Customer Reviews

Wodehouse: A Life

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2 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

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.

To someone who wrote a fan letter to "The Master" 37 years ago and received a hand-written postcard of thanks back, an object he treasures still today, this book is a bit of a disappointment. It reads too much like a shopping list. It's full of details and information but it doesn't really have much soul. And in spite of the importance that homes had for Wodehouse there isn't a photo of even one of them in the book. I suppose an academic might find that McCrum has added to the known facts of P.G.'s life, but it wasn't obvious to me. And the fact that the last hundred pages (!) of the book are footnotes is in itself perhaps an indication of McCrum's attitude to his task. The basic problem is that loveable old P.G. was a writaholic, had a rather faceless personality and his vices were morning callisthenics, Pekinese dogs and cucumber sandwiches. It may be interesting, but it's not edge of your seat reading - though the picture of Wodehouse calmly writing away in a country mansion à la Blandings in deepest Germany during the war is perplexing, as is his sojourn with his Pekinese at the best hotel in 1941 Berlin. Apart from the war episode the book doesn't really make for gripping reading. One gets the impression that the real life to write about was Ethel Wodehouse's. Now there's an intriguing woman - with her hinted at affairs, her joie de vivre, her Mata Hari war years... But that book has to be written by someone with a little more humour and immediacy than Mr. McCrum who isn't even as funny as his name. There wasn't a laugh in the whole book.

Having been a fan of Wodehouse for years, I decided to pick up a copy of this book to get the inside scoop on the man behind the stories. For starters, it was a great read. I had a hard time putting it down. What an incredible life this man lived!

More than just giving valuable insight into how all the great Wodehousian characters came to be, this book offers a rare look into what kind of a person Wodehouse was, the wide variety of experiences he lived through, and (perhaps most interesting of all, as Wodehouse was a private person) how the two are linked together. Many accounts of P.G. Wodehouse's life seem to fall short when it comes to linking his life with his work. On the surface, they appear very different, almost irreconcilable. It is here that McCrum truly excels.

After reading this book, I don't believe (as some say) that Wodehouse was a "dull" person at all. He simply wasn't the witty social butterfly that people expected him to be after they read his works. He was a shy and private man who grew up in a different era; a genius who lived a life of quiet optimism even when under the harshest of circumstances (consider his prison camp internment and the Berlin Broadcasts).

If you're a fan, McCrum's book will only help enrich your appreciation of Wodehouse. I heartily recommend it.

Whenever I see the commercials for House, M.D., starring Hugh Laurie, I always get the same feeling as when I see Johnny Damon clean-shaven and in pin-stripes, or how an old folkie who Believed saw Dylan enter his electric period. Because every time I see Hugh Laurie, I see Bertie Wooster. Whenever I see commercials for House, I always think, what in the heck is Bertie Wooster doing acting so morose? He's a Yank doctor? He's always yelling & screaming, getting into fistfights about trying to save people's lives (Bertie Wooster saving people's lives?). If Jeeves showed up & tried to remonstrate as to his behavior, he would probably pop him one in the face.

Anyway, ixnay on the rant and on to the latest biography of the man who created Bertie Wooster, as well as Jeeves and other brilliant characters, nay, one big, brillant comic world. P.G. Wodehouse was a literary genius in creating and more importantely, sustaining this world for nearly seventy years and one hundred books. With his popularity and constant traveling between England, Europe & America between the teens and thirties, he was the prototype of the late 20th Century Anglo-American rock star. Robert McCrum does an admirable and readable job in portraying Wodehouse's life and career through its many phases and how the circumstances of his upbringing informed and influcened his literary output. Although I have read several prior Wodehouse biographies, I did get the sense that I learned a bit more about portions of his career, especially his work on Broadway w/Guy Bolton & Jerome Kern and his Hollywood sojourn (ironically, Hugh Laurie is more successful there than Wodehouse was). Mr. McCrum also did a good job in the unfortunate area of the war years, showing how Wodehouse's personality and detachment from the areas of reality that he wasn't interested in led him to make the Berlin broadcasts. Again, Mr. McCrum does a good job in showing how other personalities, especially his wife Ethel and stepdaughter Leonora, influenced and assisted him. Another fact that this biography reminded me about is how the magazine industry in the first half of the 20th Century influenced Wodehouse. It is a fact that Wodehouse was determined to write in order to make money. He did not set out to be the sensistive Artiste, not at all. His big dream was to be publised in the Saturday Evening Post. What amazes me was despite all this, he was not a hack writer and was so gifted in the areas of language and plotting that his work, like the Motown singles of the 1960's, has transcended its origins in Commerce. This is a good biography for Wodehouse fans and afterwards you can go straight into a Jeeves/Wooster or Blandings Castle saga, just like I did.

P.S.: I felt that one of the funniest (in the Monty Python sense) stories in the whole book, which involved Bill Townend, one of Wodehouse's old school friends was buried in the notes of Chapter 7 at the end of the book.

I never would have read this book, had I not watched the McCrum interview on the recently released DVD of "Thank You, Jeeves" and "Step Lively, Jeeves", known informally as "The Jeeves Collection". Why would I not have read it? First, because having read Donaldson's quite lively bio. of Wodehouse, I knew all of the salient facts. Second, there's a deplorable tendency in modern biographies to read into the subject. Ones on Wodehouse are the worst for this, since he's obviously in this sense not a modern.

Having dipped into this bio, what's the verdict? First, I think most of the reviewers of this bio haven't read Donaldson's, or they'd quit giving credit to McCrum for digging up what has long been common knowledge. Second, what's wrong with this book is the same thing wrong with the reviewers who rave about it. One "official" review calls it "authoritative", an over-used word employed when reviewers can't find anything else to say (something rendered authoritative may be superseded and rendered obsolete the next day, so rather than implying stability and permanence, the word really suggests something unstable and ephemeral; the word the reviewer wanted was "magisterial"). The New Yorker reviewer calls Wodehouse "undersexed", a completely idiotic adjective airily tossed out that makes one wonder why that magazine was ever considered a flagship of good writing. That's only the official reviews.

McCrum's book actually dates, in its British publication, to 2004, so he might have gotten a lot better since then, as shown in the interview. How I wish he'd re-edited the book, cutting out say, about 400 pages of dropping words like "repressed" where he indirectly alludes to the tired and extraordinarily dated Freudian analysis that makes modern bios such an interminably dull read. Of course, it turns out he's an editor at the Observer, whose readership take the title to mean Voyeur, and the book is republished in paperback by Norton, who absolutely cater to last Tuesday's paradigm, so what can the reader who'd simply like to read about Wodehouse in, were it possible, prose as good as his own, do?

Bios about Wodehouse love to say he was such a dull man who wrote such sparkling prose, as if there's some contradiction. The biographers, of course, in spite of their notoriously dull prose, are supposed to be the life and soul of the party. Those who have read the early Wodehouse know that he was just as bad a writer as everyone nowadays, and for the same reason (the school stories are an exception because they are largely their own genre, and a subject Wodehouse knew like the back of his hand). As he got better, he broke all the rules, and dropped out everything thought essential for a good novel. There is no description, no characterization. His later books are scripted like plays (or musicals) with a continuing narrative voice. Good writing is as much about what one leaves out as about what one puts in. McCrum could have left out quite a lot of psychobabble. Why did he not? Because he doesn't trust himself as a writer to go head to head with the moth-eaten Freudians of the Brit lit establishment. Why do readers say it's a good book? Because they don't trust themselves to read a straight forward biography without an interpretive framework.

Did one get past all that, there still remain problems for the American reader, mainly that the book is very British. Where McCrum could explain all this Britania, he doesn't, since his readership is firmly planted in the UK. He does explain lots of things that don't need to be explained, as they are self- evident in Wodehouse. Of course, if you can wade through this bio., you discover lots of great stuff, particularly about the Edwardian Age, enough to mourn for its destruction in WWI. McCrum, of course, has a motive, whether ulterior or not. He believes Wodehouse has been undervalued and wants to provide a reassessment. That would be OK if he meant, as he seems to, to provide his own view of Wodehouse's place and achievement in literature. Unfortunately, the people he seems to want to convert are the motheaten Freudians, who can't help read into everything, and sadder yet, he gives them every chance to do so. No one would mourn that Wodehouse was an "innocent" except one regaling himself as a "decadent", which, of course, these cultured despisers do (never mind that both terms are undefined). Wodehouse, like Shakespeare, never played to the box, he was "of the people". If others choose to look on, well let them, he would say. He was no snob, and he had nothing to hide.

First of all, if you're not on a first name basis with at least Lord Emsworth, Bertie Wooster, and Jeeves (his first name's Reggie by the way) then don't even contemplate buying this book. You've got a lot of reading to do, but don't worry, you'll be laughing out loud most of the time.

Put simply, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse's literary achievements entitle him to a biography like this, but once you get a few hundred pages in you realize that he really didn't do anything but write his books. You do find out quite a bit about his early life and there's a lot of detail about his unfortunate misstep during World War II, but even this material is dull as dishwater and it makes you long for the restorative cocktail at Blandings Castle or a turn pitching bread at the Drones. That longing to escape is exactly what Plum must have felt too, explaining why he wrote 96 books.

In short, buy this book if you really have to know all about Wodehouse's life, there's probably no better biography out there. But don't be too surprised if you wind up wishing you'd re-read `Heavy Weather' or `Very Good Jeeves.'

Perhaps only we diehard wodehouse fans will enjoy the book but for us it's a treasure chest. For the first time I understand why Bertie Wooster loathed Christopher Robbin so. Milne their author, attacked Wodehouse viciously for broadcasting from Germany during WW11.

Wodehouse's parents denied him first love and then a university education. I would have liked to know how they reacted to his success as a writer. McCrum never mentions it.

The author made a few mistakes in describing the stories but considering Wodenhouse's massive output that's understandable.

This is everything a biography should be: thorough, enthusiastic, unbiased, and beautifully written. McCrum gives not only a complete "life" of Wodehouse, but an excellent picture of literary and theater life in the UK and the US during his lifetime. His explanation of Wodehouse's "wartime disgrace" is just right.