Book Review – Wodehouse: A Life
A Comprehensive Biography of One of England's Most Beloved Authors
May 21, 2009
P.G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse was born in 1881 and died in 1975. The man who became one of the English language’s most famous and beloved writers witnessed nearly the whole of the 20th century unfold. And yet, for Wodehouse, who published more than 90 books over his lifetime, time seemed to stand still, at least in his fiction. This determination to remain unchanged, argues Robert McCrum in his excellent biography Wodehouse: A Life, is the result of Wodehouse’s age and upbringing. Wodehouse was the British stiff upper lip personified, and this led, ultimately, to his mid-life disgrace.
P.G. Wodehouse: Portrait of the Writer as a Young Man
McCrum traces Wodehouse’s early years in boarding school, his brief sojourn at a London bank and his young adulthood establishing himself as a writer. Throughout the biography, McCrum draws parallels between Wodehouse’s work and the author’s life at the time, showing that he was not completely unaffected by the world around him.
The details of Wodehouse’s youth are thin; by Chapter Three, Wodehouse is already at the bank. Wodehouse’s inner life, too, remains a bit of a mystery. This is not McCrum’s fault. Wodehouse was a private man, whose own memoirs skipped over major details and stretched the truth on others. McCrum draws heavily both on Wodehouse’s work as well as on his published correspondence with close friends, but many of those letters were likely edited by Wodehouse too.
But these are minor quibbles. McCrum takes the reader across the Atlantic as Wodehouse travelled from England to New York to Hollywood and back (several times). In great detail, he examines Wodehouse’s tax battles in both the U.K. and the U.S. And, most importantly, McCrum gives a fair account of Wodehouse’s hugest blunder: broadcasting from wartime Berlin over Nazi radio.
Wodehouse in Berlin: Wartime Disgrace
One could read all of Wodehouse’s books and hear almost nothing about World War II. But in 1940, Wodehouse, then living in France, was taken prisoner by German soldiers and remained in various internment camps for more than a year. When the Germans discovered their prisoner’s identity, they persuaded him to do a series of broadcasts that would be played in America; a way, Wodehouse thought, to let his American fans know how he was doing.
McCrum makes no apologies for this asinine decision, and notes that the charge of collaborationism and even treason would follow Wodehouse to the end. But McCrum does such a masterful job of showing how Wodehouse’s mind worked – that he never turned down work; that his wife and daughter usually made the big decisions; that an Englishman of Wodehouse’s generation and temperament simply would not make a fuss in public – that he makes the mistake seem, if not forgivable, at least comprehensible.
The Twentieth Century Grew Up With Wodehouse
The section dealing with Wodehouse’s wartime experience is the strongest in the book. This is partly due, no doubt, to its inherently dramatic subject matter, but in order to place Wodehouse’s actions in context, McCrum has to cast a wider net than elsewhere and explain what was going on in the outside world while Wodehouse was imprisoned. It’s a masterful précis of the 20th century’s darkest years.
And this, ultimately, is the triumph of Wodehouse: A Life. While a few more insights into the man himself would be welcome, McCrum wisely paints a picture of the changes Wodehouse lived through, even as he pretended to be unchanged by them. In creating a portrait of a man who lived to be nearly 100 years old, McCrum paints a pretty good picture of the century itself.
