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The movies also sought Wodehouse's talents. For a time in the '30s, he was one of the highest-paid writers in the world, earning $2,500 a week from MGM on top of his royalties from novels and plays. He and his wife Ethel, whom he married in 1914 and who survives him, lived for a time in London, where they had butlers and maids of their own. In the '30s, they settled at Le Touquet, a French island resort on the English Channel. When the Germans invaded in 1940, friends advised them to flee to England, but they could not think of a way to get their treasured dogs past England's six-month animal quarantine. They were still pondering when Wodehouse was carted off to a Nazi internment camp.
He was actually well treated by the Germans, and when CBS Radio in 1941 asked him to describe life there, Wodehouse, one of nature's innocents, saw no reason why he should not say to an American audience how pleasant things were. That decision, as he later ruefully admitted, was as simple-minded as any thing Bertie Wooster had ever done. The British, who were momentarily awaiting a German invasion, were outraged.
Wodehouse, who only two years before had received an honorary degree from Oxford, was virtually branded a traitor in Parliament and the press. Toward the end of the war, the British, in a calmer mood, recanted, but Wodehouse never went back to England. He returned to America in 1947 and eight years later became a U.S. citizen.
Slowing Down. As he grew older, Wodehouse slowed down from the breathtaking writing pace of his youth, turning out "only" one novel a year — to gether, of course, with a few short stories. His prose, which looked so simple and read so well, was actually the result of great effort. He would plot out each zany story as if he were programming a computer, with perhaps 400 pages of notes, and he would write and rewrite every page nine or ten times. "Every thing I've turned out is as good as I can make it," he said. "I've never not taken trouble over anything."
He began to feel old, he said, only after 90. "When I was in my 70s, I felt as if I were in my 30s. And my 80s were all right. But I'm feeling a bit ninetyish lately," he complained last year. Still, his mind was as nimble as ever, and his pen as clever and facile. One of the great moments of his life came only last month, when Queen Elizabeth named him a knight, which allowed friends to call him "Sir Plum."
In his customary self-deprecating way — half-humorous but wholly serious — Wodehouse had written his own epitaph years before: "When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up: 'But he did take trouble.' "
Gerald Clark