Tom Sharpe penned this preface to the 1986 edition of In search of Blandings by N. T. P. Murphy.
THERE is something mysterious about P. G. Wodehouse. For a man who, from February 1900 when he first published a story in the Public School Magazine until his death on St Valentine’s Day 1975 with the half-completed Sunset Over Blandings beside him, never wrote an unkind or offensive word, he has aroused an enormous amount of controversy. Even now the world still seems divided into those who consider his work a joy to read and his use of words to be among the finest penned in English this century, and those others who find his books trivial and without social content, and in their ignorance believe that he betrayed his country during the War. The latter charge has been finally and irrefutably proven false by Ian Sproat in his book Wodehouse at War but the stigma of having written nothing worth reading still scars his reputation among earnest and otherwise intelligent people. Even Frances Donaldson, commissioned by his heirs to write the authorized biography, was puzzled by Evelyn Waugh’s unstinted admiration for him and his use of the term ‘The Master’ when speaking of Wodehouse. In her book Evelyn Waugh she wrote ‘. . . I had never been able to read his [P.G.W.’s] books. I cannot see the point of them,’ and was admonished by Waugh on the grounds that any writer who could on average produce two or three unique and original similes per page, was entitled to be called The Master. Hugh Walpole too was puzzled when Hilaire Belloc declared in a broadcast that Wodehouse was the best living writer of English and ‘the head of my profession’, praise he repeated in his introduction to Week End Wodehouse. ‘It seems such an extraordinary thing to say. The old man’s getting very old,’ Walpole commented with monumental insensitivity to Wodehouse himself. And when, in 1939, Oxford University saw fit to award Wodehouse an honorary doctorate for his services to Literature, F. R. Leavis seemed to find the judgement further proof that Oxford was a sink of trivia. Later on Sean O’Casey attempted to insult him by calling him ‘English Literature’s performing flea’, a title Wodehouse cheerfully took for the collection of his letters to his friend, Bill Townend, published in 1953.
But the mystery does not lie simply in the wildly divided opinions of the critics, his fellow writers and the public, or even in the choice of an authorized biographer who had never been able to read his books: it lies in the gulf that seems to separate Wodehouse the comic novelist from any reality in the world he wrote about. Where on earth did he find Ukridge, the galaxy of Bertie Wooster’s aunts, Lord Emsworth and Galahad; or did he create unique and wonderful characters from no other source than his own imagination? Even his greatest defenders have always supposed the latter to be the case, and Evelyn Waugh, in an article on Plum’s approaching eightieth birthday, wrote the famous lines, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale . . . He has made a world for us to live in and delight in,’ only to add, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s characters are not, as has been fatuously suggested, survivals of the Edwardian age. They are creatures of pure fancy.’ Again, the world’s greatest authority on Wodehouse, Richard Usborne, whose Wodehouse at Work to the End is without doubt the best analysis of the novels and stories and of the literary influences in Plum’s youth, has never suggested that realism was his forte. Wodehouse himself denied any such thing. In 1935, writing to Townend, he speaks of his writing ‘. . . musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether’ and, in 1938, ‘. . . I go off the rails unless I stay all the time in a sort of artificial world of my own creation. A real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb.’ No statement could be clearer. Plum’s characters were creatures of pure fancy and his ‘world’ was entirely artificial.
But is that the end of the matter? Norman Murphy clearly thinks not and, even if we ignore the evidence he produces in this book, we know enough about Wodehouse to have doubts. If he invented his characters and the world they inhabit, he was not only the genius of the simile and a superb stylist, he was also a writer with an incredibly fertile imagination. Yet the settings of his stories are clearly limited to places and things with which he was familiar: Shropshire, schools, golf clubs, Hollywood, newspaper offices, theatres, New York, banks and, most of all, country houses. We can check all these against his own experience. Never once did he venture into strange territory or set a story against a background he did not know. His characters are similarly limited and form a small familiar cast of types. Hardly surprising in the light of the number of books and stories he wrote, and certainly no criticism – simply a fact, but one that suggests he drew on what he knew. And his knowledge of the world was circumscribed as much by his own nature as by his habit of working prodigiously hard. One had only to meet him, as I did in 1973, to realize that he was a shy, private and thoroughly decent man who, when he wasn’t writing, was thinking about it, and liked nothing better than to talk of plots and sub-plots and the whole craft of which he was The Master. It was his wife, Ethel, who hogged the conversation and drove him off to watch television in the afternoon as imperiously as any of the aunts in his books. It was Ethel (Malcolm Muggeridge described her in his autobiography as ‘a mixture of Mistress Quickly and Florence Nightingale, with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in’) who dominated the house, told the interesting stories and managed everything just as she must have done throughout the sixty years of their marriage. For his part, Plum rose early to do his Swedish exercises, to write and let the dogs out, to read and to go for walks (after lunch) with Guy Bolton before writing still more. I came away from the visit in the certain knowledge that I had met one of the kindest and shyest of men and, in Ethel, one of the most extraordinarily assertive and lively old women – a view for sure shared by the Headmaster of Dulwich, who, rumour has it, had his leg pinched by Ethel when she was well into her nineties.
In the biographies there are further indications that Plum was exceedingly shy and not at all gregarious. He loathed the social life Ethel led between the Wars and disappeared from parties to go to work on the kitchen table. Even with his great friend, Denis Mackail, with whom he took long walks through the streets of London at night, he was in the habit of suddenly flitting across the road without warning leaving Mackail to realize he was on his own, a disappearing trick so customary it became known to his family as ‘the Wodehouse glide’. Again, although he wrote with seeming affection about Clubs, he detested nearly every one he joined, called The Garrick ‘The Pesthole’ and stayed loyal only to the dullest and quietest where he could work in peace. If that weren’t enough to prove his love of privacy, there is the testimony of his adored stepdaughter Leonora who, writing in The Strand magazine in 1929, told of an occasion when Wodehouse suddenly went from New York to Georgia for no better reason than that he had told a reporter he didn’t want to meet that he had to go there. Only Lord Emsworth, of all his characters, would have thought of anything so extreme and, if we want an insight into Wodehouse’s true nature, we will find it best in his portrait of that delightfully dotty peer of the realm.
But could Lord Emsworth have written the greatest comic novels of the century? Clearly not, unless, of course, he had Gally at his elbow to supply him with names and anecdotes from his own gay, wild youth. This then is the mystery behind Wodehouse and the one Norman Murphy has solved in this book. Having been privileged to be with him when he discovered the Octagon which figures in Jeeves and the Impending Doom, I can vouch for the thoroughness with which he has gone about his research. More weirdly, a casual joke of mine, about a hen run looking like a pig sty, inspired him to unearth the origins of the Empress of Blandings. At the time, I must admit, I had my doubts but, since then, Norman Murphy has dug away at the facts and I am convinced. In short, In Search Of Blandings has provided us with a mass of new and fascinating material, far beyond the range of any biography yet written. Best of all, he has done nothing to disturb the mystery of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’s genius, and the ‘idyllic world’ remains intact.