BIOGRAPHY
P. G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse, called
"Plum"[1] by most family and friends, was born prematurely to
Eleanor Wodehouse (née Deane) while she was visiting Guildford.[2] His
father, Henry Ernest Wodehouse (1845–1929), was a British judge in Hong Kong.
The Wodehouse family had been settled in Norfolk for many
centuries. Wodehouse's great-grandfather Reverend Philip Wodehouse was the
second son of Sir Armine Wodehouse, 5th Baronet,
whose eldest son John Wodehouse, 1st Baron Wodehouse,
was the ancestor of the Earls of Kimberley. His godfather was
Pelham
von Donop, after whom he was named.[3]
When he was just three years old,
Wodehouse was brought back to England and placed in the care of a nanny. He
attended various boarding schools and, between the ages of three and
15 years, saw his parents for barely six months in total. (McCrum, 2004, pp. 14-15)
Wodehouse grew very close to his brother, who shared his love for art.
Wodehouse filled the voids in his life by writing relentlessly. He spent quite
a few of his school holidays with one aunt or another; it has been speculated
that this gave him a healthy horror of the "gaggle of aunts",
reflected in Bertie Wooster's formidable aunts Agatha
and Dahlia,
as well as Lady Constance Keeble's tyranny over her many
nieces and nephews in the Blandings
Castle series.
Wodehouse was educated at Dulwich
College, where the library is now named after him. He enjoyed his time at
Dulwich, where he was successful both as a student and as a sportsman: he was a
member of the Classics VIth Form (traditionally, the preserve of the brightest
students) and a School prefect, he edited the college magazine, The
Alleynian, sang and acted leading roles in musical and theatrical
productions, and gained his school
colours as a member of the cricket First XI
and rugby football First XV;
he also represented the school at boxing (until barred by poor eyesight) and
his house at athletics.
Wodehouse's elder brother,
Armine, had won a classics scholarship to Oxford
University (where he gained a first class degree) and Pelham was widely
expected to follow in his brother's footsteps, but a fall in the value of the
Indian rupee (in which currency his father's pension was expressed) forced him
to abandon such plans. His father found him a position with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
(now known as HSBC), where, after two years' training in London, he would have
been posted to an overseas branch. However, Wodehouse was never interested in
banking as a career and "never learned a thing about banking". He
wrote part-time while working in the bank, and in 1902 became a journalist with
The Globe (a now defunct newspaper), taking over the comic column from a
friend who had resigned. He contributed regularly to Punch,[4] and
wrote stories for schoolboy's magazines (The Captain and Public School Magazine) which were collected
together to form his first published novels. During his 1909 stay in Greenwich
Village he "sold two short stories to Cosmopolitan
and Collier's
for a total of $500 - much more than I had ever earned before." He
resigned from The Globe and stayed in New York, where he became a
regular contributor (under a variety of pseudonyms) to the newly-founded Vanity Fair.
However "the wolf was always at the door", and it was not until The Saturday Evening Post serialised Something
New in 1915 that he had his "first break." Around this time
he began collaborating with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern on (eventually eighteen)
musical comedies.[5]
In the 1930s, he had two brief
stints as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he claimed he was greatly over-paid. Many
of his novels were also serialised in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and The
Strand, which also paid well.
Wodehouse married Ethel Wayman in
1914, gaining a stepdaughter, Leonora. He had no biological children, perhaps
owing to having contracted mumps as a young man.
Life in
France
Although Wodehouse and his novels
are considered quintessentially English, from 1914 onward he shared his time
between England and the United States. In 1934, he took up residence in France,
to avoid double taxation on his earnings by the tax
authorities in Britain and the US. He was also profoundly uninterested in
politics and world affairs. When World War
II broke out in 1939 he remained at his seaside home in Le Touquet,
France, instead of returning to England, apparently failing to recognise the
seriousness of the conflict. He was subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans
in 1940 and interned by them for a year, first in Belgium, then at Tost (now Toszek) in Upper
Silesia (now in Poland). He is recorded as saying, "If this is Upper
Silesia, one wonders what Lower
Silesia must be like..."
While at Tost, he entertained his
fellow prisoners with witty dialogues. After being released from internment, a
few months short of his 60th birthday, he used these dialogues as a basis for a
series of radio broadcasts aimed at America (then not at war) that the Germans
tricked him into making from Berlin. Wodehouse believed he would be admired as
showing himself to have ‘kept a stiff
upper lip’ during his internment. [6]
Wartime England was in no mood for light-hearted banter, however, and the
broadcasts led to many accusations of collaboration
with the Nazis and
even treason.
Some libraries banned his books. Foremost among his critics was A. A. Milne,
author of the Winnie the Pooh books; Wodehouse got revenge by
creating a ridiculous character named Timothy Bobbin, who starred in parodies
of some of Milne's children's poetry. Among Wodehouse's defenders were Evelyn
Waugh and George Orwell.[7] An
investigation by the British security service MI5 concurred with
Orwell's opinion, concluding that Wodehouse was naive and foolish but not a
traitor.[8]
Documents declassified in the 1980s revealed that while living in Paris, his
living expenses were paid by the Nazis.[9] However
papers released by the British Public Record Office in 1999 showed these had
been accounted for by MI5 investigators when establishing Wodehouse's
innocence.[6]
The criticism led Wodehouse and
his wife to move permanently to New York. Apart from Leonora, who died during
Wodehouse's internment in Germany, they had no children. He became an American
citizen in 1955 and never returned to his homeland, spending the remainder of
his life in Remsenburg, Long Island.
Later
life
He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the
British Empire (KBE) shortly before his death at the age of 93.[10] It is
widely believed that the honour was not given earlier because of lingering
resentment about the German broadcasts. In a BBC interview he said
that he had no ambitions left now that he had been knighted
and there was a waxwork of him in Madame
Tussaud's Wax Museum. His doctor advised him not to travel to London to be
knighted, and his wife later received the award on his behalf from the British
consul.[11]
In 2000, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
was established and named in his honour; it is given annually for the finest
example in the UK of comic writing.
© http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse