Wodehouse: A Life

Having been a fan of Wodehouse for years, I decided to pick up a copy of this book to get the inside scoop on the man behind the stories. For starters, it was a great read. I had a hard time putting it down. What an incredible life this man lived! More than just giving valuable insight into how all the great Wodehousian characters came to be, this book offers a rare look into what kind of a person Wodehouse was, the wide variety of experiences he lived through, and (perhaps most interesting of all, as Wodehouse was a private person) how the two are linked together. Many accounts of P.G. Wodehouse's life seem to fall short when it comes to linking his life with his work. On the surface, they appear very different, almost irreconcilable. It is here that McCrum truly excels. After reading this book, I don't believe (as some say) that Wodehouse was a "dull" person at all. He simply wasn't the witty social butterfly that people expected him to be after they read his works. He was a shy and private man who grew up in a different era; a genius who lived a life of quiet optimism even when under the harshest of circumstances (consider his prison camp internment and the Berlin Broadcasts). If you're a fan, McCrum's book will only help enrich your appreciation of Wodehouse. I heartily recommend it.

This is everything a biography should be: thorough, enthusiastic, unbiased, and beautifully written. McCrum gives not only a complete "life" of Wodehouse, but an excellent picture of literary and theater life in the UK and the US during his lifetime. His explanation of Wodehouse's "wartime disgrace" is just right.

I often wondered, when reading the various Wodehouse stories, which character most matched the author's viewpoint. Certainly not Bertie, too brainless, nor Jeeves, too understated; for a time I believed it might be those formidable Aunts. This book gives the answer - but read it to find out. The book is entirely sympathetic to Wodehouse, its biggest surprise to me is the enormous difference between his lifestyle and that of his characters. There are similarities - Wodehouse would flit off to various leased houses in the US, UK and Europe until his fifties. However his working life resembled that of a monk, he rose early, exercised often and wrote incessantly. He was quite a remote person, and quite a few people were disappointed at his lack of sparkling repartee in company. McCrum is quite forgiving of Wodehouse's ordinariness; as he is of Wodehouse's major faux pas by broadcasting on German radio during the war. McCrum puts this down to Wodehouse's other wordliness, disorientation and lack of trusted advisors. Yet he paints a picture of an author, single-minded about his craft, and quite professional in his commercial and public relations, so this picture did not convince. Similarly Wodehouse sat out the First World War in America, but no calumny seems to have attached itself to him for that, McCrum assures us that Wodehouse did not volunteer, because he felt he would be unfit - I wonder. The major attractions of the book for me, are the chronology of the books and the inferences McCrum makes about Wodehouse's personal circumstances. He was a most guarded personality, not given to personal revelation and the books are lightness itself, yet McCrum makes some convincing arguments about Wodehouse's feelings from the various texts. Wodehouse lived so long, and his work changed so little, that he went from writing recognizable humour to historical fiction within his lifetime. Less known (at least to me) is the range of Wodehouse's work, he was a journalist, a theatre critic, a novelist and a lyricist - working with Cole Porter and the Gershwins. It is the sheer craft of his work that delights - for me it is the ability to convey the full implications of the Wooster plots, through the dim-wittedness of the narrator, that makes Wodehouse unmatched. However, in some senses, he was the last of the Victorian writers - his work was serialised in popular magazines, as well as published in book form. For each novel he had four sources of income - US and UK serialization rights and book royalties, as he turned out a book a year, he became very wealthy, though his constant house-changing may have been a taxation issue as much as anything else. To have written characters which define an epoch, was a triumph. To have done so in the Twentieth Century, when the public looked to novelists to define life's meaning, may have led to Wodehouse's downfall, for he was never really interested in anything outside of professional writing, his family an

McCrum's book is an excellent, exhaustive account of Wodehouse's long life. McCrum avoids the trap of many biographers, that is, becoming an apologist for his subject. It would have been easy for McCrum to do 60 years after Wodehouse's controversial involvement with the Nazis during World War II. But McCrum's account is beautifully balanced, pointing out Wodehouse's strongest writings, as well as his weakest, all the while taking Wodehouse to task for his naivete of world affairs. McCrum's account gives me the impression that, seemingly, Wodehouse was about as deep and frothy as his wonderfully light-hearted books. One of the oddities of this book, however, is how Wodehouse's immediate family, essentially, disappears upon his becoming professional. Granted, Wodehouse did not have a close relationship with his parents given their absence during his upbringing, but does McCrum believe that all connections were severed? If so, that part of Wodehouse's life certainly needed to be explored more fully or explained with greater depth.

The consensus about P. G. Wodehouse held by everyone who knew him was that he was very pleasant, sweet and good-natured, but also rather boring. He was never witty. His conversation centered around writing and sport. Mr. McCrum has pulled off a tour-de-force and written a biography that is captivating. He has obviously done his research and he doesn't gloss over the unseemly events of World War II. But he also shows the generous side of a man who was notorious for watching his pennies. This is truly an excellent biography that reveals much about late Victorian and Edwardian England. Wodehouse was the great comic writer of his day, and this book shows what it took for him to achieve his apparently effortless prose. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in writing.