Birthday of writer P.G. Wodehouse (Writer's Almanac tribute Oct. 15)

from Garrison Keillor -- Minnesota Public Radio dot-org

It's the birthday of the writer who said, 'I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!' That's novelist P. G. Wodehouse, born in Surrey, England (1881).

When he was two years old, his parents went off to Hong Kong, leaving him to be raised by various aunts. He would later feature lots of scary, mean-spirited aunts in his fiction, and he once wrote: 'It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later out pops the cloven hoof.'  He's the author of 96 books, including My Man Jeeves (1919), Carry On, Jeeves (1927), Thank You, Jeeves (1934), and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), all of those about a butler named Jeeves who is forever rescuing his employer, Bertie Wooster, from all sorts of ludicrous situations.

He first invented his character Jeeves in 1915. About 50 years later, in a book called The World of Jeeves (1967), he explained: 'I find it curious, now that I have written so much about him, to recall how softly and undramatically Jeeves entered my little world. ... On that occasion, he spoke just two lines.
The first was:
'Mrs Gregson to see you, sir.'
The second:
'Very good, sir, which suit will you wear?'
It was only some time later ... that the man's qualities dawned upon me. I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter.'

Wodehouse was exiled from England after some satirical comments he made on German radio during World War II, when he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He moved to France and then the United States, became an American citizen at the age of 73, continued to write stories about English castles and butlers, and eventually settled in Long Island, where on a daily basis he walked his dogs, had cocktails with lunch, and watched a soap opera -- all in addition to writing novels at his typewriter. When asked how he approaches his writing, he said, 'I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.' He lived to be 93.
He described one of his characters like this: 'A tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'' He wrote of another: 'He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.'
He once said, 'I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that -- humorists they are sometimes called -- are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.' But he's considered a brilliant stylist, and all sorts of 'serious' literary writers, including Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie, have professed to being big fans of Wodehouse.