When it comes to letter-writing, P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster belongs to the minimalist school:
Dear Freddie, —
Well, here I am in New York. It’s not a bad place. I’m not having a bad time. Everything’s not bad. The cabarets aren’t bad. Don’t know when I shall be back. How’s everybody? Cheerio! —
Yours,
Bertie.
PS. — Seen old Ted lately?
‘Not that I cared about old Ted’, he adds, ‘but if I hadn’t dragged him in I couldn’t have got the confounded thing on to the second page.’1
Receiving post is, for Bertie, equally confounding. This is partly a matter of timing; morning, after all, is never the best time for reading, especially if you have a ‘bit of a head on’.2 But it is also because the letter, in the world of Wodehouse, is an intrusive presence – a symbol of reality permeating the all-too-secure haven of one’s bachelor flat, gentlemen’s club or country seat. Whether it hails from an aunt, fiancée or amorous peer of the realm, the envelope by the toast rack is a threatening sight – a crumb in the butter of the Wodehousean Eden.
Wodehouse’s own attitude to letters was more positive. Many different exchanges – ranging from notes to his family to business letters and discussions of plot design – offer a fascinating and unique insight into a twentieth-century writing life, and the history of his time. Wodehouse exchanged letters with numerous well-known figures – including artists and writers such as Ira Gershwin, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. He also kept up a regular correspondence with his friends and family, especially his beloved step-daughter, Leonora, or ‘Snorky’.
While some might assume that Wodehouse’s novels are conventional, beneath the mostly male upper-crust there is some radical table-turning. Butlers bail their masters out, passion wins over reason, and girls, invariably, know more than boys. The letters reveal the roots of this reversal. Wodehouse was a self-made man who married a chorus-girl, spent time with Hollywood movie stars, and endured Nazi imprisonment and journalistic accusations of treason. This was a life that was much more eventful than many – especially many of his younger generations of readers – might assume. As for the man himself, this ‘laureate of repression’ could be affectionate, naughty and tender in correspondence.3
A number of these letters touch on Wodehouse’s feelings about love. Bertie Wooster declares that there are two sorts of men. Those who would like to find a woman in their bedroom, and those who would rather not. From accounts of his own marriage, Wodehouse was, in many ways, of the second sort. Nevertheless, his early letters to his friend Leslie Bradshaw contain some revealing details about his romantic encounters, while in his later letters he speculates, from time to time, on other people’s sex lives, marriages and divorces.
Solvency is also a key theme of his correspondence – the getting, losing and spending of money dominates his letters as much as it does his plots. Ever since missing out on his place at Oxford, Wodehouse was driven by the idea of bringing in the ‘boodle’ – and he was hugely successful as an earner.4 The correspondence follows his financial fortunes, his crises with the taxman, his affectionate reflections on his wife’s spending, and his gifts to friends and family.
Elsewhere, letters demonstrate the difficulties of plotting, the complexities of character creation and also the moments of inspiration. When Jeeves, ‘the perfect omniscient nanny’, first entered the Wodehouse oeuvre, he came in with the utmost discretion.5 As Wodehouse told Lawrence Durrell, ‘[i]t never occurred to me that Jeeves would do anything except open doors and announce people.’6
Whether delivering an account of the difficulties of getting a small glass of whiskey during Prohibition, or giving the ‘low down on the Riviera’,7 Wodehouse offers characteristically comic accounts of living, writing and socialising in England, America and France through the 1920s and 1930s – as well as an extraordinary account of his life in a German internment camp, in Nazi Berlin, and in occupied and post-liberation Paris.
Given Wodehouse’s acknowledged skill as a novelist, it is perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for so many of these letters to be collected in one volume.8 The delay comes in part from Wodehouse’s unusual place in the English canon. An acknowledged master of the English comic novel, praised by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Anthony Quinton, and writers such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, he has also always been an unashamedly popular writer – one whom readers have, on the whole, simply enjoyed, rather than studied. From one perspective, Wodehouse merits a scholarly volume, directed at an academic audience – from another, he deserves a letters book aimed at the general reader. This edition seeks to serve both readerships.
Wodehouse is also a writer whose works resist a certain sort of biographical approach. He disliked investigations into his personal life and circumstances, partly because he found them intrusive. (He wrote to his friend William Townend that their unedited correspondence should eventually ‘be destroyed. Gosh’, he added, ‘it would be awful if some of the things I’ve written you were made public’).9 And he also intimated that biographical context was, to a degree, irrelevant to understanding a work of art. Writing about Shakespeare, he noted that ‘a thing I can never understand is why all the critics seem to assume that his plays are a reflection of his personal moods and dictated by the circumstances of his private life. You know the sort of thing I mean. They say “Timon of Athens is a gloomy bit of work. That means that Shakespeare was having a lousy time when he wrote it.” I can’t see it. Do you find that your private life affects your work? I don’t.’10
Indeed, while the Edwardian England of Wodehouse’s early adulthood permeates his works, his personal circumstances and the tenor of his fictional worlds are not always an easy match. One of the surprises of this correspondence is the occasional, startling disparity between life and art. Take his masterly Joy in the Morning, written during one of the most difficult periods of his life. Just weeks after leaving Nazi internment, Wodehouse was still able to conjure up the ‘embowered’ hamlet of Steeple Bumpleigh, ‘in the midst of smiling fields and leafy woods’. While he struggled with the weight of national disapproval, his halcyon fictional world had only one cloud on the horizon – the ‘somewhat sticky affair’ of Bertie, Florence Craye and ‘Stilton’ Cheesewright – effortlessly resolved by the shimmering Jeeves.11
Parallels between Wodehouse’s correspondence and his fiction run at a deeper level. Wodehouse may have famously parodied the modernist poets, but he has more in common with T. S. Eliot than he might have admitted. For Wodehouse, as for Eliot, the aim of the written text was not to express, but to ‘escape’ from emotion.12 It is, as he told a friend, ‘hopeless to try and put down on paper what one is feeling’.13 From Wodehouse’s earliest works, we find that the idea of internal psychology, in what he referred to as ‘the Henry James style’, is parodied and resisted.14
His letters have a similar emotional reticence. It was Dr Johnson, one of Wodehouse’s earliest literary loves, who wrote that a man’s soul, ‘lies naked’ in his letters.15 Wodehouse’s attitude to nudity was a wary one: ‘You know my views on nudes’, he once wrote to a friend, ‘I want no piece of them.’16 Wodehouse’s letters are usually clad in the epistolary equivalent of Bertie’s heliotrope pyjamas, carefully buttoned up to disguise true feeling.
The ‘cladding’, for Wodehouse, has always been his extraordinary written style. Drawing on the techniques of such writers as Dickens and Thackeray, Conan Doyle and O. Henry, as well as lesser-known but popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors such as W. W. Jacobs and Barry Pain, Wodehouse’s fiction offers something unique in the history of English prose. He is, as Stephen Medcalf argues, ‘the greatest and most original’ of a group of writers (the list includes G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman) who may have eschewed the techniques of modernism, but who still provide stylistic paths through the same insecurity that the modernists exposed.17
While such a style is difficult to analyse (one critic has compared the act to ‘taking a spade to a soufflé’), there are a variety of figures of speech that recur throughout Wodehouse’s fiction, and his letters.18 One is the way in which he deflects emotion away from the self. When disaster occurs in the shape of income-tax demands or illness, it is the ‘home’ that metonymically laments. When he expresses admiration for his wife, her outfits – rather than her body – garner the praise. Such manoeuvres are perfected in his fiction, with his use of the transferred epithet – a technique that casts the state of mind of the protagonist onto a nearby, unlikely inanimate object. We have, for example, ‘I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar on my teaspoon’;19 ‘he uncovered the fragrant eggs and b. and I pronged a moody forkful’20 – or the memorable ablutions in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit:
As I sat in the bath-tub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy.21
The shifting of affect, from mind to limb, is not only absurdly incongruous; it has the effect of holding the emotion in question at arm’s (or leg’s) length. The pace of this sentence is also ingenious. It suspends its meaning, clause after clause, building up our expectations, till it sinks, like a punctured rubber duck, on ‘boomps-a-daisy’. It is a phrase as unexpected – after the precision of ‘if I remember’, the mystique of ‘Shalimar’ and the rhetorical nod to ‘my public’ – as it is daft. But Bertie isn’t even feeling ‘boomps-a-daisy’; it is part of his charm that his low mood is described not only tangentially, captured in the shape of his ‘meditative’ foot, but through negative inference and euphemism.
Discretion also governs another feature of the typically Wodehousean syntax – his use of abbreviation. Terms such as ‘posish’, ‘eggs and b.’, ‘f.i.h.s’ (‘fiend in human shape’) and ‘festive s.’ (‘festive season’) appear both in Wodehouse’s fiction and in his letters, and there is a perfectly balanced comic tension about these coded syntactical tics. The unsaid-but-understood creates a clubby feeling of intimacy between writer and reader. But there is also something subtly self-deprecating about the Wodehousean abbreviations – as if he is creating a voice that is necessarily compacted, determined not to draw too much attention to itself. As Basil Boothroyd points out, both Wodehouse’s heroes and Wodehouse himself ‘are vulnerable at heart’.22
Wodehouse is a writer who could easily have chosen to write quite a different sort of fiction – one ballasted by an armoury of academic knowledge. A brilliant scholar, disappointed in his hopes for university, he had an immense grasp of literature, philosophy and Classics. Well into his later years, his letters reveal that he spent time reading Balzac, Austen, Fielding, Smollett and Faulkner, and throughout his career his writing demonstrates this literary breadth. But this is not the dense allusive erudition that one finds in writers such as Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein. Balancing Byron and Shelley, Plato and Maeterlinck against contemporary slang, Wodehouse moves seamlessly between registers, both celebrating and diminishing the world of high art.
Wodehouse’s pre-eminent stylistic flourish is his use of metaphor and simile. Page after page of his novels contain sparklingly unusual stretches of the imagination – ‘Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes’; a man ‘wilts’ like ‘a salted snail’ – and one finds the same in his letters.23 ‘Things’, he tells a friend, ‘are beginning to stir faintly, like the blood beginning to circulate in a frozen Alpine traveller who has met a St Bernard dog and been given a shot from the brandy flask’;24 returning to New York, he reflects, ‘was like meeting an old sweetheart and finding she has put on a lot of weight’.25 It is a technique that does more than simply amuse. Some of Wodehouse’s similes and metaphors are so extraordinary that they approach the absurd. Style, for Wodehouse, is a carefully crafted form of ludic release, and it is in the very texture of his sentences that one can see the originality of his mind at work.
Nevertheless, the letters in this volume have a very distinct stylistic difference from Wodehouse’s fiction. Often written at speed, the letters show Wodehouse without his crafted style in place. Moments of great emotion break through: his excited optimism at the prospect of winning a scholarship to Oxford; his terrible disappointment when he learned that a ’varsity life was not to be his lot after all; his stoicism in the face of romantic disappointment; his devastation at the death of his stepdaughter; his bewildered outrage and sorrow at the public response to his wartime errors.
Apart from a hiatus during the years 1915–1917, for which unaccountably no letters survive, the correspondence provides an extraordinarily detailed account, not only of Wodehouse’s activities, but of his evolution as a writer: his early success in schoolboy magazines (Mike Jackson and Psmith), his rapid development as a writer in Edwardian journalism, his battles to make his mark with New York periodicals, his writing for Playboy magazine, and his love of 1970s TV soaps. New sources for Wodehouse’s characters, from to Billie Dore to T. Patterson Frisby, are revealed – and new caches of correspondence provide important insights into his years in New York and Berlin.
It is all too often forgotten that Wodehouse was a famous lyricist and playwright as well as a novelist. As the critic Mark Steyn notes, ‘[h]ad Wodehouse died in 1918 he would have been remembered not as a British novelist but as the first great lyricist of the American musical.’26 Wodehouse read his way through Shakespeare each year – and he adored the works of W. S. Gilbert. This book of letters has a dramatic quality of its own, with its fair share of characters standing in the wings. Wodehouse’s friend and one-time collaborator, Herbert Westbrook, one of the inspirations for his comic hero Ukridge, was an influential backstage presence in Wodehouse’s life. The imperious theatrical producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, was partially responsible for the numerous changes of address that we find in Wodehouse’s correspondence, frequently sending verbose telegrams summoning Wodehouse from across the Atlantic to rescue his latest production. Elsewhere in these letters, we catch glimpses of Wodehouse’s dealings with wayward literary agents, stroppy actresses and loyal wartime comrades. And there is his huge range of enduring non-human attachments – Wonder and Squeaky, Bimmy and Bill, his adored dogs and cats. The most important of all behind-the-scenes presences was his wife, Ethel. In the letters, we see her negotiating prices for Wodehouse’s serials, rethinking his plot ideas and liaising with agents, before heading to the local casino. Wodehouse, meanwhile, was often to be found cutting a letter short because of Ethel’s pressing demands. I must stop now, he told his friend, the novelist Denis Mackail, as Ethel is ‘yowling in the passage that my cocktail is ready.’27
There is a further staginess to these letters, for Wodehouse is often to be found ventriloquising a specific persona according to the perceived preference of his correspondent. With his friend Eric George, he adopts the role of a passionate but jilted inamorata out of a Thackeray sketch, then switches to the character of an ersatz Sam Weller, before brandishing his literary knowledge like an undergraduate manqué; to Leonora, he is both an adoring father and good ‘pal’, full of slang and silliness; when writing to Denis Mackail, Wodehouse can be unusually sarcastic and catty. Meanwhile letters to the dashing Guy Bolton have an uncharacteristic machismo about them, containing innuendos, dirty jokes and – somewhat implausibly – a mention of the ‘brave old days’ when Wodehouse ‘used to have the clap’.28 Indeed, reading these letters, one feels that Wodehouse comes close to Keats (a poet often quoted in his novels): he is a writer with ‘no self at all’, constantly shape-shifting to suit his audience.29
Of course, the central drama of Wodehouse’s life was one in which he was an unwitting player. The story of his internment by the Nazis, and the subsequent controversy that ensued after he had made a series of humorous broadcasts on German radio, is well known. These letters, many of which have never been seen before, offer an unprecedented insight into the ways in which Wodehouse negotiated, or failed to negotiate, the complexities of wartime Berlin and occupied Paris – and his deep fear of losing his public as a result of his error of judgement.
Given Wodehouse’s lack of any real involvement in the major political events of the twentieth century, it is often asked whether there is any political aspect to his writing – indeed critics may ask how to negotiate an oeuvre that seems to resist politics so determinedly. Wodehouse’s method of writing a novel was, he claims in a letter, ‘making the thing frankly a fairy story and ignoring real life altogether’.30 As Evelyn Waugh writes, when reading about Wodehouse’s characters
We do not concern ourselves with the economic implications of their position; we are not sceptical about their quite astonishing celibacy. We do not expect them to grow any older, like the Three Musketeers or the Forsytes. We are not interested in how they would ‘react to changing social conditions’ as publishers’ blurbs invite us to be interested in other sagas. They are untroubled by wars. […] They all live, year after year, in their robust middle twenties; their only sickness is an occasional hangover. It is a world that cannot become dated because it has never existed.31
Wodehouse’s work, however, can be seen as more than simply escapist, providing us, as it does, with the notion of an alternative universe. He is, as Auden notes, one of the ‘great English experts on Eden’ – he ‘proclaims the dream of a world where things could be otherwise’.32
As for the politics of the man himself, these letters demonstrate something of Wodehouse’s particular brand of good nature, mixed with naïveté and blindness – and ‘a complete unawareness that anyone could be as ungentlemanly as the Nazis actually were’.33 Wodehouse’s comments on international events range in character from patriotic interest to somewhat disengaged bemusement. One thing the letters make clear, however, is his lack of snobbery and prejudice. Wodehouse writes as readily to ex-housekeepers as to aristocrats, and his letters are always warm, interested, and invariably concerned with the welfare of his correspondent. Indeed, one of the reasons why Wodehouse’s personal sense of politics was so hazy was that he never seemed able to conceive of, or interest himself in, the notion of others in the context of any sort of group at all; his concern was wholly with the individual.
Looking through these letters, a reader might be struck by the workaday nature of Wodehouse’s correspondence. He is, at times, downright ordinary. While the letters are consistently interesting for the detail they contain and the light they shed upon his times, they display only on occasions the extraordinary stylistic élan that one finds in his fiction. The particular qualities that make up Wodehouse’s character as both a man and a writer explain this resistance to extensive rhetorical flair. The ethics of Wodehouse’s entire oeuvre are, as critics have noted, an ethics of humility. It is, after all, Bertie’s humility ‘with all its complicated to and fro of self-realisation and avoidance of self-realisation’ that makes him, for us, an interesting character.34 And there is a humility in Wodehouse’s writing from the largest scale – he happily adopts the role of a popular genre writer – to the level of an individual sentence. Wodehouse may play with the everyday cliché, but he never derides it. The rhythms of everyday speech, are, for him, a form of communion. He was a humble man, and the modesty of his letters reflects this.
Born in 1881, the year in which the first telephone company was formed, Wodehouse grew up at a time of phenomenal change in methods of communication, and he was acutely aware of the expressive capacities – or failures – of varying media. ‘You can’t’, as he wrote in a 1923 lyric ‘make love by wireless’:
It’s like eggs without the ham
There is nothing girls desire less
Than a cold Marconigram;
For it’s something you can’t speak to
From a someone you can’t see;
It’s like a village church that’s spireless,
Or a Selfridge’s that’s buyerless
Or a Pekinese that’s sireless
And it isn’t any good to me!35
But Wodehouse was no technophobe. Like his contemporary, James Joyce, Wodehouse relishes the comic possibilities that such new media allow a writer. One thinks, for example, of Monty Bodkin’s garbled telephone call to Lord Emsworth in Heavy Weather, alerting him to an imminent pig-napping, or Smallwood Bessemer’s whistle-stop proposal in ‘Tangled Hearts’:
‘Miss Flack?’
‘Hello?’
‘Sorry to disturb you at this hour, but will you marry me?’
‘Certainly. Who is that?’36
Telegrams also provide a rich vein of humour. Aunt Dahlia’s epic telegram exchanges with her ‘fat-headed nephew’ in Right Ho, Jeeves are a case in point. Or Madeline Bassett’s lyrical telegraphese – ‘Please come here if you wish but, Oh Bertie, is this wise? […] Surely merely twisting knife wound’ (in which, as Stephen Medcalf writes, the humour ‘lies in the idiocy of omitting “in the”, after putting in “Oh Bertie”’).37 Elsewhere, we see Wodehouse’s comic riffs on the public letter form in Over Seventy, and his mocking of cliché in Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin, in which Chimp Twist is left to brood on a picture postcard presenting ‘a charming picture of the Croisette at Cannes’ bearing the unusual inscription: ‘Having a wonderful time. Glad you’re not here’.38
Wodehouse’s writing career took off at a point when there was a boom in the appearance of the ‘open’ or ‘public’ letter. The daily paper, as Matthew Rubery notes, was an interactive entity, full of personal announcements, advertisements and ‘brief stories written in the blood of broken hearts’.39 Wodehouse himself was briefly an ‘agony uncle’ for the journal Tit-Bits, and he took a particular delight in the psychology of the public letter writer, as his 1904 Punch article ‘Balm for the Broken-Hearted’ reveals. The article is allegedly constructed from the contents of an editorial waste-paper basket, containing readers’ responses to a ‘broken-hearted’ correspondent who had written to the paper during the previous week:
SIR,—The accident of which your correspondent complains is one that might happen to anybody. All that he needs, in my opinion, is a little perseverance and determination. Perhaps travel would prove as efficacious in curing him as it was in curing me under similar circumstances. The object of my devotion was a lady whose refined singing and dancing had created something of a furore at the music-halls. My life was temporarily blighted by the discovery that she was already married, and that her youngest son was then playing Hamlet in the provinces. But I soon recovered on joining my ship and going for my first voyage, and since then her memory has cost me scarcely a pang. Like the good sailor I am, I have now a wife at Marseilles, a second at Amsterdam, a third in London, and others at Nagasaki, New York, Athens, Archangel, and, I believe, Constantinople.
I am, yours, &c., VIKING.
Sir,—Your correspondent might derive consolation from the history of the Israelite kings. King SOLOMON was in all probability jilted—perhaps frequently—in his salad days. Yet in the end, by persevering and not giving way, he amassed the substantial total of one thousand (1,000) wives. Without counselling him actually to go and do likewise, I should like to point out to your correspondent that this is the right spirit.
Yours, &c., THEOLOGIAN.
MY VERY DEAR SIR,—Take my advice, and look on the bright side. What seems a misfortune at first sight, often proves in the end to be a blessing. Many years ago I was engaged for six months to a lady who afterwards refused to marry me. What was the result? Misery? Gloom? Not a bit of it. I wrote and placed to great advantage articles on ‘How to Propose’, ‘Buying the Ring’, ‘Do Girls like Presents?’, ‘The £ s. d. of Courtship’, ‘Should Kisses be Taxed?’ and ‘How to Write a Love-letter’; also two hundred and four sets of verse, and a powerful story called The Jilting of Joshua Jenkins. I attribute to my engagement and the experience I derived from it my present position of sub-editor on Blogg’s Weekly Nuggets. Verb. Sap.
Yours in haste, ENERGETIC JOURNALIST.40
All these written forms – the public letters, the telegrams, the postcards – feature in this book, and it is one of the pleasures and challenges of this edition to attempt to convey Wodehouse’s pride in impressively headed notepaper, his marginal doodles, and his frustration with his beloved Royal typewriter. One imagines that the felicitously mistaken euphony of a 1932 telegram, instructing his agent to ‘PUBLISH OMNIBUSH’ signed ‘SODEHOUSE’, would have made Wodehouse smile.41 A full sight of Wodehouse’s extant correspondence gives a sense of the rate at which he was working and writing. He was often typing several letters a day – almost every day of his life. And, despite a (fictional) anecdote in which he claimed that he tossed all his letters out of the window, relying on the public’s goodwill to post them, he was an assiduous and careful correspondent.42
There are many such confected anecdotes in Wodehouse’s autobiographical works. They appear not through any innate mendacity, but from his almost compulsive desire to please his readers. ‘We shall have to let truth go to the wall if it interferes with entertainment’, he told Guy Bolton, as they planned their autobiographical memoir, Bring on the Girls.43 Indeed, any editor setting out to work on Wodehouse’s correspondence from a biographical perspective is conscious that Wodehouse likes to ‘improve’ his primary material. The ‘letters’ from Wodehouse, collected by his friend William Townend and published under the title Performing Flea, are a prime example – radically rewritten, as Wodehouse told his editor, to be ‘full of anecdotes about celebrities – which the public loves – and a lot of funny stories’.44 The letters are also heavily cut, to remove what Wodehouse saw as the ‘frightfully dull’ focus on ‘Pekes and footer’.45
The original copies of Wodehouse’s letters are kept in a variety of locations. A large number are held in the Wodehouse Archive. Many are in private hands, and a quantity in library collections across the world. Their forms are various and fascinating, ranging from handwritten and typed letters, to telegrams, novelty Christmas cards, postcards, and scribbled notes, letters embedded in government papers – and not a few transcribed by admiring friends.
Given the adverse comments that have been levelled at Wodehouse over the years, transparency has been of paramount importance in the preparation of this edition. I have been fortunate to have the full support and cooperation of the Wodehouse Estate, which granted me the freedom to publish any and every part of any Wodehouse letter. But the vast size of Wodehouse’s correspondence has necessarily made this a selected edition. Letters have been chosen for inclusion on the basis of their individual merit – either in terms of the information that they offer about Wodehouse’s life, the evolution of his style, or times in which he lived. Cuts within individual letters have also been essential, but passages have only been removed if they are irrelevant to the main thrust of the letter, or to Wodehouse’s biographical or artistic narrative. I have made a particular point of leaving the letters that Wodehouse sent during the war years as complete as space will allow.
One of the problems in editing Wodehouse’s letters is the effect it has on their particular rhythm and tone. Given that Wodehouse is the subject of this book of letters, cuts have obviously been made to make him the primary focus. This has the effect of diminishing one of the key aspects of his correspondence – his concern for other people. There is almost no letter that does not begin and end with Wodehouse’s often extensive concerns for, and enquiries about, the person to whom he is writing. Bill Townend’s eczema, Rene’s arthritis, Lily’s finances and the state of Denis’s dog’s bowels are all part of the substance of his letters.
A final editorial decision relates to the question of when a letter actually qualifies as being a letter; whether, for instance, one should include letters that were written but never posted, letters that were posted but never received, or letters that exist only in the form of copies – transcribed within the letters of others. I have included all of the above in this edition, with the view that the journey a letter has taken, or not taken, may be illuminating in its own way. A particularly intriguing history surrounds one of the critical letters in this book – a note that was written by Wodehouse when under prison guard in Paris. The letter was an affectionate and cheerful one, intended to reassure Ethel of his safety and to raise her spirits in the frightening atmosphere of newly liberated Paris. Wodehouse gave the letter to a messenger – but it was in fact never delivered as intended. Instead, some forty-seven years later, an envelope arrived in Remsenburg, Long Island, addressed to Lady Wodehouse. The Frenchman who had been charged with its delivery had, for some reason, been unable to carry out his mission, and the document only came to light after his death.
Wodehouse himself had died just two years earlier – but the delivery of this love letter from beyond the grave seems a small material tribute to his fictional world where all, in the end, comes right. As Wodehouse’s Ginger Kemp puts it, ‘such is the magic of a letter from the right person’.46
1 ‘The Aunt and the Sluggard’ (Strand and SEP 1916), repr. in Carry On, Jeeves (1925).
2 See ‘Doing Clarence a Bit of Good’ (Strand 1913; Pictorial Review 1914), repr. in My Man Jeeves (1919).
3 The phrase is Robert McCrum’s. See Wodehouse: A Life (London: Viking, 2004), p. 139.
4 See PGW’s early letter to Eric George, October 1899 (Morgan).
5 The description is W. H. Auden’s. See ‘Balaam and His Ass’ (1954), repr. in The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage, 1948), p. 144.
6 PGW to Lawrence Durrell, 19 May 1948 (Southern Illinois).
7 PGW to Leonora Cazalet, 2 April 1921 and 30 March 1925 (Wodehouse Archive).
8 There have been two earlier collections of Wodehouse’s letters. Frances Donaldson’s Yours, Plum: The Letters of P. G. Wodehouse (1990) is limited to the letters located in the Wodehouse Archive, and its thematic arrangement makes it necessarily highly selective; Performing Flea (1953) contains solely Wodehouse’s letters written to William Townend.
9 PGW to William Townend, 23 March 1955 (Dulwich).
10 PGW to William Townend, 24 February 1945 (Dulwich).
11 Joy in the Morning (1946), Chapter 1.
12 ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion’, T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1969), p. 21.
13 PGW to Denis Mackail, 18 November 1949 (Wodehouse Archive).
14 See P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Stone and the Weed’, The Captain (May 1905), repr. in Tales of Wrykyn and Elsewhere (London: Porpoise, 1997), p. 315.
15 Dr Johnson to Hester Thrale, 27 October 1777. See Letters To and From the Late Samuel Johnson L.L.D., published by Hester Lynch Piozzi (London: A. Strachan, 1788), p. 11.
16 PGW to Denis Mackail, 7 November 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
17 Stephen Medcalf, ‘The Innocence of P. G. Wodehouse’ in The Modern English Novel: the Reader, the Writer and the Work, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (London: Open Books, 1976), p. 188.
18 See Punch, or the London Charivari, 1 February 1933, vol. 184, p. 140.
19 Joy in the Morning, Chapter 5.
20 ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’, in Very Good, Jeeves (1930).
21 Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. See Chapter 1.
22 Basil Boothroyd, ‘The Laughs’ in A Homage to P. G. Wodehouse (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), p. 62.
23 Pigs Have Wings (1952), Chapter 5; Bertie Wooster Sees It Through (1954), Chapter 19.
24 PGW to Guy Bolton, 1 September 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
25 PGW to William Townend, 11 May 1947 (Dulwich).
26 Mark Steyn, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight (London: Faber, 1997), p. 53.
27 PGW to Denis Mackail, 26 January 1946 (Wodehouse Archive).
28 PGW to Guy Bolton, 16 October 1959 (Wodehouse Archive).
29 ‘the poet has […] no identity […] he has no self […] When I am in a room with People […] the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated’, John Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, repr. in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 195.
30 PGW to William Townend, 23 January 1935 (Dulwich).
31 Evelyn Waugh, ‘An Angelic Doctor: The Work of P. G. Wodehouse’ (1939), repr. in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 255.
32 W. H. Auden, ‘Dingley Dell & The Fleet’, repr. in The Dyer’s Hand, p. 411. My second quotation is taken from Theodor Adorno’s ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’ (1951) in Telos 20 (1974), p. 5.
33 Medcalf, p. 189.
34 Medcalf, p. 197.
35 ‘You Can’t Make Love By Wireless’ from The Beauty Prize (1923). See The Complete Lyrics of P. G. Wodehouse, edited by Barry Day (Oxford: Scarecrow, 2004), pp. 325–6.
36 ‘Tangled Hearts’ in Nothing Serious (1950).
37 P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters, Chapter 2; Medcalf, p. 197.
38 Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin (1972), Chapter 3.
39 ‘Our Wants’, Punch 3 (1842), p. 140.
40 P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Balm for the Broken-Hearted’, Punch, or the London Charivari, vol. 126, 24 February 1904, p. 135.
41 PGW to Paul Reynolds, 27 April 1932 (Columbia).
42 See Bring on the Girls in Wodehouse on Wodehouse (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 139.
43 PGW to Guy Bolton, 4 November 1952 (Wodehouse Archive).
44 PGW to J. D. Grimsdick, 23 March 1953 (Dulwich).
45 PGW to William Townend, 23 March 1955 (Dulwich).
46 The Adventures of Sally (1922), Chapter 11.