WODEHOUSE AT SUNSET

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 17

WODEHOUSE AT SUNSET

Sunset at Blandings. By P. G. Wodehouse (edited by Richard Usborne). Chatto and Windus. 213 pp. $9.25.

When P. G. Wodehouse died on February 14, 1975, he left beside his hospital bed 16 chapters of a new novel and a horde of notes outlining another six chapters which would have completed the tale. The material will sound a familiar echo for millions of Wodehouse readers. Lord Emsworth is still trying to find an artist who will paint the great Empress pig so that her portrait can hang with those of Lord Emsworth’s ancestors. Brother Galahad is still plotting; young women are being kept captive at Blandings to prevent them from marrying young men deemed to be unsuitable. As Wodehouse left it, the book had no name. The author had jotted down 15 possible titles. When Richard Usborne came to edit the manuscript he rejected them all and invented his own to capture the spirit of what has to be the last episode in a chronicle of doings at Blandings which stretches back more than 60 years. Usborne has not attempted to finish “Sunset at Blandings.” Instead, he gives a rich selection of Wodehouse’s working notes and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. He has

also attempted to construct a map of Blandings and its district, a plan of the interior of the castle, and a timetable of trains between Paddington and Market Blandings “somewhere in Shropshire.” All this adds up to a treasure trove of material about how Wodehouse worked. He must surely be remembered as the greatest English comic writer in this century. Let Usborne sum up his feelings after a lifelong friendship with Wodehouse and two years spent among the author’s posthumous papers: “Wodehouse’s old brain stayed untroubled to the end. My guess is that published novels written by English authors aged 93 can be counted on the thumbs of one hand. And if there had been more than that. I would expect to find them tired, petulant, gloomy and grey, showing their author’s age; certainly not funny, fresh, young in heart and full of hammocks, sunshine, and four pairs of lovers headed for altars in the last pages. “Wodehouse, bless his old heart, went to his honoured grave without issuing a funeral note or a solemn message to anyone, with a farce novel warm in his typewriter. He went on being frivilous to the last.”