He Likes Old Clothes Wodehouse, Humorist, at Home

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 762, 7 September 1929, Page 18

He Likes Old Clothes Wodehouse, Humorist, at Home

SHE door swung open and in sailed a small, tawny Pekingese, disdain writ large in her brown eyes and a snub about the

black button of a nose. Behind her, walking gingerly, came a tall figure clad in brown tweeds.

P. G. Wodehouse—the initials are for Pelham Grenville —is one of the few authors whose appearance does not quarrel with any conception of him you may have previously formed (writes Claude F. Luke in "John o’ London’s Weekly”). His eyes beam at you genially through his glasses and his rather wide mouth bespeaks laughter. This man, you decide at once, would never willingly harm a fly. His voice is soft for so generous a frame, and he has an attractive gentleness of manners; and all the time he subtly conveys to you that he is enjoying your conversation immensely. He inspires you to conversational

brilliance, and your commonest phrase assumes the garb of cleverness and wit. Thus it is not usually for some hours after talking to him, until, in fact, the champagne of his presence has lost some of its sparkle, that you remember that it is he, and not you, who is Britain’s greatest humorist! It needs a craftier tongue than mine to draw him on the subject of his work, though he is quite willing to talk of his other interests. He is intensely keen on Rugger, though immediately he learned that I was at a Soccer school he cheerfully switched the conversation to the older code, a sacrifice singularly remarkable in a Rugger man! He also spoke of the first time he played hockey. “I had never seen the game, though I knew roughly how it was played,” he said. “I was at a complete loss how to dress. I decided that as you used ! a sort of bat-stick, and a hard ball, it j came nearer to cricket than anything j else, so I turned up in long flannel J trousers and white shirt!” When the conversation turned to j hooks, Mr. Wodehouse spoke enthusi- j asticallv of other writers. He has a I great admiration for W. W. Jacobs and j D. B. Wyndham Lewis, and also for j lan Hay, with whom he recently col- :

laborated in a dramatised version of his own book, “A Damsel-in Distress.” His Pretty Daughter On a table I noticed two books, both of which were inscribed by the authors; one was Hugh Walpole’s delightful essay on Reading, and the other Helen Wills’s book on Tennis. And to confirm an opinion that was gaining ground in my mind that my host was possessed of a healthily catholic taste in books, his pretty daughter-, Leonora, informed me that after dinner, when he retired, ostensibly to brood on unborn novels and musical comedies, she would often discover him eating an apple and reading Edgar Wallace! It Is from his daughter, incidentally, that you will obtain a delightfully intimate insight into the mind of the humorist. She has the uncanny knack, peculiar to daughters, of knowing their fathers better than they know anything else in the world. It was she who told me something of how Plummy, as she calls him, builds his stories. I gathered that, stern self-critic though he is, he owns an equal in his daughter. She reads every page he writes, and is rather in the position of Moliere’s cook in that if a passage fails to amuse her it is doomed. Two Mysteries Two of her father’s gifts that she cannot explain, however, are his effective command of club slang, and the conversational oddities of the bright young man-about-town, and his astonishing facility for putting into the mouth of Jeeves the sartorial criticisms which that immaculate soul delivers in almost every story to the luckless Bertie. More especially as Mr. Wodehouse himself has the strongest regard for old clothes and the most violent horror of being wheedled by his wife and daughter into a “gent’s natty suiting”! Upstairs I found the library, a beautiful room, book-lined and with an open fire, and lofty windows looking down upon the quiet street behind Park Lane. A large desk with photographs of his wife and daughter upon it, and ample chairs In which to relax after a stiff bout with Psmith, Mulliner or Jeeves, were about the room. Ideal, you would say, for the creative mind. Ideal it might be for anyone other than P. G., who, liovever, prefers to carry his typewriter into an attic, or the bathroom, and there perform his daily task. Neither is this a temperamental fad; anyone less temperamental than Mr. Wodehouse it would be difficult to imagine. It is merely that be has always accustomed himself to working in odd places, on trains, in ships’ cabins, or hotels, and the habit has grown. How He Works While at work he writes freely and happily. There is none of the hairtearing and room-pacing which are the alleged practices of most humorists. He types his work straight on to his machine, and Works at a high speed. Then comes the meticulous pruning for which his stories are famous. A Wodehouse story is rather like a Phil May drawing. May achieved his effects with the minimum number of lines, but not until he had darefully sketched in hundreds of strokes, and from them selected those essential for his purpose. So with P. G. Five pages may become a paragraph; an entire story may be rewritten three or four times before it reaches the standard which he demands. It would be a good thing for every young writer if he could spend a month in studying the humorist’s methods and learn his principle of ruthless sacrifice in the attainment of a literary ideal.