In 1971, P.G. Wodehouse, then as now the indisputably best humorous novelist of the twentieth century, reached his ninetieth birthday and just kept motoring forward, with a new book (Much Obliged, Jeeves
) that year, just like every previous year back to 1946. Even the stuffy New Yorker had to take notice of that [1], and sent Herbert Warren Wind out to Remsenberg on Long Island to interview and profile Wodehouse for the magazine.The profile appeared in the May 15 issue -- you can tell it's a profile because it says "Profile" in large letters at the top of the page; the New Yorker left nothing to chance in those days -- under the title "Chap With a Good Story to Tell," which is actually a quote from Wodehouse about someone else. (And surely the most interesting thing about Wodehouse, from a profiler's point of view, is how many stories he'd already told, and how he was hard at work on yet more of them. But never mind that; it was a great quote, and it makes a decent title.)
Not long afterward, that profile found itself spiffed up and expanded -- mostly by the addition of (as the cover puts it) "photographs drawings manuscript pages and captions in P.G.W.'s handwriting," with some additional H.W. Wind text -- as this book, The World of P.G. Wodehouse. The title is mildly misleading, since the book is a short biography coupled with a brief appreciation, rather than any sort of deeper exploration of Wodehouse's world. This book has been entirely superseded since then by Robert McCrum's fine biography, Wodehouse
, but it's an amusing curio, and a primary document of Wodehouse's writing habits (which, apparently, didn't vary much over his seventy-year career). So, if you come across this -- say, as a giveaway at the Book Thing of Baltimore, from which it made its way to me via an unnamed friend -- it's worth a look, but it's no longer the best (or only) serious book about Wodehouse.[1] I read and like The New Yorker, but it has always been vastly more convinced of its own importance and propriety than of anything else in the world.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Pomegranates - Everybody Come Outside
via FoxyTunes
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