Duke of Wooster-shire

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Wodehouse's heart was in musical comedy. He was writing lyrics for London's West End in his 20s, and by 1917, five shows featuring his lyrics were playing simultaneously on Broadway. Commuting to the U.S., Wodehouse collaborated with Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. "Musical comedy was my dish," Wodehouse wrote of those happy days. "I would rather have written Oklahoma! than Hamlet.'"

But the real money was in Wooster-shire. After a stream of popular stories about well-born wastrels, among them Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse introduced a valet named Jeeves. He paired the two to solve plot problems in The Man With Two Left Feet (1917), and the rest is history. To the many theories about the characters' origins, McCrum insightfully adds: "The cunning servant–foolish master has been a staple of comedy since classical times, and Wodehouse certainly knew his Plautus and his Terence." By the 1920s, magazines like Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post would pay up to $35,000 to serialize a Wodehouse novel. At the dawn of the Depression, he had a Mayfair mansion and a Rolls Royce with his crest on the door.

Money led to his downfall. Tax authorities in the U.S. and Britain began to pursue those royalties, so Wodehouse fled to the northern French resort of Le Touquet. There in May 1940 he was seized by the German army. For 13 months he was held in a succession of camps, where fellow inmates report that he helped keep morale high and shared his worldly goods with them. Shortly before being freed, he agreed to give five radio talks for his fans in the U.S., which had not yet entered the war (an event the Germans hoped his reassuring words could forestall). Not realizing how desperate Britain's plight had become since his capture, he produced a breezy account of camp life. "There is a good deal to be said for internment," he observed in the first broadcast. "It keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up with your reading."

He spent the rest of his life regretting that lapse. Even before the war ended, British officials dropped plans to prosecute Wodehouse, but the decision was not made public until after his death. He exiled himself to the U.S., where he was viewed with suspicion, and his stories of dukes and butlers were deemed out of touch. "I sometimes wish I wrote that powerful stuff the reviewers like so much, all about incest and homosexualism," he half-joked. Wodehouse lived in near-seclusion in Long Island, New York, with his wife Ethel (their daughter Leonora died in 1944) as he ground out yet more tales of his fantasy world. Increasingly, as modern life coarsened and Cold War anxieties deepened, people decided they liked his world better than theirs.

His countrymen eventually forgave his wartime indiscretions. He was granted a knighthood six weeks before he died. Today the Oxford English Dictionary contains 1,600 Wodehouse citations, and scholars dissect his writings for a depth that isn't really there. What is there, as fans can attest, is a timeless, effervescent cocktail of comic juxtapositions, smoothly musical prose and exuberant generosity. "Behind the Drones and the manor house weekends," writes McCrum, "is a sweet, melancholy nostalgia for an England of innocent laughter and song." An England that Wodehouse, after his thoughtless blunder, never saw again.