TO DENIS MACKAIL
Remsenburg NY
August 22. 1954
Dear Denis.
[…]
Edward Cazalet is now with us and is a terrific success. Charming chap and just right for the American scene, being completely unaffected and democratic. His two great pals down here are the son of the grocer and a college boy who works in the garden at $1.50 per hour. E. flies home next Friday and tomorrow he and Fred Garcia, the grocer’s son, drive to New York, where we are putting them up at the Roosevelt Hotel. Ethel and I go up on Tuesday. We thought it would be much better fun for Edward going around N.Y. with a boy of his own age instead of being landed with a septuagenarian like me. Though as a matter of fact Edward and I are very matey. He is very easy to get on with. As you said in an essay, you can’t beat a good Etonian, and E. is one of the best specimens I have met.
I have now been at Remsenburg three months and am coming round to Ethel’s view that we ought to cut out New York and live here all the year round. There seems very little point in having a New York apartment when we never go to a theatre or to meals at a restaurant. My life in New York is – rise, breakfast, work till lunch, exercise walk from 2.30 to 4 and back home and in for the night. All one needs in life is books, and I can get those down here.
[…]
Were you ever misguided enough to go to the movie of Gone with the Wind? Edward lugged me there on Sunday. I left after three and a half hours of it and there was another half hour after that. Isn’t it amazing that these movie people have no idea of construction and selection! Anybody could have seen, you would have thought, that there was an hour in the middle of the thing that could have come right out without hurting the story. After an eternity of it Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh fell into the embrace and I was just reaching for my hat, when blowed if they didn’t start an entirely new story. I don’t believe it was in the book at all. Brooding on this, I have come to the conclusion that Gable saw the rushes of what was supposed to be the complete picture and raised hell because he hardly appeared in it, so they wrote in a lot of new stuff. Significant that Gable refused to come to the original opening and again refused when it was revived.
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
Wodehouse wrote the following letter in response to a number of questions from Usborne, who was writing a biographical account of his work, to be entitled Wodehouse at Work.
TO RICHARD USBORNE
1000 Park Avenue
New York
Jan 14. 1955
Dear Mr Usborne.
So sorry I haven’t written before. Great rush of work.
First, it would be fine if you could come over here. But it would have to be in the summer, as we have no visitor’s room at 1000 Park, where we spend the winter, whereas at the Remsenburg house there is a swell guest room with private sun parlour.
Now about the questions. I don’t know if you are like me and never make a carbon copy, so I am returning your letter in case you want to refer to it.
Heavens! You can’t expect me to remember the set books at school after fifty-five years!! We did the usual ones, I suppose, certainly including Homer, and I sweated at Homer then, but I have never read him since. […] I did reams of Greek and Latin verse, and enjoyed it more than any other work. I was two years in the Sixth – or top – form, never rising to any great eminence – I was about fifteenth of a form of thirty – but I should probably have got a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge, as several of my inferiors got them. But there was not enough money to send me to the University even with a scholarship. I don’t remember much about the English books we read. And I can’t remember any examination on English books. I suppose one read a good bit of Shakespeare, and I seem to remember Carlyle (‘I, mine Werther, am above it all’).1 Where I got Rem acu tetigisti, I can’t say. It just stuck in my mind.2
Blandings is purely imaginary, but a composite, I suppose, of a number of country houses I visited as a child. My parents were in Hong Kong most of the time, and I was left in charge of various aunts, many of them vicars’ wives who paid occasional calls on the local Great House, taking me with them. Why, I can’t imagine, as I had no social gifts. But those visits made me familiar with life in the Servants Hall, as I was usually sent off there in the custody of the butler, to be called for later. So I got a useful insight into the ways of Beach etc. The lake and the bushes and all that I put in as I needed them. Probably my subconscious supplied the lake from Lord Methuen’s house at Corsham, Wilts, where I used to go and skate as a child.
No, I was never a tutor. I left Dulwich at the end of July 1900 and by September 1900 was a clerk in the correspondence department of the HongKong and Shanghai Bank.
Ukridge. Actually he was a man named Craxton, whom I never met. W. Townend knew him and gave me all the stuff about him which I put into Love Among the Chickens – most of which book, the chicken farm venture and so on, actually happened. But, oddly enough, a friend of mine was also exactly like Ukridge, and I suppose I drew on him for the most part. Man named Westbrook. We used to share digs.
Yes, I did have Ruby M. Ayres in mind for Rosie M. Banks. Not that I ever met her, but I wanted a name that would give a Ruby M. Ayres suggestion.3
Do shoot in all the questions you want to. I’ll answer them all.
[…]
Aunt Agatha is definitely my Aunt Mary (Mary Deane), who was the scourge of my childhood.
Let’s have some more questions. We must make this book a world-beater!
Yours sincerely
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Sartor Resartus (1833–4).
2 See, for example, this exchange between Jeeves and Bertie in Joy in the Morning:
‘Precisely, sir. Rem acu tetigisti.’
‘Rem – ?’
‘Acu tetigisti. A Latin expression. Literally, it means “you have touched the matter with a needle,” but a more idiomatic rendering would be –’
‘Put my finger on the nub?’
Wodehouse probably remembers the phrase from Plautus, Rudens V.II.1.19.
3 For PGW’s thoughts on Ayres, see his letter to Leonora Wodehouse, 30 March 1925.
Despite the tone of the following letter, Wodehouse and Christie became frequent correspondents, and she dedicated Hallowe’en to him in 1969.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
1000 Park Avenue
New York
March 6. 1955
Dear Denis.
The other afternoon I managed to stir Ethel up and take her for a walk in the park with the dogs, and we met a photographer who took pictures of us. One of these will shortly be on its way to you. Not too good of us, but marvellous of Bill and Squeaky.
[...] I’m seething with fury. Sir Allen Lane of Penguin was over here not long ago and told me that Agatha Christie simply loved my stuff and I must write to her and tell her how much I liked hers. So with infinite sweat I wrote her a long gushing letter, and what comes back? About three lines, the sort of thing you write to an unknown fan. ‘So glad you have enjoyed my criminal adventures’ – that sort of thing. The really bitter part was that she said the book of mine she liked best was The Little Nugget – 1908 production. And the maddening thing is that one has got to go on reading her, because she is about the only writer today who is readable.
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
Wodehouse is here advising Bolton about his latest musical, Ankles Aweigh, which opened on Broadway in April 1955.
TO GUY BOLTON
1000 Park Avenue
March 23. 1955
Dear Guy.
I hope the show is going like a breeze. Brooding on what you said about the laugh line at end of the ship scene not going too well, don’t you think it’s the showing of the brassiere earlier that hurts the showing of the – no, it’s the other way about. The brassiere falls flat because the audience has seen the other feminine garment, the black one (which does get a big laugh). Why not cut one of them out and get a surprise at end of scene?
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
TO RICHARD USBORNE
Remsenburg NY
June 3. 1955
Dear Mr Usborne.
Yours of April 25. Here are the answers to the questions.
1. Pronounced Wood-house.1
2. No sisters. Three brothers, two older, one younger, all dead now. We all got along very well. Any poisonous small brothers in my books were invented or based on repulsive children I had known.2
3. Mike is the only book that has been modernized, and I think myself it was a mistake. Not quite as bad as trying to modernize Tom Brown but definitely wrong. The whole tone of the story is 1900-odd, and I don’t believe anyone could mistake it for a modern school story, however much you change ‘Rhodes’ to ‘Laker’. It was also a pity that Mike – though it was originally two stories – should have had to be split up into two six shilling books. It was so much better in one solid chunk. But the price of a book that length today would have been too high.3
4. […]
5. […]
6. I’m afraid you won’t find any busts or portraits of me at Dulwich. (Or anywhere else, for that matter.)
7. When you come over here, I will give you the book in which I kept a record of all the money I earned by writing from the time I started till 1908. (Or I will send it to you, if I can find anyone to do up a parcel.) It’s very interesting, though I find it slightly depressing as it shows the depths I used to descend to in order to get an occasional ten-and-six. Gosh, what a lot of slush I wrote! I don’t know why I gave up keeping the book in 1908. Probably because early in the following year I went to America and started a new phase.
But I hope you aren’t planning to republish any of the stuff I wrote then. What a curse one’s early work is. It keeps popping up. I got a nasty shock a month or so ago when I picked up the magazine Charteris (The Saint) publishes here and found in it a detective story – yes, a detective story and a perfectly lousy one – which I sold to Pearson’s Magazine somewhere around 1910.4
Incidentally, have you noticed that all these ‘evaluators’ like George Orwell always select for examination Something Fresh, which I wrote in 1915? Why not something more recent?
8. […]
9. When was the first number of Chums? Was it 1892? Anyway, it contained – in addition to Max Pemberton’s Iron Pirate – a school story by Barry Pain called ‘Two’ (published in book form as Graeme and Cyril). It made an enormous impression me. It had practically no plot but the atmosphere was wonderful. I was re-reading it only the other day and it’s great stuff.5
[…] As a child, of course, I read Eric and St Winifred’s and the Talbot Baines Reed stories in the B.O.P. I loved them all. I think it is only later that one grows critical of Eric and St W’s. Tom Brown, fine. Also Vice Versa. But Acton’s Feud was the best of the lot.
I’m not sure I agree with your prep-school man. The B.O.P must have started in the eighties, and Chums either in ’91 or ’92.
10. It’s difficult to judge other people’s feelings by one’s own. I was always so keen on writing that any job not connected with it seemed loathsome to me. I wouldn’t have minded the most menial job in a publisher’s office, but a bank ...!6 Though, actually, after I had got used to it, I was very happy in the Hongkong Bank. My only fear was that at the end of two years I would be sent abroad, which at that time seemed to me the end of a literary career. It was all pretty exciting. Beach Thomas, who had been a master at Dulwich, had this ‘By the Way’ job on the Globe and when he wanted a day off I would plead illness to the Bank and sneak off and deputize for him and get my ten bob, and then there came the moment when he wanted to take his annual five weeks holiday. Which of course precipitated a crisis. If I was prepared to work on the Globe for five weeks, the post awaited me. If I couldn’t, he would have to get someone else. So I took a hell of a chance and chucked the bank. I had managed to save about fifty quid and I had five weeks’ work assured at three guineas a week, and it seemed to me that – as one could live comfortably in those days on three quid a week – I would be all right for about five months.
It worked out all right, I find, looking at my book, that I made £215.18.1. in my first year as a writer on my own. £411.14.10 the next year, £500 the year after that, and then £505.1.7 and £525.17.1. So I need not have worried. […]
11. Never! I was a fast bowler and almost a total loss as a bat. I once made a century for the Globe printers against the Evening News printers and once 97 for the bank against another bank, but the bowling was not so hot.
No, I never got exhausted in the ring. After three rounds I was always willing and anxious to go on and could never understand why the decision went against me, as I couldn’t remember the other fellow hitting me at all. This although I was streaming with blood.7
12. No, I never had a fight. One didn’t. I can’t remember a single one in my whole school life. (How different from my literary agent – not Watt, the New York one – who told me he was at a school in Brooklyn for six years, mostly negroes, and had a fight every day during that period).8
13. […]
14. […]
15. Very very rarely and only for terrific offences.9
16. You will find the Wodehouse villa just opposite the fourteenth fairway of the old golf course. It survived the war, though knocked about a bit. In the south of France I lived at a house called Domaine de la Frayère up in the mountains about a dozen miles from Cannes. I was always fond of the Riviera, but till I took La Frayère I stayed at hotels.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
[…] Orwell. I only met him once. We got on very well and corresponded fairly regularly, but he struck me as one of those warped birds who have never recovered from an unhappy childhood and a miserable school life. He took everything so damned seriously. […]
1 ‘You pronounce it “Woodhouse”, don’t you?’
2 ‘How many brothers and sisters did you have? Older or younger? Speaking as a man infested with brothers, I note with extra appreciation your remarks on the difficulties of having brothers. (Mike, and in at least one of Saint Austin’s stories). I also think you are very sound on kid brothers throughout for later books. I wondered if there was any factual source.’
3 ‘How many of your books have you modernized?’
4 The story was ‘The Harmonica Mystery’, a partially adapted version of ‘The Education of Detective Oakes’, which appeared in Pearson’s, December 1914.
5 ‘Can you remember which school books and school writers had impressed you most.’
6 ‘I wonder whether you can tell me a) whether your insistence on a Bank’s being equivalent to Dickens’ blacking factory was a […] mild tease of your own bank, where, I guess, you were not wildly happy’ or ‘b) was the concept general in those days’.
7 ‘Did you ever make a huge cricket score in good cricket? One of your descriptions (or Mike, I think…) suggests that you have personal memories of such wonderful exhaustion. There is a similar description of tiredness in the ring, in one of your stories that suggests you must have been on your last legs in the ring and acutely aware of it. Have you?’
8 ‘Did you ever have to fight the school bully, or the man who was later going to be your best friend?’
9 ‘Was there caning at Dulwich when you were there?’
In September 1955, Wodehouse became an American citizen.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Basket Neck Lane
Remsenburg, New York
Sept 15. 1955
Dear Denis.
This is some new notepaper which Ethel had made for me. Shows up your beastly blue stuff a bit, what? As far as I can make out, I don’t actually become a citizen till the middle of November, when I shall have to go over to Riverhead and be addressed by a Judge of sorts, but I gather that that is just a formality and that I am set.
The morning after the proceedings I was rung up on the telephone by the Mail, the Express, the Times, the Associated Press and others. They all wanted to know why I had done it, and it was a little difficult to explain without hurting anyone’s feelings that, like you, I don’t feel it matters a damn what country one belongs to and that what I really wanted was to be able to travel abroad without having to get an exit permit and an entrance permit, plus – I believe – a medical examination. The next day the Express rang up again and wanted me to do an article for them. I have done this and it has probably appeared by this time. Quite funny. […]
If you won’t write anything again, at least help a brother-brush. I have got the plot of my next one pretty well fixed, but I want a job that my hero can get.1 My big comic scene ends with him doing a great service to a young American who has lots of money – this may turn out to be Oofy Prosser of The Drones – and the grateful plutocrat gives him this job, which makes it necessary for him to go to America, which means parting from the heroine. But what job? The plutocrat can be anything – e.g. majority stockholder in a New York store, a chain of papers or anything, but what he is makes the hero what he is. Thus, if hero were an artist, I suppose Pluto could make him head of the store’s art department. It ought to be something solid, not a job from which he can be sacked at a moment’s notice. The main point is that it has to be in America. Let’s have your views.
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
I must call your attention once more to this notepaper.
1 Something Fishy (1957), published in the US as The Butler Did It.
On 4 July 1955, the Daily Mail’s René MacColl published a piece about the Wodehouses, ostensibly written in the style of Bertie Wooster. It wrongly gave the impression that Wodehouse was very depressed.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Basket Neck Lane,
Remsenburg,
New York
July 26. 1955
[…]
[…] About that McColl [sic] article. […]
I frothed with fury, of course. The bastard had rung up saying he was a great friend of M. Muggeridge’s and could he come down and have a chat, so we of course laid down the red carpet for him. He tucked into a fat lunch with cocktails and white wine, and was all cheeriness and dear-old-palness, and then he went off, bursting with my meat, and wrote that horrible article. I’m not sure that what didn’t wound me most was his thinking he was writing Bertie Wooster dialogue. Very poor stuff, I thought.
[…]
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
Basket Neck Lane,
Remsenburg,
New York
Feb 21. 1956
Dear Bill.
The trouble about writing to you is that when I do I want to write a long letter, and every day these darned fan letters arrive which I have to answer. I’ll tell you the world’s worst pest, and that is the fan who writes to say how much he has enjoyed my work. I write back and say Thanks so much etc. Then a couple of days later comes another letter, saying ‘On page 31 of your book you say that Bertie Wooster has light hair. Could you tell me if this means that you admire light hair’, and I have to write another letter.
Isn’t it extraordinary, the wave of filth which is surging over all writing these days. John O’Hara has just got the literary award or whatever they call it for his book Ten North Frederick, and it is simply pornography. I wouldn’t mind so much if the major characters were dirty, but he lugs in all sorts of minor characters who have nothing to do with the story and just lets himself rip with them. I’ll swear you couldn’t find anything dirtier in the back streets of Paris.
[…] I find that life of Kip awfully interesting. I’ll swear he never asked me that about ending in my stories.1 I met him once at the Cazalets and again at the Beefsteak Club, but we never discussed writing. […] I never met Anne Sheridan. She must be a bit of a tick, selling K’s conversation – presumably private – to the papers as an interview. But people have no scruples whatever.
Love to Rene
Yours ever
Plum
1 PGW was reading Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1955). Carrington discusses an occasion when ‘Rudyard met Wodehouse and challenged him: “Tell me, Wodehouse, how do you finish your stories? I can never think how to end mine”’ (p. 490).
On 29 January 1956, the novelist John Wain had reviewed Wodehouse’s French Leave alongside other novels in the Observer, concluding that while ‘Mr Wodehouse is probably the most endearing author in the world […] I cannot quite get rid of the feeling that the needle is scratching rather badly and that sooner or later the record will have to be taken off’. Evelyn Waugh wrote to defend Wodehouse in the Observer, following it up with his own review in the Spectator, entitled ‘Dr. Wodehouse and Mr. Wain’.
TO EVELYN WAUGH
Basket Neck Lane,
Remsenburg,
New York
March 11. 1956
Dear Evelyn.
’At-a-boy! That’s the stuff to give ’em. It was really wonderful of you to come to my rescue like that. I suppose John Wain will have some pompous counterattack in next week’s Spectator, but anybody will be able to see that you have demolished him.
What a curse this new breed of bright young Manchester Grammar School-scholarship at Oxford lads is. Kingsley Amis is another to whom we ought to attend some day. I haven’t read his Lucky Jim (which I am glad to say was a total flop over here) but his supercilious reviews in the Spectator are hard to bear. But how anyone who writes such lousy books as John Wain has the nerve to criticize others beats me.1
I have just finished another novel in 30,000 word form (in the hope of a one-shotter sale to some magazine) and am now faced with the prospect of having to expand it to full length. Frightful sweat, but I can take my time.
[…]
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
A book was published here some years ago called Treasury of British Humour (I think), containing a large chunk of Black Mischief. What wonderful stuff it is. You have eclipsed it since, but it is still one of my favourites of yours.
1 John Wain’s first novel, Hurry On Down, about a university graduate beginning adult life, had been published in 1953.
TO GUY BOLTON
Basket Neck Lane,
Remsenburg,
New York
July 5. 1956
Dear Guy.
[…] I am still trying without any success to think of a plot for a novel. I want to do another Jeeves one, but am stymied by the fact that Bertie, having a large private income, is so hard to get into trouble. I have used the getting-engaged-to-wrong girl and violence-threatened-by-jealous-rival motifs so often that I don’t see how I can use them again. The only other real trouble he can get into would be if he somehow fell foul of the Law, and I am working on that now. I thought that if he could possibly become an accessory after the act (or is it fact?), that might develop into something. However, as Grimsdick is publishing my last one in January, I shan’t have to write anything for about a year.
[…]
Raining hard today, much to Ethel’s delight, as it will be good for the garden.
Love to V.
Yours ever
Plum
TO RICHARD USBORNE
Sept 1. 1956
Dear Mr Usborne.
Yours of August 6.
[…]
My father was never anything of an athlete, though a great walker, a thing I inherited from him. Nor was he anything of a scholar. He went to Repton but I think left fairly young and went to Hong Kong. He was always wonderfully enthusiastic about any athletic triumphs Armine and I happened to achieve, and there was a regular tariff of tips – five shillings for taking six wickets, ten shillings for making fifty and so on.
No, there were no Pekes in my boyhood. Every other sort of dog but not Pekes. It wasn’t till 1920 that I became Peke-conscious.
Yours of August 16.
(a) No, there was no Nanny who was a menace. I remember all our nurses as great friends.
(b) No. I have never sung at a village concert.
(c) Heaven knows where I got ‘blinding and stiffing’. Isn’t it a fairly well-known phrase? I imagine blinding is derived from ‘Damn your eyes’, but I can’t elucidate the stiffing.1
(d) With her foot in her hand. I must have picked it up somewhere, but where? I think it’s an American expression.
(e) ‘Smiling, the boy fell dead’.2 Mr Usborne, really! I thought everybody knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself.
‘You’re wounded!’ ‘Nay,’ the soldier’s pride
Touched to the quick, he said:
‘I’m killed, Sire!’ and his chief beside
Smiling the boy fell dead.
(f) The first time I heard ‘The old oil’ was when we were writing Rosalie for Marilyn Miller and Jack Donahue. Jack spoke the line ‘Give him the old oil’, and I think he invented it.3
I imagine most of my phrases are things I have read or heard. I did invent ‘oompus boompus’, though. I wanted a synonym for ‘rannygazoo’, which is a well-known American expression. ‘Tinkerty-tonk’ was knut slang of about 1912.
(g) I was at one time a member of Garrick, Beefsteak, Constitutional, and over here Coffee House. I now belong only to Coffee House and the Lotos of New York. At a very early stage I was a member of a ghastly little bohemian club called the Yorick, and later, of course, the Dramatists Club. But I hated them all and almost never went into them. I loathe clubs. The trouble is, it’s so difficult to resign. I have not been inside the Coffee House for three years, though I sometimes lunch at the Lotos when in New York. I think I hated the Garrick more than any of them. All those hearty barristers! I did resign from the Garrick.
The Drones is pure invention. I suppose Buck’s would be the nearest thing to it. I never belonged to Buck’s but sometimes lunched there with Guy Bolton.4
[…] Let me know if there is any further info you want about anything.
Yours sincerely
P. G. Wodehouse.
1 Usborne asks about the use of the phrase in a novel such as Jeeves in the Offing (1960):
‘But I suppose these solid citizens have to learn to curb the tongue. Creates a bad impression, I mean, if they start blinding and stiffing as those more happily placed would be’ (Chapter 4).
2 Usborne asked about the provenance of this quotation. (See The Mating Season, Chapter 4.) ‘My guess is that this is a memorable foolish sentiment from some Eric or Little by Little type book of your boyhood. Can you inform me further?’
3 See Right-Ho, Jeeves (Chapter 23) when Madeline Bassett compares Bertie Wooster to ‘those Knights of the Round Table in The Idylls of the King’. ‘Dashed difficult, of course, to know what to say when someone is giving you the old oil on a scale like that’, Bertie comments. Usborne wrote: ‘Giving the old oil’ [...] Is that an original PGW coining? […] Or is it all stuff that you have overheard and grabbed and given a local habitation to? For instance “Oompus boompus”, “Tinkerty-tonk”, “Rannygazoo”.
4 ‘To which London Clubs did you belong? My vague identification of the Drones is Buck’s, perhaps because all of its members appear to be young […] Did you belong to Buck’s?’
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Remsenburg, Long Island
Sept 10. 1956
Dear Denis.
[…] Sorry I’ve been so long writing. Got tied up with my Art. A sort of autobiography lugging in my Punch articles.1 Will probably be called facetious by the eggheads.
We have at last got the workmen out of the house and the place is really looking fine now. At last I have a really spacious workroom with plenty of light. The only trouble is that they have built book shelves to hold about a thousand more books than I possess, so that part of the room looks a bit bare.
[…]
Edward should have been sent out of the army on Sept 3, and I am wondering if this Suez business has led to him being kept on. A dirty trick, if so, but not one I would put beyond the authorities.
Marilyn Monroe Gentile, but Arthur Miller definitely Hebraic. I never heard the name Marilyn before our M. Miller.2
I’m still reading Max Beerbohm’s dramatic criticism book, as it is in short spasms easy to read at breakfast before the papers arrive. I dislike it more every morning. What lice dramatic critics are, especially if they start off by being lice, like M.B.
Other reading of mine has been the Daily Express, large batches of which arrive every other day from a man I was in camp with. What a ghastly loathsome paper! My chief hates are Nancy Spain and Rene McColl [sic].
Yours ever
Plum
1 America, I Like You.
2 The playwright Arthur Miller had married Marilyn Monroe in June 1956. PGW was remembering Marilyn Miller, who had starred in the Wodehouse, Bolton and Kern musical, Sally, in 1920.
TO SHERAN CAZALET
Remsenburg, Long Island, New York
Dec 10. 1956
Darling Sheran.
[…]
Great excitement on just now. Guy has got the idea of reviving one of our old Princess shows, using all Jerry Kern’s best tunes from other shows, and he reports great interest in the idea in New York. We shall probably be lunching next week with Dick Rodgers to discuss it. Of course it would be a cinch if Rodgers and Hammerstein would put it on, but if they don’t want it I think it should be easy to get another management. There is a terrific boom in Jerry’s music just now, and it would cost something very small to put on an intimate piece with only two sets. I have been working at the lyrics, and they are coming out well.
Love from us both
Yours ever
Plum
TO RICHARD USBORNE
Remsenburg, Long Island
Dec 18. 1956
Dear Usborne.
Before I forget. ‘Not so but far otherwise’ is from Kipling’s Just So Stories.1
So glad the book is getting along. Yes, you’re right about Mike. I never cared very much for him. He is too straight a character to be really interesting.
Vanity Fair. As far as I can remember, I wrote feverishly for Vanity Fair until 1916 when the musical comedies started. (I may have carried on through 1917, though I am not sure.) I wrote under the names of Pelham Grenville, P. Brook-Haven, C. P. West and my own. V.F. lingered on till 1936, when it was merged with Vogue. According to Margaret Case Harriman, who was on V.F. till she joined the New Yorker, it was Claire Booth Luce, the ambassadress to Italy, who killed it. She induced Conde Nast to stuff it full of heavy political articles. Frank Crowninshield, the editor, hated this but could do nothing about it. Of course the loss of Benchley, Parker and Sherwood contributed a lot to the death of the magazine. Nobody seemed to have the knack of doing the right sort of light stuff after they left.
[…] Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 The phrase appears in Wodehouse’s The Gold Bat, Chapter 2, and in the 1915 Reggie Pepper story ‘The Test Case’.
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Basket Neck Lane,
Remsenburg,
New York
Dec 18. 1956
Dear Denis.
[…] I am now two books ahead and shall not have to publish anything else for about eighteen months, but would like to get a plot of some kind going. So far not a gleam. I see, by the way, that Shaw’s Pygmalion was lifted from Smollett. Did you know that? I suppose the thing to do is to read all those frightful old books. I inherited from the previous owners of this house a set of Fielding. Maybe I could rewrite Tom Jones.
Yours ever
Plum
Collier’s has just ceased publication. My only serial market on this side! What a life!
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Remsenburg, Long Island
June 8. 1957
Dear Denis.
Nice to hear from you again, but sorry you’ve been having this gouty-arthritic condition. I always have a feeling that almost anything foul can happen if you live in London. Guy Bolton, who is there now, writes to say it’s wonderful, but I don’t believe him. For about two years everyone has been telling me that My Fair Lady is wonderful, and I had to go to it last Wednesday, a prominent manager having got me house tickets, and I thought it was the dullest lousiest show I had ever seen. Even as Pygmalion without Rex Harrison it was pretty bad, but with Rex Harrison it’s awful. Who ever started the idea that he has charm? I had always considered Professor Higgins the most loathsome of all stage characters, but I never realized how loathsome he could be till I saw Sexy Rexy playing him. Why everyone raves about the thing I can’t imagine. I met a sweet clear-thinking woman the other day who told me she had walked out after the first act, which I would have done if I hadn’t had Sheran with me, all dewy-eyed and saying ‘Isn’t this magical!’.
Sheran came to us for the week end after her return from her eleven thousand mile trip, and was lyrical about Frank Sinatra, whom I have always regarded as the world’s premier louse. She was looking very pretty and has lost a lot of weight.
Have you read a book called Peyton Place? The filthiest thing ever penned. I wonder if they have toned it down for England. It’s worse than Ten North Frederick. What ghastly muck they are publishing now. I have almost given up reading modern novels, confining myself entirely to mystery stories and the good old stuff in my shelves – e.g. The Flower Show par le maitre Mackail.
I am a third of the way though a new novel. I think Something Fishy is going to be made into a musical of all things. Cy Feuer, of Feuer and Martin, who put on Guys and Dolls etc, wrote and asked if he could do it as a musical. I shall not have to work on it myself, thank goodness, but just sell him the ‘basic rights’.
We are having the usual cook trouble. My typewriter has gone lousy, blast it. Being 85 miles from New York we are out of the cook zone. Otherwise, everything is fine in the house.
Yours ever
Plum
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Remsenburg, Long Island
August 17. 1957
Dear Denis.
[…]
Letter from Sheran reports a visit to you and says you were fit. She certainly seems to move in exalted circles. Intimate little dances at Buckingham Palace and all that sort of thing. Sooner her than me.
How are you on the classics? When we bought this house, a number of books came with it, including all Fielding’s works. I have been trying to re-read Tom Jones, and my opinion is that it is lousy. Do people really think it’s the greatest novel ever written? What I felt after reading a few pages was that if this son of a bishop goes on being arch like this, I’m through. And I was through. Can you stand him?
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Remsenburg, Long Island
April 22. 1959
Dear Denis.
Delay in writing due to very strenuous work on new novel, which I finished a few days ago. What a hell of a sweat these things are. I often feel how wise you were to give it up. On the other hand, there’s probably nothing so pleasant in life as having got the thing done and being able to do the polishing work without having to wonder if one’s going to fall down on the vital scene two chapters ahead. I think this one has come out all right. My agent likes it – not Watt, the American one – which is something.
I wish I could convert you to dachshunds. I used to view them with concern, as you do, but they really are all right. Our new Jed – the first one was killed by a car – is the best company you could imagine. Eccentric, yes, but never a dull moment.
Sheran. We had a letter from her the other day. She seems to be enjoying her new job and will probably end by marrying one of those BBC lads in lavender pull-overs.
[…]
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg NY
October 16. 1959
Dear Guy.
It was a terrific relief to know that Virginia was all right. But you must have gone through a pretty bad time till you heard the verdict.
I have been on the sick list myself, but am better now. Inflamed bladder or chill on the bladder or something, the symptoms being agony when I passed water, as the expression is. It brought back the brave old days when I used to get clap. There is still a certain amount of pain, but nothing to bother me much. The only trouble is that I have to be constantly dashing to the bathroom, which hampers me socially. I wanted to go up to New York to attend a binge Knopf is giving for Ira Gershwin, whose book of lyrics is being published on the 19th, but I didn’t dare risk it. Otherwise I’m very fit for an old wreck who was 78 yesterday.
[…]
[…] I have done four good chapters of my novel, but it has taken me a month.1 I think the going will be brisker after a while. But what I had planned as a minor character has turned into a major character, and I shall have to do some thinking in order to get enough stuff for her. Characters in a novel are just like actors. You engage someone like Alec Guinness and then find that all he has is a good scene in act one. What I need is a smashing block comedy scene. I suppose it will come eventually.
We all miss you both sadly. Edward Cazalet is now with us till early November and is a tremendous success.
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 Ice in the Bedroom (1961).
TO LORD CITRINE1
Remsenburg, N.Y.
June 29. 1960
Dear Lord Citrine.
I hope this won’t be too much of a bother for you, but you can help me very much if you can spare the time.
After months of brooding I am starting a new Blandings Castle novel starring Lord Ickenham (‘Uncle Fred’) and Lord Emsworth and his pig, and in chapter two they meet and talk at the House of Lords, and what I want is some local colour.2 Where would they talk? Is there a smoking room as in the House of Commons? If so, could you give me a brief description of it.
Lord Emsworth is at the House of Lords against his wishes, Lady Constance having ordered him to go there and vote on some bill. I thought at first that he might have gone because the bill was of some interest to himself, but it works better if it is something Lady Constance is interested in, because I want to plant early how she oppresses him. Can you invent some bill which would sound right? (Lord Ickenham, of course, is voting because it gives him a chance to be in London. Lady Ickenham can’t object if he goes to London with such public-spirited motives.)
It is a very important chapter, as it introduces Lord Ickenham and gives Lord Emsworth the chance to tell the reader what the book is about. It ends with Lord Emsworth inviting Lord Ickenham to Blandings, because the Duke of Dunstable is staying there and Lord E. feels he needs moral support to help him cope with him.
Did you by any chance see the Evening Standard with an interview with me? It was an appalling thing, making me out a sort of gloomy derelict who can’t sell a book or an article in America. It appeared, oddly enough, when I had just got a commission from a magazine for a 2500 word article for a price of $2500. I have consulted experts about a libel action, and I am convinced they will tell me I shall be able to soak the Standard for thousands.
Best wishes
Yours sincerely
P. G. Wodehouse
1 British trade unionist and politician, and admirer of PGW’s work. He was to recommend PGW for a knighthood in 1967.
2 The novel was Service With a Smile.
TO LORD CITRINE
Remsenburg, N.Y.
July 23. 1960
Dear Lord Citrine.
How frightfully kind of you to go to all that trouble to help me. I really do appreciate it. Your letter has solved all my difficulties... UNLESS I have got my times wrong, which will be a big disaster.
I start with Lord Emsworth going to London to attend the opening of Parliament next day. Next day I have Lord Ickenham lunching with Pongo Twistleton at the Drones. He has been to the opening of Parliament in the morning.
After lunch he and Pongo go to a registry office to see the hero married (only the bride doesn’t turn up). Then on leaving the registry office Lord I. goes with his robes and coronet to return them to Moss Bros. (Your suggestion.) There he meets Lord Emsworth and the plot thickens.
You see what I mean. I have assumed that the Opening takes place in the morning and that the Peers have some place where they can robe themselves and after the ceremony de-robe themselves and go off in their ordinary clothes to lunch at the Drones. Is this correct? Golly, I hope so, or I shall have a lot of rewriting to do.
In the booklet you sent me I see that Elizabeth the First opened parliament on April 2, 1571, so I am making April the time of the story, though summer would suit me better. Is the opening always in April?
So can you spare a moment to brief me on the following:
1. Is the opening ceremony in the morning?
2. Is it in April?
3. Would Lord Ickenham and Lord Emsworth robe themselves at their hotel or at the House of Lords? And would they after the ceremony get into their ordinary clothes again? (I can’t see Lord I. in his robes at the Drones!)
If your answers are favourable, I am home. If not, I shall have to make the Pongo-Lord-I lunch the day following the opening, which won’t be so good.
How tricky it always is when one has to keep to known facts. One can’t afford to go wrong.
Though I shall not be using the interior of the House of Lords this time, your information is bound to come in handy sooner or later. I am sure to need the Lords atmosphere in some other story.
I think this novel is going to be good, if only I can get the end right. But I usually find that if one gets the thing going, the impetus carries one through.
I had a letter this morning from the Jenkins people saying that my Jeeves book will be out on August 12 and that they are sending me my copies. When they arrive, I will send you one. (I hope the jacket won’t be too awful!)
Did I tell you that that Evening Standard interview said that I was very rich, very sad and lonely with nothing to spend my money on and depressed all the time because my writing powers were waning and my public had deserted me. (I can’t imagine where the man got all that rot.) But the result is that every post brings letters from women in England either asking for a loan or else saying that if I will pay their fare over here they will come and cheer me up. The fact that I have been very happily married for forty-six years and would prefer my wife’s company doesn’t occur to them.
Yours sincerely
P. G. Wodehouse
TO J. D. GRIMSDICK
Remsenburg, N.Y.
Nov 28. 1960
Dear J.D.
How unerring your judgment always is! And how right you were about Usborne’s book. It is quite good, but there is so much rambling off-the-ball stuff that the good parts are smothered.
Of course I cut the ‘Internee’ chapter right out and also all the references to the broadcasts which I was able to find at a first reading. I am going through the whole book again and ought to be able to return you the script in a few days. As I take it there is no immediate rush, I will send it by sea mail.
I can’t make Usborne out. He is supposed to be friendly, but in that Internee chapter and all through the book he was making about as vicious an attack on me as anyone has done so far. And I suppose he will be amazed that I could take any exception to it!
The book is supposed to be an analysis of my work, and references to my private affairs have no part in it. Cut out all the stuff about the broadcasts and you have a neat script, about the right length.
If I had written this letter two days ago, immediately on reading the book, the tone of it would have been much more belligerent. For two days I was absolutely furious with Usborne, but now I have got over it.
He is an extraordinary ass, though. Fancy not realizing – as I suppose he didn’t – what the effect of digging up all that old stuff would be. Just as everybody or nearly everybody has forgotten about it.
In your letter you say that you think there should be a factual chapter about the broadcasts at the end. I am against this. Ignore the whole thing, I say. I feel very strongly about this.
I am cutting to the bone in other parts, especially the chapter about the school stories. Who wants three or four pages giving the plot of a thing I wrote for Chums in 1905? I am also cutting about five thousand words about my brother Armine and all the stuff about fights at school. He seems to have an obsession about fights.
Well, there it is. I think that what is left will make a very good book.
[…]
Yours ever
P.G.
TO WILLIAM TOWNEND
100 Park Avenue, New York
January 3. 1961
Dear Bill,
The letters arrived yesterday, and I have just finished a first quick perusal.
It gives one an odd feeling reading letters one has written over a period of forty years. Rather like drowning and having one’s whole past life flash before one. How few of the people I mention are still alive. Guy Bolton, thank goodness, and Malcolm Muggeridge and Ira Gershwin and Frank Sullivan, also thank goodness, but Flo Ziegfeld, Charlie Dillingham, Ray Comstock, Marilyn Miller, Gertie Lawrence. Jerry Kern, George Gershwin. Lorimer, Wells, Kipling, Molnár... dozens of them, all gone, and you and I in a few months will be eighty.
Solemn thought, that. Makes one revise one’s views. I had always supposed that the whole idea of the thing was that others might make the Obituary column but that I was immortal and would go on forever. I see now that I was mistaken, and that I, too, must ere long hand in my dinner pail. I’m not sure I like the new arrangement, but there it is.
It does seem silly that blokes as young and sprightly as you and me should have reached such an age as eighty. However, it has to be faced. I’m slowing up. I still do my before-breakfast exercises every morning, plus touching my toes fifty times without a suspicion of bending my knees, and I can navigate my daily three miles, but I can see I’m not quite the man I was.
Little things tell the story. When on my infrequent visits to New York a taxi driver nearly runs me down, he no longer damns my eyes and wants to know where I think I’m going; he shakes his head indulgently and says, ‘Watch it, grandpa!’ Furthermore, I am noticeably less nimble when getting after the dog next door if I see him with his head and shoulders in our garbage can. And I note a certain stiffness of the limbs which causes me, when rising from my chair, to remind the beholder, if a man who has travelled in Equatorial Africa, of a hippopotamus heaving itself up from the mud of a riverbank.
[…]
Waugh was to give a talk on Wodehouse on 15 July 1961. It was a prelimi-nary to the later celebration of Wodehouse’s eightieth birthday in October.
TO EVELYN WAUGH
Remsenburg N.Y.
Jan 23. 1961
It really was wonderful of you to have fixed up that BBC thing, and I am tremendously grateful. What this world needs is more people like you in it. I can’t tell you how I feel about the way you have always championed me against my attackers. I shall never forget it.
We now have one of those latest words in radio where you press a knob and get London, Paris etc, so I shall be able to listen in.
[…]
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
TO J. D. GRIMSDICK
Remsenburg, N.Y.
Jan 31. 1961
Dear J.D.
[…]
About the Usborne book. Sorry, but I destroyed all that broadcasts material. I felt strongly that after you had cut it out of the book there was nothing to prevent Usborne selling the stuff as an article to some magazine, and destroying the stuff would at least compel him to do all his scavenging all over again.
[…]
Yours ever
P.G.
William Connor, the journalist known as ‘Cassandra’, had condemned Wodehouse on the BBC in 1941. They had since become friends, and Connor wrote in the Daily Mirror of his desire to ‘bury the whole story and to forgive and, where necessary, to hope to be forgiven’.
TO WILLIAM CONNOR
Remsenburg, New York
May 10. 1961
Dear Walp.
A rather embarrassing situation has arisen. (For me, I mean. I don’t suppose you’ll turn a hair over it.)
Some time ago I had a letter from Evelyn Waugh, saying (quote) ‘I have arranged for the BBC to make an act of homage to you on July 15th, the twentieth anniversary of their attack on you.’
I thought that was fine, but I have just had a letter from Guy Bolton, recently arrived in London, and he says that somebody told him ‘that Evelyn Waugh is making a TV appearance which will be an attack on Cassandra in answer to what he wrote of you’.
Well, dash it, you and I are buddies, and if the above is correct, I don’t want you thinking that I had anything to do with this. I value our friendship too much. I’ll do what I can to halt the proceedings, though as I say, you probably won’t give a damn.
Even before I met you, I had never had any ill-feeling about that BBC talk of yours. All you had to go on was that I had spoken on the German radio, so naturally you let yourself go. And what the hell! It’s twenty years ago.
I hope the cats are flourishing. We have just had to add a stray Boxer to the establishment. So now we have two cats (both strays), a dachshund and this Boxer. Fortunately they all get on together like old college chums.
When are you going to make another of your trips to this side?
Yours ever
Plum
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg, New York
Sept 24. 1961
[…]
I suppose you saw in the London papers about Marion Davies’s death.1 I don’t know it should upset one, but it does. Maybe it’s just because it brings home to one the passage of time. I’m beginning to dislike very much the thought of being eighty in less than a month. It’s very hard to get used to it. […]
1 Marion Davies (1897–1961), the long-term companion of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, had starred in Oh, Boy! in 1917. The Wodehouses had met her again during their stay in Hollywood.
Anything Goes, the hit musical of 1934 with Ethel Merman playing Reno, had been written by Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Cole Porter, and was then heavily revised by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse. It was revived in 1962, and Wodehouse was asked to update the song ‘You’re the Top’.
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg, New York
Oct 28. 1961
Dear Guy.
Here is the revised ‘You’re The Top’ lyric. It was a pretty difficult job, as the lines were so short and one was confined to nouns and no chance of using adjectives, plus all those double rhymes. I think it has come out all right, but of course with a lyric like this one will probably get some much better ideas in the course of time. I’m not satisfied with some of the couplets like Cole’s ‘arrow collar’ and ‘dollar’, which seem flat to me, and the poor devil got very exhausted after doing five refrains. Fancy letting a line like “You’re the baby grand of a lady and a gent” get by. Not to mention ‘Inferno’s Dante’. What the hell does that mean?
Two things about the show disturb me – or, rather, three. I don’t like the letter they wrote me saying they thought of making the thing a 1934 opus. WHY? There’s nothing in the story that couldn’t be 1961, and, as you said in your letter to them, people are sick of those old-style musicals. I think we should insist on making it 1961 and tell them we won’t let the show go on as a 1934 piece.
Secondly, I have always disliked Anything Goes heartily because the wrongness of the balance offends my artistic soul. Naturally, if you’ve got Ethel Merman starring, you have to give her something to do, but when the thing becomes non-Ethel-Merman, it’s all wrong having Reno do all the three good numbers. It throws everything out of kilter. You feel Why the hell doesn’t Billy marry Reno if he thinks so highly of her? Is there no way we can give ‘You’re The Top’ to Hope and Billy? (On second thoughts, no we can’t, there’s no way of making flip stuff like this suitable for the heroine.)
Thirdly, the score is so thin. Apart from the three song hits we have almost nothing. Even after twenty-seven years I can remember how lousy that ‘Gypsy in Me’ number was. All we have except for the three big ones are ‘All Through the Night’ (which is lyrically all wrong for the spot it’s in, the love story not having advanced so far) and the comic song by Moon. Apart from those we have four sorts of opening choruses, a reprise and a finale. What we want are two good duets for Hope and Billy.
[…] Summing up, a firm hand with Reno!
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg, New York
October 28. 1961
Dear Guy.
[…]
I’m working on the A. Goes lyric and have got a masterly couplet, as follows: –
‘When the courts decide, as they did latterly,
We could read Lady Chatterley
If we chose,
Anything goes.’
(Darned sight better than anything old King Cole ever wrote).
By the way, for London most of my Top lyric will be meaningless. I’ll rewrite it. But you will have to collect as many English things to mention as you can. Would they know who Grandma Moses was over there?1
I seem to have become the Grand Old Man of English Literature. Grimsdick tells me they have already received more than five hundred inches of press notices of my birthday and more coming in all the time.
[…] Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 Born in 1860, renowned American folk artist Anna Mary Robertson ‘Grandma’ Moses had turned 100 the previous year.
TO EVELYN WAUGH
Remsenburg, New York.
November 1. 1961
Dear Evelyn.
At last I am able to write and thank YOU for your birthday cable. I had over sixty letters to answer from fans and I put off writing to friends till I had disposed of them.
I was stunned by the press I got in England. My publisher wrote me that he had already received over five hundred inches of press stuff and more coming in all the time. Entirely due to that broadcast of yours, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. It pulverized the opposition.
I hope you are going strong. I feel exactly the same as I did twenty years ago and still do my morning exercises daily. I suppose in due course I shall suddenly fall apart, but as of even date I am in great shape.
I have just been re-reading Scoop. What a masterly book! I don’t know anyone who can do atmosphere like you. Referring particularly to the home life of the Boot family.
I always feel that you and I lead exactly the same sort of life and enjoy more than anything not having to meet one’s fellow men. I have become as attached to this place as William Boot was to Boot Magna Hall. I never leave it except to go to New York for the day about three times a year. The only catch is that I would like to come to England for a visit but can’t desert the dachshund, the Boxer and the two cats, who throw a fit if I am away for the inside of a day. Isn’t it extraordinary that the country never gets dull. There always seems something to do, if it is only taking out the garbage or exercising the dogs.
I think our old show Anything Goes (1934) is going to be revived both here and in London, and I am very busy revising Cole Porter’s lyrics, bringing the topical stuff up to date. When I am through with them, I am hoping to start a new Jeeves novel. I have got the scenario all set and it looks pretty good.
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg, N.Y.
November 2. 1961
Dear Guy.
Here is the revised Anything Goes lyric. I also enclose another extra refrain for ‘You’re The Top’ (a good one) and Cole’s original lyric for ‘A. Goes’ so that you can see how lousy it was.
The trouble with Cole is that he has no power of self-criticism. He just bungs down anything whether it makes sense or not just because he has thought of what he feels is a good rhyme. Can you imagine turning in stuff like ‘So Mrs Roosevelt with all her trimmins (why trimmins?) can broadcast a bed by Simmons, ’Cause Franklin knows anything goes’?
I have rewritten the verse, because Cole’s verse seemed to me absolute drivel. What on earth does a line like ‘Any shock they should try to stem’ mean? and in the first refrain he has ‘bare limbs’, ‘me undressed’ and ‘nudist parties’ one after the other. It shows what a powerful personality Ethel Merman must have, to be able to put that sort of stuff over.
I always feel about Cole’s lyrics that he sang them to Elsa Maxwell and Noel Coward in a studio stinking of gin and they said ‘Oh, Cole, darling, it’s just too marvellous.’ Why can’t he see that you must have a transition of thought in a lyric just as in dialogue?
Do you remember a lyric of his with a line about ‘a burning inside of me’, followed by something about something being ‘under the hide of me’?1 No taste!!
[…]
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 See Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, written for the 1932 musical Gay Divorce.
TO ANGUS THUERMER
Remsenburg, New York
November 21. 1961
Dear Mr Thuermer.
Awfully nice to hear from you after all these years. How you do get around! I wonder how you are liking it in Ghana.
How well I remember that time you came to Tost. Nor have I forgotten the baked beans and the tobacco. What a curious life that was. I suppose I am one of the few internees who thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved being able to work on my novel without agents and people calling me up to ask how I was getting on and if I could rush the text of it a bit there might be a chance of a movie sale. I used to do about a page a day and never felt I had to do any more.
I’m not so sure I altogether approve of this thing of being eighty. I always thought other people might die but that I was immortal and would go on for ever. I am now beginning to doubt this. Still, I continue wonderfully fit and still do my Daily Dozen every morning, plus touching my toes fifty times without bending the knees. I have done the Daily Dozen every day since 1919 without missing a day even when we were three days on the train going to Tost. […]
If you ever come to the USA on leave, do give me a ring and we’ll foregather.
Yours ever,
P. G. Wodehouse
TO EVELYN WAUGH
Remsenburg, New York
December 14. 1961
Dear Evelyn.
I hope this catches you before you start out for the tropics.
It was awfully nice of you to put that charming inscription in The End of the Battle, but when I had finished it, which I did ten minutes ago, I felt that I ought to be putting it in a book to you. Yours has always been a high standard, but you have surpassed yourself in this one. It’s terrific.
I have been trying to analyse the way you do it, – that unhurried, almost casual, way you tell the story, with no straining for ‘punch’ scenes, so that for quite a while the reader feels that nothing is happening and then suddenly realizes that you have opened up a whole world to him. (This is rottenly put, but I hope you will get what I mean. I think what I’m driving at is that the whole thing seems so effortless. What an extraordinary gift you have for giving a whole character in a couple of lines or a few words of dialogue.)
[…]
I am now going to read all three books over again. I have been re-reading all yours lately, starting with Decline and Fall. I think I told you how much I had enjoyed Scoop. I hope Battle sells in millions.
[…]
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
TO S. C. ‘BILLY’ GRIFFITH
Remsenburg
New York
January 30. 1962
Dear Billy.
[…]
How wonderful that Mike has got into Cambridge. It would have been tragic if he had missed. A pity it can’t be Pembroke, but if I were you I wouldn’t dream of taking the gamble, for, as you say, he might strike a bad day and miss Pembroke after giving up Magdalene. It doesn’t really matter what college he goes to, as he is a cert for his cricket, hockey and racquets blues wherever he is.
I do agree with you about the folly of the Cambridge authorities in not paying any attention to ‘on the field’ excellence. I think they’re all wrong making the standards so high. Cambridge ought to be like it was in my young days, a place where you could get in if you could read and write. Bertie Wooster and his pals just walked into their university, presumably purely on charm of manner, and I think that’s how it ought to be. Too much of this business of East Salford Secondary Grammar School nowadays.
[…]
Yours ever
P.G.
TO J. D. GRIMSDICK
Remsenburg, New York
February 23. 1962
Dear J.D.
Very sad news today. Bill Townend died last week. I had a letter from his brother. Bill’s wife died not long ago, and it completely knocked him out, and on top of that, while alone in their house, he had a bad fall and was not discovered till late next morning. He went to a nursing home and there had two more falls, one of which broke his femur. His brother said he had been in a sort of coma for weeks and had lost the will to live. As you can imagine, it has been a great blow to me.
[…]
The Jeeves novel is coming out fine. I think it will be quite long enough.
Yours ever
P.G.
Writing a few days later, Wodehouse noted that ‘Bill Townend’s death makes me very sad, but it really was a merciful thing, as his wife, to whom he had been married for forty-seven years and to whom he was devoted, died a few weeks before he did, and he felt he had nothing to live for, especially as he could not do any writing. […] He would have been a helpless invalid and miserable if he had lived, so I don’t feel as badly about it as I might, if things had been different’.
A month later, he was cheered by the appearance of his old friend Ellaline Terriss on the TV show This Is Your Life. An actress and musical comedy star, Terriss made her stage debut in 1888 and went on to appear in films up until 1939 [see plate 34]. She was the widow of the famous actor-producer Seymour Hicks, for whom Wodehouse had written lyrics for The Beauty of Bath (1906) and The Gay Gordons (1907). Terriss had appeared in both shows. It was she who nicknamed Wodehouse ‘the Hermit’ when he came to stay with them in 1907 and often vanished into the woods for long walks when working out a lyric.
TO ELLALINE TERRISS
May 20. 1962
My dear Ella.
It was such a joy to me to do my little bit on the tribute to you. I wish I could have come over, but it was impossible. It would have meant leaving Mrs. P.G.W. all alone in the house, and she has just had an operation on her foot and can’t walk. (Or couldn’t then, but she is much better now and can get around.)
I have had quite a number of letters saying what a success the show was and how sweet you looked! I wonder how many people there are today beside myself who saw you in His Excellency.1 I always remember being taken to that play and loving it. I’ve always heard that the music was no good, but I thought it fine. Do you remember the ‘practical jokes’ trio – you and Grossmith and somebody else?
I have never forgotten that Devonshire holiday, nor the Christmas (1906) at your Old Forge house – was it Esher? No, Merstham. How happy those days were.
I am now very cosily settled in this pretty village ninety miles from New York with a wife I adore – we have been married 47 years – two dogs and two cats. I am still writing as hard as ever, but I don’t do anything in the theatre now.
Lots of love
Yours ever
The Hermit
1 His Excellency opened at the Lyric in 1895.
In 1962, Bolton published a novel on the love affair of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin entitled The Olympians.
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg, New York
July 2. 1962
Dear Guy.
[…]
I came across enclosed in the local paper and wondered if you might not make your next one about Hazlitt. Very interesting character. Did you know that he was a devil of a chap with the women and shocked Wordsworth because when a girl wouldn’t yield to his ‘lascivious advances’ he spanked her? According to a book that’s just been published, he was a very unpopular man and only Charles Lamb could stand him.
Yours
Plum
The following letter was written when Ethel had to go into hospital for a cancer check-up.
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
Remsenburg, New York
9 p.m. August 21. 1962
My own precious darling Bunny.
I am writing this to tell you how much I love you and how miserable I am when you are not with me. It is about half an hour since we talked on the telephone, and I have just taken round the bird seed – not omitting your brown patches!! – and also filled the bird bowls. So you needn’t worry about your pets. No sign of the ducks these last days, but your little red bird has been there, tucking in.
It’s odd about the dogs. I know they must miss you, but I think they puzzle it out and say to themselves ‘Well, the old man’s still here,’ and assume that you are bound to turn up soon. They both slept quite happily in the living room last night. I turned in at eleven, and when I hadn’t got to sleep by two-thirty I got up and took a pill and went to sleep after that. Due to worrying about you, of course.
It’s awful to think of you having to go through all those awful things again. I do hope that after they are through you will get a good rest.
Margie and Lynn are looking after me splendidly. What a nice, cheerful woman Margie is.
I’m worrying if you are getting the right food. Do get the special diet. You ought to eat lots of custards and drink a lot of milk.
[…]
What a sad thing it is being alone. Ordinarily hours pass without my seeing you, but just knowing you’re there makes it all right. Now I keep thinking ‘I’ll go up and see my Bunny’, and then I realize that you aren’t there. I do miss you so, darling.
I don’t suppose you’ll get this till Thursday or even Friday, as I shall mail it tomorrow at two in the afternoon. Still, so long as you do get it!
Oceans of love, darling. I’m thinking loving thoughts of you all the time. I love you more and more every day.
Your
Plummie
TO DENIS MACKAIL
Remsenburg
New York
June 18. 1963
Dear Denis.
Thanks for letter and the letter you enclosed. Very gratifying.
[…]
We are lapping up all the Profumo stuff and wondering who the member of the royal family is who is rumoured to have been mixed up with Christine. By the way, am I wrong or is England now a sink of vice and corruption? Viewed from a distance, it gives the impression of a country one is glad no longer to be a citizen of.1
Literary note. My last two novels have appeared serially in a magazine called Playboy (all other serial markets in the USA having disappeared), and I see in the papers that a warrant for the arrest of the publisher for publishing obscene matter has been issued. Apparently the current number (which I haven’t seen) devotes twelve pages to photographs of Jayne Mansfield in the nude (with licentious captions) and so ye Ed is on the run. How will this affect my reputation? It would be great if I found myself listed among the dirty writers. Just what I need to tap another public.
Well, Cleopatra has opened, and the NY Herald-Tribune says Liz Taylor is a lousy actress.2 Did you know she was a bosom pal of Sheran’s. Sheran, when she was over here, was weighed down with photographs of L.T. and Burton embracing one another, plus some of LT alone, signed ‘To Sheran from cousin Elizabeth’. I suppose millions will go to see the ruddy picture, but not me. Can you imagine sitting through a pic that lasts four hours?
[…]
Yours ever
Plum
1 There was a widely publicised scandal in which the British politician John Profumo was exposed as having been involved with Christine Keeler, a prostitute.
2 Cleopatra, a 1963 film, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The New York Herald-Tribune termed the film ‘at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium’.
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
October 23. 1963
My own precious darling Bunny.
This is just to tell you how much I am missing you and praying that you will soon come back safe to me. I love you, darling, more than a million bits.
Oh, how lonely it was without you last night! The house was like a morgue. I buckled down after dinner and wrote thirteen letters and this morning I wrote four more and am now all cleaned up. I wrote long letters to Birdie and Paul Schmidt and told them all about your bad health and how you wanted to write to them but could not.
Gracie turned up this morning with glowing reports of Jed. She said everybody loved him and he was as good as gold. She also said that she would take him if we went away and her sister would love to have Debbie. So if we can fix up Poona and Blackie, we could go somewhere for a change. What companions the animals are! I’m sure they knew that I was blue and missing you last night, for they made a special fuss over me. Poona came and sat on my lap for hours.
I am looking after your birds. I gave them seed and water at lunch time today and at five o’clock yesterday. So they are all right. I gave them the water just now, after taking the dogs for their walk, and every morsel of seed everywhere was eaten! I will give them some more at five. I am being very good and not going out after dark. I just let Debbie out of the kitchen door last night.
Poor darling, you must be having a ghastly time. I do hope they won’t exhaust you with those X-rays, but I’m afraid it will be very painful. But I know they will find that everything is all right and you will come back to me in a few days.
Gracie made me a very nice cheese souffle for lunch, and I am looking forward to dinner. How clever you were inviting Guy and Virginia. It will be so nice having them.
All my love, angel, and remember that I never stop thinking of you and how much I love you.
Your
Plummie.
Both dogs and both cats are in my study with me as I write this.
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg
New York
July 16. 1964
Dear Guy.
[…]
New development in the Wodehouse home. In September my brother Armine’s widow is coming to live with us.1 She has just spent a week here and we both like her very much, so I think the new arrangement will be a success. She will take a lot of work off Ethel’s hands, and one great advantage is that now I shall be able to go to New York for the night if I want to, which I couldn’t do before as I couldn’t leave Ethel alone in the house.
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 Nella (Helen) Wodehouse.
TO GUY BOLTON
Remsenburg
New York
August 3. 1964
Dear Guy.
[…]
I have been sticking to my afternoon walk, but it’s very dull without you.1 I don’t often go more than once round. I can’t help feeling that the dogs must get very bored with the same walk every day, but there’s nowhere else to go.
How do you feel about literary classics? I have come to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with me, because I can’t read them. I tried Jane Austen and was bored stiff, and last night I had a go at Balzac’s Père Goriot and had to give it up. I couldn’t take the least interest in the characters. Give me Patricia Wentworth!
Ethel is convinced that Goldwater will win in November, but I keep telling her he hasn’t a hope. The Democrats are the larger party, and I can’t see any of them defecting to Goldwater. But it does make one anxious to think there is even a chance of him becoming president. Ethel likes his TV personality, but to me he is a louse. I can’t stand him.2
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 The Boltons lived about two miles from the Wodehouses. Bolton and Wodehouse developed the habit of taking afternoon walks together.
2 PGW refers to the 1964 presidential election, in which the Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona ran against the incumbent President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had come to office the previous year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Goldwater was known for his conservative views; the Democrat Johnson, meanwhile, was associated with the popularity of Kennedy, and won the election.
TO MR SCHREYER
Remsenburg
New York
August 13. 1964
Dear Mr. Schreyer,
Thank you so much for your letter. I am delighted that you have enjoyed my books.
When I was your age, my two idols were W. S. Gilbert, the Savoy opera man, and Conan Doyle – with a slight edge in favour of the latter because I knew him through playing cricket with him, whereas Gilbert was a sort of remote godlike character to me. (I did meet him once. A mutual friend took me to lunch at his (Gilbert’s) house and I killed one of G’s best stories by laughing in the wrong place!)
Yours sincerely
P. G. Wodehouse
TO J. D. GRIMSDICK
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
Nov 27. 1964
Dear J.D.
The Galahad books arrived after I had written to you.1 Did you ever see a ghastlier jacket in your life? [See plate 35.] One would have thought that anyone reading the book would have gathered that Gally was a dapper elderly man, considering that he is fully described, and this son of unmarried parents has made him look twenty-five and one of the Beatles at that. Taken in conjunction with the loathsome title, one feels that P. Schwed ought to rent a padded cell in some not too choosy lunatic asylum.2
Yours ever
P. G.
1 The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood was published in the UK as Galahad at Blandings.
2 Peter Schwed, Wodehouse’s American publisher at Simon and Schuster.
In 1965, Wodehouse and Ethel’s grandson, Edward Cazalet, was to marry Camilla Gage in England.
TO EDWARD CAZALET
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
Jan 27. 1965
Dear Edward.
Thanks so much for the books, which arrived this morning.
I am planning – always provided the Colonel isn’t ill1 – to come over for the wedding, so will you let me know
(a) When it will be
(b) Where
as I shall want to know what boat to sail on.
I suppose morning coat and topper will be of the essence. I shall have to hire them from Moss Bros. I haven’t owned them since I attended the wedding of Pop Cazalet and Miss Leonora Wodehouse (and darned attractive I looked, too).
Tell Sheran the Sunday Times is arriving regularly.
Yours ever
Plum
P.S. Just sold a short story to Saturday Evening Post for $2500. I haven’t had anything in the SEP since 1940!2
1 ‘The Colonel’ – Edward’s nickname for Ethel, often adopted by Ethel herself.
2 ‘The Battle of Squashy Hollow’, SEP, 5 June 1965, published along with an article, ‘Fifty Years is Practically Half a Century’, to celebrate fifty years since his first contribution on 26 June 1915.
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
Feb 6. 1965
Darling Angel One.
Life’s a terrible blank without my Bunny, but I think you’re quite right to stay in NY another week. Dash it, it’s about ten years since you were out of Remsenburg and you certainly deserve a change.
Spend money like water, because we are simply rolling in it. The bank statement showed $21,000 odd, and since then I have paid in nearly $6000 from Simon and Schuster royalties, the check for the short story from the Saturday Evening Post and a nice little $500 which Playboy sent me as a token of their esteem. So go out and buy yourself a diamond tiara.
[…] I am weakening very much on the idea of going to England. It seems silly to take all that trouble and spend all that money just for about ten days there. I think it would be much better to cancel the trip. What do you think? (I thought your voice sounded sad on the phone when you asked me if I was really going.) I told Edward that my sailing was only provisional and depended on how you were feeling, so he won’t be disappointed.
It’s pretty grim here now with snow and ice all over the place and not a sign of it ever melting. I take the dogs out every afternoon, but it’s very unpleasant.
I am making rather good progress with a plot for a new novel, but as always it’s slow work.
The kitten is terrifically fit and roams all over the house. She will come and lie on my bed, which infuriates Jed and Debbie.
All my love, darling
Your Plummie
TO GUY BOLTON
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
August 7. 1965
Dear Guy.
[…]
Edward has arrived with the most charming wife. She is a nice quiet girl with no frills and a sense of humor, – more like the girls of our youth than the modern lot. They are staying till Monday, when they fly to Honolulu, and everything has worked out fine. They are staying as our guests of course at the Patio, and they like it there very much. We have lent Edward the car and they have wangled admission to the tennis at the Golf Club and also have somehow managed to get into the Swordfish, so they are well fixed. They come here for tea and dinner and bridge afterwards, so they are having a good time.
[…]
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
In a letter to Sheran Cazalet, Wodehouse described his daily routine. ‘I have started a new novel and it seems to be coming out all right, though I have never done one that departed so much from my scenario. There is now nothing left of my original idea and as for the characters all the most important ones have been cut out. Still, it’s progressing, though slowly because of the soap operas. I used to watch just Love of Life, and now I have got hooked to Edge of Night and Secret Storm, which come on from 3-30 to 4-30, so I have to do my writing after dinner. Also, at 11-30 in the morning I have to watch the Dick Van Dyke Show. Have you seen it? It’s easily the best thing on TV.’
TO GUY BOLTON
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
August 19. 1966
Dear Guy.
[…]
How difficult it is to write stories about a country when you aren’t in it. One keeps getting up against facts. I have just got to a point in my novel where a man with a guilty conscience thinks the hero is a private detective trailing him, and they both start for London from somewhere in Sussex which might be Horsham, and of course the guilty conscience man is always looking round and seeing the hero, both of them being headed for the same objective, their mutual bank in Aldwych. Now here’s where you can rally round. Do you go to Victoria from Horsham or Hayward’s Heath or whatever it is? If so, on arriving at Victoria and wanting to go to Aldwych and not wanting to take a taxi because of the traffic, you take the Tube. What station do you get out at for Aldwych?1
Great excitement down here. Yesterday a couple of men got into the house at the end of the lane where Jed barks at the poodle and came out with a lot of silver and a TV set, – and this was early afternoon. Ethel is talking of buying a gun!
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 See the end of Chapter 5 of Company for Henry (1967). In the end, the Hero and the Guilty Conscience end up both going to the Post Office in Ashby Paradene, so the information was not actually required.
TO EDWARD CAZALET
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
Dec 4. 1966
Dear Edward.
What wonderful news. How happy you must both be feeling, and what a bit of luck for a baby having parents like you and Camilla. He (or she) couldn’t have chosen better. We are looking forward eagerly to seeing you and C at Easter. Do stay as long as you can. I’m afraid an Easter visit can’t be as long as a summer one, but it will be fine if you can manage a few days. Better still, of course, if you can make it longer.
I don’t know if it has arrived yet – probably not at this time of year – but we have shipped off to you a photograph of your mother and me off to Hollywood in 1930. The Colonel hadn’t come over yet; she joined us later. It was rather funny – I had two shows in rehearsal, one a straight play starring Gertrude Lawrence, the other a musical for Ziegfeld, and I thought it would be fun to go to Hollywood for a sort of weekend just to get a change, and of course both managements took it for granted that I had skipped off permanently. We had three days in Hollywood and then came back, so all was forgiven. This was the time when we were asked to a party, and Hollywood parties always start with about two hours cocktails, and your mother got stuck with some man before dinner, and as she didn’t drink found it a bit much. So when dinner was announced she had found two hours of the man’s company about enough and heaved a sigh of relief at the prospect of getting rid of him, only to discover that she was sitting next to him at the meal. I wonder she ever recovered.
[…]
Love to Camilla
Yours ever
Plum
P.S. Here’s the old Christmas present
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
July 6. 1967
My darling Angel Bunny.
Gosh, how I am missing my loved one! The house is a morgue without you. Do you realize that – except for two nights I spent in NY and the time you were in the hospital – we haven’t been separated for a night for twenty years!! This morning Jed waddled into my room at about nine, and I said to myself ‘My Bunny’s awake early’ and was just starting for your room when I remembered. It’s too awful being separated like this.
Jed definitely misses you. […] He is quite cheerful for a while and then he starts wandering round looking for you. Sorry to say Deb hasn’t given a sign that she has noticed anything wrong.
I do hope, darling, that you aren’t having too bad a time. I’m afraid it’s bound to be pretty unpleasant with those X-rays etc. How wonderful it would be if these doctors could get you right.
[…]
Now what else is there? Dogs and cats all well. Jed wouldn’t stay on the sofa with Deb and came and slept on Nella’s bed last night. Poona is fine. I have fed the birds. I have just come back from my walk with Jed and Debbie and Minnie. How I wish I was coming up to Edge of Night and finding you in your room. James is working hard in the garden.
[…] Well, darling, I do hope you are getting along as well as can be expected and getting some sleep at nights. I am counting the days till you can get back to me.
Oceans of love, angel
Your
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
July 11. 1967
My darling angel Bunny whom I love so dear.
I am writing this in my chair after dinner. Smoky has at last got out of it after pinching it for the whole day. Poona is asleep on another chair, Jed and Debbie are asleep in the living-room. The Baby is messing around somewhere outside. Blackie and Spotty are out.
I hope Link rang you up and eased your mind about that bond. Apparently it will be quite all right if we attend to it next week.
Oh, darling, I am so depressed about all the pain you have had and the prospect of more with those injections. I am praying that they will make you all right or if not completely cured at least able to walk about without suffering. What a hell of a time you are going through.
The house still seems desolate without my darling one. I think I miss you most after eight o’clock in the evening when I used to go up to your room and watch television. It is very dreary up there all alone. It’s wonderful, though, being able to talk to you on the phone.
The Edge of the Night is really terrific. Do take a look at it at ½ past 3, Channel 2.
Letter from Scott Meredith. Peter Schwed wants to publish in the Spring a book of my humorous articles, but I am doubtful if there are enough of them to make a book. Perhaps there are.
[…] I had to tell Playboy I couldn’t do the article on ‘Royalty – Who Needs It?’ (Can you imagine what would happen to me in England if I wrote an article like that!) and they rang up from Chicago to say that they were writing to me, suggesting other subjects. Price $1500, so I hope I shall be able to work out something.
No other letters except wads of junk stuff which I have put on your desk.
I enclose the final version of that lyric you read at the dinner table. It really is good, isn’t it? It is just what we need for the end of Act One of the Jeeves musical.
Bless you, angel. Oceans of love. How wonderful to have you back on Saturday.
TO GUY BOLTON
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
July 17. 1967
Dear Guy.
First, before I forget, the two things you wanted to know. Edward’s baby, a boy, was born on June 24, and mother and child in great shape […] My last social security check was $197. In Newsweek this week they said the ante might be raised, which is good, if true.
Ethel got back from hospital on Saturday, very bruised where they had shoved needles into her, but very cheerful, for the X-rays showed that her fears about cancer were without foundation. Also her blood, which used to be not too good, is now fine.
[…]
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
TO ANTHONY POWELL1
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
Nov 16. 1967
Dear Mr Powell.
When a book parcel arrived with the name of Edward Cazalet on it, I thought he was sending me the latest Agatha Christie. It was the thrill of a lifetime when I opened it and found Waring, the one A. Powell missing from my list. I have been getting them from the British Book Store here and they came through with all the others, but I had lost hope of ever getting Waring. My collection is now complete, only marred by the fact that The Soldier’s Art is the Little Brown edition – long and black and not the neat red Heinemann. Still, it’s the contents that matter.
I have always admired your work so much, especially the Music of Time series. The early ones are all fine, but what I like, and what I suppose everyone likes, is the feeling that one is living with a group of characters and sharing their adventures, the whole thing lit up by the charm which is your secret. I hope the series is going on for ever. I should hate to feel that I should never meet Widmerpool again.
I finished Waring at a sitting and enjoyed every line of it. And had the usual Why-on-earth-didn’t-I-think-of-that feeling that I always get when I read your books, – e.g. Captain Plimley’s opus pinched by T. T. Waring and the two publishing brothers.
[…]
All the best
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Anthony Powell (1905–2000) was an English writer, particularly known for his twelve-volume opus, A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. His 1939 novel What’s Become of Waring is set in a publishing firm.
TO AGATHA CHRISTIE
[…]
I am longing to see the book. I don’t think it’s out here yet.
I often wonder how you write, – I mean do you sit upright at a desk? I ask because I find these days I can’t get out of an arm chair and face my desk and when I write in an arm-chair I have the greatest difficulty in reading what I have written. This may be because I have a deckchair, a Boxer and one of our seven cats sitting on me. But oh, how I have slowed up. It’s terrible.
P. G. Wodehouse
TO IRA GERSHWIN
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York 11960
Jan 4. 1970
Dear Ira.
Loved your Christmas telegram. It was the nicest Yule thing that happened to me. I find Christmas more of a trial every year. Did I tell you that Ethel and I have started a Shelter for stray dogs and cats in association with Bide-a-Wee? Well, we drafted out an appeal for donations and gave Bide-a-Wee a list of names and addresses which I was supposed to sign, and Ethel thought it would be much better if I signed each letter myself instead of having a what-do-you-call-it-ed signature. Have you ever signed your name 385 times? It’s an experience. By the time I had finished I couldn’t believe there was such a name as P. G. Wodehouse.
[…]
All love from Ethel and me to you and Lee. I wish we could all meet, but we seem to be tied down here permanently. I am very happy at Remsenburg, but I miss old friends.
Yours always
Plum
TO HENRY SLESAR1
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York 11960
March 20. 1971
Dear Henry.
I was just going to write to you when your letter arrived, but was prevented by a tidal wave of fan mail from people who had read that Times article. I sent the invitation things off to Freddie Bartholomew.2
I am looking forward eagerly to the April 2 binge, and it is awfully good of you to send a car for us. My only qualm is that as I never see World Turns I am going to find it awkward meeting its personnel!
Edge of Night gets better and better. I can’t imagine how you finish off a terrific sequence and then top it off with one just as good. Friday’s curtain was a smash. I wasn’t sure you were still doing it, but was reassured the other day when they at last flashed the names on the screen.
I am looking forward to meeting Mrs Henry.
[...]
Yours ever
Plum
1 Henry Slesar (1927–2002), head writer for The Edge of Night, a soap opera set in a fictional Midwestern town, between 1956 and 1984.
2 The well-known child filmstar of David Copperfield (1935) and Captains Courageous (1937), Bartholomew went on to become producer of PGW’s favourite TV programme, The Edge of Night.
TO AGATHA CHRISTIE
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
April 22. 1971
Dear Agatha Christie.
How ever did you manage to bear up against that tidal wave of disapproval of Passenger to Frankfurt? It must have required a will of iron! The trouble, of course, was that it was so different from your usual. Very fortunate that you were firm. It has been in the middle of the best-seller list over here for months.
I have been reading it again, and like so many of yours it reads even better a second time. It’s a pity from a financial point of view that the American magazines have died, but it’s a relief not having to read those cut-down-into-three-parts things they used to go in for. I remember reading one of yours in its abbreviated version in Collier’s and not liking it, but when I got the complete novel, as you had written it, it became one of my favourites. Editors have a gift for cutting out the bits which give personality to a story.
By the way, I was given three copies of Passenger for Christmas, having already of course bought one for myself.
I finished my Jeeves novel1 and my publishers on both sides of the water think it’s the best I have done. I enclose a very nice cable I had from Christopher McLehose [sic], the man who is now head of Jenkins.
I am now trying to get a plot for a new novel, but so far only incoherent ramblings. But this always happens with me, and so far something has always emerged, so I continue to persevere.
I have just recovered from what I think must have been a bit of heart trouble, brought on by a trying experience. There is a soap opera over here which I am a fan of, and the other day they reached their fifteenth year on TV and gave a big binge in New York to celebrate and insisted on my being there. They said they would send a car to take me to NY and bring me back, but omitted to mention that the car would be picking up and taking back two other celebrants, one of whom lived in a remote spot called Forest Hills. The result was that the journey to New York, normally an hour and a half, took three hours and a half, and owing to the chauffeur losing his way the trip back took over four hours. The result was heart attack as the result of strain. All right again now.
Owing to the postal strike I wasn’t able to congratulate you on becoming a Dame. I do so now with a slight shudder at the thought of all the fan mail you must have had to answer!
Yours ever
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971).
TO GUY BOLTON
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
New York
June 20. 1971
[…]
[…] I had a letter from Agatha Christie in which she says ‘I had a bit of heart trouble two years ago, and I went about puffing and panting and had to prop myself up with pillows every night. Good result, however, was that I lost four of my fourteen stone without chat or bother’. For ‘chat’ read ‘diet’. I am too much of a gentleman to ask her, but I think she must have had the same treatment as me, – i.e. pills to stimulate the kidneys. I sometimes say that it is hardly worth my while to come out of the bathroom, as I have to go in again almost immediately. I am now down to thirteen stone, and I weighed twelve stone six seventy years ago when I was at school. Except for the panting I feel wonderful.
[…]
Yours
Plum
The following note was addressed to members of a Wodehouse seminar, held at Manor Park in Farnham, Surrey.
TO NORMAN MURPHY, MURRAY HEDGCOCK AND OTHERS
May 19. 1973
Thinking of you gathered in conference as I sit mumbling over my clay pipe in my inglenook, I feel not only intensely and sincerely grateful for your interest in my oeuvre, but also a little dizzy. Am I really as good as all that, I ask myself, that citizens of sound mind gather in conference on my works. Do I inspire pity and terror, as recommended by Aristotle, or have these splendid fellows been carried away by kindheartedness and a desire to make my nineties, gay nineties? For, let’s face it, the world I write about, always a small one, – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say, – is now not even small, it is nonexistent. It has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it.
This is pointed out to me every time a new book of mine dealing with the Drones Club and the lads who congregate there is published. ‘Edwardian’ the critics cry, and I shuffle my feet and blush a good deal and say ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’ After all, I tell myself, there has been no generic name for the type of young man who figures in my stories since he used to be called a knut in the pre-first-war days, which certainly seems to suggest that the species has died out like the macaronis of the Regency and the whiskered mashers of the Victorian age.
But sometimes I am in a more defiant mood. Mine, I protest, are historical novels. Nobody objects when an author writes the sort of things that begin ‘More skilled though I am at wielding the broadsword than the pen, I will set down for all to read the tale of how I, plain John Blunt, did follow my dear liege to the wars when the fifth Harry sat on our English throne.’ So why am I not to be allowed to set down for all to read the tale of how the Hon. J. Blunt got fined five pounds by the beak at Bosher Street Police Court for disorderly conduct on Boat Race night? Unfair discrimination is the phrase that springs to the lips, and it wouldn’t hurt if a question or two were asked about it in Parliament.
Two things caused the decline of the drone or knut, the first of which was that hard times hit younger sons. Most knuts were younger sons, and in the reign of good King Edward the position of younger sons in aristocratic families was roughly equivalent to that of the litter of kittens which the household cat produces three times a year. He was always a trifle on the superfluous side.
What generally happened was this. An Earl, let us say, begat an heir. So far, so good. One can always do with an heir. But then – these Earls never knew when to stop – he absentmindedly, as it were, begat a second son, and it was difficult to see how to fit him in.
‘Can’t let the boy starve,’ the Earl said to himself, and forked out a monthly allowance. And there came into being a number of ornamental young men whom the ravens fed. Like the lilies of the field, they toiled not neither did they spin, they just existed beautifully. Their wants were few. Provided they could secure the services of a tailor who was prepared to accept charm of manner as a substitute for ready cash, they were in that blissful condition known as sitting pretty.
Then the economic factor reared its ugly head. Income tax and super tax shot up like rocketing pheasants, and the Earl found himself doing some constructive thinking.
‘Why can’t I?’ he said to his Countess one night as they sat trying to balance the budget.
‘Why can’t you what?’
‘Let him starve’
‘It’s a thought’, the Countess agreed. ‘We all eat too much these days, anyway.’
So the ravens were retired from active duty, and Algy had to go to work.
The second thing that led to the elimination of the knut was the passing of the spat. In the brave old days the spat was the hallmark of the young fellow about town, the foundation stone on which his whole policy was based, and it is sad to reflect that a generation has arisen which does not know what spats were.
Spatterdashes was, I believe, their full name, and they were made of white cloth and buttoned round the ankles, partly no doubt to prevent the socks from getting dashed with spatter, but principally because they lent a gay diablerie to the wearer’s appearance. The monocle might or might not be worn, according to taste, but spats, like the tightly rolled umbrella, were obligatory. I was never myself by knut standards, dressy as a young man (circa 1905), for a certain anemia of the exchequer compelled me to go about my social duties in my brother’s cast-off frock coat and top hat bequeathed to me by an uncle with a head some sizes smaller than mine, but my umbrella was always rolled as tight as a drum and though spats cost money, I had mine all right. There they were, white and gleaming, fascinating the passers-by and causing seedy strangers who hoped for largesse to address me as ‘Captain’ or sometimes even as ‘M’lord’. Many a butler at the turn of the century, opening the door to me and wincing visibly at the sight of my topper, would lower his eyes, see the spats and give a little sigh of relief, as much as to say ‘Not quite what we are accustomed to at the northern end, perhaps, but unexceptionable to the south’.
Naturally if you cut off a fellow’s allowance, he cannot afford spats, and without them he is a spent force. Deprived of his spats, the knut threw in the towel and called it a day.
But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival of knuttery. At the moment, of course, every member of the Drones Club is an earnest young man immersed in some serious pursuit who would raise his eyebrows coldly if you suggested that he pinch a policeman’s helmet on the night of the annual Rugby football contest between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but the heart of Young England is sound. Dangle a consignment of spats before his eyes, and the old fires will be renewed. The knut is not dead, but sleepeth.
When that happens, I shall look my critics in the eye and say ‘Edwardian? Where do you get that Edwardian stuff? I write about life as it is lived today.’
P. G. Wodehouse
TO THELMA CAZALET-KEIR
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York
May 25. 1973
Dearest Thelma.
What a wonderful surprise!!!
I feel deeply grateful to all the contributors to the book and even more so to you for all the trouble you must have taken assembling them. And how sweet of Sheran coming all the way over here to bring it to me. It was a joy to see her again, and looking so well and pretty, too.1
It really did make me blush – I won’t say to the roots of my hair, because I haven’t any – to read the marvellous things the writers said of me. I find it hard to believe that I am as good as all that, though, like Jeeves, I have always endeavored to give satisfaction. The book gave my spirits a tremendous lift, badly needed, as I am in the between-books stage when I feel, as I have done for the last sixty-odd years, that I shall never get another plot. I devoured the book at a sitting and shall of course re-read it [at] intervals for the rest of my life.
Who is Richard Ingrams?2 I think I liked his contribution best of all of them. But they were all terrific.
What appealed to me most, though, was the endless trouble you must have taken. It was just like you. Bless you!
Yours ever
Plummie
1 Wodehouse refers to a book of essays, A Homage to P. G. Wodehouse, with contributions by writers such as Sir John Betjeman and Auberon Waugh, which had been conceived and edited by Thelma Cazalet-Keir.
2 Richard Ingrams, then editor of Private Eye magazine, wrote a piece on Wodehouse entitled ‘Much Obliged, Mr Wodehouse’.
The following extract contains Wodehouse’s responses, via his agent, Scott Meredith, to his publisher’s comments about his latest novel, Bachelors Anonymous.
TO SCOTT MEREDITH
July 9. 1973
[…]
1. P. 10. Cut the line about Ethiopian slaves.1
2. Shakespeare couldn’t even spell his own name, so I don’t think we need worry about ‘sleaves’ and ‘sleeves’.2
3. Change to black.3
4. This money business always worries me. I can’t get used to the present inflation. Do you think it ought to be five pounds? It seems a terribly big sum.4
5. Yes, I’m right. The song was in one of Cole’s flops, so Peter naturally wouldn’t know it.5
6. The very flat phrase ‘the cat brought in’ was put there deliberately to balance the very poetic stuff that precedes it. But it could quite well come out if desired.6
7. The gag about ‘whereabouts’ – meaning (a) where one is and (b) under-garments which you wear about you comes from an old London musical comedy. Could it have been Floradora? Anyway, it always got a big laugh, so presumably London audiences are exceptionally quick on the uptake. But I’m surprised that Peter didn’t get it.7
8. […]
9. Yes, I quite agree. ‘Bird’ is the right word. ‘Doll’ would be too American for an Englishman who had never been to America.8
1 Schwed wrote: ‘I don’t think the gag about Ethiopian slaves is that funny and with the climate today being what it is […] I wish you’d think of something better.’
2 ‘I don’t know why Shakespeare spelled the “ravelled sleave of care” as “sleave” but I’m pretty sure he did.’
3 ‘A cab in London is referred to as “the yellow one”. I never saw a yellow cab in London.’
4 ‘Do you think that in these inflated times a pound note is big enough to be Miss Priestley’s price? Perhaps so, but I would have thought a fiver more likely.’
5 ‘I would not question your knowledge of Cole Porter but I must admit I never heard of “Mr and Mrs Fitch”. Still, I presume that you know what you’re writing about.’
6 ‘You made a pencil change along about the middle of the page when you used the phrase about “looking like something the cat had brought in” [...] I don’t think this trite phrase is worthy of P. G. Wodehouse and particularly when it’s emphasized by being at the end of the paragraph.’
7 ‘With respect to the sentence “an old joke about them being at the wash flitted into Joe’s mind…” This one completely escapes me and will the reader as well.’
8 ‘Finally, there are seven references to “popsy” […] I offer as an alternative suggestion a more modern, British term “bird”.’
In the following letter, Wodehouse describes his collaboration with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber on a potential work based on his novels, which was to become the musical Jeeves. A year later, Alan Ayckbourn (who took over from Tim Rice) and Lloyd Webber drove to Long Island to meet Wodehouse. ‘Our visit’, Ayckbourn remembered, ‘had to be precisely timed in order to fit in with Plum’s current TV viewing habits.’
TO GUY BOLTON
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York
August 15. 1973
Dear Guy.
I’m afraid the difficulty is that the boys regard Jeeves as sacred writ and think that the more of the stuff in the stories they can cram in, the better.1 I’m sure that CLARITY is the essential thing. Get a clear script and never mind how much good material you have to leave out.
What I would like them to do is jettison all they have done and start again with Thank You, Jeeves, which has everything needed for a musical – a clear straightforward story with several good block comedy scenes.
If you remember Thank You, Jeeves, it starts with Bertie and Jeeves splitting because Bertie is turned out of his flat because of complaints about his playing the banjo. A pal offers Bertie a cottage on his estate and Jeeves refuses to go there as he is not equal to listening to Bertie’s banjo at close quarters. The pal nips in and engages Jeeves.
The pal – Chuffy – is in love with the daughter of an American millionaire to whom B was once engaged. He is there on his yacht. The girl swims ashore to see Chuffy, takes refuge in B’s bed and pyjamas and Chuffy finds her there after B, who has been sleeping in the potting shed, comes in, there is a violent quarrel between Chuffy and the girl and they split up. The girl’s father finds out that heroine has slept at B’s, asks B to dinner on his yacht and says B has got to marry her. The girl’s father is giving a negro minstrel party on the boat for his son’s birthday, and the only way B can escape is by having Jeeves black him up with boot polish.
B goes back to his cottage and the valet he has engaged in place of Jeeves comes in very drunk, thinks B is the devil, chases him with a carving knife and sets the cottage on fire. B escapes, but he is all blacked up and needs butter to take it off and where is he to get butter? After that the story proceeds quite logically. You’ve probably read it, so I won’t go into detail, but it has a great finish and – which is what we want – clarity all through.
I think we shall have a flop if the boys try to cram in the Spode motif and a lot of other stuff.
[…]
What would be ideal would be if you could rough out a scenario for them.
Must stop now. Dinner just coming up. (Sausages and Mash.)
Love to Va
Yours ever
Plum
1 Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York
Sept 30. 1973
My precious angel Bunny whom I love so dear.
Another anniversary! Isn’t it wonderful to think that we have been married for 59 years and still love each other as much as ever except when I spill my tobacco on the floor, which I’ll never do again!
It was a miracle finding one another. I know I could never have been happy with anybody else. What a lucky day for me when you agreed with me when I said ‘Let’s get married’!
The only thing that makes me sad is your health. How I wish there was something I could do. What is so extraordinary is that you come to me in pain and not having slept and you look just as beautiful as you did fifty-nine years ago. But how I wish that you could get a good sleep.
I wish I could say all the things I would like to say, but really they can all be said in one sentence – I LOVE YOU.
Bless you
Your Plummie
TO ETHEL WODEHOUSE
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York
March 10. 1974
My precious darling Bunny whom I love so dear.
How I wish this was one of my ordinary love letters for you to read in bed instead of one when you were off to hospital. My only comfort is that they surely must do something to relieve that awful pain. But how I shall miss you!
Isn’t it wonderful that after sixty years we love each other more than ever! You sometimes ask me if I love you just as much now that you are ill. Much more! It breaks my heart to see you suffering.
How sad and empty this house will be without you. It’s one of the curious things about love that it doesn’t matter if you’re actually together, so long as I know you’re there. How splendid it will be if they only keep you in hospital for a few days.
I shall be thinking of you all the time. I do hope they will make you comfortable. You always get on so well with people that you will probably have half a dozen friends right-away. But they won’t love you like I do!
Bless you!
Your
TO TOM SHARPE
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York
July 27. 1974
Dear Tom.
What magnificent news! Your energy is simply incredible. I wrote the last twenty-six pages of Thank You, Jeeves, in a day, but I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been the last part of the book. The idea of starting off on a novel and writing six thousand words a day stuns me.
Wonderful news, too, about your new contract. Now you are really set up. Writing as well as you do and with your energy you can’t miss. You will always be able to get ideas.
I do admire you for getting that quiet place to write in and getting going at 5 a.m.
How right you are about the importance of the stuff in the middle. That is what is holding my novel up. Fine to the end of Chapter six and the same from about twelve chapters to the end, but I have had to [do] a lot of thinking about the middle part. I think I have got it nearly right, but I don’t want to start writing yet, as I keep getting new ideas.
My big news is that they are putting me in Madame Tussaud’s, which I have always looked on as the supreme honour. It involves having a sculptor come over here and do me, but I feel it’s worth it.
Congratulations again. I think you’re a wonder!
Yours ever
Plum
TO J. D. GRIMSDICK
P. G. Wodehouse
Remsenburg
Long Island, New York 11960
Jan 29. 1975
Dear J.D.
I would have written to you long ago, only my typewriter conked out and none of the local vets could restore it to mid-season form. Even now you will see that it refuses to print a or the letter J.
I am trying to decide whether I would advise a young man to become a knight. The warm feeling it gives one in the pit of the stomach is fine, but oh God those interviewers. They came round like flies, and practically all of them half-wits. I was asked by one of them what my latest book was about. ‘It’s a Jeeves novel’, I said. ‘And what is a Jeeves novel?’ he enquired. Thank goodness they have left me now, including the one who printed ‘I don’t understand why authors receive knighthoods’, when I had said refuse knighthoods. Alters the sense a bit, what?
We are having mild perfect golf weather over here. I hope you are having the same at your end.
All the best
Yours ever
P.G.
Half way through a new Blandings novel. Looks good.1
1 This was to become the posthumously published Sunset at Blandings.
TO GODFREY SMITH1
Jeeves’s bracer does not contain dynamite as is generally supposed.
It consists of lime juice, a lump of sugar and one teaspoonful of Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo. This, it will be remembered, is the amount of the Buck-U-Uppo given to elephants in India to enable them to face tigers on tiger hunts with the necessary nonchalance.
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Godfrey Smith, editor of the Sunday Times magazine. This undated manuscript letter, written very late in PGW’s life, was probably never posted. Since Buck-U-Uppo is no longer available, it might be wise to follow the more traditional recipe set out in Carry On, Jeeves, where we are informed in the opening chapter that the recipe comprises Worcester sauce, raw eggs and red pepper.
This final letter, written less than a fortnight before Wodehouse died, shows him recalling the start of his career. It is likely that Wodehouse had not seen Ernestine, then the Baroness de Longueuil, for sixty-five years. Wodehouse had first met the three Bowes-Lyon girls, Joan (b. 1888), Effie (b. 1889) and Ernestine (b. 1891) around 1898, and came to know them well in London in 1902. He acted as a companion and surrogate elder brother to them, often joining them for tea in the nursery and making up numbers when their mother was short of a spare man for dinner parties. Effie Bowes-Lyon remembered Wodehouse asking them if he should leave the bank and become a full-time writer, and she recalls that they all said he should. Many of his early stories involve young girls, almost certainly based on the three sisters – and his first book, The Pothunters, was dedicated to them.
TO ERNESTINE BOWES-LYON
Remsenburg
Long Island
New York
Feb 3. 1975
Dear Teenie.
Wonderful news about Raymond. What a relief it must be to you that he is well again. […]
This house has been a pandemonium since the knighthood appeared in the papers, a seething mass of interviewers and photographers, all half-wits. And can you imagine it, the BBC, who are doing a series of short stories of mine, suddenly descended on me and I had to do introductions to the stories, which meant writing them, memorizing them and speaking them into the camera. It was alright at first, but after two hours my brain became numbed and I had to repeat the stuff over and over again, to correct mistakes.
Everything is more or less calm now, except that hundreds of fan letters keep coming in. One of them was addressed to ‘His Royal Highness PGW’. And talking of Royal Highnesses I got a most charming letter from the Queen Mother. I always remember you and Joan and Effie coming back from Glamis and saying ‘Little Elizabeth was sweet.’1 She still is.
Lots of love
Yours ever
Plum
1 The Bowes-Lyon girls were cousins of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. As children, all the girls used to meet at their grandfather’s home, Glamis Castle, in Scotland.