‘About five years ago,there was a thrush who built her nest in a poplar tree, and she sang so beautifully that all the worms came up from their holes, the ants laid down their burdens, the crickets stopped their mirth, and the moths settled in the front row near her.
‘She sang a song as if in heaven, going up higher and higher as she sang.
‘At last, the song was done and the bird came down panting.
‘“Thank you,” said all the creatures. “Now my story is done.”’
That was written by P G Wodehouse, my step-great-grandfather, when he was seven.
When I was a small boy, this little story hung in a frame in my bedroom. So did the somewhat terrifying school timetable (pictured on page 7), which was Wodehouse’s curriculum at Dulwich College in the 1890s.
And, next to my bedroom, my father, Edward Cazalet, who took over his estate when ‘Plum’ (from ‘Pelham’) died, lovingly built his own Wodehouse library: his diaries, letters, the books he read, what influenced him, his notes and papers, his pipe, typewriter, tobacco box, hats and coats etc.
And, of course, his books. A world of ‘Aunts bellowing to Aunts like mastodons across the primeval swamps’, who ‘chew on broken bottles and wear barbed wire next to the skin’; of dynamic girls with ‘laughter like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge’; dukes with moustaches that ‘rise and fall like seaweed on an ebb-tide’; shy men with voices like Gussie Fink-Nottle’s, whose unique timbre reminds the hearer ‘partly of an escape from a gas pipe and partly of a sheep calling to its young in the lambing season’.
My father adored Plum, and remains the one living person who knew him well. His devotion was in part because Plum so adored and protected his mother, Leonora Wodehouse (pictured) (1905- 44), who tragically died as a consequence of a bomb in the Second World War, when my father was seven.
Plum and my father’s grandmother had married after Leonora’s own father had died, and he adopted her as his own daughter. Their relationship was deeply touching, and they wrote many playful letters to each other.
His dedication to her in The Heart of a Goof (1926) reads, ‘To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.’
Her death was devastating to him. He was not a man for showing emotion, but his letters express an aching sense of loss, magnified perhaps by his own lack of close family connections as a child.
As a product of Empire, with his parents in Hong Kong (his father was a colonial magistrate), he was brought up in England, almost exclusively by his aunts (allowing us to join the dots about his views on aunts). Between the ages of three and 15, he saw his parents on only four occasions.
I remember talking to Plum on the phone as a small boy. Every Christmas and birthday, he would send me and my siblings a signed book with a ten-dollar bill in each one, and we would call him to thank him.
When I listen to old BBC tapes of him talking, I immediately remember that crackly voice on the phone coming from across the Atlantic, old, kind and present, asking me about sports and school.
I was eight when he died, aged 93, of a heart attack, pencil in hand, still writing, 50 years ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1975.
The collapse in the value of the rupee in the late 1890s wiped out the family money. Plum was about to go up to Oxford, following in the footsteps of his brother, Armine, who had just taken a double first in Mods and Greats, and had become a don.
Armine became a visiting professor in Poona, to tutor Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti in theosophy.
Plum was meant to follow in his footsteps but, with no family financial support, he was forced to find a job at HSBC in London as a clerk. There, he said, he proved to be ‘the most ineffective clerk whose trouser seat had ever polished the surface of a high stool’.
Thankfully, his ineptness led him to a rethink. So he launched himself on a writing career, best encapsulated by his winning the
Mark Twain Medal for ‘having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’.
On the 50th anniversary of his death, we will be celebrating precisely this. This happiness stretches far and wide, with 99 books still in print, translated into 37 different languages, new adaptations of his work for stage and TV bubbling up year after year, and great authors writing their own homages to him.
His life is well documented; somewhat less documented are his musical achievements. In the 1920s, as a lyricist, he had five musicals on Broadway running concurrently! He was the bridge between music-hall entertainment of a bygone age and the modern musical.
Had he died in the 1920s, he would have died famous as a lyricist and a Hollywood writer. Gershwin and Kern were his pals and saw him as a master.
Here’s something to give you some sense of Plum’s ability to transcend time, situation and culture.
The scene is the opening of the new law courts in Bhutan. My father, then a High Court judge, is the British guest of honour, representing the weight, might and history of British jurisprudence. There is much pageantry and solemnity.
The Lord Chief Justice is walking the line of visiting dignitaries, each stiffly addressing the other with well-rehearsed words of mutual respect. The Lord Chief Justice gets to my father and, with reckless abandon, grabs him by the hand, pulls him violently into a tight embrace and with wild hoots of laughter yells,
‘WHAT HO! WHAT HO! WHAT HO!’
My father falls into this embrace like a lost brother. In the chaos that ensues, these two highly distinguished men of law escape proceedings to talk Wodehouse and became firm friends.
Why does he make us laugh? It’s sentences like this: ‘It was often said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.’
It is Pythonesque, it is Blackadder, it is Latin in structure, it is something so tangentially absurd...
And all this at the rate of three mind-boggling similes a page, with plotlines that are equally ridiculous. Just read the short story ‘Uncle Fred Flits By’ (1935) and you’ll see what I mean.
Brilliant writers and intellectuals – all, as PGW would say, ‘steeped to the gills in serious purpose’ – would visit the family library to search for the essence of his genius, and stay for weeks.
Each day, they would pore over his writing. Each night, exhausted and silent they dined with us, bringing a certain lugubriousness to home life, turning each merry party into ‘one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all’.
These academics exhibited the same ‘sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty’.
One American academic sent my father to sleep. Things got so turgid I threw a bread roll at one, to see if the Drones spirit coursed within. It didn’t.
Scholarly articles would ensue, talking about the transferred epithet and ‘his sentence structure so redolent of the Iliad’ etc.
He did, though, have a rigorous classical education, which must have shaped his prose style and lines like Bertie Wooster’s in Right Ho, Jeeves (1934): ‘I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day before he overcame the Nervii.’
Has anyone truly got to his essence? Can you bottle genius? Robert McCrum and Paul Kent have brilliantly tried in their books – both joyously, unlike the above scholars.
Robert’s account of a heavy-drinking night out in Holland with the Dutch P G Wodehouse Society is a joy.
I asked Robert, returning a ghost of a man from Holland, whether he’d enjoyed his time with our Dutch brothers.
He nodded... ‘A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, “So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?” ’
Somewhere between Shakespeare, the Bible, Horace and a deep love of the English language you will find Plum.
And when you find him, as in a game of sardines, you will creep into the space with him, you will feel life is better, and you will feel quietly smug as you watch, from a small crack in the curtains, all the others searching, still yet to discover him.
