This article was published in the Cambridge Evening News on 22 November 1977.
TOM SHARPE reviews Sunset at Blandings by P G Wodehouse (Chatto and Windus, £3.95)
“I was plugging along like this when everything changed and the millenium set in,” P. G. Wodehouse wrote of the sale of Something Fresh, his first Blandings book, to the Saturday Evening Post in 1915.
When he died, 60 years later he was still plugging along on his tenth Blandings book.
In the interval he had written nearly 80 other books, countless short stories, 18 plays, a good few filmscripts and the lyrics for 27 musicals.
The millenium had indeed set in, an age of perfect happiness, where the worst that could happen to the characters who peopled his world was that they were confronted by ferocious aunts or banished to Blandings Castle for falling in love with penniless artists. Even then there was always Galahad or Jeeves to come to the rescue and the fairy tale world of Wodehouse’s imagination continued happily ever afterwards.
It continues in Sunset At Blandings, the 16 chapters of his last unfinished novel, published by Chatto and Windus and with notes and appendices by Richard Usborne. Of the latter by far the most interesting are the transcriptions of Plum’s notes showing the way he worked out his plots. The 16 chapters cover merely 95 pages while for the remaining six chapters he had already compiled 183 pages of notes.
This was the way he had worked since the early 20s when he first began to write scenarios and had discovered that the secret of writing “is to go through your stuff till you come on something you think particularly good, and then cut it out.”
Had he lived to complete “Sunset At Blandings” there is no doubt he would have cut out a great deal and while the book would have gained, budding writers who need to know how a professional writer works would have lost.
This book containing his notes, and the letters published under the title, “The Performing Flea” are to my way of thinking essential reading for anyone foolish enough to imagine that writing is an effortless and self-indulgent hobby. Plum loved writing and from the age of 18 it was the only thing he wanted to do but effortless it was not.
To produce the frivolous comedies that were published year after year he worked away, devising, rejecting, trying new angles and evolving plots so intricate and in a style so brilliant that readers and the more serious critics were beguiled into thinking that the books rolled from his typewriter.
But then Plum belonged to a breed of writers who never suffered the conceit that the public had a duty to read their works. He enjoyed writing and he wrote for the enjoyment of his readers. He was still succeeding on both counts when he wrote the last words of Sunset at Blandings.
They are spoken appropriately by Lord Emsworth’s sister, Florence. “I have of course told Victoria that Mr Bennison is leaving the castle immediately.”
If you read the notes you will find that she was wrong. Jeff Bennison had played football for Wrykin. So had Wodehouse and at 93 he was still plugging away at “Something Fresh.”