The Mind Creative DEC 2013
Imagine my ecstasy when I received a friendly letter from him
which is reproduced with this tribute.
Here are some quotes from some of his contemporary writers.
Hilaire Belloc said in a radio broadcast in 1948, “Wodehouse is
the best writer of English now alive”. Hugh Walpole was so envious
that he hit back with “I think the old man [Belloc] is getting very
old!”
JB Priestley wrote, “Wodehouse who lived so long, wrote so much,
earned several fortunes, was really a schoolboy... Most of us who
enjoy him still have a schoolboy somewhere in us.”
Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry
as Bertie Wooster and Jeeves
Wodehouse spent the last
decades of his life in the
United States, becoming
an American citizen in
1955. This was because of
a controversy that arose
after he made five lighthearted broadcasts from
Germany during World War
II when he was interned by
the Germans for a year.
Speculation after the broadcasts led to unfounded allegations of
collaboration and even treason, and some libraries banned his
books. Although an investigation later cleared him of any such
crime, he did not return to England.
But at heart he remained as English as the bearded English
cricketer WG Grace (1848–1915). And his characters remained
mainly English peers and eccentrics with a few American halfwits
thrown in. Earlier, Wodehouse also wrote lyrics for the hit song
“Bill” in Jerome Kern’s Show Boat in 1927 and worked with Cole
Porter on the musical Anything Goes in 1934.
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