P.G. Wodehouse and the natural order. (Literature).(Biography)

"Right ho, then. So much for the western front. We now turn to the eastern."

"Sir?"

"I speak in parables, Jeeves. "

--Right Ho, Jeeves

IN ANSWER TO HIS Aunt Dahlia's need when her daughter, Angela, has broken off the engagement with Tuppy Glossop, Bertram Wooster is at Brinkley Court in full charge of the case (and also that of Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Basset). He has relegated Jeeves' role to that of a bystander--for there is a certain coolness between them caused by a white mess jacket. Earlier, he had resisted his aunt's summons to Brinkley when she wished him to present the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar's Speech Day--but this emergency was a different matter.

Thought by his biographer, Frances Donaldson, to be the finest of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse's novels, Right Ho, Jeeves was published in 1934 when its author (called "Plum" since his schooldays) was fifty-three and in his prime as a writer. At the age of twenty, while working at a London bank, he had begun writing with the intent to become a full-time author; his early success was with short stories, then a little later, serialisation of full-length yams, in boys' magazines such as the Captain. His break with the bank came two years after, when he discovered that the editor of the "By the Way" column in the Globe newspaper was a former master of his old school, Dulwich College. When approached, the editor offered him his own job for a period of five weeks while he was on holiday in France and Wodehouse promptly left his own secure job; by this time Wodehouse had had published over eighty pieces in various journals and magazines, though his main effort was still concentrated on the schoolboy market.

When the five-week period ended, Wodehouse was out on his own without a job; however, he resumed his literary efforts. It was at this time that his first book, The Pothunters (a public school story) was published and a short time later the editor of "By the Way" retired and Wodehouse was offered the position, this time on a permanent basis. Not content with this, he was able to turn out several books in the next few years and even dip his toes into the music hall, beginning to write lyrics which others--such as Jerome Kern--set to music. A little over a decade later, he was to begin a collaboration with Guy Bolton which was to lead to many "books" for successful Broadway musicals.