Review by Choice Review
Remembered primarily for his farcical novels featuring characters Jeeves and Bertie, P. G. Wodehouse was a prolific writer with some 90 books to his name. He was also a lyricist for some of the most outstanding works of the American musical theater. His reputation suffered after WW II from accusations (unfounded) of Nazi collaboration. The present collection includes letters from 1899 to 1975--years witnessing enormous cultural evolution as well as changes to his fortunes. This edition by Ratcliffe (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Univ., UK) expands greatly upon the previous, selective Yours, Plum: The Letters of P. G. Wodehouse (CH, Jun'91, 28-5587) by Frances Donaldson. The volume's presentation and editing are first-rate, and Ratcliffe succeeds in her aspiration to serve both academic audiences and general readers. She offers an introduction, 14 biographical prefaces following stages in Wodehouse's life, prefatory notes, and footnotes--all pithy and lively. Wodehouse fans could enjoy a straight-through reading; those wanting to consult a letter or topic are well served by a good index and brief biographical introductions to the primary correspondents. Wodehouse comes through in a voice that is generally amiable, usually humorous, often inquisitive, always engaging. His style is immediate and down-to-earth. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. W. S. Brockman Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
BY most measures, P.G. Wodehouse, arguably the greatest writer of comic prose ever, hardly had a life. That was what enabled him to be so productive. In the course of his very long career, he published close to 100 books, worked on more than 30 Broadway shows, put in a couple of highly paid stints as a Hollywood screenwriter and corresponded with practically anyone who sent him mail. Writing and doting over his beloved Pekingese lapdogs was pretty much all he did. Even Wodehouse's 61-year marriage to Ethel Wayman, a twice-widowed former chorus girl (Malcolm Muggeridge called her a "mixture of Mistress Quickly and Florence Nightingale with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in"), seems to have been a fond and companionable arrangement rather than a profound emotional attachment. As Bertie Wooster once pointed out, there are two sorts of chaps: those who would like to find a woman in their bedroom and those who would rather not. Wodehouse belonged to the second category, though his letters do include a surprising mention of the "brave old days when I used to get clap." We already have a life of Wodehouse, Robert McCrum's excellent 2004 biography, and though it's welcome to have one now in Wodehouse's own words, this volume - a chronological selection of letters, meticulously edited - won't change most readers' view of him. Wodehouse's correspondents included Ira Gershwin, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and his letters are seldom uninteresting. They are not nearly as funny or entertaining as his books and stories, however, and they aren't much deeper. Wodehouse was not one to show emotion or worry over a complexity, and in some crucial ways he never grew up. "I sometimes feel as if I were a case of infantilism," he wrote to his friend William Townend at the age of 51. "I haven't developed mentally at all since my last year at school. All my ideas and ideals are the same. I still think the Bedford match the most important thing in the world." Something like real feeling emerges only in his letters here to Townend, an old school chum whose efforts as a writer Wodehouse secretly subsidized for years, and to Ethel's daughter, Leonora ("Snorky," Wodehouse called her), who became both a favorite and a literary confidante. After she died, unexpectedly, during World War II, Wodehouse wrote, "It just sets the seal on all the ghastliness of life these days." A surprising number of letters are about what Bingo Little called "the stuff" - money, that is - and unlike Bingo, Wodehouse was seldom without it. For a while he was probably the most highly paid writer in the world. Yet he kept track of his fees and royalties - boasted of them, even - with the same exactness that Trollope did, and probably for the same reasons. His success was simultaneously a surprise to him and a form of self-vindication. As he got older, Wodehouse - sometimes half-knowingly - became a Wodehouse character, a bit of a crank. Here he is, writing to Snorky on the subject of travel: "Mummie and I have come to the conclusion that we loathe foreign countries. We hate their ways, their architecture, their looks, their language and their food.... We both want dogs and cats and cows and meadow-land. Directly you get out of England you get nothing but spiky palms and other beastly shrubs." In other letters, he complains about Dickens - unreadable; Henry James - a "dull, pompous chump"; the movie "Gone With the Wind" - unwatchable; and television - "Do you see any future for it? We have a set and I enjoy the fights, but everything else on it is too awful for words." More troubling are some letters he wrote during the war. In 1939, Wodehouse was living in France, a tax exile, and utterly failed to read the signals. "Do you know," he wrote to Townend, "a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present. ... I think if Hitler really thought there was any chance of a war, he would have nervous prostration." Still in denial when the Germans invaded France, Wodehouse and Ethel did not get out in time, and in 1940 he was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Upper Silesia, where he agreed to give a series of German radio broadcasts intended for an American audience. The broadcasts were comic and lighthearted - meant to assure his readers that he was well and in good spirits - but in England they did not go over well and left such a lingering cloud over his reputation that he banished himself to America for the rest of his life. "His name stinks here," Churchill said. As Christopher Hitchens once pointed out, it's impossible to believe that the creator of Sir Roderick Spode (the Oswald Mosley-like character about whom Wodehouse wrote, "It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment") harbored any sympathy for Nazism. Yet the evidence in the letters suggests that his political naïveté bordered on moral obtuseness. While the war was going on, Wodehouse made a deal with a German film company, for example, to develop his novel "Heavy Weather" into a movie. And in the letters he wrote from the Adlon Hotel - Berlin's most luxurious - after his release from camp, he treats the war mostly as a personal inconvenience, with seemingly no awareness of Hitler's genocide or of the thousands of lives being spent on both sides. WODEHOUSE was so little troubled, in fact, that he wrote four novels during the war, including "Joy in the Morning," one of his best and blithest. The strongest impression his letters leave is of the delight he took in his own creativity. He is always firing off a message to Townend or to Snorky or to his agent announcing the completion of yet another new novel or show or batch of stories, every one of them a "corker." Wodehouse had very few moments of self-doubt, and went through low periods only when he was between projects or when the ideas weren't coming fast enough. Sophie Ratcliffe has gone about her enterprise with a scholar's care and attentiveness and includes a lot of material, especially letters documenting Wodehouse's underappreciated Broadway career, that is new and revealing. Not surprisingly, Wodehouse is most interesting when the subject is writing itself. It's fascinating to hear him talk shop (and rewrite Cole Porter) with Guy Bolton, his Broadway collaborator, or worry over plot details with Townend and Snorky: How does one learn to spot imitation jewels? What would happen if Bertie visited a girls' school and was "snootered" by the headmistress? It was his plots that Wodehouse most worried about and fussed over, and yet his plots are not why we read him. We read him for his larksome style, his brilliant melding of high and low vocabulary, the genius of his syntax, the timelessness of his slang. For the most part he took all that for granted, and yet, thanks to Ratcliffe, we know he labored over it. "Writing a book is like building a coral reef," he told Townend. "One goes on adding tiny bits. I must say the result is much better. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding color and seeing that I don't let anything through that's at all flat." What he's talking about, in a way, is the difference between the books and these letters. The letters, good as they are, lie flat on the page. The books practically levitate. Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a contributing writer for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 10, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This first comprehensive collection of correspondence by the creator of the irrepressible Jeeves and Bertie Wooster reveals Wodehouse (1881-1975) to be an indefatigably cheerful chap whose "voice" might easily be mistaken for that of one of his comic characters. Weaving biographical information around skillfully edited and annotated letters from 1899 to 1975, Ratcliffe creates a portrait of Wodehouse as a tireless worker, devoted family man, and loyal friend. An energetic Wodehouse bounced ideas off fellow writers William Townend and Leslie Havergal Bradshaw, and regaled recipients with anecdotes about his collaborations as a lyricist with Guy Bolton, Jerome Kern, and others. Wodehouse was a footloose transatlantic traveler, often accompanied by his wife, Ethel, and beloved stepdaughter Leonora. Letters from Hollywood and New York, and from rented homes in France and England detail the life of a well-heeled cosmopolite. The upbeat tone of his letters notwithstanding, Wodehouse dealt with considerable drama, including as a prisoner of war accused of collaborating with Nazi propagandists, and in his later years, he bore up against the deaths of friends and family. Ever droll and witty, the letters burst with insights about the craft of writing, appraisals of his surroundings, and negotiating the vicissitudes of life ("One good result of the [air]-raid is that two dinner engagements which we had have been cancelled!"). The book is an excellent introduction to Wodehouse's life. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The life and times of the creator of Bertie and Jeeves, as told to friends and family. Although they don't reveal him at his stylish, polished best, these letters by P.G. Wodehouse (18811975) are casual, funny and revealing asides from a prolific and successful career. Although he began his working life in a dull banking firm, it wasn't long before writing would make him rich. By the 1920s, he was getting top dollar. "I have just signed a contract with the Cosmopolitan for eighteen stories at $6500 each (including English rights)," he wrote Ira Gershwin in 1928. "Also a serial for Collier's for $40,000." As one of the most popular writers (and Broadway lyricists) of his day, he kept up an indefatigable pace. (A typical progress report from 1932: "I'm writing like blazes. A novel and eight short stories in seven and a half months.") Wodehouse was constantly on the lookout for stories, and he didn't mind using retreads ("I have only got one plot and produce it once a year with variations"). Evelyn Waugh noted that Wodehouse characters live in a perpetual Eden; their creator was a similar case of arrested development. At the age of 51, he wrote, "I sometimes feel as if I were a case of infantilism." Taken prisoner by the Nazis while living in France, he made broadcasts over German radio in hopes of letting his readers know he was OK; it took years of postwar damage control to convince them he had been a "Silly Ass," not a Nazi stooge. To wife Ethel ("precious angel Bunny") and stepdaughter Leonora ("Snorky"), he was affectionate; to fellow writers and readers--he always answered fan mail--he was instructive, gossipy and supportive, sometimes financially. Editor Ratcliffe's (On Sympathy, 2009) generous annotations and judicious edits give scope to a rich, brilliant, happy, oblivious life.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
