BBC 4 showed a rather splendid documentary about P.G. Wodehouse last night. It was aired to coincide with the publication of Robert McCrum's equally splendid Life. My review of McCrum's book will appear in the next issue of the literary magazine Zembla; I reproduce it here.
WODEHOUSE: A LIFE
Robert McCrum
Viking, £20
“I go off the rails,” P.G. Wodehouse once confided to a friend, “unless I stay all the time in a sort of artificial world of my own creation.” Wodehouse was referring, of course, to what George Orwell called the “peculiar mental atmosphere” of his fiction – the unchanging pastoral idyll of lunatic aunts, unsuitable cousins and whisky-and-soda at six; but he could just as well have been talking about his own conduct during the Second World War, the murkiness of which once threatened permanently to stain his reputation as the presiding comic genius of English letters.
In this magisterial new “Life”, Robert McCrum shows convincingly that Wodehouse’s disastrous decision to make wartime broadcasts from Berlin in exchange for release from a Nazi internment camp was an act of moral negligence rather than the behaviour of a genuine Quisling. Wodehouse, he says, was “at heart an Edwardian”, and when the modern world impinged upon him so brutally, it was almost predictable that he should go “off the rails” as he did. And that out-of-timeness, McCrum argues, is also the key to understanding the books, which oughtn’t to be obscured by their author’s frivolous and stupid blunder.
McCrum’s treatment of those books is enhanced by the fact that he eschews the fawning and excessive veneration of previous biographies of Wodehouse - he doesn’t refer to him as “The Master” for a start. Admittedly, he does think that Wodehouse “transformed comic prose into a kind of poetry”, but unlike other card-carrying Wodehousians, he doesn’t claim that this merits his subject a place in the pantheon somewhere between Shakespeare and Dickens. A better comparison, says McCrum, is with the miniaturism and narrowness of Jane Austen.
That judicious and suggestive parallel is entirely characteristic of McCrum’s scrupulous approach. He’s mostly resistant to the temptations of psycho-biography too, briefly mentioning rather than endorsing, for example, the thesis that an early attack of mumps stunted Wodehouse’s libido. McCrum is more interested in the technical challenges which the excision from his stories of all mention of sex posed for Wodehouse. And his analyses of Wodehouse’s fictional method are buttressed by a very rich description of the upper-middle class, minor public school milieu on which the novelist drew in order to create a “lunatic Eden”, whose gentle but fanatically tended acres are among the most hospitable and welcoming in the entire canon of English literature.
ADDENDUM: Backword Dave has some interesting things to say about Stephen Fry's Observer review of McCrum's book. Like McCrum and Fry, Dave considers Wodehouse a "very, very great writer".