Wodehouse: A Life [Paperback]

Robert McCrum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2005

"An invaluable portrait, thanks to a broad, incisive and complex understanding of Wodehouse's psyche." --Janet Maslin, New York Times

To Evelyn Waugh he was simply "the Master." He wrote ninety novels and story collections, and among his immortal characters are Jeeves, Psmith, and the Empress of Blandings (who is, of course, a pig). Equally impressive is the range of his devotees: Dorothy Parker, John Updike, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Salman Rushdie, John le Carre, and Seamus Heaney. Wodehouse had an extraordinary Broadway career, working with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and even dared to rewrite Cole Porter's Anything Goes for the London stage. Robert McCrum's magisterial biography chronicles the achievements and shadows of a gilded life. The ill-judged broadcasts from Berlin, where Wodehouse was interned during World War II, produced a violent backlash in England and tarred him, unfairly, as a Nazi sympathizer. His long love affair with America was compromised by endless acrimony with the IRS. This is the book all Wodehouse fans have been waiting for; it eclipses all previous accounts of his life. An Economist Best Book of 2004. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his authoritative biography of P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), British author McCrum (My Year Off), literary editor of the Observer, rightly identifies the crisis over the great, if naïve, English humorist's 1941 radio broadcasts from Germany (which led to accusations of his being a "Nazi stooge") as "the defining moment of Wodehouse's life." While the broadcasts and their aftermath get the most scrutiny, McCrum ably surveys a 75-year writing career that began in 1900 and ended only with Wodehouse's death at 93. He succinctly covers all the major topics—Wodehouse's creation of the immortal Jeeves and Wooster; his triumphs as a lyricist for the musical theater; his frustrating stints as a scriptwriter in Hollywood; his tax troubles; his love of animals; his post-WWII U.S. exile; his long and successful, if apparently sexless, marriage. McCrum is franker on this latter subject than previous biographers and also dispels a myth or two. While Wodehouse largely left his financial affairs to his wife, Ethel, "in important literary business Wodehouse was always clinically decisive." When his new literary agent, Paul Reynolds Jr., wasn't successful, he fired him. Earlier studies have tended to be partisan or personal and stronger on some aspects of Wodehouse's varied life than others. For balance and readability, this popular biography, like Jeeves, stands alone. 16 pages of illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

"His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit" was Evelyn Waugh's assessment of P. G. Wodehouse, and, by all accounts, Wodehouse was the most undersexed and sweet-tempered of men, a stranger to the drunkenness and philandering that often enliven the biographies of English men of letters. McCrum tells the story judiciously, though he dithers around certain mysteries, such as the entanglements of Wodehouse's wife with various louche men. The dramatic center of the book is, quite properly, the broadcasts Wodehouse made on Nazi radio during the Second World War. McCrum shows how Wodehouse was bamboozled into making those broadcasts, and why he never quite understood the "global howl" they provoked. In his view, after all, he was showing British sang-froid in the face of dire circs. Total war and the creator of Blandings Castle were simply not cut out for each other.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393327515
• ISBN-13: 978-0393327519
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,191,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating book about a dull man who wrote clever books., November 22, 2004

By 

Matthew Asnip "bibliophile" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wodehouse: A Life (Hardcover)

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.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wodehouse's Sources, Inspirations, Habits and Shame, December 26, 2004

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Wodehouse: A Life (Hardcover)

Should a dedicated fan of P.G. Wodehouse's writing read this book? Yes, I think so. Mr. McCrum's book is filled with information that will make reading Mr. Wodehouse's many comic offerings more rewarding. For instance, where did so many of those wonderful names come from? Many were drawn from people and places that Wodehouse knew as a youth. Why did he have such a jaundiced view of aunts and say so little about mothers? His own family history contained strained relationships with dictatorial aunts and a distant mother who ignored him. Where did the inspiration for Blandings Castle come from? It turns out to be based on actual experiences in an English country home. Simply from those perspectives, I felt that my understanding of Wodehouse plots, humor and references were vastly increased.

In addition, I knew that P.G. Wodehouse was very prolific, but I never quite understood how he did it. I was fascinated to see how disciplined he was to keep doing his daily quota of words. As someone who likes to write as well, this was a positive inspiration to keep to that discipline myself. I was also pleased to find out more about how he developed his plots and characters and did his rewriting. If you combine this book with Sunset at Blandings, you can get a quite helpful perspective on the details of his craft.

Next, I am always running into veiled and ambiguous references to P.G. Wodehouse having done some broadcasts for German radio during World War II while living in Germany. It was never clear to me what that was all about. Now, this book gives me enough information to have views on the subject. I hadn't realized that Wodehouse had been interned by German forces in prison environments for over a year before the broadcasts. In addition, he was released from internment before agreeing to do the broadcasts which turn out to have been very ill-considered but not a clear-cut case of selling out to the enemy.

Naturally, the ultimate question is also about how interesting Wodehouse must have been in person. That's a disappointment. He was a real bore in public who preferred solitude. On the other hand, I was fascinated to see how much of his personality can be found in the various characters in the stories.

I was aware of his famous quote about writing about life as though it is musical comedy, but I didn't realize that he actually helped write lyrics for musical comedies among his many successes.

Finally, there's a marvelous question of what-might-have-been. Wodehouse was about to go to university with bright prospects when he family pulled the financial plug to favor his older brother. P.G. spent two years working in a bank while writing furiously at every spare moment to establish himself in England, rather than being sent abroad as another bank trainee. You'll find yourself cheering for him!

Mr. Wodehouse lived so long that there's also the fascinating part of the tale about how his writing went from being cutting edge comedy to being historical fiction about the Edwardian era.

The less you have read of Mr. Wodehouse's work, the more you will probably enjoy this volume.

I found that the book's main weakness was that it gave me a great many more details about his personal life than I really wanted to know (such as all of his dogs and his relationships with them) and a little less on his writing than I would have liked to know.

But it's a solid effort, nevertheless, and one that will provide much pleasure to Wodehouse fans.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, if commissioned, biography, January 16, 2005

By 

Brian Taves - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wodehouse: A Life (Hardcover)

Robert McCrum's book, first of all, is a commissioned biography. It represents the best efforts, and inevitably failings, of such endeavors. McCrum is a literate, thorough researcher, and has produced a respectable volume ready to stand aside the best other Wodehouse biographies. Most importantly, McCrum has intelligently meshed both the retelling of a life and literary analysis, including analysis of many of the Wodehouse books, demonstrating his familiarity with the canon. However, there are significant and unavoidable drawbacks to an effort such as McCrum's, which represents an assignment, rather than the labor of a true Wodehouse scholar. McCrum only stands alongside, not supplanting, the many existing Wodehouse biographies, going all the way back to David Jasen's pioneering first effort. Such specialized books as Lee Davis's Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern, Iain Sprott's Wodehouse at War, Kristin Thompson's analysis of the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves saga (and, humbly, my own forthcoming book on Wodehouse and Hollywood), all remain necessary specialized adjuncts to all the more general biographies. For American readers, McCrum rather overplays the significance of the Berlin broadcasts to Wodehouse's legacy, and only narrowly avoids a tendency to lapse into an Anglocentric perspective in the book that is evident in his promotional interviews. McCrum does make a number of surprising factual errors, surely a result of coming to the subject "cold," rather than as an expert, but more annoying is his determination to interpret levels of meaning into Wodehouse's personal life rather than simply accepting him as the product of a generation who kept private matters private. Nonetheless, despite these shortcomings, the McCrum book is solid, scholarly, and well repays its price and the time necessary to read the 400 + pages, for he does enlighten both the life, and the writing, of P.G. Wodehouse.