Robert McCrum Wodehouse: A Life.(Book Review)

Robert McCrum Wodehouse: A Life. Norton, 530 pages, $27.95

Do we need another biography of P. G. Wodehouse? Probably not. Richard Usborne, David Jasen, and Frances Donaldson have already done the heavy lifting, and Norman Murphy, Barry Phelps, and Lee Davis put in their own nine-to-fives. But as King Lear says to Goneril and Regan, "O, reason not the need." Robert McCrum has written an eminently enjoyable, readable biography of that singular creator of Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Aunt Agatha, and Psmith. The author of nearly one hundred books (which added 1,600 quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary), Wodehouse exported a mad Englishness to the world at a time when England was going insane at home. Like Jane Austen, "who famously worked on a 'little bit (two inches wide) of ivory,'" Wodehouse created a universe in miniature and "placed his characters in a recently vanished society."

McCrum's Wodehouse occasionally falls prey to the biographer's follies of Freudian couch-trip and pedantic laundry list. Yet I must say that this biography had the rare effect of encouraging me to read and re-read the literature of its subject. McCrum's task, as he puts it, has been to take Wodehouse back from the "medley of ill-informed stories recycling aspects of his wartime disgrace; and secondly, some equally uncritical celebrations of his ...