When I put it to one of my more sagacious workmates that I was reading a biography of PG Wodehouse his response was: "Is he enough of a deviant for it to be interesting?"Jeeves' creator didn't go in for drunkenness, or infidelity, or excessive displays of emotion, or any of that angst-ridden poet stuff.
But the man who emerges from Robert McCrum's Wodehouse is certainly not without interest.
Skewered by Sean O'Casey as "English literature's performing flea", Wodehouse was a man who managed to avoid serving his country in not one, but two, world wars, and a man who could write:
A man with a near-pathological lack of interest in the wider world, who described himself as a "mere writing machine" and saved all his best material for the printed page.
In person Wodehouse was benign, good natured, but somewhat dull. Evelyn Waugh's brother Alec, who you may recall as "disgusting Uncle Alec", described the unchanging pleasures of Wodehouse's company thus:
His innocence made him a dupe of the Nazis during World War II but, McCrum says, it also gave him "an exceptional good nature and a profound humanity."
And Wodehouse's prose "danced on the page like poetry, marrying the English style of the academy with the English slang of the suburbs" in a "lunatic celebration of an Edwardian twilight" boasting lines like these:
And as for that "performing flea" squib .... years later, living in permanent exile in the USA, Wodehouse was able to gloss it like this: "Thinking it over, I believe he meant it to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trouper."
"I never feel that real people are interesting. Even if they are, they never actually do funny things, at any rate in sufficient quantity to make an article."
A man with a near-pathological lack of interest in the wider world, who described himself as a "mere writing machine" and saved all his best material for the printed page.
In person Wodehouse was benign, good natured, but somewhat dull. Evelyn Waugh's brother Alec, who you may recall as "disgusting Uncle Alec", described the unchanging pleasures of Wodehouse's company thus:
"He looked exactly the same. He had not put on weight. He was always completely hairless. He was his familiar, massive, genial self. He had no peculiarities of manner or expression. He was not funny. He never repeated jokes. There was no sparkle in his conversation. He did not indulge in reminiscences. There was a straightforward exchange of talk ... 'It is an extraordinary thing,' he would say, 'Marlborough beat Tonbridge and Tonbridge beat Uppingham, but Uppingham beat Marlborough. What do you make of that?'"
His innocence made him a dupe of the Nazis during World War II but, McCrum says, it also gave him "an exceptional good nature and a profound humanity."
And Wodehouse's prose "danced on the page like poetry, marrying the English style of the academy with the English slang of the suburbs" in a "lunatic celebration of an Edwardian twilight" boasting lines like these:
"You see before you, Jeeves, a toad beneath the harrow"
"He spun around with a sort of a guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat's milk."
"Like a man who, stooping to pluck a nosegay of wild flowers on a railway line, is unexpectedly struck in the small of the back by the Cornish Express."
And as for that "performing flea" squib .... years later, living in permanent exile in the USA, Wodehouse was able to gloss it like this: "Thinking it over, I believe he meant it to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trouper."
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