World of Wodehouse

In the Seventies and Eighties, Wodehouse was barely collected. In every second-hand bookshop there were rows and rows of his books (he published more than 100 titles) and no attempt was ever made to segregate first editions from reprints. A clean hardback 12th printing might have been priced at £2, whereas a first edition in the dust-wrapper might cost twice that.

Today, a first edition from 1920 to 1950 with a dust-wrapper would sell for six to 10 times the price of an unjacketed copy; and that, depending on condition, could be anything from £100 to £1,000.

Wodehouse's "school stories", written for public schoolboys, 1902-1910-ish, can fetch several thousand pounds today, though I never paid more than £30 for any one of them: 30 years ago, things were different.

I included an extensive (though flawed) bibliography of PGW - "Plum", as he was known - in my first book, Collecting Modern First Editions (1977). The following year, I decided to do the job more thoroughly and write an illustrated biography.

In the course of that book, I quoted quite copiously - his letters, war diaries, nuggets from the novels - all with the blessing of the Wodehouse Estate.

I am about to publish an extensively revised and updated edition, but this time, I am sorry to say, the estate has forbidden me to quote one single word despite my pioneering Wodehouse history. They want to leave the way clear for Robert McCrum's authorised biography, which is also due next month. It seems rather ungenerous and not at all how the Master would have handled it.

So much for the politics. But Wodehouse is intriguing. Could there have lurked, behind so happy a face, within the creator of so many breathtakingly funny and scintillating novels, some deep and brooding secret? A hidden agenda, conceivably?

Was Wodehouse the sort of upper-class ass he wrote about? Or were his books - as has been darkly suggested - a cleverly disguised and devastating communistic attack on the inherent inanity of English privilege? And what, too, of his wartime broadcasts on German radio? Was Plum, the quintessential Englishman, a traitor to his country?

I find all such suspicions wholly unfounded. The world that Wodehouse created was ludicrous and dated, even as he invented it. All classes (and ages) love his books simply because they are funny, and the British have a fine sense of humour - which doesn't remotely explain why he was rapturously received throughout the rest of the world.

Wodehouse himself, with tongue in cheek, was of the opinion that he couldn't possibly be a great writer because he had a happy childhood and school days in his beloved Dulwich College, and was quite content to potter along (I would quote his exact words, but the Wodehouse Estate would sue me).

As to communism-well, I doubt whether Plum could have grasped the concept. He was wholly apolitical, which is why - when he was interned by the Germans during the war, after being trapped in occupied France - he accepted the chance to broadcast some very funny and Wodehousian talks on the radio, largely to assure his American fans (America was not yet in the war) that he was alive and well.

He later acknowledged that he was naive and foolish to have done so. Both the Government and MI5 agreed after the war that Wodehouse had been guilty only of innocence.

And while held by the Germans in quite dreadful conditions - sleeping on straw and kept alive on watery soup - he set about writing no fewer than five firstrate Wodehouse novels - including Joy in the Morning, possibly the greatest Jeeves and Wooster of them all, featuring his unique creations, the omniscient valet and his dim-witted bachelor employer.

The sole event in Wodehouse's life to have truly thrown and upset him deeply was the death, aged 39, of Leonora, his much-loved stepdaughter. He was married to Ethel for 60 years and the couple never had children of their own: I think it is entirely possible that he was asexual, as indifferent to the whole business as he was to anything that did not involve books, writing, cricket, golf, television soap operas and Pekingese dogs.

Homosexuality, latent or otherwise, has been hinted at, though there is no evidence of physical contact that I am aware of.

The tone of my biography, befitting the man, is rarely short of joyous, because what I discovered was this: Wodehouse was not deep. He had no message. He was merely one of the greatest writers in the history of literature. Behind the happy face there lived a happy man.

Wodehouse, by Joseph Connolly, is published by Haus Publishing on 1 September, price £9.99.