PG Wodehouse: a life in letters

Countless readers of Wodehouse have testified to the way his novels have their own "stimulating effect" on morale, providing not just comic, but almost medicinal effects: the exiledKaiser Wilhelm, after his defeat in the first world war, consoled himself by reading Wodehouse to his "mystified" staff; the late Queen Mother allegedly read "The Master" on a nightly basis, to set aside the "strains of the day"; more recently, news reports tell of the imprisoned Burmese comedian Zarganafinding comfort in Wodehouse during solitary confinement. 

"Books are my best friends", he confided. "I liked the PG Wodehouse best. Joy in the Morning – Jeeves, Wooster and the fearsome Aunt Agatha. It's difficult to understand, but I've read it three times at least. And I used it as a pillow too." Wodehouse was born in 1881, and his early years were, in many ways, highly conventional. His father, Ernest, was "as normal as rice pudding" and determined to give his sons a childhood to match. The only thing conspicuously – but critically – missing was Wodehouse's parents. Ernest had a post as a magistrate in Hong Kong, so the children were billeted with nannies and various relatives in England. Pelham Grenville had almost no parental contact for the first 16 years of his life...

The "cladding", for Wodehouse, has always been his written style. While difficult to analyse (a critic in Punch compared the act to "taking a spade to a soufflé"), there are a variety of figures of speech that recur throughout his fiction, and his letters. One is the way in which he deflects emotion away from the self. When disaster occurs in the shape of income-tax demands or illness, it is the "home" that he metonymically laments. When he expresses admiration for his wife, her outfits – rather than her body – garner the praise.

Such manoeuvres are perfected in his fiction, with his use of the transferred epithet – a technique that casts the state of mind of the protagonist onto a nearby, often unlikely inanimate object. We have, for example, "I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar on my teaspoon"; "he uncovered the fragrant eggs and b and I pronged a moody forkful"; or the memorable ablutions in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: "As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, 'Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar', it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy."..

Faced with a changing political landscape, Wodehouse does what he knows best – he restyles it. But in a reversal of his fictional technique, this time his similes domesticate rather than distance – it brings the horrors of war home, but leaves the pain behind.

There is something telling about the absence of sentiment in Wodehouse's postwar letters. While forever saddened by his "blunder", he refuses to pay lip service to the all too readily summoned brand of postwar existential shame – what Primo Levi calls "the vaster shame, the shame of the world", finds no place in Wodehouse's articulated emotional repertoire. This is not to say that it wasn't felt. But complex emotion, for Wodehouse, was best played down. Shame, especially, was to be worked out according to the best codes of public-school etiquette, in the privacy of one's mental dormitory. The postwar period also shows Wodehouse recognising that the tenor of his fictional universe rode uneasily with the contemporary moment, with its "welter of sex" and "demand for gloom and tragedy". While his novels preserve their Edenic calm, his letters sometimes seem bewildered or angry. His chief pleasure, he noted, was "writing stinkers to people who attack me in the press".

The letters of his final years are calmer, offering a view into the endearing routine of his domestic life – the round of dog-walking, cocktails and daily soap operas. Ultimately, writing, and his beloved Ethel, were his greatest loves, with the rest of the world kept at bay. In an open letter to some admirers, he admits that his fiction was never intended to fit the criteria of "relevance": "The world I write about, always a small one – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say – is now not even small, it is nonexistent. It has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it. But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival."

The beauty of this sentence is that it enacts what it says. In a superlative run of clichés – "gone with the wind", "one with Nineveh", "in a word" – Wodehouse revels in, and revives, the contained sphere of an exhausted language (a "small world" of its own) and makes it a little larger. So it is with the worlds of his fiction. Almost lyric in their perfection, sometimes escapist, but never small-minded, they offer what Adorno called "the dream of a world where things could be otherwise". Right until the end, Wodehouse wrote to preserve the world of innocence he never quite grew out of – and to resist a world he never quite grew into – a ghost of Gladys by his side.. read more: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/04/pg-wodehouse-life-in-letters