Heresies and Heretics by George Watson

Author:George Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Who are the Heretics?, The War of the Canon, A View from the Basement, The Virtue of Verse, The Privilege of Absurdity, The Best of British, Making History, Shooting a President, Commonplaces, No Marx for Engels, Americanophilia, The Americanness of Poetry, The Rain in Spain, Educating the Prime Minister, The Indictment of the Germans, Thoughts on a Dead Elephant, The Sudden Death of Imperial GuiltPart III: The Heretics 18. P.G. Wodehouse19. The Forgotten Churchill20. Arthur Quiller-Couch21. E.M. Forster22. C.P. Snow23. Hugh Sykes Davies24. Angus Wilson25. Moses Finley26. Hugh Trevor-Roper27. Frank Kermode29. Douglas Adams
Publisher: The Lutterworth Press
Published: 2014-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

III The Heretics

18. P.G. Wodehouse

Heresy can mean doing obstinately what you do best, and doing it in the most improbable places. Jeeves, for example, was conceived and born in New York. At least P.G. Wodehouse was living there when he first thought of him.

That may sound like an odd place to do it, but the fact is not in doubt. After two discontented years in a London bank and a little journalism, Wodehouse settled in Greenwich Village (off and on) in 1909. He had first visited America in 1904, drawn by its boxing tradition, but he soon came to believe he could write for it; and it was there in the autumn of 1914 that he met and married a young English widow called Ethel, whose daughter he adopted. War was breaking out in Europe, but his poor eyesight made him unfit for active duty, so he wrote on. There was to be another world war in his lifetime, as unexpected to him as the first, and after than he settled again in America, dying in 1975 on Long Island in his nineties. So New York was as much home to him as anywhere, though you sometimes wonder if anywhere was. He casually inhabited the whole world. Born in Guildford in 1881, his first infant years had been in Hong Kong, where his father was a magistrate, and his middle years, after New York and Hollywood, were spent in France. Like many Englishmen down the centuries he had the carefree talent of being mostly somewhere else and yet never losing sense of who he was.

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It was in Greenwich Village that inspiration came. The first of the Jeeves stories, ‘Extricating young Gussie,’ appeared in Saturday Evening Post in September 1915, where the manservant was given two lines, to be collected in The Man with Two Left Feet (1917); the story is largely set in New York, and all the Jeeves stories in My Man Jeeves (1919) are set there too. So the most famous manservant of modern literature started life as an expatriate – the creation, what is more, of an expatriate mind.

Wodehouse spent much of his life pursuing ideas for serials, and he was to apologise one day, in the preface to the Jeeves Omnibus (1931), for the offhand way he had introduced the star of the best serial idea he ever had. In ‘Extricating young Gussie’ Jeeves’s two lines are wholly commonplace: ‘Mrs Gregson to see you, sir,’ and ‘Very good, sir, which suit will you wear?’ Such was his unobtrusive entry into immortality, and the idea of an impossibly perfect valet grew only slowly over the years. The second Jeeves collection, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), was a loosely built novel of eighteen chapters that eventually made ten stories for the omnibus, which contained thirty-one, all revised. Progress was slow. Wodehouse was not a natural writer in his early years, if there is such a thing, and his seemingly effortless and ebullient style was an effect of long rumination and revision, missed chances, many trials and much error.

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