PRISONER WODEHOUSE

QUICK SERVICE--P. G. Wodehouse--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Few noises are more thrilling than the shrieks of pleasure with which non-stop readers of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse sometimes curdle the late night air above pent and country houses. Aldous Huxleyans and Evelyn Waughans smile from time to time with irony and pity, but their eyelids are a little weary. Confirmed Wodehousians hoot, holler, writhe, snort, bellow, nicker, and in culminating transports, belch. Asked why, they may look blank, indignant. Anton Chekhov once said that the best description of the sea he had ever read was written by a Russian schoolboy: "The sea is vast." Wodehousians explain the master's illimitable spell just as simply: He is funny.

Wodehouse has been at it almost since Queen Victoria died, does not quite remember whether he has written 40 or 50 books. He is always just the same, usually just as good. Some critics attribute this titillating timelessness to the fact that he has raised the stage Englishman to the dignity of literature. Others have called him an acute social critic, professing to see the blunderings of Munich foreshadowed in the maunderings of Bertie Wooster.

Actually he has created a best of all impossible worlds in which everybody is as loony as a bedbug, absurdity is the only plot, and only rationality is vile.

Wodehouse usually anchors his cloud-cuckoo land in Shropshire, Sussex and London. Dominating the loony Wodehouse landscape are two hoary eminences--Blandings Castle and its proprietor, "that amiable and boneheaded peer," the ninth Earl of Emsworth. In the course of some 40 years of nonsense, the multiple Wodehouse nitwits and their overlapping, interlacing misadventures have come to revolve more & more dizzily around Blandings. Hence only confirmed Wodehousians are sure if the stories are one great inspiration or several. Experts incline to recognize four.

There is the psaga of Psmith ("the p ... is silent as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan"), the fastidious young man who calls everybody "Comrade," and almost alone among Wodehouse fauna has enough wits to live by. There is the epic of Jeeves, the infallible, verse-quoting valet ("We are in the autumn, sir, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"). In the workaday world Jeeves might seem like an average enough gentleman's gentleman but stacked up beside Bertie Wooster, to whose harebrained Don Quixote he plays a discreet Sancho Panza, Jeeves looks like an intellectual giant. There is also Mr. Mulliner, of the bar parlor at the Angler's Rest, and his multifarious nephews. And there are the legends clustering about the Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth's prize pig. As in all major epics, there are minor themes, characters and inspirations--the ups & downs of the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth's useless boy, who finally gets himself an American heiress and a job in her father's dog-biscuit business ("I can't think what they would use him for," mused Lord Emsworth, "unless as a taster"); or the love-and-golf short stories of that Ancient Mariner of the links, the Club Bore.

This week Humorist Wodehouse published a new book, Quick Service (previously serialized in the Saturday Evening Post). Quick Service is laid in Claines Hall, "the Tudor mansion in Sussex recently purchased by Mrs. Howard Steptoe of Los Angeles," who looked a little like a rattlesnake. Other Claines inmates: 1) Mr. Steptoe, an ex-boxer "with a squashed nose and ears like the handles of an old Greek vase" who "could get a certain noise-response even out of mashed potatoes, but it was when eating toast that you caught him at his best"; 2) Lord Holbeton, a "willowy young man" with a prominent Adam's apple, whom Mr. Steptoe "considered a palooka of the first water"; 3) Mrs. Chavender (her portrait hung in the Claines breakfast room), who sometimes looked like Mrs. Siddons in one of her more regal moods, sometimes like a Roman matron who has unexpectedly backed the winning chariot at the Circus Maximus. More or less involved in the weird things that happen to these three are Painter Joss Weatherby, a good-looking young hound with the nerve of an army mule, and J. Buchanan Duff, an old blister who had courted (and lost) Mrs. Chavender by wooing her with descriptions of Duff's Paramount Hams.

As in most Wodehouse stories, most of the characters are interested in getting or keeping "the stuff," "the ready," "the thing that causes French Revolutions and the Declines and Falls of Roman Empires." How they get and keep it, how Joss Weatherby tries to steal Mrs. Chavender's portrait from the breakfast room (so that Mr. Duff can use his lost love as an ad for Paramount Hams), makes one of the best Wodehouse novels. Advance sales indicate that it will be one of Wodehouse's best sellers. But Author Wodehouse was not around to collect "the stuff."

Pelham Wodehouse was a round peg who wrote himself out of a square hole in the Bank of England, became one of Britain's highest-paid authors. Not long before World War II he moved to a villa at Le Touquet in northern France. There, with Mrs. Wodehouse and their Pekingese, he pecked away during his rigid working hours at his antediluvian typewriter. There, when the Germans were sweeping toward Paris last spring, "Plum" (to his friends) was throwing a cocktail party in the jolly old pine woods. Suddenly a motorcycle gendarme tore up, shouted: "The Germans will be here in an hour," tore off. The guests, thoroughly familiar with this sort of drollery from Wodehouse novels, laughed, continued to toss down cocktails.

The Germans arrived punctually, first having taken care to block all the roads. They arrested the Wodehouses and guests, later permitted American-born Mrs. Wodehouse and celebrants to depart southward. Said Plum as his friends left: "Maybe this will give me material to write a serious book for once." Soon Mrs. Wodehouse was back again, remained with her husband until the Nazis moved him inland. Then she returned to Paris, is still there.

Next Wodehouse was reported to be in a prison camp at Huy in Belgium. To a request for information about Wodehouse, or his release, signed by U. S. writers, editors, theatrical producers, the German charge d'affaires in Washington, Hans Thomsen, replied that Wodehouse was "quite comfortable." "You may rest assured that the American friends of Mr. Wodehouse . . . need not feel any anxiety about his fate as far as the German authorities are concerned." Doubtless there was no anxiety about Wodehouse's fate as far as the German authorities were concerned.

Wodehouse's American friends for a long time heard nothing about him at all. This week they learned that he is interned in a former insane asylum at Tost, a small village in the monotonous sugar-beet flatlands of Upper Silesia. Wodehouse has been there since the prison camp was created last September. No Castle Blandings, his prison is a big, brick, T-shaped, three-storied structure with many barred windows, high brick & wooden walls. A small military garrison runs and guards the camp. Central heating is said to be good, sanitation adequate. There are hospital facilities.

The camp holds some 1,000 British civilians caught by the Nazis in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, France, on the high seas. Wodehouse is one of a group of 60 who share a long dormitory with double-decker bunks. They are allowed to use the high-walled prison yard at any time. But they must eat, sleep, get up by military schedule. Food is reported to be the same ration given German civilians--one course of stew with bread on the side. There is hot water daily, but baths only every ten days. Prisoners have only the clothes they brought along. There are no books. For recreation, the prisoners are allowed to play cards, and there is an empty room where an acrobatic dancer practices while others watch. Some of the men are learning the steps.

"A man" saw Wodehouse at the end of October. Wodehouse was wearing grey flannels, a tweed jacket. Asked if there was anything he wanted, P. G. said: "You know I write. Well, I find it difficult to write in a room with 60 other people. Could you arrange to get me a room alone?" The head of the prison said it could be arranged.

Wodehouse is allowed to write three letters, four post cards monthly. He is said to be getting all the working supplies he needs, to be writing a novel. What the novel is about Prisoner Wodehouse did not tell.

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