Lunch with Plummie

P.G. Wodehouse invited the New Yorker to lunch on October 15, 1960.I was four years old then, and had not yet discovered my grandfather's Herbert Jenkins editions of Plum's novels. I'd discover them at 10, and chuckle over them for many summers to come. Strange as it may seem, there was much in that Edwardian world to entrance and amuse a kid growing up in India. I, too, had obsessions--not newts, but notebooks and pens and the other stuff of writing. I, too, had aunts. Not masses of them, but they were certainly strange, alien beings to me, the way adults are during the developmental phase of conjecture and bewilderment that we term childhood.Although I leaped with delight into the Jeeves and Emsworth books, into legends on the golf course and the nutty exploits of Psmith, I would know nothing of Wodehouse's life, its ups and downs, its errors and regrets, its triumphs and sorrows, until many years later, when I read Robert McCrum's biography, Wodehouse: A Life. For me, the ex-child who once found something close to pure delight in his books, it matters that Plum's story is told as clearly and compassionately as it is in this biography. McCrum unravels the charges of Fascism and treachery that tainted Wodehouse's legacy, the blind spots and flaws that led to his dreadful miscalculations.He recognizes the sweet melancholy in the books, the importance of their lightness and airiness, the universality of the human connections they delineate. I couldn't have said so at the time, but all those things resonated for me at 10 and 13 and 15. They resonate still.Courtesy of WGBH, I came across this talk by McCrum and was delighted to find out that he, like me, had discovered Wodehouse at the age of 10. There was something pleasing about that coincidence.  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqNkEc7gttA?rel=0]When, at 15, I wrote Plum a fan letter, he sent me a typed reply with an ink signature and one of his wife's return labels bearing their New York address. Plum adored America. (“It’s like being elected to a very good club.”) I can't help wondering what he'd think of it, if he could see it today. Perhaps our time would remind him of another era when Fascist thinking spread its tentacles through Europe and otherwise well-meaning people did their best to carry on, ignoring what was going on around them.