Quotations from P G Wodehouse are copyright of, and reprinted by permission of, the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate © 2012 The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

Finding God and other investigations

by Tim Andrew

Judging by the programme – sorry, Order of Service – Saturday was going to need stamina. Wall-to-wall talks about sums it up, with the ever popular Business Meeting offered in the way of light relief after lunch. Those who had stayed up until the end of the Clean Bright Entertainment the night before were likely to find staying awake for the entire proceeding a serious challenge (one to which, I confess, your correspondent did not quite rise, but I won’t hint – I hope – at where I lapsed).

For those of us who have spent a fair part of our working lives living – or perhaps more accurately, dying – through days of endless presentations, Saturday’s programme could have looked pretty terrifying. But seasoned revellers at the Wodehouse Society’s conventions know differently. The mixture is always entertaining: there will be pure frothy fun, serious scholarship and, usually, something for the real anorak: stuff that might have as its pivotal revelation the fact that in the first Penguin printing of Sam the Sudden a typographical error on page 129 led to a semi-colon being replaced by a comma, making possession of a copy a must-have for a particularly fevered kind of mentality.

It's all underpinned by words from the Great Man, of course, so none of it is dull.

And there is always something completely unlooked-for that is unexpected and absolutely brilliant. This year it came in the first talk, from Wendell Verrill, who has spent the last 40 years earning the weekly envelope, so far as they get one, as a Catholic priest. The title, "Wodehouse and God", was not, it has to be said, to my eye promising. How wrong I was! Armed with a wonderful sonorous voice that could amply fill the largest cathedral effortlessly, personal warmth to match, a terrific sense of humour and a tendency to wander down a few by-ways, he had his audience in tucks of laughter.

We even got onto a life of celibacy (“... and they call the Pope that thought of it ‘The Great'?!”). We listened hard and laughed in equal measure as we were told the number of biblical references in Cocktail Time (52 if you must know) and heard about the rhythms of the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in Wodehouse’s writing, to say nothing of the consistent triumph of Good over Evil. Wendell concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that although "the jury is out”, he felt that deep down Wodehouse was a believer. Hm, well, maybe. But the most amazing start to the day: a combination of serious mental stimulation and laughing until it hurts is not the norm at 9am on a Saturday, and I could only feel sympathy for the person who was following, since the task seemed impossible.

Not impossible, as it turned out. Margaret Slythe’s talk on "The Dulwich Factor" – the impact of his time at public school on Wodehouse – was different in tone but in no way less riveting. Of course, Margaret and Wendell have an unfair advantage over most speakers, each having spent their professional lives keeping potentially mutinous audiences in order (congregations and schoolboys, respectively).

In particular, Margaret talked about the effect of being a younger sibling to an extremely able older brother, the impact on PGW of the decision not to send him to Oxford (“up there with the death of Leonora”) and above all the influence of Gilkes, the Master of Dulwich. Gilkes’s personal interest in Wodehouse, his skill as a teacher and the kind of school he created (“the captains”, i.e. the boys, “ran the teams”) had a profound effect on Wodehouse’s life and his writing; he never lost his love of the place.

After such a brilliant start, I still felt that those following were going to find it hard to match the standard set. Although my doubts about Wodehouse and God had been shown spectacularly to be ill-founded, I couldn’t help wondering about Telegraph, Telephone, Tell a Wooster: The Use of Mass Communication in Wodehouse. It seemed to be one of those topics that could go either way. Well, we were never to find out. The speaker had scratched his nomination at the last minute (coughing all night in his stable, or some such). As a late substitute, we therefore had the treat of hearing from Sophie Ratcliffe, who is editing a new edition of PGW’s letters. She told us how she was going about her research and asked if we had any thoughts about how the letters should be organised: thematically, chronologically, etc. She also promised to tell us about Wodehouse’s attitude to nudity ...

After coffee we were into some TWS stalwarts, beginning with Brian Taves and "Hollywood Adapts Wodehouse". Brian talked of the fact that PGW was writing musical comedy in the era of silent films, and that the ‘talkies’ did not take advantage of his dialogue. Indeed, the adaptation of Wodehouse’s writing for the screen was done largely without his involvement.

Brian was followed by David Jasen, PGW’s first biographer and bibliographer. David first met Wodehouse when he (David) was 20 years old. We enjoyed personal reminiscences and insights. David described PGW as a writer of serials before World War II and a novelist after, with Bill Townend as supplier of the best plots.

Any thoughts of a post-lunch snooze would have been dismissed from the mind of anyone who had looked at the programme, for Norman Murphy followed the Business Meeting. Norman somehow conveys the impression that his enthusiasm for all knowledge and the making of connections within it knows no bounds. Nowhere is his passion more evident than in identifying the real places and people behind Wodehouse’s stories. Such lively, cheerful and infectious excitement was the ideal antidote to any thoughts of slumber. With the merest hint of a plug for his new book(s) and Elin twiddling the knobs on the magic lantern, we were treated to an illustrated talk of real places and their fictional counterparts. The climax was evidence that it was indeed George Grossmith’s stage ‘dude’ that had made Bertie Wooster possible, if he wasn’t the exact prototype.

The programme organisers, in their cunning way, had clearly planned to keep the audience on its toes by ensuring that each talk should be as big a contrast as possible with the one before. Hence, I assume, Norman was followed by Dan Cohen’s "Gorilla My Dreams". Whilst it might be going too far to accuse Dan of having a gorilla fixation, regular attenders at TWS conventions know that the smallest excuse is enough for Dan to dust off the all-over hairpiece and appear as his alter-ego Cyril Waddesley-Davenport in gorilla mode. But not this time. There was Dan himself, not a picture, in white hair and beard, with not a physical hint of the sub-species Gorilla gorilla gorilla (to use the full Linnaean trinomial), to be discerned.

There were those unkind souls who attributed this to the fact that at the Hollywood convention the gorilla-suit-clad Dan had accidentally but spectacularly disappeared off the back of the stage as though he had dropped through a trap door, a disaster plainly visible to the audience but not to the other performers further downstage, who became conscious that they had lost their grip and were failing to hold the house’s attention but could not fathom why, adding in no small measure to the entertainment of the latter.

But no, Dan’s enthusiasm for things gorilla, and in particular the going about suited up as one, is clearly unimpaired by the experience. Among his revelations was the astonishing quantity of gorilla imitation undertaken at the behest of Hollywood and the existence of National Gorilla Suit Day (“Wear your gorilla suit with pride or the terrorists have won”).

Next was a piece of delightful whimsy from Anne Cotton. Having asked herself the question:”If such-and-such a Wodehouse character were a dog, which breed would he/she have been?”, she treated us to the answers, with pictures to help those of us not absolutely au courant with pooch minutiae. By way of examples: Bertie Wooster was deemed an Irish Setter; Constance Keeble a Rotweiler; the aunts Agatha and Dahlia a Giant Schnauzer and a Basset Hound, respectively; Lord Emsworth a retired Greyhound: and The Efficient Baxter – after consideration and rejection of the Pit Bull – a Short-Haired Fox Terrier. And for Wodehouse himself? Anne suggested a Pug.

Next up came nothing short of an interloper: David Trumbull talked about Robert C Benchley (no, no, NOT the shark bloke, the other one: born in 1889, died in 1945; mate of Dorothy Parker; replaced PGW as Vanity Fair film critic; you know, THAT one). Benchley, we heard, was revered among professional and serious amateur writers alike. He was friendly with the writers and humorists of his time; nearly all crossed his path, including Wodehouse, no doubt, and he became something of a guru to them. So there were, of course, parallels and cross-references.

Finally we had the treat of Charles Gould talking on "The Discretions of Archie". Describing the activities of Archie as ‘indiscretions’, Charles told us, was a masterpiece of irony. This last was a word I didn’t think Americans knew, but when you see C Gould slated to perform, you know you are in for erudition of a high order, and he delivered in heaping measure.

Charles was not impressed with If I Were You. The old changeling plot had gone round and round the block with no freshness left after Fielding wrote Tom Jones. Wodehouse was described as beneath the spell of the powerful Russians, and indeed we had comparisons between passages from If I Were You and some of old pop Dostoevsky’s more cheerful output to make the point.

Interestingly, Wodehouse was working on Hot Water, his next book to be published, at the same time, but fortunately If I Were You seems to have purged him of his Russian leanings and he was back on form.

We had begun the day as we started: real mental stimulation from someone who knew his stuff, could assemble it and deliver it with panache, and all the way through we were laughing out loud.

In all a terrific day. I don’t know quite how The Wodehouse Society does it. By definition, we know they depend on volunteers to make presentations and the danger of falling foul of the literary equivalent of the Pegley-Bassingtons is pretty obvious, but somehow they never do. We enjoyed serious scholarship, knockabout fun and whimsy. All of it was enjoyable. And we laughed all the time. But then, as I said, we Wodehouseans are lucky: all we have to do is find an apposite quotation from the Great Man and let his words do the rest.