It is not often that a writer of comic prose finds himself both praised and damned in parliament and damned and praised in print, but such was the curious fate of P.G. Wodehouse.
His radio broadcasts from Berlin during the second World War led to his denunciation in the Westminster Parliament - and to this stirring indictment from Sean O'Casey in 1941, when England was experiencing the worst of Germany's bombing raids: "The civilisation that could let Joyce die in poverty, and crown with a D. Litt. a thing like Wodehouse, deserves fire and brimstone from heaven, and is getting it."
O'Casey also called Wodehouse a "performing flea". Wodehouse characteristically responded by saying that he believed that O'Casey "meant 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". O'Casey's famous remark later became the title of one of Wodehouse's many books.
Wosehouse was mentioned in parliament on this side of the Irish Sea as well when Paddy McGilligan, a Fine Gael TD, wondered during a Dáil debate on finance in 1953, whether "any deputies have read the stories by P.G. Wodehouse," since if they had, "they must know the efforts that his most futile character - even more futile than some of the deputies here - made to get work. He was the great Bertie Wooster, and there was an occasion on which Bertie got work and it did not develop too well - like the way Fianna Fáil did not develop too well last year." Wodehouse has also been mentioned in the course of several other Dáil debates encompassing such remarkably diverse topics as the delimiting of water supply disconnection powers and industrial alcohol legislation.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey on October 15th, 1881. None too happy with his parents' choice of names, he later recalled that, despite his vigorous protests at the font, the clergyman pressed ahead to ensure that his godfather's terrible names would live on. Fortunately, common sense prevailed when his family decided to call him Plum, a name by which he is also known to his legion of fans worldwide. While his literary debut came in the form of a poem written at the age of five, his first novel, The Pothunters, was published in 1902.
Wodehouse was an accomplished sportsman, enjoying success in rugby, athletics, boxing and cricket, which he also played with such notable literary figures as J.M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Interestingly, the phrase "elementary, my dear Watson", which is commonly attributed to Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes, appears nowhere in the Holmes stories. It is Psmith, a much-loved Wodehouse character, who utters this memorable line while conversing with Mike Watson in a novel published in 1915.
Wodehouse wrote almost 300 stories and more than 70 novels between 1901 and his death on February 14th, 1975, just 30 years ago this month. In the course of his career, he managed to create over 2,000 characters, many of whom had the most outlandish names; but only two have succeeded in imprinting themselves on our collective imagination. The manservant Jeeves and his hilariously inept master, Bertie Wooster, first appeared in a short story written for the Saturday Evening Post during the first World War. These two characters alone formed the basis for four story collections and 11 novels, the last of which appeared a year before Wodehouse's death.
Robert McCrum's recently published biography, Wodehouse: A Life (Viking, £20 sterling), adds considerably to our knowledge of this prolific writer. John Mortimer, whose comic creation, Rumpole of the Bailey, continues to delight old and new readers alike, wrote recently that "those who delight in Wodehouse will also delight in McCrum's biography". Perhaps the key to understanding Plum's extraordinary popularity and success as a writer lies in Mortimer's observation that Wodehouse had a "wonderful talent for reducing all the most serious moments of life to a kind of cheerful absurdity". Many years earlier, Evelyn Waugh, a lifelong admirer of Wodehouse, observed that James Joyce "had a good talent for parody and a keen sense of the absurd, but he never had the discipline, nor the organisation, the wide reading, the sheer intelligence or wit of Wodehouse".
It is worth noting that Wodehouse's writings sold very well in Ireland for many years. Indeed, there is at least one distinctly Irish character, Donough O'Hara of Castle Taterfields, Co Clare, who appears in two books and two stories between 1904 and 1907.
Perhaps the finest Irish tribute to this great writer came from a TCD academic whom David Norris cited in the course of a debate in the Seanad. "Old X", as he was affectionately known, had felt so deeply about Wodehouse's work that he decided to write a book that has since become a standard text on the subject. This writer was also said to have closely resembled Wodehouse in dress and appearance. Senator Norris fondly recalled that when he talked at meetings of Trinity College graduates throughout the world, R.B.D. French "is the one person who is remembered with affection and joy and as someone who illuminated their lives and taught them something." Fans of P.G. Wodehouse would, I'm sure, readily concur with these sentiments, were they to be applied to someone who was surely the 20th century's greatest master of comic writing.