The gruntler.(Wodehouse: A Life)(Book Review)

Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (Norton, 384 pp., $27.95)

TOO Good to Be True Dept.: The two reigning masters of the outrageous simile went to the same English public school. In fact, P. G. Wodehouse ("She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd 'Emu' in the top right-hand corner") and Raymond Chandler ("He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food") were near-contemporaries at Dulwich College, though they never met. Yet their characteristic modes of expression were similar to the point of occasional interchangeability. Perhaps it was something in the water.

Of course, Wodehouse and Chandler had something else in common: Both were popular novelists whose work was, and is, admired by literary professionals of the highest possible voltage. Everybody who writes about Wodehouse, for instance, mentions--as well they should--what Evelyn Waugh said about him in a 1961 tribute: "For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man; no 'aboriginal calamity.' His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled... . Mr. Wodehouse's world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own."

Only the author of Decline and Fall would have had the cheek to slip a reference to Cardinal Newman into a heartfelt tribute to the author of Uncle Fred in the Springtime. But Waugh was right on both counts: Wodehouse was a complete innocent, and it was his innocence that made his tales of Vicwardian life so sempiternally fresh. What other author has written so well about matters of no consequence? I lunched the other day with a friend who told me that a terminally ill relative of his had only just discovered Wodehouse, and was gulping his books down like pain pills. I, too, have turned to them in times of extreme disorder, and found their exquisitely carpentered nonsense to be as comforting as ... but who am I to be bandying similes with a master? Let's just say that P. G. Wodehouse is a damned good writer for a post-9/11 New Yorker to have around the house.

Contrary to popular belief, he was not an uninteresting man, nor did he lead an uninteresting life. It wasn't particularly eventful, though, and Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the London Observer, has cannily made the most of its high spots in Wodehouse: A Life. Every Wodehouse fan, for instance, knows at least a little something about how he fell into the hands of the Germans at the beginning of World War II, made the fatal mistake of agreeing to broadcast to America under their auspices, and promptly found himself up to his ears in hot water with the British government. McCrum tells the tale in extensive but not excessive detail, leaving no doubt that Wodehouse was a fool, not a traitor, and once you've read his account of this pitiful interlude, you won't ever have to read anything else about it.

Much the same thing might be said about the rest of Wodehouse: A Life. I suppose there's no such thing as a definitive biography, but I can't see how this one could be bettered. It tells you everything you want to know about Wodehouse, and does so in a clear, straightforward manner. Where on earth did Jeeves, the valet-superman, and Bertie Wooster, his "mentally negligible" employer-puppet, acquire so rich (if in Bertie's case imperfectly recalled) a storehouse of literary allusion? Just ask McCrum: "Wodehouse's school career was progressive instruction in the classical greats, ...