McCrum's Wodehouse

After we had sent in our card and waited for a fewhours in the marbled anteroom, a bell rang andthe major-domo, parting the priceless curtains,ushered us in to where the editor sat writing at hisdesk. We advanced on all fours, knocking ourhead reverently on the Aubusson carpet.‘Well?’ he said at length, laying down his jewelledpen.We just looked in,’ we said humbly, ‘to ask if itwould be all right if we sent you an historicalstory.’The public does not want historical stories,’ hesaid, frowning coldly.‘Ah, but the public hasn’t seen one of ours!’ wereplied.The editor placed a cigarette in a holderpresented to him by a reigning monarch, and lit itwith a match from a golden box, the gift of themillionaire president of the Amalgamated Leagueof Working Plumbers.‘What this magazine requires’, he said, ‘is red-blooded, one-hundred-per-cent dynamic stuff,palpitating with warm human interest andcontaining a strong, poignant love-motive.’That,’ we replied, ‘is us all over Mabel.’What I need at the moment, however, is a golfstory.’

‘By a singular coincidence, ours is a golf story.’‘Ha! say you so?’ said the editor, a flicker ofinterest passing over his finely-chiselled features.‘Then you may let me see it.’He kicked us in the face, and we withdrew.

Thus the immortal Wodehouse on the codegoverning writers’ approaches to editors, opening‘The Coming of Gowf’ originally published in TheStrand (May, 1921) and subsequently in TheClicking of Cuthbert (1922). But in our case theeditor is Glaswegian.

Concerning Glasgow, that great commercial andmanufacturing city in the county of Lanarkshire inScotland, much has been written. So lyricallydoes the Encyclopaedia Britannica deal with theplace that it covers twenty-seven pages before itcan tear itself away and go on to Glass,Glastonbury, Glatz and Glauber. The only aspectof it, however, which immediately concerns thepresent historian is the fact that the citizens itbreeds are apt to be grim, dour, persevering,tenacious men; men with red whiskers who knowwhat they want and mean to get it.

That introduces the topic of the head gardener ofBlandings Castle, Angus McAllister, to the readerof ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend’ (Strand,November 1928; Blandings Castle and Elsewhere(1935)).

Our business today is with Wodehouse – a Life byRobert McCrum (Viking, £20).

McCrum fulfils the clearest specifications of aWodehouse reader as laid down in The Girl on theBoat (1922), chapter XVII (and last), opening lines:

If there is one thing more than another whichweighs upon the mind of a story-teller as hechronicles the events which he has set out todescribe, it is the thought that the reader may begrowing impatient with him for straying from themain channel of his tale and devoting himself towhat are, after all, minor developments. Thisstory, for instance, opened with Mrs HoraceHignett, the world-famous writer on Theosophy,going over to America to begin a lecturing-tour;and no one realises more keenly than I do that Ihave left Mrs Hignett flat. I have thrust that greatthinker into the background and concentrated myattention on the affairs of one who is both hermental and her moral inferior, Samuel Marlowe. Iseem at this point to see the reader – a greatbrute of a fellow with beetling eyebrows and a jawlike the ram of a battleship, the sort of fellow whois full of determination and will stand no nonsense– rising to remark that he doesn’t care whathappened to Samuel Marlowe and that what he

888 the drouth the drouth 888

McCrum’s WodehouseOwen Dudley Edwards

wants to know is, how Mrs Hignett made out onher lecturing-tour. Did she go big in Buffalo? Didshe have ‘em tearing up the seats atSchenectady? Was she a riot in Chicago and acyclone in St Louis? Those are the points onwhich he desires information, or give him hismoney back.

I cannot supply the information. And, before youcondemn me, let me hastily add that the fault isnot mine but that of Mrs Hignett herself. The factis, she never went to Buffalo. Schenectady sawnothing of her. She did not get within a thousandmiles of Chicago, nor did she penetrate to StLouis. For the very morning after her sonEustace sailed for England in the liner ‘Atlantic’,she happened to read in the paper one of thoseabridged passenger-lists which the journals ofNew York are in the habit of printing, and got anasty shock when she saw that, among thosewhose society Eustace would enjoy during thevoyage, was ‘Miss Wilhemina Bennett, daughterof J. Rufus Bennett of Bennett, Mandelbaum andCo.‘. And within five minutes of digesting thisinformation, she was at her desk writing outtelegrams cancelling all her engagements. Iron-souled as this woman was, her fingers trembledas she wrote. She had a vision of Eustace andthe daughter of J. Rufus Bennett strolling togetheron moonlit decks, leaning over rails dampwith sea-spray and, in short, generallystarting the whole trouble all over again.

The passage itself may inform the critic whyWodehouse survives so effortlessly into thepostmodern age. To put it in his own terms,can one not see Derrida hissing to HaydonWhite out of the corner of his mouth that this isthe sort of stuff to give the troops when theywant to know why the reader is more worthy ofinvestigation that the writer? Wodehouse wascertainly the man to pass the postmodernbefore the race began: even in his youth hewould have had Derrida suitably garnished inGilbertian lyrics (‘If this be so, why Derrida-derry’ &c).

More immediately, he would have welcomed ademand for concealment of the author: he didnot want to be written about, although he wastoo generous in spirit to complain about a goodnotice. Few writers, indeed, more aptlyreported on reviewing conventions, as when inCocktail Time he summarised the initialreception of a novel entitled Cocktail Time byDon Marquis, author of archy and mehitabel,speaking of poems:

It has been well said that an author whoexpects results from a first novel is in aposition similar to that of a man whodrops a rose petal down the GrandCanyon of Arizona and listens for theecho. The Peebles Courier called it notunpromising, The Basingstoke Journal

thought it not uninteresting, and the TimesLiterary Supplement told its readers that it waspublished by Alfred Tomkins Ltd. and contained243 pp ...

Then the novel is denounced by a Bishop and itsname is made: to those (including himself) whodeclared Wodehouse a nostalgist for a long-deadworld, we may point out that Cocktail Time if anything,appeared in 1958 a date if anything somewhatpreceding the annual yearnings of Edinburgh FestivalFringe companies that somewhere, somehow theymight get their production condemned by theModerator of the General Assembly of the Church ofScotland preferably in the words in Cocktail Timewhich the Bishop uses to condemn Cocktail Time(‘obscene, immoral, shocking, impure, corrupt,shameless, graceless and depraved’). Nor wasanachronism visibly shaking its few last grey hairs intreatment of the news value:

In these days when practically anything fromGuildford undertaker bitten in leg by Pekinese toRonald Plumtree (11) falling off his bicycle inWalthamstow High Street can make the frontpage of the popular press as a big feature storywith headlines of a size formerly reserved forannouncing the opening of a world war, it was notto be expected that such an event would passunnoticed.

888 the drouth the drouth 888

[Wodehouse was born in Guidlford and keptPekinese.] The Bishop is not of course, the reader ina pure or Derrida sense: the reader is in fact theBishop’s daughter whom the Bishop had foundengrossed in what he presumed to be a work ofdevotion but which proved on closer inspection to be anovel entitled Cocktail Time. Peeping over hershoulder, he was able to read a paragraph or two.She had got, it should be mentioned, to the middle ofChapter 13. At 5-5 sharp be was wrenching thevolume from her grasp, at 5-6 tottering from the room,at 5-10 in his study scrutinizing Chapter 13 to see if hehad really seen what be had thought he had seen.

He had.

The Bishop not as Reader but as protagonist draws usback to Mrs Horace Hignett whose epiphany had beenin 1922, and to the reader with whom Wodehouseequipped her. Despite the comparabilty of reactionsthe postmodernism of their situations varies: theBishop is in a novel called Cocktail Time for thepurpose of denouncing (ie. best-selling) another of thesame name, indeed since his effect on the sales of theCocktail Time he attacks will be that of Wodehouse’sname on the sales of the Cocktail Time he has written– that of transforming the sale from a trickle to atorrent – the Reader will (rightly if subconsciously)identify Wodehouse with Bishop status and sanctity.

But the Reader of Wodehouse (not being the Bishop’sdaughter invented by Wodehouse) remains effectivelyconjured on Chapter XVII of The Girl on the Boat.

It is thus gratifying for the reader of McCrum’sWodehouse to find from his picture that McCrum’seyebrows beetle second to none, and that his jawmight make any battleship look to its laurels. His twosentences of autobiography beneath have a tersenessin keeping with the Wodehouse specifications: ‘RobertMcCrum is the author of several novels and two worksof non-fiction. He is literary editor of the Observer andlives in London.’ As on a previous occasion McCrumpresented as his credentials introducer to a newPenguin edition of Hot Water ([1932] 2000] that hewas a Wodehouse ‘fan’ – the Reader, in fact, if interms too human to be sufficiently Derrida. This wascredential enough. If introduction was needed,McCrum’s faith alone made him a good choice: but nointroduction is needed for a Wodehouse, and be theM. C. ever so fantastic, the Reader is left complainingabout the delay, as Wodehouse implied about his ownintroduction to the short stories of his friend BillTownend (who in fact badly needed the selling-pitchfrom his P. G.). The choice of novel was unwise in anycase. Hot Water is one of the few Wodehouse novelswhich really turns on a last-minute unmasking (to thechagrin of the detective almost as much as that of thecriminal), and so McCrum had to whisper – even toconceal – the denouement. As though in revenge, HotWater produced a series of pitfalls for this biographerin his own text. Mrs Gedge is not ‘A fairly typicalWodehouse woman’ (pp. 198-99): she is in fact acrook in brilliant disguise crossed with a ruthless socialclimber probably inspired by Edith Wharton’s The

Custom of the Country, whose equivalent figure endsthe novel with her only regret being her divorce’sprevention of her becoming an Americanambassador’s wife, also the burning ambition of MrsGedge. Mrs Gedge is also a blackmailer, bleeding (bymeans of his letter to his bootlegger) the prohibitionistSenator Ambrose Opal whom McCrum also reads as‘another typical Wodehouse character from the1920s’:Wodehouse never again made use in his fiction of thecorruption in US Congressional politics. McCrum saysHot Water was actually written just after Prohibitionhad been lifted’: it was written in 1931 and Prohibitionwas not repealed until December 1933. ThePresidential election of 1932 arrayed the Democrats,committed to repeal Prohibition, against theRepublicans, sworn to retain it. It looks very much asif Hot Water was a satire against Prohibition with a titleAmericans in 1932 would easily read as a sneeragainst the political opponents of alcohol. McCrum iscommitted to the consensus view that Wodehouse waswholly unpolitical: Prohibition made politicians out ofmany an apolitical, even those whose alcohol intakewas as moderate as Wodehouse’s.

But how apolitical was Wodehouse? And why shouldMcCrum consense with consensibility? His back ofjacket features encomia from Tom Sharpe and John IeCarre, and no two major writers of the last half-centurymore tellingly flaunt their Wodehousian colours. LeCarre predicts that ‘as long as P. G. Wodehouse isread, this will be the seminal work of reference, theindispensable vade mecum and let us say at once thatLe Carre has rung the bell and is entitled to the cigaror coconut according to choice. Sharpe sees the bookas ‘head and shoulders above all previousbiographers’.

It is also true that McCrum stands on their heads andshoulders, but in so doing he has got more from them(and handsomely acknowledged it) than anyone wouldhave imagined they provide. He also honours debtsall Wodehouse students must have to two non-biographers, Richard Usborne and N. T. P. Murphy.Usborne’s Wodehouse at Work (1961) does what itsays, with small biographical knowledge and littlecritical pretension: it is indispensable in ways few ofWodehouse’s biographers or critics could even hope tobe. Wodehouse’s greatness rests on the basis ofScott’s or Balzac’s or Dickens’s or Trollope’s: he was aworkman. He did not even take the time off Scott didfor law or public affairs, Dickens for performing his ownworks, Trollope for sanitising the Irish postal service orinventing the pillar-box. Jailed or quarantined, as hewas by the Nazis, he simply went on writing his stint.Money in the Bank (1946) may be the funniest novelwritten in prison, all the more for having its centralcharacter based on one of his fellow-prisoners. LikeTrollope, Wodehouse ultimately produced a writer’sreport on his work; the letters to Townend reworked bywriter and recipient. Readers interested in writing as away of life find much to inspire their business inPerforming Flea (1953) much as they can in Trollope’sAutobiography. Like Trollope also, Wodehouse died inharness: the title of Usborne’s revised book summed itup – Wodehouse at Work to the End (1976).

888 the drouth the drouth 888

Usborne showed his man creating and buildingcharacters; Colonel Murphy’s In Search of Blandings(1981, 1986) showed where they had come from,fastening on places and persons in Wodehouse’s life.McCrum makes excellent use of their findings,sometimes with insufficient improvement. McCrum, forinstance, follows Murphy’s proof of Wodehouse’saristocratic lineage and himself gives us Bertram deWodehouse, serving with Edward I against the Scots,as origin of Bertram Wooster standing firm againstJeeves’s opposition to his benjoleile-playing by thethought that ‘his ancestors did dashed well at theBattle of Crecy’ (Thank You, Jeeves). Wodehousebrought inspiration from the Scottish wars to anothercharacter, but not on the same side as Bertram deWodehouse:

Lord Emsworth did not grind his teeth, for he wasnot given to that form of displaying emotion; buthe leaped some ten inches into the air anddropped his pince-nez. And, though normally afair-minded and reasonable man, well aware thatmodern earls must think twice before pulling thefeudal stuff on their employees, he took on theforthright truculence of a large landowner of theearly Norman period ticking off a serf.‘Listen, McAllister! Listen to me! Either you sendthat girl away to-day or you can go yourself. Imean it!’A curious expression came intoAngus McAllister’s face –always excepting theoccupiedterritories.It was thelook of aman whohas notforgottenBannockburn, aman consciousof belonging to thecountry of WilliamWallace and Robertthe Bruce. He madeScotch noises at theback of his throat.‘Y’r lorrudsheep willaccept ma notis,’ he said,with formal dignity. ‘I’ll payyou a month’s wages in lieu of notice and you willleave this afternoon’, retorted Lord Emsworth withspirit.’‘Mphm!’ said Mr McAllister.

(‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’, Strand, December1924; Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935)

Ultimately McAllister rescues Emsworth from a policearrest and Emsworth pleads with him to return, in afine contribution to MacDiarmid’s revival of Lallans:

Angus McAllister gazed woodenly at the tulips.‘A’ weel,’ he said at length.‘You will?’ cried Lord Emsworth joyfully.

‘Splendid! Capital! Excellent!’‘A’ didna say I wud.’‘I thought you said “I will,”’ said his lordship,dashed.‘I didna say “A’ Weel,”; I said “A’ weel,”‘ said MrMcAllister stiffly. ‘Meanin’ mebbe I might, mebbenot.‘ Lord Emsworth laid a trembling hand uponhis shoulder.‘McAllister, I will raise your salary.’The beard twitched.‘Dash it, I’ll double it!’The eyebrows flickered.‘McAllister ... Angus,’ said Lord Emsworth in a lowvoice. ‘Come back! The pumpkin needs you.’

And on that plea of Art for Art’s sake, McAllister returns(the quarrel having been about his cousin whomEmsworth’s son wants to marry and does), but thatshrinks into insignificance beside the needs of thewould-be prize pumpkin.

Yet while McCrum proclaims Wodehouse’s self-mockery on aristocratic ancestry, he simply throws inthat one Wodehouse won a baronetcy in 1611, another‘secured a peerage in 1797; and, finally, a third wasrewarded with the earldom of Kimberley in 1866’. Itmay be that McCrum is so disillusioned by the peers ofpelf promoted in the twentieth century that he sees noneed to ask why: but that earldom was given scarcelyfifteen years before Wodehouse’s birth, and it’s fair to

feel that a man whowrote about

earls mightbe

influenced byhaving one given to thefamily so soon before hisbirth. Wodehouse was in fact athird cousin of Gladstone’s ColonialSecretary (in 1881 when he was born), an officeretained in subsequent Liberal reigns until Wodehousewas thirteen when Kimberley became Rosebery’sForeign Secretary). Wodehouse himself was of lesswell endowed parents, and hence knew little of theworld of the great house until he was rich and famous,but if the Foreign Secretary is your third cousin,you areno more apolitical than Lord Emsworth was unlanded.You ignored the politics – or the land – until you feltyou should take a look at it in case a spot of botherdeveloped. Wodehouse toyed with a little Socialism inthe Edwardian era (Psmith in the City (1910)) at a time

888 the drouth the drouth 888

when other youngsters in old Liberal families went infor it. McCrum notes a dedication of Meet Mr Mulliner(1927) to Asquith. There are one or two hilariousstories of idiotic wealthy young men making disastrousefforts to enter politics by skating on the thinnest ofinformational ice: in his ninetieth year Wodehouseproduced a gorgeous episode in which Bertie Woostertries to canvas a voter for the Tories (Much Obliged,Jeeves (1971)):

I pressed her closely, or do I mean keenly.‘You want taxes cut, don’t you?’‘I do.’‘And our foreign policy bumped up?’‘Certainly.’‘And our experts doubled and a stick of dynamiteput under the pound? I’ll bet you do. Then votefor Ginger Winship, the man who with his hand onthe helm of the ship of state will steer England toprosperity and happiness, bringing back oncemore the spacious days of Good Queen Bess.’This was a line of talk that Jeeves had roughedout for my use. There was also some rather goodstuff about this sceptred isle and this other Eden,demi-something, but I had forgotten it. ‘You can’tsay that wouldn’t be nice’, I said.A moment before, I wouldn’t have thought itpossible that she could look more like AuntAgatha than she had been doing, but she nowachieved this breathtaking feat. She sniffed, if notsnorted, and spoke as follows:‘Young man, don’t be idiotic. Hand on the helm ofthe ship of state, indeed! If Mr Winship performsthe miracle of winning this election, which hewon’t, he will be an ordinary humble backbencher, doing nothing more noteable than saying“Hear, hear” when his superiors are speaking and“Oh” and “Question” when the opposition have thefloor. As’, she went on, ‘I shall if I win thiselection, as I intend to.’

And, at story’s end, she is clearly about to win it,Jeeves having persuaded the Tory candidate towithdraw in her favour. But not before Lord Sidcup, aTory supporter, is hit in the eye with a potato, thusdisposing of his intentions of standing in the Toryinterest. Sidcup has inherited a peerage he has beenproposing to relinquish to qualify for Commonselection. But constant Wodehouse readers hadalready encountered him in 1938, as Roderick Spode,Fascist leader of the Saviours of Britain, making hisrepulsive debut in one of Wodehouse’s finest works,The Code of the Woosters. Ex-Fascists as Tory peersand possible candidates! Fairly hot stuff for thesupposed non-politician.

The Code of the Woosters is the most scathing attackproduced by British fiction before World War II: in fact,it appeared less than a year before the outbreak ofwar. McCrum pursuing the consensus ofWodehousian apoliticism has to grasp that nettle first,and does so by telling us that the book in some ways(pg 250) ‘is as sublimely detached from reality as TheSwoop!, but it also bears the imprint of the times inwhich it was written’. This is a bit like saying that

Orwell’s 1984 ‘is as sublimely detached from reality asAnimal Farm, but it also’ &c, &c. It may be dubiouscriticism but it is excellent conjuring. The Swoop(1909) was a hard-hitting early satire by Wodehousewhich McCrum (p. 87) has already analysed with theacumen readers of his book have every reason toadmire and love: the novel nominally recordedEngland under invasion but actually subverts theconventions of an odd little genre. In place of thecustomary North Sea naval engagement, the invadersarrive like day-trippers at Brighton, Lyme Regis and‘the little Welsh waterubg okacem Llgxtpll’. AsMcCrum notes, the invasion-scare novels then growingfashionable were taken up by the sensationalist pressbaron Northcliffe; in fact, they were playing asubsidiary part in the coming of World War I.

Wodehouse for good measure subverted the classicimperial novel for boys by having the Russian andGerman commanders lured into mutual hostilities by aBoy Scout. McCrum finds that much of its strengthconsisted of Wodehouse capitalising on his ownknowledge of ‘Edwardian music halls and theEdwardian popular press’, In fact he showed how suchstar performers in War reporting as Edgar Wallace andBart Kennedy pumped up chauvinist fever on whatproved much less authority when pathfinding throughhome terrain. One can learn much today on TheSwoop’s targets, and it is not reassuring to the usualpicture of a benign Edwardian peace. McCrum honesinto the novel’s ‘basic joke, a good one, ... that theEnglish are indifferent to international politics until theyimpinge on the nation’s sporting prospects’. But whatThe Swoop tells us is how the media are gearing up tobring about an unwanted war. Wodehouse recorded apeace, but an increasingly self-doomed peace. Howthen can McCrum, less than 200 pages later, see TheSwoop as ‘detached from reality’?

Or rather, is McCrum playing a linguistic game assophisticated as some of Wodehouse’s own? TheSwoop pitched a fable into the real press and musichall environment to warn against an increasinglydangerous scare literature. Equally, The Code of theWoosters directly lampoons the reality of BritishFascism, with Roderick Spode ‘plainly modelled on SirOswald Mosley’. But Mosley’s Black Shirts becomeSpode’s ‘Black Shorts’, as Gussie Fink-Nottle explainsto Bertie:

Wooster: ‘... That chin. ... Those eyes. ... Thatmoustache. By the way, when you say “shorts”,you mean “shirts”, of course.’‘No. By the time Spode formed his association,there were no shirts left. He and his adherentswear black shorts.‘‘Footer bags, you mean?’‘Yes.’‘How perfectly foul.’‘Yes.’‘Bare knees?’‘Bare knees.’‘Golly!’‘Yes.’

888 the drouth the drouth 888

This targets Mosley all right, but it also volleys left andright at the sources of Mosleyism. The Mosley cultinvited English imitation of the Hitler cult. Spode lookslike a Dictator, more of Mussolini than of Hitler girth butBertie thinks of him fundamentally for Hitler physicalfeatures. The footer bags deride German Lederhosenbut they also indict the Nazis for confusing schoolboygames with adult life. Because Wodehouse of allwriters enjoyed appealing to the child in his readers –as opposed to writing for child readers – and becausehe himself followed the fortunes of his own school atfootball and cricket he was the man exactly tomeasure what was wrong with a movement based onfooter bags. And when Bertie is suddenly enabled todefy Spode, he becomes what Orwell saw elsewhereas the little man defying the bully (Orwell listed MickeyMouse, Charlie Chaplin, Popeye the Sailor, but this,turning on vocabulary, set truth against propaganda):

‘He asked me if I had called him a slob, and I saidthat I had.’‘A fat slob?’‘A fat slob. It is about time’, I proceeded, ‘thatsome public-spirited person came along and toldyou where you got off. The trouble with you,Spode, is that just because you have succeededin inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure theLondon scene by going about in black shorts, youthink you’re someone. You hear them shouting“Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice ofthe People. That is where you make yourbloomer. What the Voice of the People is sayingis: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swankingabout in footer bags! Did you ever in your puffsee such a perfect perisher?”’

And there is no softening of Nazi bullying, or of upper-class adoption of lower-class brutality:

‘Now, what you are saying to yourself, no doubt,is that you will not be caught. You imagine thatyou and this precious aunt of yours will be cleverenough between you to steal the cow-creamerwithout being detected. It will do you no good,Wooster. If the thing disappears, howevercunningly you and your female accomplice mayhave covered your traces, I shall know where ithas gone, and I shall immediately beat you to ajelly. To a jelly’, he repeated, rolling the wordsround his tongue as if they were vintage port.‘Said he would beat you to a jelly, did he?’‘That was the expression he used. He repeatedit, so that there should be no mistake.’‘Well, I wouldn’t for the world have youmanhandled by that big stiff. You wouldn’t have achance against a gorilla like that. He would rendyou limb from limb and scatter the fragments tothe four winds.’I winced a little.‘No need to make a song about it, old flesh andblood’This bird of whom I speak was a simple,untutored soul and Spode a man of goodeducation and upbringing, but it was plain thatthere was one point at which their souls touched.

I don’t suppose they would have seen eye to eyeon any other subject you could have brought up,but in the matter of wanting to see the colour ofmy insides their minds ran on parallel lines. Theonly difference seemed to be that whereas myemployee had planned to use a carving knife forhis excavations, Spode appeared to be satisfiedthat the job could be done all right with the barehands.

In the nick of time Bertie remembers that all will besaved if he tells Spode he knows all about Eulalie (onwhich he knows nothing) and at the end of the storyJeeves (who has given him the escape-mechanism)confides:

‘Mr Spode designs ladies’ underclothing, sir. Hehas a considerable talent in that direction, andhas indulged it secretly for some years. He is thefounder and proprietor of the emporium in BondStreet known as Eulalie Soeurs.‘‘You don’t mean that?’‘Yes, sir.’‘Good Lord, Jeeves! No wonder he didn’t want athing like that to come out.’‘No, sir. It would unquestionably jeopardize hisauthority over his followers.’‘You can’t be a successful Dictator and designwomen’s underclothing.‘‘No, sir.’‘One or the other. Not both.’‘Precisely, sir.’

This was probably the most effective piece of literaryanti-Fascism to appear in Britain, in sales, wit, andrealism. McCrum produces one of his best thumb-nailcritiques of the novel, and his best is sublime, apartfrom minor conflation of the plot with its predecessorRight Ho, Jeeves. He even insures himself againstplot misstatement by justly warning us that ‘tosummarize the plot of The Code of the Woosters is toconcentrate on the well-oiled machinery of a beautifullyconstructed fictional timepiece to the exclusion of itsstyle and rightly chooses as his first example:

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his could seethat, if not actually disgruntled, he was far frombeing gruntled ...

McCrum even takes Bertie’s Philippic against Spodeand shows its use of ‘late-Victorian slang of the bankclerks and the Pooters, those lower-middle-classdenizens of south London, land of laurels and semis.By the late 1930s, it was a language that, almostsingle-handedly, Wodehouse had forged into auniversally recognized English style, a marriage ofsuburban vernacular with classical syntax’. At otherpoints he sensitively explores Wodehouse’sinterweaving American usages with his own classicaland colloquial vernacular. He follows the consensus ingrounding Wodehouse so firmly in late Victorian style,but it mixed with the world of Hollywood writers andNew York literati, Anglophones in France and music-hall (British) and musical-comedy (American) creatorsand camp followers. Tacitly McCrum acknowledges a

888 the drouth the drouth 888

style perfected over time and space, and brought toculinary perfection – as Wodehouse delicatelyinsinuated in making his ‘wonder’ chef, Anatole, aspeaker mingling Drones Club (learned from BingoLittle) and Brooklyn (from a native chauffeur calledMaloney):

‘Hot dog! You ask me what is it? Listen. Makesome attention a little. Me, I have hit the hay, butI do not sleep so good, and presently I wake andup I look, and there is one who make facesagainst me through the dashed window. Is that apretty affair? Is that convenient? If you think Ilike it, you jolly well mistake yourself. I am somad as a wet hen. And why not? I amsomebody, isn’t it? This is a bedroom, what-what,not a house for some apes? Then for what doblighters sit on my window as cool as a fewcucumbers making some faces?’ (Right Ho,Jeeves (1934))

This creation of the Anatole macedoine mixed its ownspecial recipe from literary sources as variedas Damon Runyon and the Magnet comic,Balzac and Scott Fitzgerald, Conan Doyle andOllendorff’s French exercises. Wodehouseamused himself with various self-portraits – theschoolboy cricketer Mike Jackson, thevisionary con-man Ukridge’s long-exploitedschoolmate Corky, the younger Bertie Wooster,the autobiographer Galahad Threepwood, thelater Lord Emsworth – but Anatole is a creationexceptionally remote from him. Yet in Anatoleis the self-portrait, in caricature, of his stylisticcraft. McCrum reminds us that Anatole is inany case marinated by Wodehouse’s sojournsin various parts of France, almost in reflectionof how he felt he sounded to the French.McCrum, very early on, chooses a res ipsaloquitur opening The Luck of the Bodkins(1935):

Into the face of the young man who sat onthe terrace of the Hotel Magnifique atCannes there had crept a look of furtiveshame, the shifty, hangdog look whichannounces that an Englishman is about totalk French.

McCrum sees this sentence as proof of theperpetual ‘passion for grammar and ... virtuosoassurance over the perils of the mostsophisticated English sentence’ deriving fromthe fluency in Latin and Greek fromWodehouse’s schooldays at Dulwich:but thesentence’s preoccupation with translation (forwhich the French waiter then shows muchmore capacity than the Englishman seekingspeech with him) does McCrum’s work twiceover. Wodehouse was no great linguist, but hethought of words under the lens of thetranslator, foreign words, words of classical derivation,words colliding with one another from differentvarieties of English.

Yet McCrum’s insistence on the antiquity of influenceson Wodehouse, so often right, still runs risks of a well-played note in a misleading context, creating problemssuch as afflicted the seaside orchestra at the openingof Wodehouse’s short story ‘Best Seller’ (Strand (July1930), Mulliner Nights (1933):

From far away in the distance came the faintstrains of the town band, as it picked its waythrough the Star of Eve song from Tannh’auser –somewhat impeded by the second trombone whohad got his music sheets mixed and was playing‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’.

Take Spode, for instance (granting it sounds like aninvitation to pocket the Albert Hall, as Wodehousewould say). McCrum takes him straight on (p. 251):‘Wodehouse’s devastating portrait of Spode is not onlya clear indication of his political sympathies but also acharacteristic use of humour to defuse a bad situation,and obliquely to suggest the virtues of tolerancethrough an infuriating tease. But having done so

much, why tie Wodehouse to Bertie Wooster’s irritationin the same book at being blackmailed by an aunt atbreakfast ... [and] by a female crony after dinner?Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world. ...

888 the drouth the drouth 888

Bertie betrays not only Wodehouse’s sentiments, butalso his creator’s Victorian origins.’ It won’t do. StiffyStephanie Byng, the blackmailing crony, is based inpart on the person Wodehouse seems to have lovedmost in the world, his adopted daughter Leonora(Snorkles) who also supplied model material forZenobia (‘Nobby’) Hopwood in Joy in the Morning,Roberta (‘Bobbie’) Wickham in seven short stories,and above all Sue Brown in Summer Lightning and itssequel, the unjustly slighted Heavy Weather(vindicated by McCrum in a masterly miniature ofpositive criticism). Bertie is infuriated by Stiffy, Jeevescensorious of Bobbie, Lady Constance Keeble(convincingly identified by McCrum with Wodehouse’sWife) is hostile to Sue Brown, but all the signs are thatWodehouse heartily disagreed with them. ButMcCrum must follow the consensus that Wodehousewas really a Victorian/Edwardian marooned and freelyspouting his hundred books and hundred-odd shortstories to subsequent ages (whose welcome for themrevealed universal time-machine-slippage?). Spodethus has to be explained ‘While Wodehouse couldescape from threateningreality into Wooster-shire,even he could not ignoreit altogether’.Wodehouse’s grudgingconformity, his half-nod tothreatening reality was tooutdo all his literarycontemporaries in‘devastating’ BritishFascism! With this logicMcCrum would placeChurchill irreparablybefore 1910.

There is good sense inarguing that Churchill’sstrength owed much tothe survival of lateVictoran and Edwardianattitudes within him: notvery peaceful ones, but1881-1914 were muchless peacetul years thanMcCrum seems to think –they may well have takenhis England to the edgeof revolution, accordingto some historians. ButChurchill was the man tostand up to Nazism in1940, and Wodehousewas the man to stand upto British admiration forNazism in 1938. Withoutthe dissection of Spode,there could have been more British defeatism in thoseterrible months following April 1940, with all theEuropean continent in treaty, or capitulation, to Hitler.If The Code of the Woosters stiffened a few backsagainst international bullies, and strengthened theimage of the weak man defending decency againstthem, so much the better for Britain (and for humanity).

If it reinforced the notion that the brave but idioticaristocrat must make a stand, and must depend on thebrains of his Jeeveses, the workers and professionalsubordinates – so much the better still.

But Wodehouse, captured by the Nazis in France in1940, imprisoned and released under German control,broadcast on German radio and became identified withcapitulation. Some brave and intelligent people whostood firm in the Britain of 1940 subsequently refusedto read Wodehouse and saw him as the collaborator inBritain’s darkest (though finest) hour. I do not includeamong the brave those who publicly denounced him,dealt with by McCrum in awesome integrity. Orwell’sgenerous defence of Wodehouse (initially in theWindmill (July 1945) and reprinted by him in hisCritical Essays the following year) summed up thecase against them:

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it wasexcusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did,but to go on denouncing him three or four years

later – and more, tolet an impressionremain that he actedwith conscioustreachery – is notexcusable. Fewthings in this warhave been moremorally disgustingthan the presenthunt after traitorsand Quislings. ... InEngland the fiercesttirades againstQuislings are utteredby Conservativeswho were practisingappeasement in1938 andCommunists whowere advocating it in1940. ... thewretchedWodehouse – justbecause successand expatriation hadallowed him toremain mentally inthe Edwardian age –became the corpusvile in a propagandaexperiment, and Isuggest that it isnow time to regardthe incident asclosed ... in the case

of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to theUnited States and renounce his British citizenship,we shall end by being horribly ashamed ofourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punishthe people who weakened national morale atcritical moments, there are other culprits who arenearer home and better worth chasing.

888 the drouth the drouth 888

McCrum’s historical sense of period may occasionallybe shaky – his Edwardian England is far more self-assured than it really was, and Wodehouse’s earlywork ferreted out much more of its social ills and fearsthan McCrum allows himself to notice. But as ahistorian, in quest of objectivity, McCrum’s is anexample to cheer: he is, in fact, as judicious asJeeves. He culls the Daily Telegraph correspondenceof 1-13 July 1941, and there, if anywhere, we mightexpect to encounter Tories with pasts to hide behindwitch-hunts against Wodehouse. It even included aprize entry from Orwell’s other guilty men, theCommunists needing to conceal their appeasementfervour during the Hitler-Stalin pact, which had justbeen unilaterally ended by Hitler’s invasion of Russiaon 22 June 1941: Sean O’Casey is quoted by McCrum(pg 315): ‘If England has any dignity left in literature,she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of EnglishLiterature’s performing flea’. McCrum terms this ‘abrilliant phrase that Wodehouse later turned to hisadvantage’, ie. entitling his revised letters to BillTownend, his testament as a writer, Performing Flea,which McCrum (p. 386) salutes for its ‘almost insolentirony’, Wodehouse closing the book with what McCrumhappily affirms ‘an exquisite, slightly lethal, courtesy’:

With Sean O’Casey’s statement that I am ‘EnglishLiterature’s performing flea’ I scarcely know howto deal. Thinking it over, I believe he meant to becomplimentary, for all the performing fleas I havemet have impressed me with their sterling artistryand that indefinable something which makes thegood trooper.

But while Wodehouse turned O’Casey’s malice into asneat and just a self-epitaph as one could ask, malice itwas. O’Casey was not seeking to have Wodehouse’salleged offences forgotten; but Wodehouse and hiswork. Wodehouse possessed much common groundwith St Francis of Assisi, and his praise for the flea(whose abilities in gymnastics certainly resembled hisown prose technique at its finest) made a mockingcontrast with the self-appointed Irish culturalemancipator only ready to see the flea as a means ofabuse. O’Casey had of course been attempting avariant for Tennyson’s denunciation of Churton Collins,‘a louse on the locks of literature’ (O’Casey, to hiscredit, was fond of Tennyson, and rendered hiswaspish homage in entitling the last volume of his ownautobiography Sunset and Evening Star).

O’Casey’s posture as arbiter elegentiarum for Englandwith his wild Hitler-Stalin harp slung as far behind himas possible made sense in his Communist party’s rushto respectability: the war it had denounced as acapitalist squabble, possibly to end in the deserveddestruction of the British empire, had now become thewar whose most fervent patriots were (and always hadbeen) the Communist party. There was an awfulappropriateness to his finding the Daily Telegraph asthe appropriate shooting-range in which to perform hisshadow gunmanship. But O’Casey was no more thana great playwright selling himself short in self-deludingmasquerade as a politician. Wodehouse’s old

collaborator Ian Hay stated that ‘No broadcast fromBerlin by a world famous Englishman ... can serve asanything but an advertisement for Hitler’ which (ifMcCrum has conveyed Hay’s denunciation limits inthat quotation) was perfectly fair: the tragedy was thatWodehouse, fresh from his internment camp, had noinkling that such was the case, and gave his interviewsand broadcasts under the illusion that he was simplyshowing stiff upper lip, and not letting the side down bymoaning. The real horror was the traitor: A. A. Milne,whose diatribe against Wodehouse McCrum finds‘consumed by envy at his old friend’s literary successand frustrated in his own career’. McCrum worked forsome four years on this present book, but he hadample opportunity to consider Milne’s case whenediting Ann Thwaite’s excellent biography of Milne(1990) for her publishers, Faber and Faber. It showedthat while the Telegraph did print letters defendingWodehouse from Dorothy Sayers, Sax Rohmer, StormJameson and Gilbert Frankau, they suppressed acounter-attack on Milne by Compton Mackenzie(Milne, whose letter seems scarcely sane, haddenounced Wodehouse for shirking the responsibilitiesof fatherhood in a quotation which was in fact from aspeaker in a Wodehouse story; Mackenzie retortedthat a father who had exploited his own son for literarycash to the extent Milne had in Christopher Robin, wasin no position to sneer at others). But there was aworse case. McCrum notes that Harold Nicolson–parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Informationto 18 July 1942 and then Governor of the BBC –thought Wodehouse a traitor, though telling his diary ‘Ido not want to see Wodehouse shot on Tower Hill.But I resent the theory that “poor old P. G. is soinnocent that he is not responsible”. A man who hasshown such ingenuity and resource in evading Britishand American income tax cannot be classed asunpractical.’ In fact, as McCrum shows, Wodehouse’stax troubles arose because he trusted in badly chosenadvisers: it was not evasion.

Nicolson’s support helped Duff Cooper, his Minister, tolet loose an evil denunciation of Wodehouse in a BBCbroadcast by W. N. Connor despite Nicolson’s futurefellow governors’ indignation. Nicolson, ten yearsbefore, had been a political associate of Mosely. Ayear before the Wodehouse affair Nicolson had vetoeda BBC broadcast by Bernard Shaw, the oldest greatwriter in the UK: ‘Shaw’s main theme is that the onlything Hitler has done wrong is to persecute the Jews’[the script in fact said ‘we must risk our lives for’ theneed to defeat anti-Semitism]. Nicolson’s view(shared, he said) by Duff Cooper) continued: ‘millionsof Americans and some other people’ thought Hitler’santi-Jewish persecution ‘is the only thing he has doneright’. McCrum does not go as far afield as this (andin any case would have been restrained by permissionhe was granted by Nicolson’s heirs to quote theunpublished diary passage on Wodehouse). But it isworth noting, for Wodehouse’s stupid acceptance ofthe Nazi offer to let him broadcast seems far lessheinous than the standards of his official British critics.Orwell had known his business.

The Nicolson record and claims on Cooper come from

888 the drouth the drouth 888

Michael Holroyd’s Shaw vol, 3. Holroyd wasparticularly aware that Shaw had designed his ownbiography, imposing his version of events onbiographers in his lifetime and posthumously facinghis biographers with records as he wished them tobe studied. McCrum is aware of some comparableforce from Wodehouse, particularly in his frequentself-portrait as a workaholic Bertie Wooster. Fewgreat writers have more vigorously enjoyedpresenting themselves as idiots. He had beendoing this long before World War II, in hisoccasional non-fiction piece and over-generousintroductions to Townend’s and others’ writings.Wodehouse was ceaseless in help – financial aswell as professional – for Townend, his oldestfriend, mostly concealing gifts from the knowledgeof Wodehouse’s wife. Townend was not the writerWodehouse claimed, but he was better thanMcCrum thinks. McCrum is constantly on thewatch for Wodehouse’s revisions of events,including letter-texts, mostly because as a workmanhe was a perfectionist. He died, as Usborne says,working to the end: McCrum tells us he died alonein hospital with the manuscript of the novel onwhich he was working beside him, having intendedto get back to it after dinner. Usborne published it,rightfully re-entitling it Sunset at Blandings, butwhat appeared would probably have been greatlychanged, including the loss or gain of individualcharacters, had Wodehouse survived. In generalwhat Wodehouse changed (in any control hepossessed of versions of his life) was in the interestof entertainment. McCrum does not, of course,intend to be trapped by Wodehouse: he knows hisman was a great writer, and a writer whoseincessant work made him so. But there is always theGoldsmith factor. David Garrick’s premature epitaphfor Goldsmith is easily remembered:

Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness call’dNoll,Who wrote like an angel, but talk’d like poor Poll.

Its facility gets it confused with reality, although we getmuch closer the reality if we look at Goldsmith’s reply,‘Retaliation’, whose dissection of Garrick (and EdmundBurke and various others) has profound truth, notsimply superficial attraction. If Nicolson had been lessdespicable, he might have judged Wodehouse’sintellect by his writing rather than his tax adventures.McCrum, unquestionably, sees the genius in thewriting of Wodehouse, but explains his irresponsibilityover the Nazi offer to broadcast by putting himperpetually into Edwardian attitudes. Here, he followsOrwell, writing with the same intent. But in so doingthey are compelled to deny Wodehouse the hardfoundation of realism in his early work which remainedwhere he wanted it for his later. Wodehouse’smasterly analysis of American Populism come east tofire the journalism of American Progressivism, inPsmith, Journalist (The Captain, serialisation 1910;book 1915), is perhaps the shrewdest observation ofthe sources of the great Muckrake movement in theUSA‘s early twentieth century.

The old Etonian who changes his name and ethnicityto Irish so as to get his hands on the rewards of policecorruption, in A Gentleman of Leisure (1906), teachesa lesson about status displacement by choice inimmigrant machines, and it is not Wodehouse’s fault ifhistorians were slow to learn it. Wodehouse’s satireon literary pretentions, forms of creativity, spawn ofparasite journalism, &c remains at home in thepostmodern era because it was so blazingly acute(and because literary activity changes inherently muchless than it likes to think it does). Also, of course, it isblazingly funny, a quality at a premium in discussion ofliterature anywhere, in any place, at any time.Wodehouse is not behind the times, but what the timesdiscover still laughing ahead of them.

And he was not out of touch when he inventedRoderick Spode and his Black Shorts. So how do weaccount for the Berlin broadcasts? One answer wassimply the effect of sudden apparent liberation frominternment camp conditions. The atmosphere offriendship and goodwill in place of harshlycircumscribed jail would be bound to make anyonelose perspective. McCrum’s time-lapse inWodehouse’s sense of his world of the 1930s won’twork if we (and he) confront some of his more hard-bitten fiction such as Summer Moonshine (1938) withits desperate expedients in house-letting and house-sale for impoverished aristocrats, bitter hatred betweenstepsons and stepmothers dictating the writing of playsand their suppression, not to speak of the romance of

888 the drouth the drouth 888

process-servers’ lives. But McCrum has a point withregard to wars. Wodehouse noted that when movedto internment in Liege in late July 1940:

We walked through Liege, whistling ‘Tipperary’and ‘The Barrel’, and up a long steep hill whichtested some of us pretty severely. Then parade.Then hot soup. Lovely day, so arrival notdepressing.

McCrum has found this, but he might have decoded it.They were in fact doing something very brave.‘Tipperary’ was a famous marching song for British(and even more, for Irish) troops, although the wordsdeploring the distance to Tipperary and taking leave ofthe posher parts of London bore little formal anti-German sentiment (naturally the troops provided theirown very graphic sentiment of intent of affection (forFrench girls) and hostility (to German men) althoughthe same four-lettered verb might be employed foreach activity). But ‘The Barrel’ was something else:

Roll out the Barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun!Roll out the Barrel, we’ve got the Hun on the run!

Wodehouse does not say they sang it, and therewould have been sharp remonstrance if they had. Butit clearly was something uniting the British prisoners.We cannot say how much they knew of the tragic fateof the French and British troops in the precedingweeks when the Hun very definitely had them on therun. They did know they themselves were prisoners ofwar, however nominally civilian in treatment. And theyresponded in the whistles of the only war songs theyknew – World War I, or perhaps also the Boer War.The vital thing was to keep up good spirits, and showthey believed in keeping up morale.

Wodehouse’s chief Mentor in writing had been ConanDoyle (Jeeves and Wooster are two of the greatestliterary children of Holmes and Watson), and one ofConan Doyle’s finest stories, ‘The Lord of ChateauNoire’ is about treatment of prisoners in the Franco-Prussian War. Wodehouse could first have read it inthe Strand for July 1894, when he was a boy of 13. Itturns on a French count’s capture of a German captainon whom he inflicts all the sufferings and insults metedout to his son, a victim of the conflict; but he alsoseeks to bestow all the acts of kindness. It is a storyof immense power, and Wodehouse never wavered inhis admiration for the Conan Doyle writing of thoseyears. Wodehouse’s prison notes seem scrupulouslyanxious to follow the Count’s principles, and every kindgesture by his captors seems to be noted, wherepossible. There is no capitulation in any of this: butthere is almost a stoical fairness. Since anythingwritten was under scrutiny by their captors, hostilecomment was not likely to survive, although accountsof ugly official actions did. Also, it was vital not to getinto a whining mood; so comment should be aspositive as possible, looking at the problem ofimprisonment in Nazi hands as though it were holdingone’s own while isolated from the rest of the world bya fall of rock when climbing. And that meant theimportance of getting messages out to friends and the

beloved (but now married and English-domiciled)Leonora. We must remember that while Wodehousehad written for the movies, and had written bettersocial criticism of them than anyone save his friend F.Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished Last Tycoon, he seems tohave had little sense of the weapon wireless hadbecome from the World War I days when it scarcelyexisted. Radio talks as a means to say he was aliveand had not allowed ill fortune to make him whine,made sense to him in his isolation. His mentalitytacitly assumed that his hearers would be heartenedby realising matters were much worse than he wasallowing himself to say, but that he was true to hiscode in staying good-humoured. He clearly neverimagined people would think him a collaborator withthe Nazis: had he not, after all, written The Code of theWoosters?

It surely is not necessary to de-intellectualiseWodehouse in order to protect his memory. Britainsaved the world between July 1940 and June 1941.That many, including Winston Churchill, misjudgedWodehouse because of the broadcasts isunderstandable for the suffering those of them withgood consciences had gone through. (It remains evenmore understandable for those with bad consciences.)Wodehouse’s immediate circumstances lessened hisremarkable powers of perception: that does not meanhe didn’t have any, or that his work did what it didbereft of social observation beyond his twentieth year.Orwell in his anxiety to clear Wodehouse of the chargeof being anti-British went to an extreme he ofteninhabited (and on which McCrum quotes him withuncritical respect): finding writers of 1940 who hadalso flourished in the days of King Edward, his reactionwas to insist their social attitudes remained unchangedover thirty years. Wodehouse (if only in reactionagainst the new world of Black Shorts) might havesoftened his satire against aristocracy from its firstcontemptuous brilliance in Something Fresh (1915):Lord Emsworth gradually becomes more lovable sincethe days when he fired Angus McAllister. But thepresent benevolence was built on the earlier acidityagainst the worthless peers, and if Emsworth grewcharming, the utterly selfish bullying Duke of Dunstabledid not, The Code of the Woosters made a venalmagistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett the ally of the would-beDictator, and the Princess von und zu Dwornizchekbought her stepson’s play to destroy it. Wodehousewas deeply grateful for Orwell’s defence, all the moresince he realised how stupid he had been, but afterOrwell’s death he found himself resenting the chargeof being out of touch. It remained in howeversweetened a form the basis of the Wodehouse cult: toEvelyn Waugh in the broadcast with which he regallyapologised on behalf of Britain to Wodehouse, in 1961twenty years after Connor’s attack, eighty fromWodehouse’s birth, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world cannever stale’. But this in part derived from itsenchantment beyond mundane reality. Penguinrepeated Waugh on every Wodehouse jacket for manyyears: ‘He has made a world for us to live in anddelight in’ – thus it had no more to do with the worldWodehouse had witnessed and on which so much ofhis best work was grounded, than Lewis Carroll’s

888 the drouth the drouth 888

‘Jabberwocky’ had to do with his academic subject,mathematics.

McCrum’s biography is thus flawed, if only lightlyflawed, by his fidelity to a consensus built from thenoblest motives. The weakness is normally serious,but not here, so gigantic have been McCrum’s laboursin Wodehouse papers, and so profound his analyses(the last four pages are surely the best thing that hasever been written about Wodehouse). But McCrum’smastery of such detail, and his wisdom over so muchdeduction, are not simply heroic in stature. They areheroic in nature. McCrum merely tells the reader viahis publisher that his other books have included fivenamed titles in fiction, two for children, and two in non-fiction, the second being My Year Off: Recovering LifeAfter a Stroke. To learn more one goes to that book,which is a Godsend to anyone either making a similarrecovery or to anyone ministering to stroke patients. Itis a brave and wonderful book, at once a delight and alesson. McCrum actually makes the reader enter hisbody and almost physically understand the impact ofthat paralysis. Officially, that has nothing to do withthe Wodehouse biography. Actually, it does everyoneless than justice if we do not realise that this giganticbiography is in itself a human triumph, that it is asgood as it is, not in spite of McCrum’s havingpreviously sustained a stroke, but because of it. Thestroke no doubt accounts for mistakes, especially inWodehouse summaries: his subject’s innumerablereaders can enjoy themselves with appropriatecorrections. But the stroke also narrows his focus,deepens his understanding, and makes the greaterlabour it entailed result in a heroic book about a heroicwriter. And it’s one man’s victory – no consensuscould make it.

‘Well?’ we said, anxiously.‘I like it’, said the editor.‘Good egg!’ we murmured.The editor pressed a bell, a single ruby set in afold by the tapestry upon the wall. The major-domo appeared. ‘Give this man a purse of gold’said the editor, ‘and throw him out.’

888 the drouth the drouth 888