P.G. Wodehouse

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (Guildford, October 15, 1881-Southampton, New York, February 14, 1975) was a British humorist who enjoyed extraordinary success in life and continues to being read. Recognized for the literary quality of his works, and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, his admirers include Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Henry Asquith and Wittgenstein, among others.

Biography

He was a prolific writer, author of more than 90 narrative books (70 novels and 20 collections with a total of 200 stories), another hundred short stories in magazines, 400 articles, 19 plays and 250 song lyrics for 33 Broadway musicals (by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, etc.) as well as film adaptations and screenplays´

He was the son of Eleanor Deane, of a landed family, and Henry Ernest Wodehouse (1845-1929), who was a British judge in Hong Kong. The Wodehouses had settled in Norfolk for many centuries. His great-grandfather, the Reverend Philip Wodehouse, was the second son of Parliamentarian Sir Armine Wodehouse, 5th Baronet (of Wilberhall), posthumous son of John Wodehouse, 1st Baron Wodehouse, ancestor of the Earls of Kimberley. His godfather was Pelham von Donop, after whom he was named. His lineage is ancient: it goes back to no less than 1227, when a Sir Bertram de Wodehouse fought with Edward I against the Scots.

She lived until she was two years old in Hong Kong, where her father was a British government judge. Returning to London, he grew up with his two older brothers Philip Peveril and Ernest Armine practically as an orphan until he was fifteen, as his parents continued to reside in Hong Kong, under separate family guardianships. Despite this, in Over seventy , Wodehouse wrote that he lacked the three "advantages" that he lacked. fundamentals for an autobiography: having an eccentric father, a miserable childhood and a lousy memory of public school .On the contrary, he stated that his childhood was as normal "as a pudding of rice & # 34;. However, the absence of his mother is reflected in his copious production: in his work there are no mothers, but aunts, often fearsome and formidable aunts... And there are also few fathers and their relationships with their children they are sparse and funny. The literary editor of The Times A. P. Ryan suggested that all the authority figures at Wodehouse, including Jeeves, were real or disguised aunts.

On the other hand, his biographer Barry Phelps claimed that he created his own myth: he posed as a somewhat retarded and borderline Lord Emsworth (the main character of the Blandings Castle cycle), when in fact he was much closer to Jeeves or the false goofball Bertie Wooster and he was much more intelligent, complex and cultured than he pretended to be: he knew Latin and Greek and classical literatures perfectly and read a lot of French. Thanks to that fake naive disguise, he was able to concentrate on what he really liked: writing.

Having studied at Dulwich College, his first paid article was "Aspects of Game Captaincy". He was unable to follow his brother to Oxford, because the family finances began to get tight. So, instead of a university degree, in September 1900 he reluctantly took a job at the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. To disassociate himself from that job that he did not like at all, he began to write about sports and humorous stories in the press and magazines. Although his father did not approve of his literary inclinations, he continued his career in 1903 publishing a series of school stories that were collected in The Captain, a boys' magazine, where Psmith, one of of its most important characters. His first collaboration in The Globe dates from 1901 and the following year the humor magazine Punch published an article of his. Between 1903 and 1909 he worked for The Globe writing a humorous column, "By the Way". In 1906, while working as a lyricist for Seymour Hicks at the Aldwych Theatre, in London's West End, he coincided in the play The Beauty of Bath with Jerome Kern.

A great sportsman, he represented Dulwich College in boxing and won Blue in cricket and rugby, sports that, along with golf (at Eighteen Holes, for example), figure directly or indirectly in many of his stories. In 1905 he debuted, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, in the Authors Cricket Club, a cricket team made up of British writers that disappeared at the outbreak of the First World War.

New York

Although he had already visited New York in 1904, it was during another visit in 1909 that Wodehouse sold "two short stories to Cosmopolitan and Collier's magazines for a total sum of $500-much more than ever before." cattle”, so he decided to leave his position at The Globe and settle in New York. In 1914 he married Ethel Newton, a widow he had met in New York two months earlier and whose daughter, Leonora, was adopted by him. The following year he was hired as a drama critic by Vanity Fair magazine.

By then his first novels A Prefect's Uncle (1903) and Mike (1909) had met with some success, and from 1909 Wodehouse lived between Paris and USA; His reputation as a humorous novelist was established with his work Psmith in the City (1910), the first of a series of novels with this protagonist. He maintained his enormous popularity through almost a hundred novels in which a series of curious and very British characters (Psmith, lord Emsworth, Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Mulliner, Ukridge among others) were reiterated, almost young people always idle and disoriented by the absurd and comical situations in which their Machiavellian author placed them, within a formalized London and Edwardian cosmos in which the rigid and class-oriented Victorian system was painfully thawing. It encircled Saint James Street on the east, Hyde Park Corner on the west, Oxford Street on the north, and Picadilly on the south, with excursions "to country districts, to cottages in Shropshire and other delightful counties." In 1919 he began what would be his most famous series of novels and stories, with My Man Jeeves ; this character, Jeeves, a shrewd valet who always gets his reckless Mr. Bertie Wooster out of trouble, almost always the victim of some conspiracy by his Aunt Agatha to marry him off or get him out of idleness, had already appeared, like Bertie, in a short story within the collection entitled The Man with Two Left Feet ("The man with two left feet") from 1917. From the entire series, in which curious supporting characters such as Bingo Little, Anatole the cook, the club "Los Zánganos", "Tuppy" Glossop and Aunt Dahlia and her grumpy husband of hers, may be singled out from Very Good, Jeeves (1930).

Wodehouse was also the author, as a lyricist, of numerous musical comedies, along with Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, among which O, Kay (1926) and Rosalie (1928), which were staged mainly in the United States, the country where he carried out a large part of his production.

France and World War II

In 1934, already with great success as a writer, and to avoid double taxation on his income, Wodehouse moved to live in France. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, rather than return to the UK, he decided to stay at his house on the coast at Le Touquet. In the summer of that year, Wodehouse had gone to Oxford to be made an honorary doctor, and shortly after his return to Le Touquet, the German authorities interned him, aged nearly sixty, as an "enemy alien". », first in Belgium, then in Upper Silesia (now Toszek in Poland).

While Wodehouse was hospitalized, his stepdaughter Leonora died. Released after a year, shortly before his sixtieth birthday, Wodehouse stayed at the famous Hotel Adlon in Berlin and was asked to make a series of five radio broadcasts for his fans in the United States. Thinking that it would be a good opportunity to show that, despite having been a prisoner of war, he had known how to keep his morale high (“keep a stiff upper lip”).

The British government, despite having a report written by a senior MI5 official exonerating him of treason, which was not published until after his death, denounced him as a Nazi collaborator, and the media continued to accusing him of treason for a long time. Some public libraries banned his books and even some prominent authors, such as A. A. Milne and Sean O'Casey, harshly criticized him. Other authors, however, such as Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, this The latter in a well-known essay entitled "In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse" (July 1945) came to his defense.

Wodehouse, disgusted by his treatment by his country, never returned to the UK, and in 1955 he obtained US citizenship.

Work

Among his most important novels are: Love and Chickens (1906, Ukridge's first appearance), The Man with Two Left Feet (1917), The inimitable Jeeves (1923, first appearance of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster), Onward Jeeves! (1925), Jim of Piccadilly (1928), Mr. Mulliner Speaks (1929), Lots of Money (1931) and the series that begins with Blandings Castle (1935), in the which describes with fine irony rural, traditional and aristocratic, innocent and optimistic Edwardian England, which the author liked so much.

Stephen Fry, starred with Hugh Laurie in the television series Jeeves and Wooster, wrote in his foreword to the anthology What ho! The best of P.G. Wodehouse:

Their world of disdainful and disapproving aunts, severe butlers fond of making snails, impatient uncles, sporty-looking girls, young stunned who throw themselves at other bread buns in the club eaters, but they blush and stutter in the presence of people of the opposite sex..., can be presented as proof of finding us before the world of a preclassed man. The beds, in Wodehouse, are not scenes of passions and carnal desires, but a very purposely furniture to hide you when they persecute you. Girls are angels of perfection, or marimachos of wild ideas, or severe institutrices committed to improving and educating all who are at their fingertips, or joyful sisters who pose no threat to the perfect peace that offers man the state of solitude. In the world of Wodehouse there is no place for poverty either. A guy may be out of white, because his aunt, guardian or father show remissions to drop the pasta and his friends are not likely to be able to get five pounds out of trouble to a comrade, but deprivation and misery are absent from the fun..

Wodehouse is a gifted writer, especially for the short story; His complex intrigues have an impeccable construction, almost mathematical, exact to the smallest detail, and the management of an inimitable style stands out in them, in which the special management of the contrast between vulgarity and finesse shines, a very particular irony and the mastery of literary parody, as well as bomb-proof optimism and joie de vivre. His hard-working translators into Spanish have been, among many others, Manuel Bosch Barrett, Luis Jordá, Carlos Botet, Emilio Bertel... P. G. Wodehouse is considered one of the best English humorists along with Jerome K. Jerome, Evelyn Waugh and Tom Sharpe. An edition of his complete works is practically impossible, since in more than seventy years of constant literary work (1902-1975) Wodehouse did not let a day go by without writing something, his books were published differently in England and in the United States, no longer with different titles, but with changes in the text that are sometimes very sensitive and many appeared in installments before becoming books, with changes between these versions, apart from the fact that some stories were also published separately or only in magazines and several are posthumous. He also wrote several times in collaboration and participated in plays and musicals, sometimes in adaptations of his own stories and adapting stories of others or collaborating on original works, and there is a large number of short plays, poems and miscellaneous that he published in magazines.

Publications in Spanish

• Bill's advent, 1947 (The Coming of Bill). Ed. José Janés

• Something fresh., 1947 (Something fresh). Ed. José Janés

• A child's groom, 1947 (The Little Nugget, 1913)

• Love and hens, 1959 (Love Among the Chickens, 1906). Madrid: Revista Literaria Novelas y Cuentos

• File the Indiscreet, 1946 (The Indiscretions of Archie, 1921). Ed. José Janés

• The Adventures of Sally, 1947 (The Adventures of Sally). Ed. José Janés

• An extravagant gentleman, 1946 (A Gentleman of Leisure)

• Ukridge Tales; edited as well Ukridge's wild adventures

• Leave it to Psmith.1944 (Leave to Psmith). Col. Paper monopoly, Ed. José Janés

• A dineral1944 (Big Money)

• Eighteen holesEd. Plaza & Janés. 1980

• Money in the bank, 1947 (Money in the Bank). Ed. José Janés

• Money MolestoEd. Plaza & Janés. 1982

• Cute, rich and distinguished 1944 (Hot Water). Ed. José Janés

• Guillermo the conqueror 1945 (Bill, the Conqueror). Ed. José Janés

• The man with two left feet 1943, (The Man with Two Left Feet). Ed. José Janés

• Jeeves, you're my man," 1947, anthology All right, Jeeves!, Thank you, Jeeves!, Go ahead Jeeves!, The Wooster Code, All right, Jeeves. and The inimitable JeevesEd. José Janés

• Youngsters with boots, 1947 (Young Men in Spats). Col. Paper monopoly, Ed. José Janés

• Matinal jubile, 1946 (Joy in the Morning)

• Hollywood Madness(The Old Reliable, 1951)

• Full moon, 1947 (Full Moon)

• Works by P. G. Wodehouse, 1960; collects 6 books from the saga Jeeves, 1923-1938 (All right, Jeeves! - Go ahead, Jeeves! - Thank you, Jeeves! - The Wooster Code - All right, Jeeves. - The inimitable Jeeves)

• A couple of singles1944, 1994 (The Small Bachelor)

• Poor, vague and optimist1944, Ukridge

• Psmith journalist 1944, 1947 and 1951 (Psmith Journalist). Col. Paper monopoly, Ed. José Janés

• Well, go!, 2004 (What Ho! The Best of P. G. Wodehouse).

• Sam, the witch, 1946 (Sam the Sudden).

• Miss in misfortune, 1944 (A Damsel in Distress, 1919)

• Fast service, 1947 (Quick Service)

• If I were you, 1950 (If I Were You)

• Uncle Fred in spring1943, 1948, 1994? (Uncle Fred in the Springtime, 1939)

• The man upstairsNovember 1947. Col. Paper monopoly, Ed. José Janés
• The luck of the Bodkin, 2006 (The Luck of the Bodkins). Col. Compact, Anagram. ISBN 978-84-339-1451-4.