When the English writer and humorist P.G. “Plum” Wodehouse died 50 years ago this month, most would be forgiven for believing that his death took place at some grand English country house, not unlike Blandings Castle, or some salubrious Mayfair gentleman’s flat of a kind that Bertie Wooster inhabited. It therefore comes as a surprise, even a faint shock, to discover that Wodehouse died at his home in Southampton, New York, aged 93. And it might provoke a far greater shock to realize he had lived in the United States for nearly 30 years previously. He visited Britain for the final time in the summer of 1939 and never returned there again, because he was terrified of being arrested and imprisoned after some ill-advised broadcasts that he made during World War II, on behalf of the German authorities, went down predictably badly in his home country. To this day, a stigma hangs over his name in Britain because of them.
It was a very different story when the young Wodehouse visited America for the first time in 1904, aged 22. He wrote in his memoirs that “I had always yearned to go there,” seeing it as “a land of romance.” When he arrived in Manhattan on April 25, after a journey in a second-class cabin on the S/S St. Louis, he was not disappointed. He said of New York that “being there was like being in heaven, without going to all the bother and expense of dying.” When he returned to Britain, he was able to parlay his monthlong visit into commercial success, observing that “in 1904, anyone in the London writing world who had been to America was regarded with awe. … My income rose like a rocketing pheasant.”
By the time of his second visit in 1909, Wodehouse, who had begun to build a reputation both as a comic novelist and a lyricist of note, sold two short stories for $500. He said, of the largesse of American editors, it was “like suddenly finding a rich uncle from Australia. This, I said to myself, is the place to be.” Wodehouse spent nearly a year in New York, living at the Hotel Earle and writing prolifically, as he would do all his life. He completed one of his best and funniest novels there, Psmith, Journalist, in which his monocle-wearing hero, Psmith, becomes entangled with criminal gangs and turns the simpering lifestyle magazine he is editing, Cosy Moments, into an exposé of their nefariousness — “Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!”, Psmith barks at one point. Wodehouse took care to show that this was his own experience rather than simple fiction, writing in the preface that “The ‘gangs’ of New York exist in fact. I have not invented them. Most of the incidents in this story are based on actual happenings.”
Wodehouse survived his encounter with New York’s criminal fraternity, but in the next decade, he found himself embroiled with another kind of dangerous clique: the world of Broadway showbusiness. He and his writing partner, Guy Bolton, began to collaborate with Jerome Kern, “the American Schubert,” from 1916 on. Although Kern was a demanding and prickly character, Wodehouse’s self-effacing and wholly professional manner meant that they produced some of the most successful shows of the period. This included 1917’s Oh Boy!, which led the critic and future playwright George S. Kaufman to say that its success “has elevated [Bolton and Wodehouse] in a single season to the enviable position of being the most sought-after musical comedy authors in the land.” Still in his 30s, Wodehouse, never a man who did not know the value of a pound or dollar, became hugely wealthy off the proceeds, and purchased a property in Great Neck, Long Island.
He may have become richer still, had he cracked Hollywood, which was the obvious destination for many successful and ambitious Broadway playwrights. Wodehouse arrived in California in 1930, at the beginning of the sound era of cinema, and was promptly signed up by Irving Thalberg, “the last tycoon,” at MGM, to add jokes to and punch up flailing comic scripts. At first, Wodehouse was in clover. “I get up, swim, breakfast, work till 2, swim again, work till 7, swim for the third time, then dinner and the day is over,” he told one friend. He was paid $1,700 a week for these endeavors. “The actual work is negligible”, he chortled, remarking that his major contribution to screenplays was to bring in earls and butlers, given his presumed expertise as to both.
However, Wodehouse soon took against Los Angeles, complaining that “Californian scenery is the most loathsome on Earth — a cross between Coney Island and the Riviera, but by staying in one’s garden and shutting one’s eyes when one goes out, it’s possible to get by.” He found the film industry frustrating, complaining that he was not allowed enough opportunities to write the sparkling dialogue for which he had become famous. Surprisingly, he shied away from satirizing it, saying “Hollywood hasn’t inspired me in the least. I feel as if everything that could be written about it has already been done.”
He finally burnt his bridges with his paymasters by giving an interview to the Los Angeles Times in which he suggested he had been paid “$104,000 for loafing,” and that “I cannot see what they paid me for. The motion picture business dazes me. They were extremely nice to me, oh, extremely, but I feel as if I have cheated them.” Wodehouse’s remarks, made innocently enough, outraged the industry, and his MGM contract was not renewed. He shrugged it off, and returned to the novels and short stories with which he was instinctively more comfortable.
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His eventual decision to settle in America had been in the cards since 1934, when he said, “My wife and I both want to make it our headquarters.” They got their wish in 1947, when Wodehouse and Ethel arrived in Manhattan. The controversy that had arisen over the matter of his broadcasts had been an English rather than global issue, and Wodehouse was delighted to find that he was received with warmth rather than hostility. He modestly called his comeback “a sensational triumph” and praised New York, saying of the city that it was “five times larger than it was when I last saw it, and more bustling than ever … like meeting an old sweetheart and finding she has put on a lot of weight.”
Yet he was happy to return, saying, “Everything in the garden is lovely.” Although he occasionally complained about American literary culture, saying, “I can find practically nothing to read now,” he took American citizenship in 1955, something that the New Yorker described as making up “for the loss of T.S. Eliot and Henry James combined.” Wodehouse himself may have quipped, “I see myself directing the destinies of this great country and making people sit up all over the place. I may decide to abolish income tax,” but he lived quietly and peaceably in his adopted country. He continued to write brilliant, hilarious novels about a Britain that no longer existed, if it ever had, except in his own fond imagination, and which he would never see again.
Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at the Spectator World.