused of insurrection, ‘degrading conduct’ and homosexual practices. Some two hundred or more SA officers in Berlin were also shot as part of Hitler’s ‘clean-up’ campaign. Articles about the ‘abnormal proclivities’ of the victims continued throughout July in the British press (‘Herr Hitler’s Defence’, The Times, 14 July 1934), along with leader articles expressing concerns about the Nazi party’s principles.

2 Austrian statesman and dictator, Engelbert Dollfuss, was assassinated by a group of Austrian Nazis on 25 July 1934.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Royal Picardy Hotel

Le Touquet

Aug 16. 1934.

Dear Bill.

Thanks awfully for your letter.

[…]

Things aren’t so bad as they seem at first sight, always provided that the English income tax people don’t reopen that case which I won before the Commissioners in January. If they do, and win it, I may be soaked for a pretty good sum.

[…]

[…] In a way, the excitement of the thing rather dims the financial loss, though I’m afraid Ethel is worried. I feel as if I were starting a new life. I can now send stuff to America without having to make it exactly like all my other stories. It will be rather fun seeing if I can build up another name.¹

Of course, we have not yet gone into all the possible ways of beating the game. […]

I feel very vicious against them, as they have behaved like bandits. They fined me 25% for not making a return and on top of that 75% for making a false return. Now, how anyone can make a false return without making a return at all is a thing that seems to me to need explaining.

[…]

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to select a pseudonym. Now that I may have to, I can think of no name that sounds like anything. My mind dwells on things like Eustace Trevelyan (Old Brook has just written a story under the name of Batt Rimes!!). I think the thing is to combine two actual names – such as Reeves Grimsdick.

A slight contretemps is caused by the fact that I am now writing with Guy Bolton a musical comedy for New York which ought to be the biggest thing of the season, as it will be the only one with three cast-iron stars and Cole Porter is doing the music. It seems very moot whether I shall be able to cash in on this. However, we shall see.

[…]

Cheerio. Write soon.

Yours ever.

Plum

1 To avoid the consequences of a tax lien, Wodehouse very briefly experimented with the practice of submitting a story under a pseudonym.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

Royal Picardy

Le Touquet

Paris-Plage

Aug 24. 1934

Darling Snorky.

We are simply enraptured by the photographs of Sheran. I never saw such a beautiful baby. What a change from the old Chinese gangster who leered at us on your bed in April, fingering her gat under the swaddling clothes. You must have her photographed every year.

We dined the other night with Mrs Somerset Maugham.¹ Diana Churchill was there and talked a lot about you. She is an awfully nice girl.²

[…]

My relations with U.S. Government continue distant. I am now rather in the stage of hitching my shoulder petulantly and saying nasty things about them in a falsetto voice.

Washburn went to Washington the day before yesterday with our latest offer, and Mummie and I watched the clock all day, calculating how soon we could get a cable.

[…]

Eventually Washburn’s cable came […] and read ‘Offer submitted. Decision within a month’. So there we are!

[…]

Winky and Boo have just been washed, preparatory to being exhibited with Mummie in the ‘Madame de 1934 et son chien’ event in the local dog show. As far as I can gather, this is decided partly by how the Madame is dressed and partly by personal influence with the judges. We have one of them in our pocket and are full of confidence.

[…]

The other night I went to the Casino, had a shot at Roulette, won three mille in two minutes and came home. At seven a.m. Winky was restless, so I took her out, and we had been out about ten minutes when Mummie arrived, having been at the Casino all night and lost three mille. So we took the dogs for a walk and went in and had breakfast.

Love to all

Plummie.

1 Syrie and Somerset Maugham had divorced in 1928. Syrie Maugham was a renowned interior decorator and her Le Touquet salon, furnished entirely in shades of beige, was widely admired.

2 Diana, the eldest daughter of the MP, and later Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Nov 12. 1934

Darling Snorky.

Just been reading your letter to Mummie. How splendid that you have taken up riding and enjoy it so much. Rather, as one might say, you than me, but I’m awfully glad you’re doing it.

BOOKS. Yes, do send me the two Claudius books.¹ I’d love to have them.

I had a letter from Denis Mackail, laughing heartily at me for saying I liked Goodbye, Mr Chips. I still stick to it that it’s a jolly good book. I was on the eve of getting the author’s last one, Lost Horizon, but mercifully found out in time it was a tender, wistful story of Thibet. Gosh darn these writers who leap from one spot to another.²

Have you read Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust? Excellent in spots, but he ought to have you to read over his stuff before he publishes it. You would have told him (a) that he couldn’t have a sort of Mr Mulliner farce chapter about the man going to Brighton if he wanted the story to be taken seriously and (b) for goodness sake to keep away from Brazil.

What a snare this travelling business is to the young writer. He goes to some blasted jungle or other and imagines that everybody will be interested in it.

Also that Dickens stuff. Marvellous in a short story, but too much dragged in.

[…]

Our N.Y. lawyer cabled us that he was having a conference with the income tax people last Saturday, but we have heard nothing since.

[…]

Love to all

Your

Plummie.

1 Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina were both published in 1934.

2 Good-bye, Mr Chips, by James Hilton, was serialised in The Atlantic.

TO A. P. WATT

Low Wood

Le Touquet

France

March 20. 1935

Dear Mr Watt.

A letter from Miss Ella King-Hall, my literary agent in England, informs me that owing to ill health she is closing her agency on April the 5th. And I am wondering if you would care to take on my work.

There are one or two complications. The first is that I know your commission is 10% and I would not want to pay more than 5%.

[…]

My reason for paying only 5% is that there is so little work involved in handling my stuff.

[…]

I am particularly anxious to centralize all my work in England in your hands, as I shall be doing a good deal of theatrical work and movie work from now on, and I should like a big organization like yours behind me. I see that Cochran is to produce the American musical comedy, Anything Goes, after all, and I am part author of this.

[…]

Well, will you think it over and let me know?

[…]

With best wishes

Yours sincerely

P. G. Wodehouse

P.S. While I was writing this, a telegram arrived from Miss King-Hall saying that Westbrook was willing to go on handling my work. […]

Now, this is a thing I am particularly anxious to avoid. […] A literary agent’s is a highly specialized job, and can’t be done by an amateur. Also, strictly between ourselves, the brains of the firm was always Mrs Westbrook. […]

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

March 28. 1935

Dear Bill.

I’m so glad the cutting of Voyage Without End has come out so well. […] I forgot to tell you. Raymond Needham says I ought not to come over to England for another two months. This case is pending with the income tax people and he thinks he would have a much better chance of getting them to shelve it if he could prove that I wasn’t in the country and hadn’t been for more than a year and was, so to speak, off the map.

It’s a damned disappointment, as I was hoping to see you in a week or so. But there’s over twelve thousand quid at stake, so I mustn’t run any risks. […]

[…]

I have been writing a farce, and you’ve no idea what a sweat it is doing it by oneself.¹ When I work with Guy Bolton it is all so easy […]

Playwrighting is like what Kipling says in The Light That Failed about line-work for an artist. You are up against it and can’t fake.

[…]

Another bit of news is that owing to ill health Ella King-Hall has closed down the agency, and I have now gone to Watt. […] I must say I’m glad in a way. I can’t help feeling that a big organization like Watt must increase one’s earnings. […]

Listen, laddie, do you realize what a much more wholesome frame of mind the world is in now. Can you imagine a situation like this German one not leading to war twenty years ago? Things seem to me to look promising. I don’t believe you could get this country into a war for another thirty years

[…]

Cheerio. Love to Rene and Bim.

Yours ever

Plum

1 The Inside Stand, Wodehouse’s adaptation of his own novel, Hot Water.

Wodehouse’s correspondence with S. C. ‘Billy’ Griffith CBE., the former Alleynian, began in the 1920s. Griffith was an outstanding cricketer who joined Dulwich Prep School in 1922, long after Wodehouse had left, and went up to Cambridge in 1933. Letters were exchanged between the pair, based on their interest in sport and in Dulwich. At this point, Wodehouse congratulates Griffith for receiving his Cambridge Blue.

TO S. C. ‘BILLY’ GRIFFITH

Shipbourne Grange

Tonbridge

Kent

May 17. 1935

Dear Billy.

I have just read the great news in the Evening Standard. I can’t tell you how bucked I am. You had made yourself a certainty, of course, but it’s wonderful to get your Blue in the middle of May. You must be the only case on record of a man doing it with snowstorms going on all over England!

I wish I could be at Cambridge tonight to celebrate your Blue and Hugh’s great century.¹

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse

1 Hugh Bartlett, another talented cricketer and former Alleynian, who went on to play for Surrey and Sussex.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

Low Wood

Le Touquet

June 4. 1935

Darling Snorky.

[…]

Sensational news. Yesterday we bought Low Wood!!! We have been changing our minds every day since we got back, and as late as yesterday morning had made an offer for another house. But it was refused, and then Mummie suddenly switched back to Low Wood.

I must say I am delighted. I have grown very fond of the house, and with the alterations we are going to make it will be fine [see plate 29]. We came to the conclusion that we wanted to live in Le Touquet and that Low Wood was the best bet on account of the position.

[…]

Armine and I went down to Bexhill and saw Mother.¹ She seemed a bit frail, but not too bad. I say, what an enormous size Armine is. I made him walk from the Dorchester to Victoria, and three times en route he pleaded for a cab. And when we got to Bexhill he had a fat lunch at half-past one, a big tea with some friends of his at Cooden at three-thirty, and another tea at Mother’s at four-fifteen. He told me he thought he had put on a little weight in front – did I notice it? I said I thought he had, a little.

Must stop now. Lunch.

So long. Love to all.

Your

Plummie.

1 Armine had recently retired from his role as Professor of English at the Deccan College in India. He later returned to Poona, where he acted as a tutor to the young Prince of Sangli.

TO A. P. WATT

Low Wood

Le Touquet

June 21. 1935

Dear Mr Watt.

I have so much work on hand that will have to come ahead of Daily Mail articles that I would prefer not to tie myself down to a contract at present. […]

[…]

Newspaper articles are always a difficult proposition. What editors want is ‘What are you going to laugh at this Whitsun?’ or ‘Should the Modern Girl use lipstick?’, whereas my ideals are very soaring and I won’t write that [sic] isn’t good enough to appear simultaneously in the New Yorker. […]

I have an idea for a thoughtful thesis on the subject of Literary Criticism entitled ‘Back To Whiskers’ – my argument being that the soppiness and over-enthusiasm of modern literary criticism is due to the fact that critics are now clean shaven instead of wearing full-size whiskers, as in the brave old days when authors and critics used to come to blows. What we need is a return to the old foliage and acid reviews. […]

Yours sincerely,

P. G. Wodehouse

TO LEONORA CAZALET

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

Sept 8. 1935

Darling Snorky.

Just caught boat, and found that about two thousand of the proletariat had decided to catch it, too. […]

I loved my visit, as always, and wish I could have stayed longer. (‘The hell you do’, you mutter. ‘It seemed quite long enough to me.’) I carried away with me sentiments of the liveliest gratitude for your refined hosp.

I arrived back to find my Daily Mail article the talk of Le Touquet. Everybody seems to think it is my masterpiece! There’s one thing about writing for the D.M. – you do get read.

Mummie is very fit and longing to see Sheran.

[…]

Bill and Rene sent their love. Poor little Bim wasn’t well. V. pathetic. Winks and Boo, on the other hand, bursting with health. I got a great reception.

All my love, darling. Love to the Puss and Nanny etc.

Your

Plummie

TO A. P. WATT

September 15. 1935

[…]

If Hunt can give me a reasonable time for the Haggis article I think I could do it. My difficulty is that I know nothing about Haggis and must have some facts in order to be funny about it. Do you know of a good Haggis reference book?

[…]

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Jan 20. 1936

Dear Bill.

Just off to Carlton Hotel, St Moritz, where I expect to stay for a few weeks. I don’t know how I shall like it. I’ve always avoided Switzerland up to now, but I hear there is wonderful sunshine there and it is a very good place for getting material for my sort of story.

Doesn’t Kipling’s death give you a sort of stunned feeling?¹ He seems to leave such a gap. I didn’t feel the same about Doyle or Bennett or Galsworthy. I suppose it is because he is so associated with one’s boyhood. It has made me feel much older all of a sudden.

I went to Snorky’s for Christmas, but hadn’t a chance of getting over to see you. It was one of those visits where you have to be around all the time. […] Armine and Co. have left Bexhill for Cheltenham. Much better for them all, I think. They have managed to sell the house.

[…]

Low Wood is in a hideous mess now, but will emerge as a very nice house when it is finished. […]

Love to R and B. Write to me at St Moritz.

Yours ever

Plum.

1 Kipling died of a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

Feb 26. 1936

Darling Snorky,

Your fat letter to Mummie arrived by this afternoon’s post. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. Jolly sensible taking that three weeks in bed. Nothing like it.

Stephanie. Oke with me, though Mummie says it reminds her of the Rector of Stiffkey.¹ I once knew a girl named Stephanie Bell. I like the name. The thing that is breaking me all up is this idea of Edward if offspring is a son. I suppose Mollie is all for it, but I can’t see where it comes in. Pete can’t have been old enough to have known Edward Cazalet very well, so I don’t see why he and I – two of the best fellows in the world – should be exposed to the risk of being related to someone who, unless steps are taken through the proper channels, will be called Teddy. Why not William, after Mr Cazalet? Then we should have a good honest Bill, which would be great.

Alternatives

(a) ‘I see old Bill Cazalet, the Rugger blue, won the Grand National yesterday!’

(b) ‘They tell me Teddy Cazalet is on the Riviera with Dennis Freeman, getting brown absolutely all over.’

No comparison.

[…]

Your loving

Plummy

P.S. Teddy would take to ski-ing like a bird.

1 Harold Francis Davidson (1875–1937), Rector of Stiffkey in Norfolk, was a press sensation in the early thirties. Known as ‘the Prostitutes’ Padre’ for his work ministering to streetwalkers, he was banished from the Church in 1932, accused of immoral practices.

TO ARMINE WODEHOUSE

March 17. 1936

Dear Armine.

I was awfully glad to hear from you. I hope you are feeling fitter now.

[…]

I worked for six weeks solid on a novel after coming back from Switzerland and ran over to Snorky’s last week for a few days. I hadn’t a chance of getting down to see you, as my time was so occupied with going to London on business. Snorky was looking extraordinarily well, I thought, considering that the event is only a few weeks off. She takes great care of herself.

I feel in tremendous form with the typewriter just now. My holiday did me good. I don’t seem to get ideas quite as readily as I should like, but the ones I do get are good, and the novel is coming out well. I don’t know if you saw it in Pearson’s Magazine as a short serial, – about 20,000 words? It is called Laughing Gas and the central idea is a shameless crib of Vice Versa.¹ My hero goes to Hollywood and he and a child star have teeth out under gas simultaneously and their souls get into the wrong bodies. Since writing it in short form I have had a lot of further ideas, so I am now making it a full length novel. I’m afraid those who remember Vice Versa may raise their eyebrows a bit, but I don’t believe the reading public remembers the book at all and the theme may seem quite new. Anyway, the setting and plot are original.

We didn’t like Switzerland at all, but I am glad I went, as it gives me a new atmosphere. I expect I shall get some stories out of it later on.

We would love to have you and Nella over here, but I fear it will be a long time before we can move into the renovated Low Wood. The Norfolk Street house won’t be free till next February, so that we can’t get our furniture till then. I suppose next May is about the time when we shall settle in. You must come then. I think you would like Le Touquet. I like it far better than England to live in, though of course there are a lot of things in England that I miss. Still, I can always get over for any cricket match I want to see.

Peter took me down to Eton on Sunday, and I lunched at one of the houses. I am rather dubious about Eton. I admire it in a great many ways, but Etonians as a class always strike me as a bit weedy. Perhaps it is those awful clothes they wear.

I think that idea of a family reunion is an excellent one. I am all for it and will turn up when you say the word. Pev seems likely to be the difficulty. He apparently goes nowhere now and sees nobody. Still, I imagine he would roll up for a thing of that sort. We must certainly go and have a look at Ham Hill. Also Stableford, which is an easy motor ride.²

I found Ethel much better when I got back last night. Before I left, she had been a bit down and had been having a lot of pain, but most of it seems to have gone, thank goodness. This is a bad place for her in the winter, but now Spring seems on the way. Today was simply gorgeous, – as good as Cannes.

I must stop now, as I have rather a lot of letters to write. If I can get over to London fairly soon I’ll let you know, and you might come up for the night.

Love to all

Yours ever

Plum

1 Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, an 1882 novel by F. Anstey about a father–son body swap caused by an Indian magic stone.

2 ‘For two weeks every summer the three Wodehouse boys would go to stay at Grandmother Wodehouse’s home’, Ham Hill in Powick, Worcestershire, which overlooked the river Teme. For PGW, ‘it was always the great event of the year’ (Jasen, p. 7). The Wodehouse family lived in Stableford, Shropshire, during PGW’s last years at Dulwich.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

April 2. 1936

Dear Bill.

I’m sorry you are going through a mistrustful phase in your book, but I am pretty certain it is only because you have been working so hard at it. I have had just the same experience with the one I am doing, – a novel length version of a short serial which came out in Pearson’s last year – did you see it – about the man whose soul goes into the body of a child film star. A few days ago, it all seemed absolutely idiotic, but it looks quite all right again now.¹

[…]

Listen. Extract from a book by Arnold Bennett called How to Become an Author.

‘He should take care to produce books at regular short intervals. He may continue this process for years without any really striking result in fame or money, and he may pessimistically imagine that his prolonged labours are fruitless. And then newspapers will begin to refer to him as a known author, as an author the mention of whose name is sufficient to recall his productions, and he will discover that all the while the building of his reputation has been going on like a coral reef.

Even mediocre talent, when combined with fixity of purpose and regular industry, will infallibly result in a gratifying success.

But it must never be forgotten that while the reputation is being formed, the excellent and amiable public needs continuous diplomatic treatment. It must not be permitted to ignore his existence. At least once a year, and oftener if possible, a good solid well made book should be flung into the libraries.’

He also advises against frittering away energy on a lot of small things, – e.g. short stories.

That seems to me to sum up your position, except that you certainly can’t call yours a ‘mediocre talent’. Really good stuff like yours is bound to succeed if you keep turning it out. I think this plan of yours of doing a lot of novels is the right one. What you’ve got to remember is that, in a sense, you really started with Voyage Without End, because the other books were buried.

I believe you’re going to see a big improvement when Chapman and Hall have published three or four.

Arnold Bennett’s own case was just the same. His early books didn’t sell. But gradually one began to see his name about.

[…]

I’m awfully sorry poor old Bim is bad again. What a tragedy. I do hope she gets all right.

More later. Love to Rene.

Yours ever

Plum

1 Laughing Gas (1936).

TO LEONORA CAZALET

Low Wood

Le Touquet

April 16. 1936

My darling angel Snorky,

This is just a line to tell you how much I love you and how much I am thinking of you. I am praying that you won’t have too bad a time, because you’re very precious to me.

I am bucking myself up by thinking of the lovely summer you will have when it’s all over. What a fuss we shall make of you.

I shall come over directly you are able to see people. What a long time ago it seems that I saw you with Sheran at the nursing home and you said she was like a Chinese gangster! And do you remember Lord Somebody’s baby being brought in from next door, and we agreed that Sheran looked prettier than that, anyway.

I can’t bear the thought of you being in pain. I do hope things will be as easy as last time. Thank God there won’t be that awful rush and confusion. I’m glad Mummie will be with you.

It’s a lovely sunshiny day, and I shall stroll about with the dogs and think of you. And tonight I shall take out all your old letters and read them.

I hope this reaches you before the great day. I want you to know how much I admire you for the way you have gone through all this beastly time of waiting. Everybody thinks you have been wonderful.

Bless you, darling,

Your

Plummie

Leonora gave birth to a son in April. ‘Everybody is very pleased about it’, Wodehouse wrote. ‘She had hardly any trouble about it. […] I dashed over and saw her, and she was looking splendid.’ Despite Wodehouse’s protestations and prognostications, the child was named Edward Stephen.

In June 1936, Wodehouse received a letter offering him ‘the Mark Twain Medal’, in recognition of his ‘outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Golf Hotel

Le Touquet

July 23. 1936

Dear Bill.

I’ve just returned from a hurried visit to England, but simply couldn’t get a moment to get in touch with you. I had a phone call from Ethel saying that Guy Bolton had been rushed into hospital at Worthing with acute appendicitis and nearly died, and I had to spend my time travelling up and down. He seems to be all right now, thank goodness, but it was a near thing.

[…]

Enclosed will give you a laugh. Me and Mussolini!¹

[…]

Yours ever

Plum

1 The list enclosed, noting previous winners, included Mussolini.

TO NELLA WODEHOUSE

The Beverly Wilshire

Beverly Hills, California

Oct 10. 1936

My dear Nella.

Your cable came as a stunning blow to us, and I really hardly know how to write. I can only say how deeply Ethel and I are feeling for you and wishing that we could be with you. I hate to think what you must be going through.

I feel quite humbled by the shock of it. I always felt so near to poor Armine and looked up to him so enormously. He was a man whom everybody loved, and he and I had always seemed so particularly close to one another. Ours was one of those attachments which are not dependent on close contact. I always felt that we could pick up the thread even after not seeing each other for years.

It is awful to think that he has gone. He will leave a gap in my life which can never be filled.

I shall always treasure the letter which I got from him when I sailed. (When your cable arrived, I was just about to write in answer to it, telling him how much I appreciated all he had said and how absolutely right he was in his criticisms of my work.)

It must be a consolation for you at this awful time to feel how tremendously happy you made him. I can’t imagine a more ideal marriage than yours. You have been wonderful.

I feel so far away here, and I am worrying whether you are all right. If there is anything I can do, will you let me know.

Bless you

Yours

Plum

The Wodehouses’ return to Hollywood in October 1936 offered Ethel the chance to socialise on a grand scale. ‘Parties were very easy to do’, she recalled, ‘if you had the money. We did, because Plum was getting $2,500 a week. I would go down to the supermarkets and buy a big saddle of lamb, vegetables, turkey, ham and chicken livers. We would have seven cases of champagne. Our butler Arthur would handle the floral arrangements. […] Then we hired a caterer and barman.’ Wodehouse was less comfortable in the celebrity set, but enjoyed spotting the movie stars in town. ‘I saw Clark Gable the other day,’ he wrote to Bill Townend, ‘also Fred Astaire, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and looking about a hundred.’ Wodehouse was working hard, and still found Hollywood difficult to like.‘[E]verything’, he reflected, ‘seems flat.’

TO LEONORA CAZALET

1315 Angelo Drive

Beverly Hills,

California

Dec 28. 1936

Darling Snorky.

I had just settled down to work off my correspondence – owing to my having ignored all letters for about a month in order to concentrate on work, I have quite thirty letters to write – when Mummie brought me your letter, so the rest of them will have to wait.

[…]

Yes, I am back on Rosalie again, just as in the dear old days, but this time, thank goodness, it really is a solid proposition. […] [T]hey are planning it for their big musical of 1937 and if I can pose as the saviour of the thing – the man who converted a half-million dollar loss into a five-million profit I shall be in very strong at the studio.

[…]

Thanks for the page from Express about the recent Edward.¹ Over here, the Hearst papers, of course, took a very yelling attitude about the thing, trying to stir up feeling on the ground that wasn’t a pure, sweet American girl a fitting mate for the highest in the land: but the others were all right, and Mencken wrote a very good article, putting the thing very sanely and showing what an ass Edward was.

A significant thing, I thought, was that when I went to the pictures the other night and Mrs Simpson came on the news reel there wasn’t a sound. Nobody clapped. It shows once more how futile the Hearst papers are when it comes to influencing the public. He roasted Roosevelt day after day for months, and look what he done! What people buy the Hearst papers for is the comic strips.

I agree with you that England has come darned well out of this. By God, sir, I’m proud of the boys. Can you imagine any other country in which a king’s abdication would have been received with a sort of universal ‘Oh, yes?’ and just left at that?

[…]

Must stop now. Love to you all.

Your

Plummy

1 In December 1936, Edward VIII, who had been King for less than a year, announced his intention to marry an American socialite and divorcée, Mrs Wallis Simpson. This created a constitutional crisis, resulting in his abdication on 10 December.

By April, Wodehouse’s time with MGM was drawing to a close. The Hollywood studio RKO had bought the rights to Wodehouse’s 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress, and contracted Wodehouse to work on the script. The film would feature Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

1315 Angelo Drive

Beverly Hills

Cal.

April 10. 1937

Darling Snorky.

Your marvellous letter arrived this morning. The best I have ever had from you. […]

The home is passing through a bad time just now. Poor Mummie is in great trouble. She had her teeth X-rayed the other day, and it appeared that they were in terrible condition. Last Tuesday she had gas and had about four taken out, on Thursday four more, and now she has gone to the dentist to have another lot out. Also one of the bones in her face had got poisoned and had to be curetted. It has been unbelievably ghastly for her, but she has been heroic over it, and what we are all hoping is that the cause of her arthritis has at last been discovered and that she will now get all right.

Apart from the pain, it means that she will have to lie low for two or three months, till the new set can be put in, and see nobody. Fortunately, she has never been keen on parties and dinners, so maybe it won’t be so bad. We shall be able to go to the movies. It will be the same sort of hermit life which we led in Le Touquet during the winter, and we were both very happy then.

The only trouble about that is that we haven’t the walks we had there. Our favourite walk on the mountain is now barred, owing to rattlesnakes. This place is rather like La Frayère, – when you go out, you have to go either up a hill or down one, so that you can’t stroll as we used to do on the golf links at Le T.

I must say the thought of another six months out here appals me a bit. It puzzles me why I should have liked it so much last time and dislike it so much now. It may be the weather. Just after I started swimming again, it has suddenly got icy. And, of course, I am having one of my in-between books times. I finished the novel I had been working on since last May, and haven’t managed to get another plot going yet. I am beginning to get glimmerings of one now, so I expect I shall be all right soon.

I think you’re quite right about only coming out here for three or four months. The place isn’t really fit for human habitation after that.

Helen Wills is here now, having tests at Fox. What on earth they think she can do on the screen, I can’t imagine. I gave her lunch yesterday. I have an idea she has more or less split up with Pop Moody.¹ At least, she never mentioned him, and she seems to spend all her time away from him.

Your letter made me very homesick! What an ideal life you lead. We were thrilled by your hunting feats. […]

I do hope that idea of going to live at Fairlawne comes off. It would be perfect. I don’t see how you’re going to be able to put Anthony² and me up at the Grange much longer, with She-She wanting a room of her own soon and Edward throwing his weight about. My objective is a cosy suite at Fairlawne, with use of swimming-bath.

[…]

The situation as regards the movies is as follows: – It seems to be pretty certain that I shall do a four weeks job on Damsel in Distress for Fred Astaire, unless some other job comes up before that. There is talk of my doing Robin Hood for Warner’s and also a new Grace Moore picture for Columbia. Meanwhile, my new novel is being shown round the studios, and that may click. I think the obstacle in the way of my getting work is the fact that my agent is demanding $2000 a week, while there seems to be a strong feeling that I’m damned lucky if I get $1750. Personally, I think I’m worth about $500. When you reflect that horny-handed directors, with dozens of successes behind them, are only getting $1500, what have I done to deserve $2000? On the other hand, I’m such a good chap that I feel my yessing alone is worth a good stiff salary.³

[…]

1 Helen Wills Moody, American tennis player, eight times Wimbledon champion. Wills was the former girlfriend of Victor Cazalet, Leonora’s brother-in-law. She had since married Frederick Moody.

2 Anthony Mildmay, 2nd Baron Mildmay of Flete, a gifted amateur steeplechase jockey.

3 PGW refers to his satirical short story about Hollywood, ‘The Nodder’.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

1315 Angelo Drive

Beverly Hills

California

July 13. 1937

Darling Snorky.

Your fat letter arrived this morning and cheered me up a lot at a time of depression, owing to the fact that poor Mummie is having a very bad time. She was taken off to the hospital last Saturday.

It started on Friday night. All through Friday she had been wonderfully well. At five in the evening she had a rather heavy massage, and then went and did a lot of exercises, so that she tired herself out. I was in my room, reading with the communicating door open, and she called out to me that she had overtired herself. I was feeling rather tired myself after a heavy day’s work, so I said that this was obviously the moment for us to split half a bottle of champagne. So I brought it up to her, ice cold, and we drank it, and in about half an hour she suddenly became terribly sick and went on being sick all through the night. In the morning the doctor came and she was taken off to the hospital – which isn’t quite what it sounds but is more like going to a nursing home. (They don’t have nursing homes here, but you take a private room at a hospital.)

On Sunday and yesterday she was very bad, but I went to see her this morning and found her a lot better, though terribly weak and having pain. The doctor was there, and said he was delighted with her progress. I don’t understand the first thing about ‘blood count’, but apparently it ought to be around 8000, and that was what hers is today – after being 18,000 a couple of days ago.

It seems that the trouble is in her kidneys principally. But there is also the possibility that she has eaten vegetables which have been sprayed by the gardeners with arsenic. Do you remember how bad you were after that grape diet, probably through grapes that had arsenic on them. What amazes me is the calmness with which people here accept the idea that these Filipino market-gardeners spray the vegetables with too much arsenic to kill the insects. According to one man, there are a thousand people at the moment down with this poisoning around here, and yet nobody seems to consider making any protest.

The unfortunate thing is that Mummie’s imagination is always so active, and there is no doubt that her symptoms are very like those of Jean Harlow.¹ Also, it didn’t help when the news reached her that George Gershwin had just died in the same hospital.

Still, she did seem ever so much better today. She was very weak, but she seemed to be improving. The nausea has stopped. The doctor absolutely assured me that her recovery was now only a matter of days. Yesterday I was horribly anxious, but tonight I feel everything is going to be all right.

That was a shocking tragedy about Gershwin, wasn’t it. The gruesome thing about it is that everybody treated the thing so lightly. I mean, at first. We had asked him to our party, and he couldn’t come and Mrs Ira Gershwin said that it was ‘simply something psychological’ – in other words, rather suggesting that he had had a fit of temperament because Sam Goldwyn didn’t like a couple of his songs. On the night of our party, too, Mrs Edward G. Robinson (the wife of the film star)² invited us to a party she was giving for George Gershwin on July 14. I said we should love to come, but wasn’t he supposed to be ill? She smiled in a sort of indulgent, knowing way and said ‘Oh, he’s all right. He’ll be there’, – again suggesting that he was doing a sort of prima donna act. Then last Sunday in the paper was the news that he had been operated on for a tumor in the brain, and a few hours later he was dead.³

Well, let’s get on to something more cheerful!

Your account of Ascot made me very homesick. I do hope I don’t get entangled into staying out here longer than my one year. I rather shudder when my agent talks to me about what he is going to do, once the Damsel in Distress is produced and I get a big screen credit. If I do make a hit with it and get offers at enormous salary, I shall do like Sherriff and come over here for visits of no longer than three months. I wouldn’t take on another salaried job like the last one for anything.

I must say it is altogether different working at R.K.O. on a picture based on my own novel from being on salary at M-G-M and sweating away at Rosalie! I like my boss, Pandro Berman, very much. He is the first really intelligent man I have come across here – bar Thalberg, whom he rather resembles. Everything is made very pleasant for me, and I like the man I am working with – a chap named Pagano. The way we work is, we map out a sequence together, then I go home and write the dialogue, merely indicating business, and he takes what I have done and puts it into screen play shape. Thus relieving me of all that ‘truck shot’ ‘wipe dissolve’ stuff!

It is also pleasant to be working on something that you know is a real live proposition and not something that may be produced or may be put away in a drawer for years! As far as I can gather, we are going to start shooting this picture in about a week. We have actually completed about sixty pages out of probably a hundred and fifty, but this isn’t as bad as it sounds, because we can write twenty pages while they are shooting two. There is a whole sequence laid in London which will take them at least ten days to shoot, I imagine, and they can be getting on with that while we are finishing the script.

Helen Wills is getting a divorce !! I thought she would.

Did Mummie tell you that I went on the air with Hedda Hopper the other day.⁴ She does a weekly talk about Hollywood, and she asked if she could interview me. I wrote a comic interview, full of good lines, (which I gave mostly to her – nothing small about me), and it was a great success, – in spite of the fact that she killed my gags by laughing in front of each one and putting ‘Well’ at the head of each line. (I find I am a real ham at heart. I go about now with my hat on the side of my head, saying ‘Say, lissen, if that dame hadn’t of stepped on my laffs, I’d have had ’em rolling in the aisles’.)

My God! What a hell the home must be, with old Pete boiling pig’s urine in the study! When I get back, you and I must get together and dope out a plot, using all Pete’s stuff. Chemistry in the study is exactly the sort of thing Lord Emsworth would do.

[…] The Henry Daniels [sic] had asked us to dine the night Mummie was taken ill.⁵ His wife smokes cigars, – the only woman I have seen do it except Mrs Patrick Campbell. And not just ordinary cigars, but those huge five-bob things that Basil Rathbone gives his guests.

[…]

Johnny and Maureen remain our greatest friends here. We go down to their house at Malibu from time to time. It is lovely there for a day, but I think I would get sick of it. There is talk of Maureen going to England to do a picture with Robert Taylor. I hope she does, though we shall miss her, as it will be a big thing for her. She is sweeter than ever. Also prettier. Her marriage seems a terrific success. Johnny is very sedate, and absolutely devoted to her.⁶ […]

[…]

Winky is in marvellous shape. Nine years and two months old and brought up from infancy on cheese, sugar, cake, milk chocolate and ham, and the fittest dog in California!

Love to everybody

Your

Plummie

1 The movie star Jean Harlow was hospitalised with kidney failure in 1937, and died in early June.

2 A Romanian-born American actor, famous for his 1931 movie, Little Caesar.

3 George Gershwin had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and died at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Los Angeles, following surgery.

4 Hedda Hopper (1885–1966), American actress, radio presenter and gossip columnist.

5 Henry Daniell, an English actor, living in Hollywood.

6 Maureen O’Sullivan had married the writer John Farrow in 1936.

TO PETER CAZALET

1315 Angelo Drive

Beverly Hills

California

May 7. 1937

Dear Pete.

A letter from Snorky arrived this morning, in which she said that your wrist was healing well. I’m awfully glad. Rotten luck getting crocked like that.

[…]

I have been seeing a lot of Gubby Allen, who came back from Australia via Hollywood. A very good chap. I met him two years ago at Le Touquet. He was extraordinarily interesting about body-line, and the picture he drew of conditions during the Jardine–Larwood tour were almost exactly like an eyewitness’s description of the Spanish War.¹ Larwood, apparently, was going about saying that he did not intend to return to England without having killed at least a couple of Australian batsmen, and Jardine threatened to leave Gubby out of the team if he would not promise to start bowling at the batsmen’s heads immediately he was put on.

This tour seems to have been almost as bad in a quieter way. Apparently the Australians never cease trying to slip something over on the English captain. […]

[…]

There is a big strike on in the studios now, which may quite easily develop and close down the picture industry indefinitely. I get a big laugh out of it. ‘So you wouldn’t take up my option, eh?’ is the way I feel. ‘Well, now see what’s happened to you.’

In addition to this, our butler is still, at the moment of writing, soused to the gills. Over here, the domestic staff takes every Thursday off, and apparently our man went and got badly pickled. I got down this morning at nine, to find all the blinds still drawn and no preparations for breakfast. It is now nearly lunch time, and he is still sleeping it off.

I liked Snorky’s description of your Coronation orgies.² Free beer for the village is going to set you back a bit. I wish I could be with you. We made a bad mistake in taking this house on for a year instead of six months.

Love to all

Yours ever

Plum

1 Sir George Oswald Browning (‘Gubby’) Allen was an Australian-born England cricketer. ‘Bodyline’: a tactic first used by the English cricket team on the 1932–3 Ashes tour of Australia, aimed at curbing the runmaking of the new star, Don Bradman. The ball bowled at great pace was aimed at or wide of the leg stump, pitched short to rise towards the batsman’s body. If he played a defensive shot, he could be caught by one of several close legside fielders; if he hit out, he could be caught by fieldsmen deep on the legside. Australian crowds and the media were bitterly hostile to the tactics, leading to a protest by the Australian Board of Control, and a controversy which extended into the diplomatic arena. But the England authorities backed MCC captain Douglas Jardine, who led his team to victory by four Tests to one. The laws of cricket were later changed to prevent this tactic being repeated. Harold Larwood was one of the English bowlers.

2 The Coronation of King George VI (and Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother) took place at Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937, in the wake of Edward VIII’s abdication. This was the first coronation to be transmitted on television, and there were celebrations throughout the country.

TO LEONORA CAZALET

1315 Angelo Drive

Beverly Hills

California

Aug 13. 1937

Darling Snorky.

How clever of you to write to me direct about that money. It would have spoiled Mummie’s day! There is no need for her to know anything about it, as I have written to the Hongkong Bank to send old Pete a cheque, which you ought to get soon after you get this letter. What a damned nuisance these income tax people are. Have you noticed that there’s always some sum like eighty pounds to be paid, however much you shell out.

It’s much better recouping Pete on the quiet like this, as Mummie is so keen to get back to what we had before we paid out that twenty thousand to the American tax people. I shan’t miss it from my Hongkong account, as it was all gambling winnings, anyway, so what the hell!

I loved the snap shots. Sheran is becoming a regular beauty.

[…]

Mummie is all right again now and going strong. We had a domestic upheaval a week ago, when she fired the staff. I really think the average servant here is the scum of the earth. We found out later that these two had worked for the Frank Morgans and, when thrown out, wrote dirty cracks about them on all the walls of the kitchen premises. They had a Scotch terrier with them, which used their bedroom as a Gents Toilet, and it took us two days cleaning up.

We went to a party at the Edward G. Robinsons the night before yesterday. Very nice, but I do hate getting to bed late. Heather was there. She starts a small part in a picture today, I think. She isn’t doing badly, really, – three pictures this year – but I doubt if she will ever really make much of it out here. She looks too young for ‘Aunt Caroline’ parts and not young enough for heroines or comic sisters.¹

Scandal about Henry Daniel [sic] and wife. Apparently they go down to Los Angeles and either (a) indulge in or (b) witness orgies – probably both. Though don’t you think there’s something rather pleasantly domestic about a husband and wife sitting side by side with their eyes glued to peepholes, watching the baser elements whoop it up? All it needs is the kiddies at their peepholes. And what I want to know is – where are these orgies? I feel I’ve been missing something.

Dirty story for Pete. Two men pick up two women in the street and take them home. Shortly after they have retired, one man knocks at the other man’s door and says he’s afraid they will have to change girls, as the one he’s got turns out to be an aunt of his. (Not so very funny, really. I suppose it wants telling. Reggie Gardiner told it to me at the studio yesterday, and took about ten minutes over it, working it up with dialogue and business.)

We were thrilled by the book of photographs of Low Wood. How you must have worked over it. It looks as if you had made the place marvellous.

Met a rattlesnake just outside our front gate a few days ago. Fortunately the puppy wasn’t with me, or she would have started playing with it.

I had a letter from Victor a couple of days ago, saying that he would be out here on Sept 7. It will be great seeing him again. What we are wondering is if he has come out to marry Helen Wills!! Do you think there is any chance of it? She is an awfully nice girl. What a mug she was to marry that man.

Love to all

Your

Plummie

1 Heather Thatcher, English actress, who had appeared in Wodehouse’s Sally, The Cabaret Girl and The Beauty Prize, as well as in a specially written abridgement of Good Morning, Bill, condensed into one act for the London Coliseum in 1929.

TO PAUL REYNOLDS

1315 Angelo Drive

Beverly Hills

California

Aug 19. 1937

Dear Reynolds,

I enclose a letter from Mr Leff, with whom I have been having some correspondence about a proposed comic strip based on one of my butlers. I have told him to use the name ‘Keggs’ instead of ‘Jeeves’.

The idea is, I gather, that I shall simply lend my name. I believe J. P. McEvoy has done this with a comic strip.¹ A bit undignified, of course, but I don’t see that it can hurt me, and there ought to be quite a lot of money in it, if it catches on.

Will you get in touch with Mr Leff and fix up the contract. The terms he names are quite agreeable to me.

Best wishes

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse

1 The writer J. P. McEvoy had turned his 1928 novel Show Girl into a comic strip, Dixie Dugan, which was syndicated to a number of American newspapers.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

Nov 22. 1937

Dear Bill,

[…]

Did you ever read a book called Helen’s Babies about a young bachelor getting saddled with some kids?¹ The Ladies’ Home Journal editor has got a fixed idea that a splendid modern version could be done, and he has actually offered me $45,000 if I will do it. And here’s the tragedy. I can’t think of a single idea towards it. When Helen’s Babies was published, all you had to do was to get the central idea and then have a monotonous stream of incidents where the kids caused trouble. Nobody seemed to mind in those days that you were being repetitious. But surely that sort of thing wouldn’t go now. In any case, I can’t work it. But isn’t it tragic, getting an offer like that and not being able to accept it.

Maybe you can dig up a fine plot on those lines?

I’m dying to see you. Millions of things to talk about.

Love to Rene

Yours ever

Plum

1 John Habberton’s Helen’s Babies (1876).

The ‘Jeeves novel’ Wodehouse mentions here is The Code of the Woosters (1938), in which the villainous Roderick Spode makes his first appearance. A man who looks ‘as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla then changed its mind at the last moment’, Spode is modelled on the politician Sir Oswald Mosley. Wodehouse’s fictional ‘amateur dictator’, and leader of the ‘Black Shorts’, mocks Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, which, by the mid-thirties, was becoming increasingly aligned with the Nazi party.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

January 4. 1938

Dear Bill.

[…]

I am finding finishing my Jeeves novel a ghastly sweat. I don’t seem to have the drive and command of words that I used to. […] Still, the stuff seems good enough when I get it down.

[…]

We had quite a nice time at Snorky’s, but I hate Christmas and all the overeating. Sheran (granddaughter) is a nice kid. She took a great fancy to me and hauled me off for long walks.

[…]

Love to Rene

Yours ever

Plum

TO LEONORA CAZALET

40 Berkeley Square

W. 1. *

(Good address. Ca fait riche)

Jan 4. 1939.

Darling Snorky.

I can’t get over the awed feeling of having been lushed up at the Grange for a solid month. Nobody but the iron Cazalets could have stuck it out. But, grim though the experience may have been for you, always remember that I enjoyed it. Nay, loved it. I was feeling so emotional about it yesterday that I came within an ace of buying Pete two shillings’ worth of halfpenny stamps, to replace those I pinched. Wiser feelings prevailed, however, and he doesn’t get them. (I have used the word ‘feeling’ three times in above. Flaubert would have something to say about that.)

We are frightfully snug here. The last word in luxury.

[…]

We ran into Randolph Churchill on Sunday and lunched with him at his flat yesterday.¹ I have misjudged him. Very good chap.

Love to all.

Yours ever

Plum.

1 The son of Sir Winston Churchill, and also a Conservative MP from 1940 to 1945.

TO LILLIAN BARNETT

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-De-Calais

April 5. 1939

Dear Lily.

It was so nice to hear from you again. I’m sorry Bert is not well.

I hope Norah will be very happy. I enclose a cheque. Will you buy her a wedding present. I’m afraid it is a bit late, but I couldn’t write before.

How exciting the news from England is these days. My wife is rather pessimistic, but I have a feeling that things are soon going to be all right. I don’t think Germany would dare to do anything that would bring England and France down on them.

It was very sinister here in September. Everything was quite quiet in Paris Plage, which is the little seaside town near Le Touquet, but every day, when I went to buy things, I would find that the man of the shop had slipped away to the Maginot Line.¹ This time I haven’t noticed this. My tobacconist is still there, and so are the others, as far as I can make out. So let’s hope that all will be well.

[…]

Best wishes to you all

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse

1 The French defence line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles and machine-gun posts that ran along the borders with Germany and Italy.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

April 23. 1939

Dear Bill.

[…]

I am coming over – unless there is a gale – next Sunday (today week). Mind you’re in, and I will get a car and drive over for tea.

I’m sorry you are finding it difficult to write short stories. It was just the same with me. Those first hot days of Spring bowled me over. I have now managed to get out two plots, with a third almost completed. I think you have earned a rest. I’d take it easy for a bit.

Do you know, a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present. It has just dawned on the civilians of all countries that the good old days of seeing the boys off in the troop ship are over and that the elderly sportsmen who used to talk about giving sons to the country will now jolly well have to give themselves. I think if Hitler really thought there was any chance of a war, he would have nervous prostration.

Incidentally, doesn’t all this alliance-forming remind you of the form matches at school, when you used to say to yourself that the Upper Fifth had a couple of first fifteen forwards, but you’d got the fly half of the second, the full back of the third and three forwards who would get their colours before the season was over. I can’t realise that all this is affecting millions of men. I think of Hitler and Mussolini as two halves, and Stalin as a useful wing forward.

Anyway, no war in our lifetime is my feeling. I don’t think wars start with months of preparation in the way of slanging matches. When you get a sort of brooding peace, as in 1914, when a spark lights the p. magazine, that’s when you get a war.¹ Nowadays, I feel that the nations just take it out in blowing off steam. (I shall look silly if war starts on Saturday, after Hitler’s speech!)

The ghastly thing is that it’s all so frightfully funny. I mean, Hitler asking the little nations if they think they are in danger of being attacked. I wish one of them would come right out and say ‘Yes, we jolly well do!’.

Wonder and the pup are now great friends, and play together all the time. Ethel keeps saying that three dogs are too much of a nuisance, and she’s about right. But I think that if we can get into Low Wood, where they will be able to run about in the garden, all will be well. At Northwood we have a small front garden opening on the street – or road – and there is no way of preventing the dogs getting out. The Low Wood garden is wired all round, so as to form a pen.

Love to Rene

Yours ever

Plum

1 Powder magazine – a place where gunpowder is stored.

After Oxford University decided to award Wodehouse an honorary doctorate, Douglas Veale, the University’s Registrar, had some difficulty in getting in touch with him. The initial letter was sent to the Constitutional Club and not forwarded, so it was some months before Wodehouse received any communication from Oxford. He immediately telegraphed his acceptance.

TO DOUGLAS VEALE

May 16. 1939

HONOURED TO ACCEPT WRITING

P G WODEHOUSE

TO DOUGLAS VEALE

Golf-Hotel Du Touquet

Sur les Links

Le Touquet – Paris – Plage P de C

May 17. 1939

Dear Mr Veale.

I am so sorry I did not receive your first communication. I generally look in at the Constitutional for letters pretty regularly, but I have not been in England for some time.

I am tremendously flattered that I have been chosen for this honour. I wonder if you can give me some idea of the nature of the ceremony?

Does it involve making a speech? I ask this in trepidation, as I have never made a speech in all my life, though well stricken in years, and I have a sort of complex about it. If you can relieve my mind by telling me that I can preserve a dignified silence, I shall be most grateful.

Yours sincerely

P. G. Wodehouse

Veale was delighted to receive Wodehouse’s response, declaring himself ‘an ardent devotee’. He noted that ‘the only place at which you are exposed to the risk of having to make a speech is at the dinner’ at Christ Church ‘and I think the risk is not very great there’.

TO DOUGLAS VEALE

Golf-Hotel Du Touquet

Sur les Links

Le Touquet – Paris – Plage P de C

May 24. 1939

Dear Mr Veale.

Thanks most awfully for your letter and its reassuring contents.

I propose to present myself in a dark grey suit with black bootings. I take it this will be all right? If not, I have a dark blue suit. If really pushed, I could dig out my morning suit, but as you say there is no need for it, I would much rather not.

I’m afraid I can’t claim the credit of having taught you Latin. I was never a schoolmaster. When I left school, they put me into a bank, from which I escaped after two years to start doing the ‘By the Way’ column on the old Globe. I wonder if it could have been my brother E.A.

Best wishes

Yours sincerely

P. G. Wodehouse

TO PAUL REYNOLDS

Golf-Hotel du Touquet

Le Touquet

Paris-Plage

Pas-de-Calais

June 3. 1939

Dear Reynolds.

So glad the short stories are selling.

[…]

Great excitement here. The University of Oxford is making me a Doctor of Letters, which is apparently a biggish honor. Mark Twain appears to be the only man who has got it, outside of the dull, stodgy birds whose names are quite unknown to the public but who seem to get honors showered on them. I go to Oxford on the 20th, stay two nights with the Vice-Chancellor, and wear a cap and gown throughout!

For the last three weeks I have been trying to get out a plot for a novel. It is in a frightfully chaotic state, as usual, but in the last two days has begun to clarify a little, and I am hoping that something definite will shortly emerge. I find that infinite patience is the only thing that really does it, and I cheer myself by remembering that every story I have ever written has been through this stage. Uncle Fred was the worst of them all. It wasn’t till I had written three hundred pages of notes that I got the idea of putting Uncle Fred into the story at all! So maybe this one will come out all right.

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse

Despite reassurances from Mr Veale that a speech would not be required at Wodehouse’s doctoral award, the students of Christ Church did call upon him to speak at dinner that night – banging the tables, with cries of ‘Speech!’ Wodehouse ‘rose awkwardly to his feet […] mumbled “Thank you”, and sat down in confusion’.

TO MARY GORDON

Hotel Splendide and Green Park Restaurant

105 Piccadilly

London, W.1

June 23. 1939

Dear Mrs Gordon.

I wonder if anybody has ever enjoyed a visit to the President’s Lodging as much as I did.¹ Henry the Seventh, possibly, but nobody else. I shall never forget how kind you all were to me. It was wonderful of you to give me such a good time.

My only complaint is that that bedroom has spoiled me for the sort of thing I shall have to put up with for the rest of my life. I shall feel like a sardine in the one I have at Le Touquet.

I forgot to tell you that I achieved a complete triumph over the geyser. I had it eating out of my hand before I left.

I hope you are not feeling too tired after your Encaenia exertions.² I thought the Garden Party was a tremendous success.

With best wishes

Yours sincerely

P. G. Wodehouse

P.S. Love to Simon.

1 Wodehouse stayed with George and Mary Gordon. George Stuart Gordon was the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University from 1938 to 1941, and President of Magdalen College.

2 An academic ceremony at the University of Oxford in which honorary degrees are conferred.

TO MOLLIE CAZALET

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas de Calais

July 10. 1939

My dear Mollie

Thanks most awfully for your letter.

I had a great time at Oxford. I stayed with the Vice-Chancellor, who is a splendid chap, and enjoyed every minute of it. Did Victor tell you that I rolled up to the Christ Church dinner in a black tie, to find four hundred gorgeous beings in white ties and decorations? It never occurred to me that an all-men dinner would be white tie. However, the robes hid my shame quite a bit. They were dove grey and scarlet – very dressy. I had to wear them all day, and was sorry I couldn’t go around in them in private life. They certainly do give one an air!

[…]

I ran over to London for three days last week to see the Gentlemen and Players match, but the visit was spoiled by the weather.¹ Most of the people I met seemed a bit nervy, but Ian Hay was comforting. He seemed to think that things would be all right. The thing I noticed chiefly was that plays were doing badly and books not selling. I suppose nobody feels like reading nowadays. Thank goodness, my last book has had a record sale (for me – well over twenty thousand in England), but I am wondering what will happen to the new one, which comes out in August. Personally, I am optimistic. I don’t think Germany will dare risk a war.

Love from us both

Yours ever

Plum

1 The Gentlemen v. Players match, played annually between teams consisting of amateurs (the Gentlemen) and professionals (the Players). The 1939 match was played on 5 July at Lord’s, and was won by the Players. PGW went over to see Billy Griffith play.

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

Oct 3. 1939

Dear Bill.

When this war started, I suddenly found myself totally unable to write letters. I don’t know why. I suppose I had the feeling that they would never get to their destination. But now the post does seem to be working, if a bit spasmodically. I expect you’ll get this in about ten days.

I’m wondering a lot how you are getting on. They all say that there is going to be a big boom in books, and I suppose that will include magazines, so maybe we shall be all right. I should think a book like And Now England – what a pity they didn’t call it The Hun, as they were thinking of doing, – ought to take on a new life if it is pushed properly.¹

Are you doing any war work? Mine is confined to running a doss house for French officers. We have three, though the only one I see anything of is the one actually in our part of the house. Owing to the war catching Low Wood half furnished, we had only one guest room and the others have had to sleep in the staff wing. (Which sounds as if L.W. were about the size of Blandings Castle!)

When was your silver wedding? Weren’t you married just before me? Ours was last Saturday, and we gave a party for the whole of Le Touquet, including fifteen non-English-speaking French officers, who of course arrived early, before we could muster our linguists. Still, after a rather sticky ten minutes, everything went triumphantly. The officers lined up in front of us and sang an old Flemish chant, which involved two of them holding a towel over our heads. Rather impressive.

How is your part of the world for living in these days? Le Touquet is fine. One slight drawback is that the war has caused almost all the villas to be occupied, so that I don’t get that desert island feeling which I love. Still, if we are going to be marooned here for three years, perhaps a few neighbours will be a good thing.

We black out, of course, which is a nuisance. But the worst nuisance is that we are not allowed to ‘circulate’. That is to say, the only place we can go is Paris Plage. Ethel was talking airily about running into Boulogne for a bite of lunch today, and we found it couldn’t be done even with fifty-five passes and cards of identity. I don’t mind very much, as I never do want to go anywhere.

How is the work? I am well on in a new novel, and enjoying writing it tremendously, as I feel I can take my time.² My only qualms are about how to get more typewriter ribbons. I suppose I shall be able to get some from London or Paris after a bit of delay. My other qualm is that I am wondering if the m.s. will get to America all right. I suppose boats are running. Qualm three is the feeling what a blank it will leave in my life when I have finished the book. (By the way, the S.E.P. insist on serials with instalments not over 8000 words – presumably seven of them, which makes it necessary to add a colossal amount for book form. It’s a great handicap to one’s ease of writing, as I keep feeling that I can’t let myself go.)

I keep getting letters from A. P. Watt, asking if I will consent to accept three and sixpence for Latvian rights of something. I have told him he’s got to decide for the duration.

Didn’t you think that was a fine speech of Churchill’s on the wireless? Just what was needed, I thought. I can’t help feeling that we’re being a bit too gentlemanly. Someone ought to get up in Parliament and call Hitler a swine.

Must stop now, as our only link with the post office is leaving and I must get this off.

Love to Rene

Yours ever

Plum

1 Townend’s novel, And Now England, was published in 1939.

2 This was almost certainly Joy in the Morning.

TO FRANK SULLIVAN

October 6. 1939

Dear F.S.

I’m so sorry I’ve been all this time answering your letter. C’est la guerre!

I do hope S. at Bay is going strong.¹ It ought to sell terrifically both on its merits and because everybody wants some cheerful stuff.

Everything is very quiet & peaceful here. I was just about to come over to America when all this started, and now I suppose I shall have to wait till it’s over. When I do come, do let’s meet.

Yours ever.

P. G. Wodehouse.

1 Sullivan at Bay (1939).

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

Dec 8. 1939

Dear Bill.

Long time since I wrote. Sorry. How is everything with you?

Things have been very gloomy with us this last week. Our Boxer suddenly got ill, and we took it for granted it was tick fever and he had two injections. Then a vet came from Boulogne and said the trouble was with his kidneys. Today, after being a bit better, he has started walking very stiffly, which looks as if it had been tick fever after all, and we are very anxious. He is the most angelic dog, and we love him. Of course, he may still recover, but I’m afraid it is doubtful. It does seem a shame that a place like this, so perfect in every other respect, should be spoiled by these ticks. One lives from day to day, wondering if the dogs will get through all right.

The outline of the novel you sent me sounds very good. How is it getting on? I finished mine, and it should be on its way to America by now. (It is being typed in Paris.) I am now in the dismal state of trying to think out another and having no ideas. One always goes through this stage, of course, but one never seems to get used to it. What I would like to do would be a Jeeves story. But it is so hard to get a good menace for Bertie – I mean the doom which is hanging over him which Jeeves averts.

In addition to the Windsor, Pearson’s has stopped publication, also the Cornhill. I’m afraid the day of the magazine is pretty nearly over.

[…]

I have been reading all Churchill’s books – i.e. the World Crisis series. Have you read them? They are terrific. What strikes me most about them is what mugs the Germans were to take us on again. You would have thought they must have known that we should wipe them out at sea and that there never has been a war that hasn’t been won by sea power. It’s very curious to see how the same old thing is happening all over again, with the difference that we are avoiding all the mistakes we made last time. I never realized before I read Churchill that the French started off in 1914 by losing four hundred thousand men in the first two weeks. Also, what perfect asses the Germans made of themselves. There was a moment when all they had to do was strike East and they needn’t have worried about the blockade. Instead of which, they went for Verdun, which wouldn’t have done them any good if they had got it.

[…]

I see in your first letter you asked me about Peter. He started as a second in command of an anti aircraft unit and proved to be so good that he has now been singled out for all sorts of weird courses etc, and looks like being something quite big. He really is a splendid chap, he throws himself into everything he takes up and is on his toes all the time.

Snorky is another marvel. I forget if I told you that they had moved into Fairlawne? Anyway, they had scarcely got in when she was allotted eighty-six children, plus about twenty adults!! She assimilated them all without turning a hair. She and her crowd live in one wing of the house, and the other is given up to the children, and apparently everything works absolutely smoothly. She now says she is giving a party on Christmas Eve for the children, the teachers and all the children’s parents, and she says it won’t be any trouble. Of course, she has got a lot of space. Fairlawne was built at a time when you didn’t look on a home as a home unless you had about thirty spare bedrooms. I was there for a day or two last Spring, and I used to get lost in the place. Miles of passages, rambling all over the countryside.

When this war is over, you must get another Peke. The puppy we had and gave to a girl who lives here has turned out the most angelic thing you ever saw. It comes up to spend the day about four times a week and brightens the whole place up. Its name is Mrs Miffen, and it is one of those rowdy Pekes who bound about and think nothing of a seven mile walk. It reminds me of Bimmy a little, though different colour.

Wonder is in great form.

Love to Rene

Yours ever

Plum

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

France

Jan 23. 1940

Dear Bill,

[…]

Your description of the writing of the novel took my breath away. As far as I can make out, you thought out and wrote the thing in a month! It sounds good.

Thank goodness the S.E.P. have taken my serial.¹ At a time when it is so difficult to get money out of England, a bit over in America will be useful. I have also managed to get out four short story plots this year, which is a record for me.

I agree with you about the weariness of war. I find the only thing to do is to get into a routine and live entirely by the day. I work in the morning, take the dogs out before tea, do a bit of mild work after tea, and then read after dinner. It is wonderful how the days pass. One nuisance of living here is that we get today’s papers tomorrow, and not always then. The Continental Daily Mail is regular enough, but a touch of fog in the Channel is often enough to stop the English papers.

[…]

I liked Churchill’s speech the other night, didn’t you? When he had finished, we switched off the radio and discussed it, not knowing that the next item on the programme was a Ukridge story. Still, I don’t imagine I missed much.

[…]

I can’t make out what is going to happen. Do you think everything will break loose in the Spring? I don’t see how it can, as surely by that time we shall be too strong. My only fear is that Germany will be able to go on for years on their present rations. Apparently a German is able to live on stinging nettles and wood fibre indefinitely.

[...]

Love to Rene.

Yours ever

Plum

1 Quick Service (1940).

Elmer Flaccus was an admirer of Wodehouse’s work and collected his books.

TO ELMER FLACCUS

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

Feb 3. 1940

Dear Mr Flaccus,

Thank you so much for your letter. It was very nice to hear from you again. Congratulations on your marriage.

Everything is very quiet here. This place is within a few miles of Boulogne, so we are not touched by the war except in so far as seeing people we know go off to it. Our gardener has left, also the postman, who was a great friend of mine. They both came back on leave the other day, looking very fit. Life on the Maginot Line seems to be healthy.

We are also putting up one or two French officers, very nice fellows but they don’t talk English and my French is in a very elementary state. We also see a lot of the R.A.F. boys, who come over here on short leave. We had a great party at Christmas.

Nobody seems to know what is going to happen, if anything is. To me, knowing nothing about it, it seems that if Germany were really going to do anything big, they would have had to do it long ago. Chamberlain in his last speech said that England already had a million and a half men under arms, and I believe our air defences are now such that it would be ruinous for Hitler to try to attack England. I suppose he could do some damage, but at a cost which would not make it worth it.

[…]

Best wishes to you both

Yours sincerely

P. G. Wodehouse

TO WILLIAM TOWNEND

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

April 6. 1940

Dear Bill.

I keep looking out in the papers for your new book. When does it come out?

[…]

Also, how did the novel go in America? I wrote four short stories at the beginning of the year, and have now discovered that one of them will have to be chucked away because I need the plot for a novel. Does that ever happen to you? It’s agony, as the short story was really good. But it contains a solution for a Jeeves novel, so I am trying to work out a plot. Listen, is it possible for a hard-up young peer to become a country policeman? A London one, yes, but this must be country. Could such a man start in as a village cop, with the idea of later on, if in luck, getting into Scotland Yard? Would a village policeman have any future? I wish you would buttonhole the next policeman who passes your door and ask him if it would be possible for him to soar to the heights. (My chap has got to be a policeman, because Bertie pinches his uniform in order to go to a fancy dress dance, at which it is vital for him to be present as he has no other costume).¹

The other day Lady Dudley’s² parrot (now living with us) was outside on the terrace and Wonder, the Peke, inside the sitting room. The French window was shut, and they suddenly fell foul of one another and started a desperate fight with the glass of the window in between them. Honble parrot beat at the glass with his beak and Wonder leaped at it, yelling. Eventually the parrot moved off, so I suppose Wonder won.

We now go out in the afternoon with seven dogs, – our two, the visiting Peke and four belonging to a neighbour.

[…]

We alternate here between a sort of cook-general life and a staff of servants such as you would find at Blenheim or somewhere. This is due to the fact that all the men we have ever employed come and work for us when they get leave. This last week we have had a marvellous butler (husband of the cook) and two extra gardeners. In a day or two they will have disappeared. I do think the French are marvellous. They just take a war in their stride. They toddle off and fight and come back and work and then go and fight again.

Everyone seems to expect great things of Reynaud. And I am glad that Churchill now seems to be running things in England.³ But I wish, when they have a Cabinet shuffle, they wouldn’t just make A. and B. swap jobs. I would like to see something entirely fresh, like Nuffield being made Minister of Air or something. Incidentally, don’t you feel you would make a good Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster? It sounds the sort of job I could do on my head.

I am having a very pleasant time, except that I can’t get enough to read.

Love to Rene

Yours ever

Plum

1 This character is to become G. D’Arcy ‘Stilton’ Cheesewright, an old Etonian and Oxford man, who becomes a village policeman in Joy in the Morning (1946).

2 The actress Gertie Millar, a successful variety actress and singer, originally from Yorkshire, had married the Earl of Dudley in the mid-twenties. She now lived in Le Touquet.

3 Paul Reynaud had been elected Prime Minister of France in March 1940. Winston Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, and was then made Chairman of the Military Coordinating Committee in April. He became Prime Minister the following month.

TO PAUL REYNOLDS

Low Wood

Le Touquet

Pas-de-Calais

April 25. 1940

Dear Reynolds.

I’m afraid I have changed my plans about coming over for the moment. It is such a business getting started, what with permits and so on, and then having to sail from Genoa. (I suppose any day now Genoa will be barred, too!). So I am sitting tight here and writing a new Jeeves novel, of which I have just finished the first four chapters.

I was tremendously pleased that you got the same price for Quick Service. I think they must have liked it, as they are giving me eight instalments, and in the proofs not a line has been cut.

[…]

I wish I could get over to have another of those lunches with you, but I doubt if I shall be able to manage it till the Fall.

Yours ever

P. G. Wodehouse