The regular Wodehouse evenings at the Savage Club are nothing if not erudite. They are many other things as well, but let that pass. The evening of 11^th February was no exception. The affable chap who was to give us the mid-evening talk, during which the barman can get his breath back, introduced himself as ‘a lapsed biologist’. Sadly this turned out to have nothing to do with discovering a debilitating allergy to newts. The title of the talk was: ‘Wodehouse and the Psychology of the Individual’. And the speaker was Tim Andrew, PG Wodehouse Society committee member and, in real life, a headmaster. So we were well prepared for a few severe words from the beak. He is also the organiser of the biennial Wodehouse dinners so he is an important person to keep in with.

His main disclaimer was that he was far from being a psychologist except, as he put it, ‘at the university of life that goes with being a teacher’. He said that he had pretended to study something called "The Psychology of Education" some 35 years previously. But, like most of his fellow students, had regarded it as optional.

‘When the dreaded day of the end of year exam loomed’, he told us, ‘our kindly tutor advised us that if we didn’t feel we knew the textbook answer to any of the questions, we should put our own ideas down. I have been following his advice ever since’, he said, and would be following it again through his talk.

The Andrew line on Wodehouse is that the reality of Wodehouse himself differed from the image handed down though his books. ‘We seem determined to perpetuate the view that Wodehouse was a sort of saint, unworldly to a fault, except of course that he had no faults, since he was practically perfect in every way, his sunny disposition untroubled by the normal tensions and strife of human relationships, untroubled indeed by the outside world.’

‘Well, phooey, say I,' said he. ‘Wodehouse was far from being the dumb brick he liked to present himself as. He may have been politically naïve and - after a year’s internment - out of touch with the world. An intensely private man, yes. A man who so valued his privacy that he created a persona to hide behind? Probably, and which public figures don’t do it? But unworldly in the sense that he was disconnected from the world? I think not.’

He directed us to his letters, and in particular one which Plum had written to Denis Mackail in 1953. ‘I find in this evening of my life,’ he wrote, ‘that my principal pleasure is in writing stinkers to people who attack me in the press. I sent Nancy Spain of the Daily Express a beauty. No answer, so I suppose it killed her. But what fun it is giving up trying to conciliate these lice. It suddenly struck me that they couldn’t possibly do me any harm, so now I am roaring like a lion. One yip out of any of the bastards and they get a beautifully phrased page of vitriol which will haunt them for the rest of their days …’

Andrew suggested that this letter illustrated the point that ‘the emotions expressed are very human, completely understandable, and perhaps not entirely saintly’. But, he said, this is obvious not only in private utterances but also in his published writings.

For example: ‘Poets as a class are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet’s eye as rolling in fine frenzy, from heaven to earth, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice, you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns.’

He referred us to The Little Nugget and, metaphorically pulling on the edges of his headmaster’s gown, told us that what Wodehouse had to say about the world of schools ‘still strike a chord in every staff common room in the land’. Referring to Mr Abney, the headmaster in the book, he quoted how Abney had ‘realised intuitively how excellent the discipline of work was for my soul, for the kindly man allowed me to do not only my own, but most of his as well … the headmasters of private schools are divided into two classes: the workers and the runners-up-to-London. Mr Abney belonged to the latter class. Indeed, I doubt if a finer representative of the class could have been found in the length and breadth of southern England. London drew him like a magnet.’

At this stage we should point out that Andrew had prefaced his talk with an apology that he would have to leave immediately after his talk because he was supposed to be at a parents’ meeting back in Buckinghamshire which had, at this point, already started.

He continued with a short exposition of the heart of his argument. ‘My contention,’ he said, ‘is that you can’t write anything which grips unless you understand human nature in all of its manifestations, and you certainly can’t write humour that hits the bull’s-eye as often and as unerringly as Wodehouse’s unless you have real insight into the foibles of mankind. And, manifestly, this insight is evident in his writing.’

He illustrated this with the description of Lady Julia Fish from Heavy Weather and of Monty Bodkin: ‘The proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company could not have put into words his ideal of a young journalist, but it would have been something rather shaggy, preferably with spectacles, certainly not wearing spats. And while Monty Bodkin was not actually spatted at the moment, there did undoubtedly hover about him a sort of spat aura.’

He took us through Bertie Wooster’s fear of a meeting with Florence Craye: ‘The root of the trouble was that she was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove.’

‘The serious point,' Andrew said, ‘is that at the heart of the joke is a kernel of hard reality. Which of us does not, at least deep down, entirely understand and identify with Gussie’s diffidence when it comes to declaring his love for Madeline?' We could all recognise, in our own lives, the same feelings, even though we might not have carried them through to such daft conclusions. ‘In the context of a Wodehouse story,' Andrew suggested, ‘we empathise with the feelings of the character, and without that firm root in reality, the farce would not work.’

Warming to his task he took us through the synopsis, as given by Madeline Basset in The Mating Season of ‘Mervyn Keane, Clubman’, the latest effort from Rosie M Banks. It was lengthy and excruciating and punctuated with explosive laughter from the gathered members in the Savage Club. Then he gave us Bertie’s response: ‘Well it was difficult, of course, to know quite what comment to make. I said "Oh, ah!", but I felt at the time it could have been improved on. The fact is, I was a bit stunned. I had always known in a sort of vague, general way that Mrs Bingo wrote the world’s worst tripe - Bingo generally changes the subject nervously if anyone mentions the little woman’s output - but I had never supposed her capable of bilge like this.’

Andrew’s point was that the exposition of the awful book was as a sharp parody of the plot of a pulp, romantic novel, ‘just brilliant’. ‘These days’, he said, ‘we’d call it satire.’

Then he took up the subject of the names of characters in the Wodehouse oeuvre. ‘I think the quality of the names an author gives his characters is a real test,’ he said, ‘and Wodehouse passes it brilliantly.’

Andrew was now in the home straight and, as all headmasters should, he summed it all up and hammered it to us in such a fashion that we would never forget it.

‘Of course,' he said, ‘Wodehouse did indeed create a world which is unreal in that, however convoluted the plot and severe the preliminary vicissitudes, the poor win the capital to buy a share in the onion soup bar which sets them on the path to riches, the deserving young man marries the chorus girl and the stinkers get their comeuppance. But, he was able to get us to suspend our disbelief and revel in his world because fundamentally he was an extremely sharp observer of the human race. His facility with the English language was such that he could have written in any style he liked. It’s just our luck that he decided to use his insights and his abilities to entertain us. I could think of lots of words to describe Wodehouse: given the 90-odd books, the short stories, the plays, the lyrics and the rest, "driven" is one word which comes to mind. I am sure he was a nice man; his kindness to animals and his aversion to giving offence are widely acknowledged. He was no doubt a very private man, and why not? But as Robert McCrum said in the recent documentary, he was neither dumb nor a brick. And, UNWORLDLY? Please!’

And with that point hit hard home like a dart in the bull’s-eye and with the applause ringing in his ears he made his apologies and raced off to deal with mutinous Buckinghamshire parents.

After that there were a few of what the chairman referred to as parish notices. He drew our attention to a recent bequest to the Savage Club. It was a very solid stone tobacco jar, full of a very fragrant mixture of pipe tobaccos. Colonel Murphy raised the hefty object aloft. ‘Just the thing for felling diamond thieves,’ he said. Tony Ring told us of the prospect of future events such as golf in Exeter and pig-racing in Leatherhead. And then we all reverted to the bar and gentle conversation. All of it based on human nature in all of its manifestations.