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interesting cuttings from recent press articles or
comments on the same. Bertie Wooster shuts in
face of exorbitant rent It's the end of a sartorial era. After 17 years of selling tweed suits, smoking jackets, hunting kit, overcoats and tails, second-hand clothes shop Bertie Wooster is to close its doors for good. Owner George Cazenove tells me that crippling business rates, excessive rent and, latterly, the Congestion Charge, have combined to finish the Fulham Road business off. "Things have changed enormously since I set up in the Eighties," Cazenove, 42, says. "Owning a small business these days is a nightmare. I've never made huge sums out of the shop anyway, but we kept going for the love of it. Now everything's gone crazy. Blair's Britain has killed us." The shop, whose clientele over the years has included former Prime Minister Sir John Major, The Who singer Roger Daltrey, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Madonna, will close in two weeks. "Ralph Lauren used to come in, insist we closed for the afternoon and then spend £8,000," Cazenove says. "Britain has become a combination of a giant golf course and giant call centre. Another problem is that the stock has become harder and harder to find. These days nobody wants to part with a decent piece of tailoring. Clothes are handed down to sons and grandsons." Cazenove tells me he is off to trade diamonds in South Africa. "I love England, I really do. But for now I'm going to concentrate on my E-business interests in Capetown." Blandings Castle, by P. G. Wodehouse, won this year’s “Cheltenham Booker” prize, with Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains as the runner-up. The annual “alternative Booker” was awarded this time for novels published in 1935 (from The Times Online). Blandings Castle is often, and more accurately, called Blandings Castle and Elsewhere. It's a collection of short stories including one Lord Emsworth story, an Anglers' Rest story, three golf stories, and three Ukridge stories. There's much more "Elsewhere" than there is "Lord Emsworth". But it is obviously, literally and figuratively, a winner. Wodehouse
fans say tuck in and save rarest bacon The only way to save the bacon of the rare Berkshire pig is to turn more of the beasts into rashers, the PG Wodehouse Society says. The breed's numbers include the prizewinning sow Empress of Blandings, the object of Lord Emsworth's affections in several Wodehouse novels. The pig's future can be assured, the society says, only if people can be persuaded to embrace what has become known as the Emsworth Paradox – eat more of them. It is thought that there are only about 400 Berkshires left in Britain and they are considered vulnerable by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. "The Emsworth Paradox is the only way to guarantee that there will be a Berkshire pig available when our grandchildren feel the need to scratch a broad back with a pensive stick," Hilary Bruce, chairman of the PG Wodehouse Society, said. The society hopes to boost demand for Berkshires and thereby encourage more farmers to rear them. At present they are bred on only 20 farms. The Berkshire's decline is largely attributed to the Howitt report, produced by the government in the 1950s, which recommended that British farmers should focus on just three breeds of pig – the British Landrace, the Large White and the Welsh – to increase the productivity of pig farming. The strategy was largely successful but resulted in a decline in the number of Britain's rarer breeds. In her 1861 cookery book, Mrs Beeton describes the meat of the Berkshire as having "a very fine texture, which gives it that melt-in-the-mouth quality. The pig, say its supporters, has many other fine attributes in addition to its meat. Vicki Mills, vice-chairman of the Berkshire Pig Breeders Club, believes that Berkshires have a "certain confidence about them", likening them to "the sort of child who walks into a room and expects to be liked by everyone". ********************************************************************************* HOW TO COOK Maggie Todd, who keeps Britain's largest herd of Berkshires, at Smalliconbe Farm, near Honiton, Devon, says: "To get the best out of a joint of Berkshire, dry the rind of a leg or loin of pork with kitchen towel, score it and rub in some Maldon salt and fresh rosemary. Roast the joint fat side up on a bed of onions on a trivet or in a roasting tray in a medium oven for 1 hr to 11/2 hr. The crackling should be really hard and crunchy. ********************************************************************************* The charms of the Berkshire were certainly evident to Lord Emsworth. "The Empress was a great solace to him" Mrs Bruce said. "Whenever Lord Emsworth's sister and his sons were giving him a hard time he would retire to the pigsty and drape himself bonelessly over the fence to listen to the Empress eating." The Empress, who repaid Lord Emsworth's efforts by winning the Fat Pig Prize at the Shropshire Agricultural Show three times, was described by Wodehouse as "a captive balloon with ears and a tail; as nearly circular as a pig can be without bursting". Mrs Mills said: "We wouldn't want them quite as fat as that these days. "We want the succulence and the creaminess for good crackling, but if you wheeled the Empress into a show ring now she would probably be regarded as too big. Fat is just not fashionable – witness the fact that we no longer have fat-stock shows at meat markets." THANK
YOU, MR McCRUM, Robert McCrum’s biography Wodehouse – A Life, published by Viking, costs £20 and is 530 pages long. Is it too expensive? No, it isn’t. Is it too long? Well, Wodehouse lived for 93 years and wrote for 75 of them. Is it any good? Yes, it’s good, it’s very good. I have read many of the Press reviews, and each reviewer seems to feel he must point out some weakness or another. Well, perhaps that is their job. I read the book from another point of view. I have written about Wodehouse, read every biography of him and, putting it bluntly, I reckon I know more about him than most people do. I went through the book expecting to find certain areas overlooked, the odd gap, the occasional misinterpretation. I found a couple of typos, a couple of fictional names wrong – but I learned much more than I ever thought I would. I have something over a thousand pages of notes on Wodehouse, and realizing Mr. McCrum must have had a similar information overload, I am full of admiration for the way he dealt with it. The book is well-written, balanced, comprehensive, accurate and courteous. I use the word ‘courteous’ since Mr McCrum took the time – a lot of time – to talk to people like Tony Ring, Murray Hedgcock, Iain Sproat, myself and many others, learned from all of us, used what we told him and punctiliously acknowledges our assistance in the book. It is a small point but his approach proved well worthwhile. The result is an enormous amount of information from a great many sources; an awesome amount of material which is handled remarkably well. I could argue that Mr McCrum exaggerated the effects of Wodehouse’s deprived childhood, since I am of an age when many children had the same experience. But his view is a valid one, and I have always maintained, as he does, that Dulwich was Wodehouse’s real boyhood ‘home’. Mr McCrum has managed to avoid the trap other biographers fall into, the temptation to quote Wodehouse’s ‘funniest bits’. His task was to write an account of Wodehouse’s life, not of his literary achievements, and he has done so with a remarkable wealth of precise detail; it could easily become tedious but does not do so. My speciality has been to find the originals of Wodehouse’s characters and locations. Mr McCrum mentions the fact/fiction connections when it is appropriate, but sticks firmly to his task of recounting what Wodehouse did in his long life, who he did it with – and why he did it. Whether he is correct in all his surmises is clearly impossible to judge. All I would say is that, with some very minor reservations, I think McCrum has got nearer than anyone else in describing how Wodehouse ticked. I also admire the thumbnail descriptions of the people Wodehouse knew. Perhaps it is from Mr McCrum’s journalistic training that Guy Bolton, Herbert Westbrook, and Bill Townend are described in superb single introductory sentences, while we learn much more about such shadowy figures as Bobby Denby and Ethel’s secretary in Hollywood. I have no hesitation in saying I think no biographer will ever give us a fuller account of Wodehouse’s life. Years ago, when I met Guy and Virginia Bolton, I asked them about Wodehouse’s famous ‘one wild oat’ mentioned in Bring On The Girls. They confirmed the incident, they confirmed what McCrum says, that Ethel blamed Guy Bolton for encouraging Wodehouse, but neither could remember who the girl was. I’ve wondered about her for 30 years – McCrum names her on page 128. Now, that really is research. If you want to know about Wodehouse’s life – buy the book! On 12.12.04 the Mail on Sunday Best Christmas Reading List offered (including that shot of PGW at the wheel): John Mortimer - The funniest writer, the greatest inventor of comic plots, the man Evelyn Waugh called the greatest novelist of the 20th Century, comes sparklingly to life in Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum. Wodehouse emerges as the eternal schoolboy who couldn't take anything, even the Second World War, entirely seriously. His comic and completely harmless broadcasts from Berlin to America caused him to be denounced as a traitor by William Connor, the Daily Mirror journalist. In spite of this, Wodehouse invited Connor to lunch when they met in America aftter the war. A charming book. Robert Harris - The book I most enjoyed as a perfect combination of subject and author, was Robert McCrum's Wodehouse: A Life. The subject, for the obvious reason that he was a comic genius, and almost every page has some gem from Wodehouse, who started writing when he was five ("before that, I loafed"). And the author of this biography was very much the right man for the job - a novelist, publisher and literary editor, who was able to bring to life the whole business of the book world, as well as giving sympathetic treatment to PGW's undeniable peculiarities. Top-hole stuff. Wodehouse:
A Life. By Robert McCrum A GOOD test of almost any book is to ask whether one would not bebetter off reading a work by PG Wodehouse, and the answer, in this reviewer's opinion, is nearly always "Yes." Robert McCrum, however, has written a book that provokes the answer "Perhaps not." This is high praise indeed. In many respects Wodehouse was a deeply ordinary man. Born, in 1881, into a "good" family of colonial administrators, he was brought up in England, largely under the auspices of nannies, relations and schoolmasters. Between the ages of three and 15, he saw his parents, who were doing their bit for the empire in Hong Kong, for a total of barely six months. Starved of maternal affection, he grew to treat emotions as dangerous but discovered that sport, and animals, could be substitutes of a kind. Fortunately, school, in particular his public (ie, secondary) school, Dulwich College, was wonderful. Here, for six happy years, he learnt classics, developed a passion for grammar and became something of an athlete. But he emerged a shy young man with few friends, whose hopes of going on to Oxford were dashed when his father, somewhat inexplicably, pleaded poverty. Instead, Wodehouse entered a bank, which he loathed. The very unordinary aspect of Wodehouse's character was his response to an upbringing that was quite typical for young men of his class and circumstances. Instead of a conventional marriage and a conventional career, or even a conventional death in the first world war, he turned to writing, first about the things he knew well – school, life in a bank – then increasingly about an invented version of the Edwardian world in which he had spent his formative years. This imaginary world was the one that Wodehouse was, in many respects, to inhabit for the rest of his life, and that was to give so much pleasure to his millions of readers. About most things, and most people, Wodehouse was detached. The exceptions were, first, writing, which was perhaps his greatest love. The second was Ethel, his wife, to whom he was devoted. The third was Leonora, her daughter, whom he adopted, and adored. Leonora's death – in 1944, after a routine operation – was the private blow from which he never recovered. And by then Wodehouse had already suffered a devastating public blow, having done the "loony thing" that was to keep him out of England for the last 34 years of his life and blight his reputation for a generation. This was his readiness to make five broadcasts from Nazi Germany in 1941 about his experiences as an internee. The hardest tasks for any Wodehouse biographer are the handling of his love life and the degree of culpability to assign to the broadcasting affair. Never flinching from either subject, though never dwelling unduly on the (absent) sex, Mr McCrum draws a picture that is entirely convincing. Wodehouse was clearly capable of love, and it was heterosexual, not homosexual love. But sex was not his thing: he and Ethel had separate bedrooms from the outset and, so far as is known, the pattern was broken only once, when a mouse ran across Ethel's bed in the night, prompting her to call him in to repel boarders. Just as Wodehouse was evidently asexual, so he was "aworldly", that is, neither worldly nor unworldly, simply uninterested in what was going on around him. He was never completely cut off from reality: he was quite capable, as a young man, of making money doing the conventional stuff of journalism – writing about events – and even in the 1930s he could see the ridiculousness, if not the odiousness, of fascism. But he could not take international politics seriously: it was all a sort of game, of the kind played at school, and a war was simply an away game. Though neither wholly innocent nor wholly naive, he could not see the folly, the sheer bad taste, of making frivolous broadcasts from Berlin when the concentration camps were filling up and his country faced defeat at the hands of the Germans. But did that make Wodehouse pro-Nazi, a collaborator or a traitor? No, no, no; just a fool. All this Mr McCrum deals with persuasively. If he never quite makes the reader love Wodehouse, that is his subject's fault. Wodehouse was good-natured, eager to please and usually liked. But he was also buttoned up, money-conscious, capable of strange ingratitude and, most disappointingly, never at all funny in conversation. Mr McCrum emphasises Wodehouse's under-appreciated contribution to musical comedy, and of course he pays just tribute to his much better known contribution to literature. If, at the end of it all, the reader still wonders at the link between character and genius, it is the wonderment of awe, not of incomprehension. This biography is unlikely to be bettered. From
Time Europe To
millions of readers in scores of languages around the
world, the name PG Wodehouse evokes a mirthful Edwardian
realm of hapless dukes, fearsome maiden aunts and one
very tolerant, quietly competent valet. Wodehouse, who
died in 1975 at the age of 93, remains one of the
best-loved English writers. Nearly all of his 100-odd
novels and story collections are still in print.
Wodehouse magazines and fan clubs dot the globe. Hardly a
decade passes without a new movie or play inspired by his
creations: the dim but affable Bertie Wooster, his
long-suffering gentleman's gentleman Jeeves and their
screwball cohorts at Blandings Castle and the Drones
Club. |