This book is best suited to researchers and truly obsessive Wodehouse fans. For those readers who have simply enjoyed a few Bertie and Jeeves or Psmith novels, this biography will be a struggle.

The problem is that PG Wodehouse was a person of rigid routine who had only a handful of interests (cricket, his old high school, pekinese dogs, and his own writing); he was also a workaholic. This makes for pretty dull reading, but the author did his best with it and managed to wring a real doorstopper out of it all. We learn how many words Wodehouse writes per day, how many words each book contains, how many words were written up in the initial plot outlines, and how many words had to be scratched out from the final copies of every book. Each year's articles, short stories, poems, Broadway show lyrics, script revisions, and books are faithfully reported. His daily routine is laid out in both short and long forms in 21 of the 26 chapters, even though this routine does not change for sixty years.

In fact, we learn a lot about the minutiae of Wodehouse's life without really learning much about the man himself. The overall picture is of a brilliant writer who saves everything for the page, leaving nothing for life itself. Affable and harmless, he comes off as rather simple-minded in this book. This last characteristic leads to the only interesting event in his life, the "Berlin Broadcasts", when he gave a series of radio broadcasts on Nazi radio during WWII. The biographer attempts to justify Wodehouse's conduct by claiming that he is "ill-equipped to deal with the challenge confronting him", and that when asked by friends-turned-Nazis to do the broadcasts Wodehouse "behaved as he always did when confronted by difficult or complex choices, which was to let others take care of the arrangements" (p. 304). For my part, I take the side of Harold Nicolson, who wrote, "I resent the theory that 'poor old P.G. is so innocent that he is not responsible'" (p. 316). It was hard to look at this episode with my modern eyes and feel anything but incredulity at Wodehouse's conduct, and rightly or not it did sour me towards him. As much as the previous chapters had been a slog, at least I was on his side. Afterwards and all throughout the rest of the book I wasn't sure if I liked him at all. ( )

An interesting read of a very English man. ( )

As a writer, P.G. Wodehouse was something of a Jeeves, his most famous character. He came up with outrageous solutions to outrageous problems. He even out-jeeved Jeeves by inventing the problems in the first place. Wodehouse said his novels usually began with an absurd situation. Then he just had to figure out a way to get his characters into that situation and out of it again by the last page.

Otherwise Wodehouse was more like Lord Emsworth (Clarence) of his Blandings novels, the character he most identified with according to Robert McCrum, author of the superb 2004 biography “Wodehouse.” Clarence gives every appearance of being a befuddled old man. Actually he is just preoccupied. The only thing he cares to think about is his prize-winning pig, the Empress of Blandings. On that subject he is always alert, always on top of things. Everything else just goes over his head. Wodehouse was that way. It was his writing that drew his focus. Most everything else he preferred to let his wife, agent or somebody else handle for him. When his wife gave parties, he would make a brief appearance, then suddenly disappear to return to his work.

It was this Lord Emsworth quality that led to the biggest crisis of Wodehouse's life, to which McCrumb devotes several chapters. Wodehouse was living in France when the Germans invaded early in World War II. He made no attempt to leave, although in fairness it should be noted that many other British citizens also stayed in France, assuming the Germans would be stopped just as they were in the first war.

The Nazis kept coming, however, and Wodehouse was soon their prisoner. Wodehouse being Wodehouse, he kept writing his funny stories and making light of a bad situation. When the Nazis, recognizing his propaganda value, offered him his release in exchange for doing a series of radio broadcasts, the writer viewed it as an opportunity to connect with his fans and assure them he was alright. In Great Britain especially, many saw it as betrayal, a collaboration with the enemy.

Wodehouse lived in the United States for the remainder of his long life, never returning to England because of his shame and, for many years, fear of prosecution. He was eventually knighted, but by then he was too old to travel and probably would not have returned to his home country even if he could have.

Most of the biography, if not as light as Wodehouse's novels, is at least lighter than most biographies. McCrumb describes the plots of much of his best work, and so much of his work was terrific. For about 70 years he was an important writer, not just of books but also of short stories, pieces for magazines and newspapers and even Broadway plays and Hollywood movies. For a number of years, in fact, his was one of the biggest names on Broadway, teaming with the likes of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. His books remain in print and loved around the world. I have seen a couple of his musicals performed in recent years, and they are still entertaining.

Even though Wodehouse remained productive while a Nazi prisoner, for about five years after the war he found it difficult coming up with anything funny. Eventually he put his embarrassment behind him. Wodehouse fans would be kind to do likewise. ( )

Long, but fast moving book with a lot of information about Wodehouse, his collaborators, his inadvertent collaboration, and his life. I learned things, but missed some of the stories I'd read elsewhere. For example, someone said that Wodehouse used to throw his letters out of his window and that they always got to their destination. I was left, once again, with the sense that Wodehouse did not understand the concept of evil. Still, an awful lot of research and writing went into the creation of this biography.

Turns out there are notes giving sources for what McCrum says in the book; some notes even have additional comments. But the main text gives no clue of that they exist, carefully hidden, at the back of the book, where a quote from the main text is followed by the note itself. While it gives the book a cleaner look, it also feels as if the editor didn't get a chance to clean up the details or add numbers to the end notes. There are also references in the book that didn't make sense to me: Mention of the confusion arising from two people with the same name only made sense when I discovered in the end notes that there was a second person. Or explaining that Ethel Merman became famous because of Anything Goes is followed by a discussion of the evolution of the play along with its different names, until we finally learn that it becomes Anything Goes. ( )

Having read five or six Wodehouse biographies already, I wasn't exactly falling over myself to rush out and get a copy of McCrum on the day it appeared. All the same, to have waited seven years to read it probably looks a bit slack for someone like me who claims to be a lifelong Wodehouse fan. I wasn't expecting a great deal from the book: the many articles McCrum placed in the Observer and elsewhere to drum up interest in Wodehouse in the period before publication made it pretty clear that he didn't have any startling new revelations to offer. There's a lot of song-and-dance about the Berlin broadcasts, and McCrum has evidently tracked down a couple more witnesses from this period, but he seems to have no significant new information. McCrum's conclusion is essentially that of everyone else who has written about the matter with benefit of hindsight: Wodehouse was naïve and foolish, entirely failing to see how his actions would be perceived in wartime Britain.

Though there's little in McCrum that will be new to anyone already interested in Wodehouse, this is a useful book in the way it brings everything together in one place. The last full-scale biography was by Barry Phelps, in 1992: quite some work has been done since then to track down evidence of Wodehouse's early career, his stage work and his tax difficulties. Much of this has only been published in specialist journals or obscure privately-printed monographs, difficult and expensive to track down. If you're only going to read one biography of Wodehouse, then this is certainly the one to go for.

There are slight differences of emphasis from earlier biographies, as you would expect. For a start, it's not a very literary biography. He's not particularly interested in the sources of Wodehouse's language, and only marginally in his characters and settings. We get very little about the early school stories. There's a lot more about when and how books were sold than about how they were written. On the stage work, he makes the what, who and when fairly clear, but it's difficult to get any sense of Wodehouse's talent as a lyricist and librettist. Benny Green is much better on these aspects. McCrum's not quite as sceptical of Wodehouse's own account of himself as Phelps is, even if he does look at him rather more critically than early biographers like Donaldson or Jasen did. However, he clearly disapproves of Ethel, and treats her much more roughly than other biographers have. Possibly this is simply because he has tracked down a few more of the Wodehouses' former domestics: cooks and housekeepers are in a position to see the lady of the house at her worst...

McCrum repeats himself a bit, and occasionally falls into the classic biographer's trap of foresight ("little did he know that forty years later..."), but on the whole his style is very agreeable. The text is supported by clear source notes (although he perhaps doesn't acknowledge Phelps as often as he should) and there's a useful, if sketchy, bibliography. The photographs are basically the same selection as in all the other biographies, but it would be unrealistic to expect interesting new photos to come to light at this late stage. (Tantalisingly, McCrum mentions in his Afterword having seen the original uncropped version of Thuermer's picture of Wodehouse at Tost in 1940, but the version that appears in the book is cropped, as it appeared in the American press at the time.) ( )