Why the sun never sets on Wodehouse

“Mrs. GREGSON to see you, sir.”

Such were the first words uttered in print by the character who would go on to become one of literature’s immortals. They appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of Sept. 18, 1916, in a story titled “Extricating Young Gussie.” As Robert McCrum notes in his superb biography, “P.G. Wodehouse: A Life,” “So Jeeves glides into fiction much as his creator liked to do in real life.”

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in 1881, the year of the shootout at the OK Corral; he died in 1975, the year Saigon fell. It was a Churchillian life span, from the Victorian to the post-postmodern, and, as Jeeves might say, one crowded with incident. The British humorist wrote 100 novels (including “Life at Blandings” and “Right Ho, Jeeves”) and hundreds of short stories. He also wrote or collaborated on 14 Broadway musicals (including “Sitting Pretty” and “Anything Goes”) and is credited with being the father of the modern musical form. Alan Jay Lerner called him “the pathfinder for Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and everyone else who followed.”

Wodehouse was acclaimed as the greatest living writer in the English language. He also came to be called a few other things -- “Nazi,” “collaborator,” “traitor” and “Goebbels stooge” -- after he seemed to make light of the war and his detention by the Germans in radio broadcasts to the United States. “There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up with your reading,” he said in the first of three broadcasts beginning in June 1941 that were orchestrated by Nazi propagandists in hopes of keeping America from entering the war.

The episode that generated those unhappy epithets, in McCrum’s able, even gripping account, reads like some “Bertie Wooster and the Nazi Captors” story, only there are no laughs. His description of his capture, in which he described German soldiers as “a fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green, carrying machine guns,” fell flat. It ruined him. He was denounced. He never returned to England, and though he lived long enough to be publicly forgiven, any Wodehouse biography comes with an embedded apologia. Whom the gods would destroy, first they make a comic master.

McCrum opens with a vivid account of Wodehouse’s May 1940 encounter with the German army in the French seaside resort of Le Touquet, where he was living as a tax exile, along with his bossy, unpleasant wife, Ethel. McCrum devotes a quarter of his book to the broadcasts and their aftermath. It is compelling, infuriating and profoundly saddening, but also riveting, and without it, Wodehouse’s life story would be somewhat dull stuff. Unlike his near contemporary Oscar Wilde (more about him in a moment)Wodehouse put his genius into his art, not his life. Thank heavens. We are the richer for it.

In ways, Wodehouse was not a terribly admirable figure: distant, aloof, emotionally (and almost certainly sexually) neuter, at points maddeningly passive and as obtuse as one of his fictional characters, but with little of their charm. He was, McCrum observes, “a man that people generally liked, but rarely loved.” He was unmemorable in person. When Oxford University honored him lavishly with an honorary degree in June 1939, his acceptance speech consisted of “Thank you,” leaving the crowd puzzled and unsatisfied, a bit as this portrait of him leaves the reader, especially his most devoted fans. But then if no man is a hero to his valet, why should one expect one’s hero to be as admirable as the incomparable valet, Jeeves?

And yet he left the greatest body of comic literature in the modern vault, an oeuvre numbering 1,600 citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, a veritable embarrassment of bons mots, as well as great characters (Lord Emsworth of the Blandings novels, Uncle Fred, Aunt Agatha, Bertie and, mostly gloriously, Jeeves). Only Shakespeare and Dickens created as many widely known personae, McCrum notes. Not a bad epitaph, that. Indeed, the unpleasant wife had their names carved on his tombstone.

There is no surer antidote to the fantods, the blues, mean reds or damp, drizzly Novembers of the soul than a page or two of “The Master.” Wodehouse is literary Prozac. McCrum puts it a bit more elegantly: “Wodehouse still promises a release from everyday cares into a paradise of innocent comic mayhem, narrated in a prose so light and airy, and so perfectly pitched, that the perusal of a few pages rarely fails to banish the demons of darkness, sickness and despair.”

After World War I, when Kaiser Wilhelm was exiled to the Netherlands, he would read Wodehouse aloud to his “mystified” staff, “chuckling over and re-reading the best bits.” It’s a curious image, and not entirely charming: the man responsible for the death of tens of millions, succoring himself in exile with Wodehousian antics. It’s weirdly apt that Wodehouse’s downfall came at the hands of the kaiser’s successors.

McCrum’s biography arrives in the centenary year of Wodehouse’s first novel, “Love Among the Chickens.” Nearly all his books are still in print. Why does he endure so? It’s one thing to cook a souffle, another to bake ones that stay risen. And it’s not as though he wrote about the rise and fall of empires or the old condition humaine. Ultimately, most of Wodehouse’s work is about young men blundering in search of love. McCrum compares him to Jane Austen, who said that she worked on a piece of ivory two inches wide.

“I suppose my work is pretty juvenile,” Wodehouse said toward the end of his life, living in self-imposed exile on New York’s Long Island. His Edwardian England, with its country houses, bun-tossing youths, formidable butlers and gorgon aunts, had vanished into irrelevance. He lived long enough to become irrelevant several times over. His own two inches of ivory had yellowed by the time he got to Hollywood in the 1930s, for the first of several well-remunerated screenwriting gigs. There he found himself an object of scorn and condescension among the Spanish Civil War-inspired intelligentsia.

Then came World War II. By the time it was over, he was in danger of being prosecuted by the British as a traitor. In 1945, the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, then a young MI-6 officer, was sent to Paris to debrief him and possibly lay the legal groundwork for prosecution. Muggeridge realized after a few minutes that he had on his hands a naif, not a traitor. He reported that Wodehouse had been guilty of nothing more than gross stupidity and astonishing naivete. He was, Muggeridge wrote, “ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict. He just does not react to human beings in that sort of way, and never seems to hate anyone ... such a temperament unfits him to be a good citizen in the mid-twentieth century.... It is not that he is other-worldly, or unworldly, so much as that he is a-worldly; a born neutral.”

By the time Wodehouse settled in the United States in 1947, the market for his stories had dried up. The antics of feckless young Edwardians were no longer in demand. Yet he continued to grind out his tales at a fantastic pace. In 1961, after years of being treated rather like the dead mouse on the living room floor, his 80th birthday brought about a public outpouring. Congratulatory newspaper advertisements appeared, signed by the leading writers of the time, among them W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Ogden Nash, John Updike, Cole Porter, James Thurber and Lionel Trilling. Quite a cheering section, that. John le Carre excoriated official Britain for its “disgraceful act of spiritual brutality” in not forgiving him.

Evelyn Waugh famously broadcast on the BBC a tribute that precisely explains Wodehouse’s undying appeal:

“For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no ‘aboriginal calamity.’ His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr. Wodehouse’s world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”

McCrum says early on that “the irony” of Wodehouse’s work “is that, like all comedy, it rebuffs serious analysis,” but he is being too modest here. As literary editor of the London Observer, he knows exactly how seriously to analyze his subject’s style. The elements consist of: “effortless literary allusion (to Aeschylus, Thucydides, Dickens and Tennyson); witty manipulation of cliche (‘touch these notes and you rouse the British Lion’); lively similes (‘Robinson ran like a cow’) and incongruous metaphors (‘the champagne of Head’s wrath, which had been fermenting steadily during his late interview, got the better of the cork of self-control, and he exploded’); absurd images (‘an expression on his face a cross between a village idiot and an unintelligent fried egg’); and extensive misquotation (‘how sweet the moonlight sleeps on yonder haystack’).”

By the way, Wodehouse had written those lines by age 21. They were mere warm-ups for greater tropes to come, epitomized for this reviewer in “It was the soft cough of Jeeves’ which always reminds me of a very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain top.”

McCrum says that Wodehouse “should be understood as an American and a British writer.” Though he became a U.S. citizen in the 1960s to avoid prosecution by Britain for the wartime broadcasts, he spent the bulk of his life on our shores and, except for his eventual despising of Hollywood (see also Fitzgerald, Scott; Faulkner, William; Waugh, Evelyn; Thurber, James; Parker, Dorothy; etc.), he adored the place.

“I ... have decided from now on to live in America,” he wrote in the early 1920s to his wife. “[T]here seems something dead and depressing about London ... all I want to do is to get back and hear the American language again.”

But to paraphrase one of his idols, W.S. Gilbert, Wodehouse remained an Englishman whose most enduring characters are English caricatures. America did play an enabling role. As he explained to a friend after his first Blandings novel came out in 1915, “I started writing about Bertie Wooster and comic earls because I was in America and couldn’t write American stories and the only English characters the American public would read about were exaggerated dudes. It’s as simple as that.”

His most understated “exaggerated dude,” Jeeves, takes his name from a Warwickshire cricketer -- Wodehouse was a fanatical follower of the sport -- named Percy Jeeves, who was killed on the Somme in July 1916, in the same battle that took the son of one of Wodehouse’s other literary idols, Rudyard Kipling. Another literary hero, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, also lost a son in World War I; so did the man to whom Wodehouse never once directly refers in any of his writing, an omission significant enough to raise the soft, sheep-like coughing of a thousand psychiatrists on distant mountaintops.

Wodehouse was 14 in 1895 when Oscar Wilde went from celebrity to notoriety in a matter of weeks, and thence to jail and an ignominious pauper’s death in Paris in 1900. McCrum posits that Wilde’s downfall for “gross indecency” probably terrified the young, possibly homosexual Wodehouse. How ironic, then, that both Wilde and Wodehouse, comic masters, endured disgrace and exile. Wodehouse’s death was considerably more happy than Wilde’s: He died at 94 at Southampton Hospital in New York, his pipe at hand, working on deadline on another Blandings novel.

The Wilde connection, or lacuna, is all the more fascinating for the fact that Christopher Hitchens once noted in Vanity Fair (an article oddly not referenced by McCrum) that the entire relationship of Jeeves and Wooster is contained in the opening lines of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

The only other omission I could discern in McCrum’s absorbing and generous biography, which now takes its rightful place as “the life” despite the subtitle’s demure use of the indefinite article, was that it made no mention of an insight by Kenneth Tynan, who wrote in one of his scarlet diaries that the essence of Jeeves’ appeal is that Wodehouse had taken the father figure and made him unthreatening.

No small feat, that, eh, what? Very good, sir. *