SPIRIT OF '76 FILES:

Plummie (Geoffrey T. Hellman, 1960-10-15, New Yorker)

We got a letter from Simon & Schuster the other day saying that P. G. Wodehouse was going to have his eightieth birthday on October 15th; that on that date they were issuing a large collection of his choicest pieces, The Most of P. G. Wodehouse; and that, in further celebration, they planned to run a “salute” to him in the Times, “with the signatures of some fifty well-known writers and theatre people.” Jeeves, the perfect butler, and Bertie Wooster, his employer, have been friends of ours since childhood, and besides we always like to get in touch with a spry octogenarian, especially when he has long had the reputation of being the funniest writer in the world, so we called Mr. W. up at his home, in Remsenburg, on the South Shore of Long Island, and were rewarded with an invitation to lunch. [...]

[M]rs. Wodehouse appeared from the house with a pitcher of Martinis. “We used to have a penthouse at 1000 Park Avenue,” she said. “Then, a few years ago, we moved out here on a year-round basis. I rarely leave the place except to market in Westhampton, ten minutes away. I haven’t been to New York in four years, I’m so busy feeding the birds. I got up at three this morning to feed them.”

“Owls?” we asked.

“Blue jays and quail, mostly,” she said. “I didn’t want them to be disappointed when they came in the early morning. I always see their point of view. I throw bags of nuts all over the park for the squirrels, and we have two cats and a dachshund to take care of.”

She indicated a dog that had curled up between the back of Mr. Wodehouse’s neck and a canvas chair. “I always write in the morning, and then take the hound for a three-mile walk after lunch,” its owner said. “I still touch my toes fifty times every morning. The daily dozen. I’ve done those exercises since 1919, when I read an article about them by Walter Camp in Collier’s. You sort of twist your body about while standing up. They seem to be good, but I suppose one of these days I’ll just come apart.”

After two Martinis apiece, we sat down in the dining room to an excellent lunch, served by a pretty maid called Lynn. “We’ve given her a car,” Mrs. Wodehouse said as Lynn went to the kitchen. “She and the cook, Gracie, come by the day. We have to have dinner at six-fifteen. Gracie lives in Riverhead, and her husband comes for her at night. Plummie and I will have been married forty-six years next week. He’s such a darling that it’s beyond all understanding. I call him Plummie for ‘Pelham;’ it’s Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, you know. The head of the Wodehouse family is the Earl of Kimberley.”

“I’d love to have had a nom de plume, like ‘Tab Hunter’ or ‘Mark Twain,’“ Mr. Wodehouse said.

“Plummie is absolutely a creature of habit,” his wife said. “He’s never missed his exercises.”

“I get up at eight and make my breakfast—toasted black bread, with honey, and five cups of tea,” Mr. W. said.

“Then he brings my breakfast up,” Mrs. W. said. “After a morning’s writing, he goes to the television just before noon and—bang—turns on ‘Love of Life.’ He loves ‘Love of Life.’“

“A capital soap opera,” Mr. W. said. “In the afternoon, after walking the dog, I try to do some more work.”

“At five-fifteen, he has a bath,” Mrs. W. said. “Then we have two Martinis—we don’t ordinarily drink before lunch, though we did today, in your honor—before our early dinner.”

“In the evening, we sort of mess about,” her husband said. “We may play double-dummy bridge. We see one or two neighbors, but no parties. I correspond a bit with Evelyn Waugh.”

The Boston Globe likely thinks the series was cliched and went on too long.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2004 12:54 PM