Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Strand Magazine, January 1929
THE man in the street can, I think, get some idea of the personality of his favourite actor, film star, or athlete, because they are actually before his eye; but often the nearest he gets to his favourite author is a blurred impression in the picture papers of what might be a Channel Swimmer Welcomed Home, or A Girl Guide Rally, but is really the author in question Sunbathing at the Lido.
Most writers are credited by their public with temperament and eccentricity, but their appearance, likes and dislikes, habits and amusements remain very much in obscurity. And because of this obscurity novelists are, I think, usually imagined to be something rather special, creatures who live in a rarefied atmosphere. It may be true of some authors, but I know of one at least who likes his second helping of suet pudding.
Plum, whose full name is Pelham Grenville Wodehouse—it’s such a pompous, frock-coated sort of name and has nothing to do with my breezy Plummy—started life as an artist at the age of three. It wasn’t until he was six that he took to writing seriously. For two years he produced some rather complicated jungle tales, then after a silence of almost twenty years wrote school stories for The Captain and other magazines, and gradually evolved his world of cheerful, happy characters: Jeeves, Archie, Mr. Mulliner, and the others he writes of now.
He is really the hardest of hard workers, but sometimes I think that the literary life is altogether a delightful affair. Ian Hay is staying with us for three or four days, and shouts of laughter keep coming from the library where he and Plum are working on the second act of a play that they are writing together. And at lunch-time they will say what a hard morning it has been, and then go off and play golf, having finished work for the day. The funny part of it all is that in those three hours they really have done a very hard day’s work.
When Plum is writing a novel or a short story, the procedure is very much the same. He writes in the morning and “broods” in the afternoon, when he must on no account be disturbed. It is understood that he is thinking deep thoughts and planning great novels, but when all the smoke has cleared away it really means that he is either asleep or eating an apple and reading Edgar Wallace. After tea, if we’re in London, he usually goes for a long walk, or in the country plays golf.
His tastes are very simple; books, pipes, football matches—he adores them all. Nothing is a pleasure to him that involves pain to anything, so he doesn’t enjoy shooting or fishing. A frosty November morning, a blazing fire and muffins on a January afternoon, old clothes—those are the things that he likes best. We are gradually smartening him up, and he is now occasionally to be seen in Bond Street whimpering nervously because his wardrobe is being restocked for him, which means that Mummie and the salesman decide what is best for him, and order twelve of everything, paying no attention to the thin screams of my poor Plummy.
I think that you could say that he plays Bridge. When one has got up a table, Plum will come pottering around, giving advice, telling anecdotes, and offering to cut in; but when a fourth is needed he is nowhere to be found. Often I say to him: “But, my sweet, why didn’t you lead your ace of spades sooner?” and he answers, coldly: “I played it the second I found it.” He believes that the fun of Bridge lies in finding kings and queens in one’s hand just when things look blackest. The other night one of his partners, in a furious voice, said: “Had you any particular reason for your diamond discard, partner?” “Just a happy accident,” said Plummy, pleased that his play had caused comment.
He has no real sense of money; a cheque for a thousand pounds means nothing to him except as a sort of good conduct mark. But if half a crown is missed in this house we all know who will stammer and turn pale when the hue and cry is raised. He would sell a cheque for fifty pounds to anyone at any time for seven-and-sixpence cash; as a matter of fact, that is how I keep my head above water. He has simply no idea of business or anything connected with it. Mummie looks after all his interests and is very clever about it. All Plum wants is an occasional pound to buy tobacco with and an account at a book shop. Mummie and I always arrange what our lives are to be, and where, because he hates making plans and is always perfectly happy whatever happens.
Sometimes I think of him as being amazingly faithful—I mean about places and things. An old pigsty, if he once knew the pig that lived there, is Heaven to him for always. And yet he never seems to like a steady diet of any one thing or person, so one can’t make sense out of him either way.
He has an overwhelming horror of being bored, and an overpowering hatred of hurting people. You and I on being asked to lunch with someone we wanted to avoid would probably say how sorry we were, what a pity it was, and what a shame, but unfortunately we are sailing for Canada next week. Plum will do even better than that for you. Having said so, he immediately will sail for Canada; and to make quite certain will do it this week. I really have known him once in America go to Georgia because a lady reporter asked him to tea at four. He was profuse with apologies and mumbled about catching trains almost immediately. And having let himself in for it, he went South! Unfortunately they met again on his return, and this time my poor darling Plum, tired of train journeys, accepted. Then with great presence of mind he put four tooth-brushes in his pocked and sailed for England the next day at three. Only the other day we found a note saying that he had “popped to Droitwich to brood”—but we didn’t quite believe in that motive for escape, and the arrival of a very tedious caller in the afternoon justified us in our suspicions!
In two things, however, he is amazingly and amusingly steadfast—his devotion to an antique typewriter and his adoration of Pekes.
The typewriter he has had ever since he was twenty, and he adores it. The firm that made it is extinct, and it has been so much repaired that there isn’t a single original part left. I think it manages to hang together somehow so as not to disappoint Plummy. If it is used too regularly it breaks down, and if it isn’t used enough the keys stiffen. No one is allowed to touch it, and it goes everywhere with him. If necessary, it has a first-class seat in the train, and on no account is the porter allowed to carry it—they don’t understand it, he says. We usually wire for a typewriter repairer to meet the train, since travelling always seems to make its insides slip. Plum has got five other typewriters that he has, at different times, in different countries, bought in despair when his darling has been pronounced dead; but somehow it has always recovered, and the new ones are given to me or cast aside.
Then there is Susan.
Susan is our Pekingese, and Plum adores her. Just as we have planned glorious voyages to the Far East or lazy summers to be spent in Sicily, we remember that Susan would have to be left behind, so we stay in England to keep her amused, or see the world in relays. She is very pretty, small, with a chestnut coat and that dancing way of walking that Pekingese have. Plum will leave anyone in the middle of a conversation to ingratiate himself with Susan if she gives him the slightest smile; and a man may be without morals, money, or attractions, if the word goes round that he’s “sound on Pekingese,” Plum will probably somehow find excuses for his lack of morals, lend him money, and invent attractions for him.
She has three puppies which we had meant to give away, but they are so very adorable and have each got so much of Susan in them that we are keeping them all—moving into a larger house, I expect. In two years I suppose that they will have three puppies each, so like their grandmother that it will be impossible to give any away. And in two years after that . . .
But I promised to say something of how Plum works. He never seems to stop working: his idea of a holiday is to write a play instead of a novel, a short story instead of a musical comedy. I think his work is easy to read because he enjoys writing it so. I once read of a humorist who wrote that the little dots seen at intervals on the page “were not commas, they were drops of blood.” Plum is so utterly different. Once he has got the plot more or less clearly fixed in his mind he writes quickly and easily. It may be a scene which I beg him to tear up before a soul can see it, or five pages which eventually become a paragraph, but while he is writing it is effortless.
He does take tremendous trouble with the construction of his work. No character of his ever does anything without a fairly plausible reason for it, farcical though it may be. For instance, in “Bill the Conqueror,” when the hero and heroine are to meet by chance, she answers in person a bogus begging letter from the enterprising, temporarily financially-embarrassed friend who shares the hero’s flat. Bill opens the door and the romance begins.
I am proud of him because he has never lowered his standard. You may prefer one story to another, definitely dislike some characters, but the same ingredients go to the making of them all. A plot and a sub-plot, a good scene or two, perhaps some surprises, and any amount of care and trouble. Last week he completely re-wrote a story. It is now told by Mr. Mulliner instead of Bertie, the scene is laid in the Royal Enclosure instead of in a public-house, and he telegraphed me, saying: “Poor old Colonel got to go Mother now a Maiden Aunt.”
A thing that has always amazed me about Plum is his ability to write lyrics, set them to music, and to carry a tune in his head that he had probably only heard three or four times. He’s not a bit interested in music and can’t play a note. Tosti’s “Good-bye” and “Red-Hot Mamma” would sound exactly alike if hummed by Plummy, and neither of them could be recognized as Tosti’s “Good-bye” or “Red-Hot Mamma.” But in spite of this, at the back of his mind the tune is there; with no knowledge of music he recognizes the rhythm, the short beats and the long beats. I remember when he was writing a musical comedy in America, the composer would telephone Plum, probably a hundred miles away, put the telephone on the piano, and play the tune to him three or four times. And that night Plum would finish and send off a lyric which fitted the tune perfectly.
I can’t imagine Plum as anything but a writer, a humorist, for humour seems to be so much a part of him. He laughs first and discovers the sob in his throat afterwards. That in a way is how he finds his plots and situations, I think. If his eye should slap over a paragraph dealing with the maintenance and salaries of Missionaries in the Far East, even as he is turning to the Sporting Page, something jumps up in his brain, saying: “All that explained at length to Bertie, driven into a corner by an elderly goofy aunt. Think of it!”
It is really difficult trying to explain someone you know very well; like writing history, I should think, whilst you are still living it. There is no perspective. I’m sure of this, though: that to both his great friends and casual acquaintances he is someone to be rather fond of. He has that quality that not many people seem to have, a quality of sweetness, I think it is, something that you can’t help liking. For without one sign of sympathy from him you get a great impression of it; without one word of kindliness from him, kindliness is your first and last impression of him.
The text of this article was reprinted in Frances Donaldson’s biography P. G. Wodehouse: a biography (1982), pp. 123–6; it can be “borrowed” (read online, subject to availability) at the Internet Archive.