If only he had Jeeves to advise him

If you’re trying to evoke the alternative universe that is the prose of P.G. Wodehouse, there is perhaps no better place to start than the passage in which Bertie Wooster’s schoolmate, Gussie Fink-Nottle, awards prizes to the eager scholars at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. It is, thinks Wodehouse biographer Robert McCrum, “one of the funniest 30 pages ever written.”

How to describe them?

Well, the effects build slowly, so you’d really have to start from the beginning.

After you’d introduced the main characters -- that would be the eternally feckless Bertie and his infinitely resourceful manservant, Jeeves -- you’d need to explain how the former’s shocking taste in formal wear creates a disastrous rift between them. You’d have to convey some impression of the thickening Wodehousian plot, perhaps mentioning the pastoral scene in which young Tuppy Glossop tries to lay homicidal hands on the Wooster person. You’d be obliged to narrate the bungled proposal of marriage by the aforementioned Fink-Nottle. You’d have to ...

But stop. Far better simply to press a copy of “Right Ho, Jeeves” on the person you’re attempting to convert.

“There are very few compelling reasons to be glad that one was born in the twentieth century,” New Yorker critic Anthony Lane has written, “and most of them are curative: heart transplants, the polio vaccine, the look on Grace Kelly’s face. Then, there is Wodehouse.”

Born in 1881, in Guildford, England, Wodehouse turned out almost 100 books before expiring on Long Island, N.Y., in 1975. Most are still in print.

To read the new “Wodehouse: A Life” and to chat with the biographer, McCrum, is to be reminded just how alternative the universe Wodehouse created really is. Set in gentlemen’s clubs and on country estates, populated by innocents like Bertie and their ferocious female relatives, it doesn’t even much resemble the genuine England of the Edwardian era, let alone the present day. How does this antique blighter hold up so well in 2005?

One answer is the timeless characters he created. Nearly a century after they began to spring full-grown from Wodehouse’s pen, Bertie, Jeeves, Aunt Agatha, Psmith and Fink-Nottle appear to have at least a sporting chance of living forever.

Yet there’s another essential aspect of Wodehouse that may help explain his continuing appeal. The man did his best to pretend that the 20th century never happened.

“He refuses -- he absolutely refuses -- to face reality,” McCrum says. “Reality is bad.”

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Unfazed by war

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronunciation, WOOD-house; nickname, “Plum”) lived his adult life in the century that invented large-scale trench warfare, the Final Solution and weapons of mass destruction.

The most surprising thing about Wodehouse, however, is that he largely succeeded -- with one traumatic exception -- in withdrawing from the real world.

As young Plum was about to graduate from boarding school, his father informed him there was no money to send him to college and arranged for him to join a bank. Not good. Plum had literary ambitions. By sleeplessly churning out stories and articles on the side, he established himself as a writer and quit his job.

By August 1914, at 32, Wodehouse was moving back and forth across the Atlantic, writing fiction and theatrical lyrics. When World War I broke out, beginning the unprecedented slaughter that would traumatize Europe, he was in New York. “Unmoved by this excitement, and working as hard as ever,” McCrum writes, “Wodehouse stayed on in America.”

He rarely mentioned the war. He married a “noisy and demonstrative” widow named Ethel Wayman who took over the management of his life. He wrote “Something Fresh,” introducing the Earl of Emsworth. Wodehouse describes the master of Blandings Castle -- whose sunny temperament has often been compared to his own -- as follows:

“Other people worried about all sorts of things -- strikes, wars, suffragettes, diminishing birth-rates, the growing materialism of the age, and a score of similar subjects. Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth century’s specialty. Lord Emsworth never worried.”

During the war, Wodehouse also invented Bertie and Jeeves. Bertie believes he’s a man of the world, but he’s really a childlike figure who constantly finds himself in the soup (or “waist high in the gumbo and about to sink without a trace,” as he says). It is Jeeves’ job to glide noiselessly to his employer’s side and apply his oversize brain to the task of fishing him out.

Had Bertie been a real Englishman of the time, as George Orwell once observed, he’d likely have died in the trenches around 1915. Jeeves was a real Englishman: Wodehouse borrowed the name from a Warwickshire cricketer he’d seen play. The real Jeeves was killed on the Somme.

McCrum found no evidence that Wodehouse ever noticed this.

Life was good and getting better. Never mind the Depression and the rise of fascism: The ‘20s and ‘30s were a Wodehouse golden age. He was writing furiously and selling in the millions. Broadway had beckoned and he was concocting musical comedies with the likes of Jerome Kern.

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Right man for the job

When McCrum was 42, a London man of letters, newly married, something happened to him that would never happen to a Wodehouse character. He had a stroke and nearly died.

This was nine years ago, long before he signed on to do “Wodehouse: A Life.” He wrote a memoir of his experience, called “My Year Off.” Looking at the opening chapter recently, he was surprised to find that he’d made reference to his future biographical subject.

“P.G. Wodehouse, one of my favorite writers, once said that ‘There are two ways of writing,’ ” he had written. One of these is “ ‘a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.’ ”

Strokes, he’d gone on to inform his readers apologetically, did not lend themselves to the musical comedy approach.

McCrum still has a noticeable limp. He can’t type with his left hand, so he writes out first drafts longhand, just as Wodehouse did. Before the stroke, he’d been editor in chief at Faber & Faber. Now he is literary editor of London’s Observer, where in 1999 he wrote an article lauding Wodehouse and lamenting the lack of “a properly researched biography of the great man.”

A week later, he had an offer to write one.

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A slight misjudgment

Wodehouse was living in France, for tax reasons, when the war broke out. Somehow -- he was deep in his writing; he hated to change his routine; he was worried about his beloved Pekingese -- he neglected to get out of the way of the German army, winding up in a series of internment camps.

“Am quite happy here and have thought out a new novel,” he wrote to his literary agent from one. Happy -- but oblivious to the realities of war. When a friendly camp commander asked him if he’d like to do some radio broadcasts to his American readers (this was before the United States entered the war), he foolishly agreed.

The broadcasts were light, humorous and politically tone-deaf. They put him so deep in the gumbo that he never fully emerged.

After the war, he permanently settled in America. By the time the British forgave him sufficiently to dub him Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, he was too old to travel home for the ceremony.

He never quite figured it out -- but for once, he faced reality squarely. “I haven’t a twinge of self-pity,” he wrote a friend. “I made an ass of myself, and must pay the penalty.”