Customer Reviews

P.G. Wodehouse: A Biography

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I am somewhat diffident about biographies, and I think our age has no taste for them. The reason is that they reveal more about the author than their subject. So unless you're a voracious reader, you'd far rather read something else. Bios of Wodehouse are particularly suspect. Firstly, hardly anyone is as good a writer as PGW, and therefore the bio will be less engaging than its subject. Secondly, hardly anyone in the hard-bitten writing trade is as amiable as PGW, and therefore their bio will be less enjoyable than their subject. Regardless of these obstacles, there is still good reason for the itinerant biographer to charge ahead: that is because PGW has been the object of a sustained attack, and mired in a smokescreen of disinformation. Someone must rise to the challenge to clear the air, and hopefully, his good name.

And someone has. Stephen Fry, who gave us the unforgettable Jeeves in the wonderful videos of Jeeves and Wooster, long ago raised one eyebrow (Jeeves' equivalent to two thumbs up) in favor of Donaldson's vita, and for good reason. Having full access to the collected papers of Richard Usborne (author of Plum Sauce) re: Plum's Berlin broadcasts, she delves in to set the record straight, so that, as writer Evelyn Waugh devoutly hoped, Britain can at last hug its greatest national humourist to its bosom.

That cloud dispelled, she takes us on a walking tour of the sorts of places we tourists are anxious to visit: Plum's ancestral home, where we search the grounds for a bevvy of aunts, his young days as a schoolboy and sportsman, where we look for the type of Malvern House, to the Hollywood stint whose flickering light would grace so many books, the clubs and cronies forever resonant in "Drones" and "Blandings," the pekes of Ukridge's dog wash, and a lifelong devotion to the "dumb chums." And of course we wonder whether Plum ever smothered Ethel's upturned face with kisses and called her "My Rabbit."

The mind boggles at the enormity of her task, but Donaldson has somehow won the day. Twin souls with the reader, she seems to share our distaste of bilge literature and instead shows us how Plum shines through in his engaging and enjoyable books. How can one reply but in the words of one Wooster to another soul who saved the day? Donaldson, you're a wonder.

This is, in my opinion, the best of the three biographies of Wodehouse that I have read. I must admit to being partial to biographies that are sympathetic, but not not so much so that they are adulatory and this biography is the best on that score. The author was a good friend of Wodehouse's daughter, and, therefore, acquainted with the family, which gives her a personal insight into her subject which is both interesting and refreshing.
She deals at length with what is probably the most interesting--certainly, the controversial--spect of Wodehouse's life--the German broadcasts. It includes a typescript of them, which allows the reader to decide for himself if they deserved the condemation that Wodehouse received from his fellow countrymen for having made them.
All in all, I found it to be a full and satisfying picture of a most remarkably talented man who would doubtlessly have preferred to have done nothing remarkable other than write those most delightfully clever novels, stories, plays, and lyrics that seemed to have flowed so effortlessly from his fertile imagination.