In the early 1950s, the Wodehouses were living between New York and their summer residence in the Long Island area. By 1955, they left New York permanently. Basket Neck Lane in Remsenburg was to be their address for the rest of their lives. The house, near the fashionable resort of Westhampton, was shielded from the road by a hedge, with twelve wooded acres of land behind it. Ethel made numerous alterations to the property and Wodehouse wrote jokingly about their ‘show place’. ‘Think of Knole or Blenheim and you will get the general idea.’1 The Wodehouse home was, in fact, a fairly modest affair with four bedrooms, arranged over two floors, a large sitting-dining room and a study.
Living in Remsenburg gave Wodehouse the chance to live and write with very little disturbance. His days would typically begin at eight, with his ‘Daily Dozen’ exercises, followed by a breakfast of ‘toasted black bread, jam, honey and five cups of tea’. After a morning’s writing, ‘he would join Ethel in her room, where they would watch a soap opera on television; and at one o’clock they would have lunch. Fairly soon after lunch’, he wrote, ‘I’ve got to take the dogs out. So I take them to the post office and get the mail. Then I work again from three till about five, when I take my bath. Ethel joins me for cocktails, usually martinis. We have dinner generally at about six or a quarter past six. […] We used to play double-dummy bridge but we were never very keen on it, so now we generally read. From about eight to about nine, I might go and write letters.’2 It was, Wodehouse wrote, ‘the same routine day after day, and somehow it never gets monotonous.’3
One of the main preoccupations for the Wodehouses was their ever-growing brood of pets. Animals had always been an important part of their lives, and a great bond between the couple. Remsenburg gave them even more of an opportunity to tend to numerous cats and dogs, and they became a sort of foster home for strays, or animals left by travelling friends. In the Wodehouses’ later years, these included Squeaky the Peke, Jed the dachshund and Poona the cat, as well as Bill the foxhound. Later on, the Wodehouses found themselves the owners, at various times, of Ginger, Blackie, Debbie, Enoch, Minnie, Smoky and Spotty. Ethel also became interested in an animal shelter organisation, the Bide-a-Wee association, and the Wodehouses donated $35,000 for the P. G. Wodehouse Shelter to be built at nearby Westhampton.
One disadvantage of Remsenburg life, for Wodehouse, was the fact that he had to wait until the evening before he could read the daily paper. The house was too far from the local village to get any sort of delivery. But there is a sense in which Wodehouse enjoyed the protection from contemporary events that this distance allowed. ‘I detach myself when I’m writing’, as he told a television interviewer.4 Comic writing, was, for Wodehouse, incompatible with what he saw as the increasingly ‘tense’ atmosphere of contemporary America, with its terrorist threats, political manoeuvrings, and Cold War scares. Wodehouse was also bemused by the increasingly sexualised nature of late-twentieth-century life, full of ‘ghastly muck’.5 He was amused when he did indeed find a place for himself in this market after all – becoming a regular contributor to Playboy magazine – sandwiched in between ‘photographs of Jayne Mansfield in the nude’. ‘It would be great’, he jokes, ‘if I found myself listed among the dirty writers’.6
Wodehouse’s attachment to Remsenburg, and America, was confirmed when, in 1955, he became a US citizen. Although his British grandchildren, Sheran and Edward Cazalet, were frequent visitors, Wodehouse was never to return to England. His increasing age and their ever-growing flock of animals were good reasons to avoid a long journey overseas, but the overriding obstacle, for Wodehouse, was the ‘fact that there might still be unpleasantness’.7
Wodehouse remained very sensitive to the issue of the broadcasts that he had made from Germany – a sensitivity not assuaged by some unfortunately pitched newspaper interviews. In 1954, he accepted Stephen Spender’s invitation to publish the original broadcasts in the journal Encounter, in an attempt to prove their innocuous nature. Ever the reviser, Wodehouse could not, however, resist making changes to the original script to increase the humour. Wodehouse also had dealings with two biographers in his later life – David Jasen and Richard Usborne. Although he was always charming in person, Wodehouse was naturally reluctant to talk about himself. The following letters reveal that Wodehouse’s anxiety about his broadcasts in the 1940s made this experience even more trying.
Nevertheless, he took much comfort from the support that he continued to receive from fellow writers. In 1960, tributes flooded in for Wodehouse’s eightieth year – with a notice of birthday greetings placed in The New York Times from writers that included W. H. Auden, Nancy Mitford, James Thurber, Lionel Trilling and John Updike. Evelyn Waugh was a regular correspondent and particularly championed Wodehouse – arranging a special tribute for him in 1961 to be aired on the BBC. He finished his account of Wodehouse’s work with the following:
For Mr Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man; no ‘aboriginal calamity’. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.8
After the difficulties that Wodehouse experienced with his writing during the forties and early fifties, this was a period in which he regained much of his confidence. Although he still found difficulty, as he had all his writing life, in inventing plots, he produced a string of successful novels, including Something Fishy, Ice in the Bedroom, Do Butlers Burgle Banks? and Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. Another work of reminiscences, drawn from a series of Punch articles, America, I Like You, was published in 1956,9 and there were further theatrical collaborations. A revival of one of his ‘Princess’ musicals, Leave It to Jane, was a Broadway success in 1959; 1969 saw him rewriting the lyrics of Anything Goes for a London production, while 1973 saw Wodehouse and Bolton working with the composer and lyricist of ‘Jesus Christ Superman’ [sic] – on a musical based on Jeeves.10
Wodehouse dwells, in many of these letters, on how fit and well he is feeling but, as the years go on, it becomes clear that both Ethel and Wodehouse were growing old. The death of William Townend, Wodehouse’s most long-standing and loyal correspondent, was a particular reminder of his own mortality. In the last decade of his life, Wodehouse often began to feel dizzy and short of breath – signs of heart trouble. Ethel had particularly worrying health concerns, and was treated for cancer.
Throughout these letters, Wodehouse’s love for his wife, and his reliance on her company, is abundantly clear – especially in the notes he writes whenever hospital visits forced them to spend a few days apart. He could not, he told her, imagine ever having been happy with anyone else.11
It was in his final years that Wodehouse received two accolades that brought him great pleasure. The first was a visit from a representative from Madame Tussaud’s, as a waxwork model of him had been commissioned for their London exhibition [see plate 36]. The second was the news that he was to receive a knighthood from the Queen. Unable to travel to England, he was knighted in a mock ceremony at Remsenburg. Soon after this, he was admitted to hospital with a painful skin complaint, on the advice of his doctor. A few days later, on the evening of 14 February 1975, Wodehouse died from a heart attack. He had his latest manuscript beside him. Each phrase is crafted with as much care as those in the scores of novels that preceded it, transporting his readers into a world of seemingly effortless comedy. It had been nearly a century of writing, and Wodehouse was working until the end. As he wrote in 1956, ‘with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature’:
A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one’s toes and makes one write every sentence ten times. […] When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I am, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up: ‘But he did take trouble’.12
1 PGW to Jack Donaldson, quoted in Donaldson, p. 283.
2 Jasen, p. 247.
3 PGW to Denis Mackail, 6 June 1960.
4 Interview with PGW, Monitor, BBC, 26 October 1958. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12201.shtml.
5 PGW to Denis Mackail, 8 June 1957.
6 PGW to Denis Mackail, 18 June 1963.
7 PGW to Hesketh Pearson, 24 August 1961.
8 Evelyn Waugh, ‘An Act of Homage and Reparation to P. G. Wodehouse’, Sunday Times, 16 July 1961, repr. in Gallagher, pp. 567–8.
9 Published in the UK with some changes as Over Seventy (1957).
10 PGW to Tom Sharpe, 7 October 1974.
11 PGW to Ethel Wodehouse, 3 September 1973.
12 Over Seventy, p. 23.