A READER’S GUIDE TO P. G. WODEHOUSE’S AMERICA
Deepika Karle
"It probably comes as a shock to most Wodehouse fans to learn that he has spent by far the greater part of his adult life in this country. The picture of Wodehouse that his readers invariably conjure up has him ambling across a crisp sward in Sussex or Shropshire, swinging a knobby walking stick and humming ‘Roses of Picardy.’ They find it almost impossible to picture him living in a room in Greenwich village or, as he did many years later, in a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue" (Wind 48). In 1955, P. G. Wodehouse, British humorist, became an American citizen after several years of a trans-Atlantic relationship with the United States of America. Wodehouse had made several trips to the country, was twice contracted to work for M-G-M in Hollywood, and had regularly visited New York where he wrote and collaborated on plays before he eventually decided to make it his home. Writing for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time, Wodehouse had assumed an Anglo-American status long before his naturalization, and he wore his mantle well. However, not many of his fans are aware of his connections with the United States. Despite his prolonged association with the country and his use of American personae and setting in many of his novels, little effort has been made to explore the "American connection" in Wodehouse’s work.
For most of his readers, the "jolly old world" of Wodehouse is almost exclusively English. They see it as a pristine Garden of Eden that is more like Shropshire than Shropshire is, as a particularly English paradise peopled by Edwardian men and women with a scrupulously Wodehousean code of morality who romance and intrigue their lives away with lighthearted insouciance. Certainly, Wodehouse’s world is that. But it is not the only world he was capable of creating, nor are the very English Lord Emsworth and the gentlemen’s gentleman, Jeeves, his only triumphs. Wodehouse could and did create a brilliant satellite to the
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English world, one that contains a gallery of American characters as amusing in their own rights as Emsworth or Bertie Wooster or Bingo Little. In the overriding critical preoccupation with the "English" Wodehouse (by no means unjustifiable), individual authorial traits, subdued strands of development, and the relatively minor works and characters have largely gone unnoticed and unsung. These subdued strands and these minor characters point to a different Wodehouse—to a man who adopted America not only as a citizen but also as a writer. In America, I Like You, Wodehouse had promised to relate, "just the simple story of my love affair with the United States of America" (22). It is time that story was told.
I maintain that there exists a miniature Wodehousean America in his novels, built on a somewhat smaller scale but by no means less humorous or less intriguing than Wodehouse’s Edwardian and Edenic England. It seems to me an extremely pleasurable and rewarding task to piece together the America and the Americans of Wodehouse ‘ s fictions, thereby to establish this brilliant humorist’s connection with America and to consolidate his reputation as an American humorist as well as an English one.
Wodehouse’s America
It should not surprise readers that, carefully pieced together, the America of Wodehouse’s fictions is a trifle different from the one they know. The first fact that should be at their disposal then, is that Wodehouse’s America is largely composed of New York and Hollywood. There are those who believe that "except for a few scattered hamlets, America ceased at Forty-Second Street, New York" (Uneasy Money 24). Others concede the existence of Dottyville-on-the-Pacific, "‘[a] little west of Los Angeles,’ said Mike. ‘It is sometimes known as Hollywood’" (Spring Fever 43 5-6). The rest of America is acknowledged in a passing nod. "To the inhabitants of Wodehouse’s books, abroad usually means America, which usually means either New York or Hollywood" (Green 227). Once in America, Wodehouse’s characters tend to converge on the two coastal metropolises like homing pigeons. They may spend the odd few days at the boxing championship in Chicago or the annual Siamese cat convention in Bessemer, Ohio, but then they rapidly bowl along to New York and Hollywood, where most of the action will take place.
Wodehouse’s characters usually operate within a well circumscribed New York, the limits being Wodehousean rather than geographical. In some works, New York is Greenwich Village. This bohemian quarter provides the perfect setting for the many aspiring artists who
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crowd his novels:
If you threw a brick from any of its windows, you would be certain to brain some rising interior decorator, some vorticist sculptor or a writer of revolutionary verse libre. . . . Climbing down . . . you would find yourself in the open-air premises of the Purple Chicken restaurant-one of those numerous oases in this great city where, in spite of the law of Prohibition, you can still, so the cognoscenti whisper, "always get it if they know you." A useful thing to remember.
(The Small Bachelor 7)
As far as the theatergoer and theater manager are concerned, New York is almost all Broadway and Times Square. The Wodehouse world of theater also extends to Syracuse, Rochester, and Albany, where musicals and plays are test run before they are unleashed on Broadway. Along with these areas of New York, no Wodehouse reader should be unfamiliar with Long Island, the home of some of Wodehouse’s many millionaires. The Long Island that Wodehouse speaks of is dotted with charming, exclusive, and wealthy little communities (Wodehouse himself lived in Long Island for the last twenty years of his life). If New York is the throbbing hub of culture and commerce, it is also a city of "sinister intrigue, of whisperings and conspiracies, of battle, murder, and sudden death in dark by-ways" (The Prince and Betty 170). However, Wodehouse’s characters walk the streets of New York relatively unharmed.
Wodehouse’s Hollywood is also a creation half real and half the product of his nimble imagination. If it is the land of glamour and glory, it is also the "tinsel town where tragedy lies hid behind a thousand false smiles" (Laughing Gas 115). Hollywood is the "bright city of sorrows, where fame deceives and temptation lurks, where souls are shrivelled in the furnace of desire, whose streets are bathed with the shamed tears of betrayed maidens" (115-16). Fortunately, like Greenwich village, it has its own little sanctuary where these sorrows may be, at least temporarily, forgotten. Halfway down Hollywood boulevard there is a door, and provided one has the right code word, the door opens to reveal the "primrose path that led to perdition," where one may drink freely of the blushful Hippocrene, notwithstanding the uneasy shackles of Prohibition ("The Nodder" 224). Be it New York or Hollywood, Wodehouse is quick to identify these havens of comfort, ensuring that the Wodehousean has this essential information at his disposal.
There is a passing reference to other parts of America in Wodehouse’s works. In Laughing Gas, the reader is informed that "there is a lot of
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America, especially out in the Western districts," but he is not required to develop an extensive acquaintance with it (11). It is reported to be a rather fanciful world where "men are men and women are women." "Come West, woman, where hearts are pure and there try to start a new life" urges Sigsbee Waddington, addressing his stout and stubborn wife whose soul he is convinced has been putrefied by prolonged exposure to the corruptions of the East (The Small Bachelor 309). We are told that Sigsbee is dressed like a stage waiter but in his heart he "was wearing chaps and a Stetson hat and people spoke of him as Two—Gun Thomas" (49). Here he speaks to his future son-in-law who has just informed him that he hails from Idaho, a fact which the latter is generally careful to conceal:
"You really come from the West?" he cried.
"I do."
"From God’s own country? From the great wonderful West with its wide open spaces where a red-blooded man can fill his lungs with the breath of freedom?"
It was not precisely the way George would have described East Gilead, which was a stuffy little hamlet with a poorish water supply and one of the worst soda fountains in Idaho, but he nodded amiably. (52-3)
Berry Conway attempts a description of the American West in Big Money: "I can just picture it, Biscuit. Miles of desert, with mountain ranges that change their shape as you look at them. Wagon tracks. Red porphyry cliffs. People going about in sombreros and blue overalls" (73). Wodehouse blames much of this romanticizing of the West by his characters upon the motion pictures and the novels of Zane Grey, but it would be hard to deny that he himself was making very effective use of standard conceptions of the "wild" West.
As far as Wodehouse is concerned, the rest of America is mostly uncharted territory. Some of his characters feel that "Constantinople, Michigan, was God’s footstool," while others claim "that the country began only on the western side of the Rocky mountains" (Uneasy Money 24). The Midwest is acknowledged briefly. Sometimes it is no more than an extension of the West, "where hearts are pure and men are men in Chillicothe, Ohio" (Laughing Gas 57). As far as its women go, it is the land of decided homebodies. Wodehouse mentions at least two glamorous but good-hearted Midwestern girls: Billie Dore, an Indiana chorus girl in A Damsel in Distress, turns out to be a country girl at heart. She gives up the hollow life of the stage to marry Lord Marshmoreton who loves to garden, because she can never forget the days when her father
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was a nursery gardener in Indiana. The glamorous Madame Eulalie, crystal-ball gazer in The Small Bachelor, is revealed to be none other than homely May Stubbs of East Gilead, Idaho. She abandons her glamorous career to play house with a celebrated author, Hamilton Beamish.
Surprisingly, the Midwest also appears to yield a particularly dangerous species of criminal: the female gangster. Chicago Kitty, Cincinnati Sue, and Indianapolis Edna are reputed to be criminals nonpareil. Other kinds of crime also seem to be rife in the region. Reports of a man in Minnesota who "had recently beaned his father-in-law with the family meat axe" fill Archie with pangs of envy as he broods on the menace his own father-in-law represents ("Indiscretions of Archie" 267). A New York gateman amuses himself with the "narrative of a spirited householder in Kansas who had run amuck with a hatchet and slain six" (Jill the Reckless 13 1). Gangsters and gunmen from Chicago routinely wend their way to England, there to practice their specialized skills.
But the Midwest is no less nor more violent than the rest of the country; Wodehouse unabashedly capitalizes on the reputation America had for being somewhat prone to violence and crime. In Do Butlers Burgle Banks? Gussie Mortlake, on the lookout for a gunman who will help him perpetrate an insurance fraud, is attempting to arrange a fortuitous "accident" to satisfy the dictates of the policy. But this appears problematic: "Of course, there was the problem of where to find the gunman, and he could see that this called for some thought. In the United States of America, he understood, the traffic in these fauna was brisk, and all you had to do if you wanted one was to put an advertisement in the paper or skim through the yellow pages of the telephone directory, but this was England, where such a procedure presented difficulties" (105). In another short story, "Fate," Freddie Widgeon gets turned off from his morning bacon and eggs on a trip to America because he has just seen a photograph of "Mae Belle McGinnis, taken when she was not looking her best because Mr. McGinnis had just settled some domestic dispute with the meat ax" (5). It seems to Freddie as if "everybody in the place were cutting up their wives and hiding them in sacks in the Jersey marshes or else putting detectives on to them to secure the necessary evidence" (5). Evidently, Wodehouse was not likely to pass up the chance to satirize the somewhat unsavory aspects of this civilization; references to crime in the New World abound in his fiction. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the fact that a good part of America may appear to be in the grip of crime, the lives of Wodehousean characters are usually untouched by such violence; they inhabit a relatively safe world.
Wodehouse provides thc reader with some information on the subject of the American climate: the reader should be told that even though it
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varies from region to region, the overall effect is of endless sunshine. According to Wodehouse, California has a bracing climate, Ohio is bitterly cold in winter, and Maine pleasant in the summer. Some parts of America are prone to unpleasant hurricanes. Bertie describes Aunt Dahlia’s hurried exit in these terms: "Her departure—at, I should estimate, some 60 mph—left behind it the sort of quivering stillness you get during hurricane time in America, when the howling gale, having shaken you to the back teeth, passes on to tickle up residents in spots further west" (Jeeves and the Tie that Binds 117). Another time when Homer Pyle is making for the door, it flies open "as if struck by one of those hurricanes off the eastern coast of America that become so emotional on arriving at Cape Hatteras" (The Girl in Blue 81). But occasional hurricanes and blizzards apart, the America that Wodehouse presents us with is blessed with endless sunshine. After all, if Wodehouse will allow very little rain to fall in the English countryside, so notorious for its bad weather, why should not America be the land of sunny delight?
Wodehouse’s Americans
Peopling this unique little world are Americans of a decidedly Wodehousean extraction. Wodehouse’s American characters represent the distillation of the essence of America—the enterprise and the wealth, the power and the glory of the New World, the relative paucity of history and a sense of the past, and the bustling cities inhabited by millionaires and smooth-talking gangsters. Hamilton Cosmo suggests that "Alone among English writers he can draw Americans faithfully and without caricature" (99). But caricature is an essential part of a humorist’s technique, and without the broad Wodehousean strokes, we would scarcely enjoy Mr. Peters, the dyspeptic millionaire, or Smooth Sam Fisher, the silver-tongued gangster, characters that rely for their appeal on the appreciation of stereotypes as a form of comedy. Wodehouse had balked at the suggestion that he write about Americans rather than Englishmen: ". . . if I try to do American stuff, the result is awful" (Author! Author! 82); but as long as Wodehouse remained true to his technique of creating his own peculiar blend of fact/fiction/type/individual, characters who thrive on stereotypicality at the same time that they seem to stand alone in their individuality, creatures too delightful to be real, he succeeds in creating the American that can stand along with Emsworth or Bertie as a creature of eternal delight.
Given that America was the land of plenty in the eyes of the Old World, it is scarcely surprising that most American characters in his fiction just happen to be millionaires. These are the creatures of most
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value to the impecunious English gentry, and Wodehouse does not stint in providing the reader with American millionaires. They are usually of two kinds: there is the steely-eyed, square-jawed variety and then there is the stout and dyspeptic, but shrewd variety. Both varieties share a tremendous enterprise, often coupled with a somewhat stunted sense of morality. Benjamin Scobell, one of the country’s financial leaders, is described thus: "In a financial sense he might have taken Terence’s Nihil humanum alienum as his motto. He was interested in numerous enterprises, great and small" (The Prince and Betty 10). Along with a newspaper, mines, shops, gambling paradises, he is also the covert owner of some very unpleasant tenement houses on Broster Street, New York, where impoverished immigrants are forced to live in subhuman cubby holes for exorbitant rents. A more appealing American millionaire is the versatile genius Mr. Hamilton Beamish, brisk-walking, dumbbell-swinging author of instructional booklets on subjects ranging from poultry to poetry (The Small Bachelor). Mr. Oliver Ring, that model of American enterprise, operates in the typical manner of a Wodehousean Napoleon of finance. This is the story of how Mr. Ring and America came to a sleepy little English town:
The whole thing may be said to have begun when Mr. Oliver Ring of New York, changing cars, as he called it, at Wrykyn on his way out to London, had to wait an hour for his train. He put in that hour by strolling about the town and seeing the sights, which were not numerous. Wrykyn, except on Market Day, was wont to be wrapped in a primeval calm which very nearly brought tears to the strenuous eyes of the man from Manhattan. He had always been told that England was a slow country, and his visit, now in its third week, had confirmed this opinion: but even in England he had not looked to find such a lotos-eating place as Wrykyn. He looked at the shop windows. They resembled the shop windows of every other country town in England. There was no dash, no initiative about them. They did not leap to the eye and arrest the pedestrian’s progress. They ordered these things, thought Mr. Ring, better in the States. And then something seemed to whisper to him that there was the place to set up a branch of Ring’s Come-One Come-All Up-to-date stores.
("An International Affair" 106-7)
Within a short time of the opening of the store we learn that Mr. Ring’s underling had managed to "wake up the sluggish Britishers as if they had had an electric shock," this being their usual awed response to American drive (111).
American millionaires are well equipped with grit and determination. Mr. Abney, headmaster of an exclusive school which has admitted Ogden Ford, obnoxious offspring of Elmer Ford, refers to the latter in
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