P.G. Wodehouse: Portrait of a Master

by David A. Jasen

Book Overview

An authorised biography of one of the greatest literary humourists of all time, first published in 1974 and now appearing in a revised, updated edition. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0825672759
• ISBN13: 9780825672750
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Schirmer Trade Books
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Plum by the Numbers

There's always a bloke in a Wodehouse novel who says to some other chap, "tell me your story, omitting no detail, however slight" or words to that effect. The first bloke might be David Jasen, as he has omitted no detail, however slight, in telling the story of PGW. If this is the case, however, one may ask why this 1974 bio was followed by Donaldson's P.G. Wodehouse: A Biography in 1982, and recently by Robert McCrum's Wodehouse: A Life in 2004. If Jasen said it all, what of these later works? The short answer is that the modern term for biography is expose, while Jasen's, not belonging to that breed, is often dismissed as a "tribute". In music a tribute is a good thing; in books it is said with a sneer. McCrum's book is the closest yet to a Wodehouse expose, but because there actually is no secret life of scandal to reveal, he has to imply, and, I would go so far as to say, make up things. He also seems to have lifted bits of Jasen's book nearly verbatim, although sometimes out of context so as to give the opposite impression. Each of these three bios have been updated and reissued: Jasen's in 2002, Donaldson's in 2001, McCrum's in 2005. Having read all three, I still learned things in Jasen's that are not in the others, although those later authors supposedly had access to more of the Wodehouse archives. What Jasen has which cannot be duplicated is actual interviews with Wodehouse, so much of his book is, as it were, straight from the horse's mouth. It also practically amounts to a collection of his letters, so long are the excerpts. Does this make for a boring book? Yes, it rather does, but it also makes for an accurate one. One great strength of the book is the in depth discussion of the various Wodehouse/ Bolton/ Kern musicals, not suprisingly since Jasen has written numerous books on ragtime, blues, popular song and other vintage cultural forms. Donaldson's book is well organized, centered around the misunderstood Berlin broadcasts, which are also an interest of McCrum. Jasen's book is simply chronological, but his brief treatment of wartime still includes bits not in the other books. These bios are not the first attempted explanation of that debacle. In his foreword to the Jasen edited The Uncollected Wodehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge alludes to the incident. As early as 1961 the former editor of Punch had penned "The Wodehouse Affair" for the New Statesman, which appeared in Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes in 1966 in the UK, and in the US in The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge by Simon and Schuster. The strength of Jasen's book is the tie between Wodehouse's life and work, the conditions in which he wrote each novel, short story, musical, etc., what he thought about it, and how it was received. As such, Jasen's book is invaluable for writers and readers whose main interest in Wodehouse is as a writer. The original edition ends with his death, and the last updated bits in the new edition seem rather tacked on. It even seems the last p