Memories of The Great and The Good (5 page)

It is an unlikely place to find the Master of jeeves. But he lives a mile or two west of the bay, on the South Shore, in a rural haven quite isolated from the pervasive smell of success. Remsenburg was named for one Joris Remsen, a Dutchman owning three spacious tracts of land in New York City who, once the British had finally conquered and renamed the city of New Amsterdam, decamped from its alien rule and a small floodtide of arriving Englishmen. Remsen fled eighty miles east and set up a small, bosky village which down two centuries and more has become an oasis of well-spaced houses and shade trees in the scrub-pine tundra on which the nouveau Long Islanders have built, at ten-foot intervals, their expensive variations of
ein bauhaus
by the sea.

Remsenburg is just about on the map and you have to watch out for narrow roads leading off the ocean highway and, after studying the instructions, pass a white wooden Colonial church and enter, at last, Basket Neck Lane.

It is an American lane, so there are no hedges, but the comfortable wooden houses lie back from the road on well-groomed lawns, and on the hot air of last Saturday afternoon a mower droned like a beehive. The houses have no names or numbers but only plaques propped against the entrance of the driveways. You go slowly down the lane and almost at its end see a privet hedge enclosing a wide lawn. This is the English touch. This must be it. Sure enough there is a small reflector sign against the hedge. It says “Wodehouse” and you lift your eyes from it and, as if this were the opening of a well-rehearsed television program, you “dolly up” to its owner, a big, pink, shambling, bald-headed man with thick glasses who is coming down the driveway and saying, “How nice of you to come, where shall we go? I think it might be cooler in the house.”

He was right, for the Indian summer has burned like a crystal this last golden week or two, and so we went quickly over the lawn across a terrace, blinked at a circle of blinding white chairs and went into a wing of the house that turned out to be his study, overlooking a flaming maple and the small pines and locusts that abound on Long Island.

The second impression confirmed the first, which he had made over the telephone with a voice of extraordinary ease and tunefulness. It is an English voice, secure and genial, with a disarming air of wanting to help, meaning to find an agreeable time and place, not wanting to fuss. It is difficult to describe this voice, which is tuned entirely in C major. It is not, shall we say, a tune that you hear much in the chambers or the lounges of the United Nations.

Will you have a drink? It is a little early. Wouldn't it be better if we took off our coats? We drop them over a Chippendale chair. “Now,” he says and puts his pipe in his mouth and gets up and down in the restlessness of the pipe-smoker's pursuit of the one match that will really work. This chase gives you time to focus his huge dumpling body, which is dressed in a long linen coat over a small-check sports shirt, fawn trousers, and canvas shoes with thick soles the color of almond icing. He is a giant Pickwick, an aging Micawber who had everything delightful turn up at once: good health (“a little hard of hearing in the left ear, that's all”), the ideal hermitage (“I love it here and go to New York only two or three times a year”), a happy marriage (“my goodness, it's been forty-seven years”) and a sweet-flowing stream of filthy lucre (“I get an awful lot of money out of Sweden, I can't think why”).

“Now,” he said again, as his pipe wheezed a reedy bass against the melodic tenor of his voice. “Tell me, this is awfully exciting news that the
Guardian
is printing in London. Do you think it was wise to drop the name ‘Manchester,' I wonder?”

I claimed the Fifth Amendment on that one and maneuvered, with astonishing lack of success, to get him off my job onto his. He kept springing up and down, moving piles of English newspapers and magazines still unwrapped, and occasionally disciplining a snuffling boxer that had appeared from nowhere and started to lick my nostrils and ears. “Is she being a nuisance?” It was nothing really, I assured him, and came up for air before Debbie, an ill-named hound, started on my teeth.

After about twenty minutes of praising and deploring the English newspapers (“they have the best and worst”), it was time to be firm with Debbie and with Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Debbie had been joined by a dachshund, and they were both removed, and he beamed again in utter benevolence. Not quite utter, perhaps, for his thick circular lenses give him the slightest look of Dr. Mabuse.

After Le Touquet (“the house was completely smashed in the war”) he lived in Paris for a while and in 1947 came back to America. In 1952 he and his wife were staying with his oldest friend and collaborator, Guy Bolton, “down here, and my wife came in from this awful jungle and she'd bought a house. It was a shack, but you see we fixed it up and built on to it, and reclaimed twelve acres from this scrub, and I don't think I shall ever leave Remsenburg.” He is eighty on Sunday, and I smiled a salute at the gallantry of the word “ever.”

I supposed that he had a host, at least a clutch, of close friends around. “No, no,” he fluted, as if he was lucky to be so free of claims, “only Guy Bolton. You don't really need more than one, do you?” It was evidently enough for him. “Of course, I wave to the neighbors. They are very friendly and all that. But no friends, we never go to parties or travel anymore.” He sounded like a TV announcer describing the halcyon life for a Florida insurance company.

When had he last been in England?

“I went over in nineteen-thirty-nine to see a cricket match. It was between Dulwich and St. Paul's. It was very dull. T. Bailey played a dreadful innings. They tell me England has changed in many ways, but nobody can agree on what ways.”

We were headed for another pleasant detour so I brought him back on the main road with perhaps a brutal bang.

“I think I'd better bring this up,” I said, “because a lot of people do wonder about it. You saw the last piece by Evelyn Waugh about you and the Germans and those broadcasts during the war?”

He came over to a closer chair and bent down, his pink face suddenly quite intent and grave.

“Yes, I did.”

“Does it make you feel relieved or embarrassed to have this thing thrashed over again?”

His pipe wheezed again, and wrinkled his features, if it's possible to wrinkle features as ripe and smooth as an apple.

“I don't know,” he said, honestly baffled. “I wonder if it was necessary. Evelyn Waugh is such a fine friend. I've really been in two minds about it. What do you think?”

I told him as gently as possible that I thought it had done him a service, because scurrilous legends don't wither, “they simply get coarse and smelly, and someone comes along who knows no more about you than the obvious thing about Captain Boycott. They'd say Oh that Wodehouse, wasn't he mixed up somehow with the Nazis?'“

He was suddenly like a bishop who has heard an artless truth from the lips of a babe or suckling. ‘Yes,” he said eagerly. “I think you're right. Yes, I see.” He thought through a smoky pause. ‘Yes,” he said, as if it was the last word. “I
am
grateful.”

We started up again almost as if lunch or some other domestic entrant had intervened. I wanted to ask him about his daily routine, and the writing he was doing, but there was the awkward possibility that he might be doing very little and be too proud to say so, and I might clumsily invite him to admit that his day was done and his market gone with the wind, the Second War and the Welfare State. So I mentioned the “new book”
The Ice in the Bedroom
and the literary study of him
(Wodehouse at Work) just
coming out by a certain learned Usborne.

“Oh,” he said, “the novel came out here last year. But the other book is a rather frightening thing, you know. I mean, I'm sure it's very conscientious and impressive to have someone go into one's stuff like that, but it's rather unsettling. I mean, you turn the stuff out and then public orators begin to declaim and critics analyze it… well, it's rather uncomfortable.” He writhed with unaffected conviction.

“Do you find”—this was the sneaky foot in the door— “that people still
want
the stuff turned out? I understand you're translated all over.”

“Well,” he said, waving his pipe and stressing every other adjective, “it's the most
remarkable
thing. I don't believe there is a
single
language—wait now, I am not sure about the Russians—that hasn't translated it. I get books in Burmese and Korean and Japanese, and I can't think what they are. You have to trace them like hieroglyphs and read them backwards. And all the time, you wrote them. It's
most
amazing. I can't think what
they
think they're reading!”

His bewilderment seemed completely genuine, and through all our talk there was the novel feeling that here was a hermit, a recluse, a sort of musical comedy Schweitzer, who had honestly no idea that he'd ever been heard of, or read outside the dormitories of English public schools when the lights were out. The calls from American magazines and agents (it was coming out now) of course were understandable. “They go on and on. I just had a call from an agent who wants me to make a musical comedy out of Barrie's
The Admirable Crichton
. And then they're well along with a series of television shows about Jeeves. But I don't understand the other countries. The Communists, for instance. There was a ban on me in Hungary for a while, which is just as mysterious as their reading me at all. But they do. The Czechs and the Poles and the rest. Perhaps they think of me as a satirist.”

He chuckled over this and added in a confessional tone. “Of course, I've always gone rather on the assumption that country houses and butlers have never passed away.”

I thought of Margaret Fuller accepting the universe and said mildly, ‘You'd better. After all, it's your staple.” “Of course it is,” he cried, grateful for the
mot juste
.

“It's my staple. I don't pretend these things exist. They probably never have existed. They're really historical novels. I suppose there are no Bertie Woosters, at least, anymore. If there are, I imagine they're on the make. You see, I do feel we have lost something, even in the crooks and bounders. The Woosters were really innocent people. That's what we've lost—innocence.”

This led by an obvious but gloomy association to the modern comedians and humorists. In the only downright sentence he ever spoke, he said he disliked the “sick” comedian. He writhed a little and found a better word.

“Geniality,” he said, “I think that's what I miss in the new comics and the humorists.”

I wondered who the new humorists were, and he wondered too. “Really, when you come to think of it, I can't think of any young ones coming along except Jean Kerr. When I first came to this country, everybody was funny, the writers, the vaudeville comics, the iceman, the neighbors. …”

Couldn't this have been the delight of a first exposure to the oblique turn of American minds?

“Maybe, maybe,” he said, making another tremendous discovery. “But there are no more Benchleys and Thurbers, and George Ades or S. J. Perelmans, or in England any more W. W. Jacobs and Barry Paines. And Nunnally Johnson, now there was a fine humorist.” He remembered a story of Johnson's about a man who used to come home every day and find that his wife had moved the furniture around. One day he came home and flung himself on the bed, but the bed wasn't there. So there was a court case and she was sued. He told his story “and every man in the court had gone through the same thing. The case was dismissed. Now there, you see, no magazine would possibly take that today.”

We were on the dangerous ground where a younger man suggests that maybe humor dates more than most forms of literature. Also, Debbie or the dachshund was snuffling and scratching at the door. So I came finally to the mystery of this exile and this hermitage.

“Tell me,” I said, “don't you find it difficult to mine your stuff at three thousand miles from its source?”

“Ah,” he said (the Geiger counter was swiveling like mad now), “I've had misgivings about that from time to time. But you see, even when I lived in England, I only went to country houses till I got the feel of what it was all about.” He rested the hand with the pipe on one knee. ‘You know, I've always been a recluse. I've never seen any sort of life—
I got it all from the newspapers!”

So, the rich and deathless population of Wodehouse County is all a fantasy It struck me that to the extent his picture of country house life is imagined, it probably crystallizes, better than any enlargement of reality, the preconceptions of the foreigner, especially of the Communists, who must at this moment be learning the dreadful truth about the West by commuting between
Leave It to Psmith
and
Little Dorrit
in order to strike the proper balance between the life of the oppressors in their castles and the oppressed in their factories. He thought it very likely.

The dogs bounded in again and converged on my French poodle, which had broken out of the car. There was an ugly snarl and yelp or two, and the talk was plainly at an end. “Debbie, Debbie,” he said, almost weeping with affection over this slobbering monster of a boxer. “Gently, gently.” He picked her up and saw me across the lawn and down the driveway. With the free hand he waved, as to a neighbor, and padded out of the burning sun and back into the shade of the house and the real world of Psmith and Jeeves and Lord Emsworth and Mr. Mulliner and Bertie Wooster, who don't exist any more except in the puzzled but fascinated imaginations of about eighty or ninety nations.