P. G. Wodehouse discussing Jeeves and Wooster (1960s Interview)

mr woodhouse uh how many books in all have you written i always try to make it one a year and i'm 82 now so i suppose must be 82. now there's a question that a lot of people have asked me and i don't know the answer whether there ever was a particular man uh a living human being that gave you the idea of uh bertie wooster i wouldn't say any definite individual but that type was very prevalent in the days when i was in and about london you know 1911 12 and 13 before the first war yes late anthony mild main lord mile may the steeple chaser he was very much the type of birdie worcester uh do you find that since the second war he's become a historical character he does oh absolutely i don't know whether it's legitimate to go on writing about him but i think you once mentioned that uh the strangest countries now uh can yes occasionally get a jeez from japan or yugoslavia or somewhere like that they're very popular in the penguin edition i keep getting a lot of letters from india well do they see these books for what they are i mean or do they take them very seriously as social documents oh i shouldn't think that's possible is it i think they must read them just as far as i don't suppose they think they're sort of satirical stuff do the communist countries buy them uh they've started again now i was banned in hungary do you remember a few years ago a great number of english authors were banned in hungary i was one of them i suppose they thought my stuff was too little about the proletariat and too much about the earls and dukes but couldn't they uh couldn't for instance a communist country uh pretend to uh the readers that this was an accurate or a devastating picture of these decades yes well now how about the translations this must be a tremendous feat yes i i well i think they miss an awful lot you know husband wrote a thing in punch some years ago about my stuff translated into french they showed how they whenever they came to a difficult bit they rather have to dodge it you know they'd they'd put down something that uh much straighter than what i'd written well they couldn't get the slaying i spurs of the elements of your own comic style it strikes me more and more in reading the latest book that probably you're the only man who's ever combined this very uh formal and polished uh 19th century style with contemporary english slang with american contemporaries now you must have been aware of that all through your life i suppose so yeah you came here very young didn't you yes i was about 23 i think when i first came here but i've noticed in this in this book it's possible to go along and pick out words like guff and lark and the lads which is pure english yes and then to pick out the most contemporary american slang which is woven incorrectly yes you see what i mean oh yes do you miss living in england well not really i i you see i never have lived in england very much i was in france for so many years when i was over here well would you attribute your ability to uh freeze and immortalize uh an english type to the fact that you went too close to it oh i think so especially my sort of stuff because i mean i i'm the first to admit it's not true to life i mean it's a it's probably edwardian though i imagine filler like bertie well there wouldn't be any birdies now with they're not with vellis like jeeves nobody's ever a young bachelor wouldn't have a valid nowadays of course in my day they all did but uh there are still in the united states i'm always staggered to go into uh occasionally into into big houses and find that the last of the jeeves are in the united states they are yes that's perfectly true but uh isn't it true that the butler is creeping back a little in england well there's a book uh written uh i don't know if you know it called what the butler oh yes rather i read the wonderful history isn't it isn't it and the the there's a sort of preliminary thesis there that the automation is going to throw so many people out of work that uh by 2000 every middle-class family will need to have four servants to keep people employed so there may be a tremendous revival in jeeves you may set them up uh something else occurred to me i wondered if the literary uh origin of wooster was not in dambian's son you know george grossmith and gp huntley and people like that it's difficult to say how and gets a character i think a character develops very much as you uh if you go on writing book after book about it of course in my stuff i always try to get the love story set first the plot i think it was a guy built and you say they get your love story right and the comedy will take care of itself it doesn't actually but it's it's a very good rule to go by i mean it makes a sort of solid foundation for a book do you have any uh feeling about uh uh repeating yourself or are there any books that you've forgotten completely that you wrote i'm just a nightmare that repeating myself you know i i it's awful when you're writing a book don't think it happened with this one but the one i've got coming out next year i suddenly found there were long passages yes which occurred in other books of mine and yet you can't if you've got written 82 books you can't re-read them all over to see over the series before you start writing the new one well is this a matter that that the plot suggested the same approach or this was actually totally plot so much it's phrases like throwing a purse of gold or what's another one i'm very fond of uh are you ever inclined to to uh make a big jump into completely contemporary material well i'm not sure if i can manage it this this one's coming out next year there's nothing to date it at all it could all have happened yesterday but i mean you're not moved by things like uh astronauts or urban oh no no no i feel much happier with the sort of atmosphere i'm accustomed to since the blanding's castles have now all gone into the national trust um has it occurred to you to write a book about them about the uh rather squashed life of the inhabitants no i don't think so i know i know my blending is this entirely out of date now and suppose anybody could keep up an establishment like that anymore but i don't feel like but spoiling it and you don't find it giving out by the time this plannings novel appears to be exactly 50 years since i started writing them and some of the same characters yes uh timeless like people yes oh yes that's the thing i've never seen the necessity of doing i mean the festive having my characters keep up with my own age i mean obviously if if you do that i mean jeeves started in 1916 so presumably he'd be about 90 or something like that around 30 70. but i never can see why one's got to do that well this is a good way of cashing in on your own immortality isn't it because it does make a perpetual folk figure yes that's right it stays in the same age you

Channel: Roman Styran

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Keywords: P. G. Wodehouse (Author), Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves (Film Character), Jeeves And Wooster (Award-Winning Work), Interview, alistair cooke

Id: Re9QXetFipM

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2015