Old Man on Top

COCKTAIL TIME (2 1 9 pp.)-- P. G. Wodehouse--Simon & Schusfer ($3.50).

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse is by now a part of the Anglo-U.S. climate. Scatty, erratic, now on now off the beam, Wodehouse has nonetheless pulled off the astonishing feat of making his creations a living part of the civilized world. Even the many who cannot stomach him have no option but to respond to the mere word Jeeves with a mental picture of a whole society; while to those who lap him up, a whole corner of mental life is occupied by such characters as Lord Emsworth, Lord ("Uncle Fred") Ickenham, Bertie Wooster, Mr. Mulliner, Psmith and that great Sheba of sows, "Empress of Blandings."

Cocktail Time ("A Novel about a Novel"), the latest of Wodehouse's 76 books, shares with its predecessors the Wodehousian characteristic of being strictly up to date in time and half a century behind in taste. Its characters display, as always, what Essayist John W. Aldridge calls ''the miraculous capacity of the human body to operate without the assistance of any mental powers whatever." Among the 15-odd starters:

P: Frederick Altamount Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham, who shoots off the top hat of a London barrister by means of a slingshot loaded with a Brazil nut--thus confirming his title as "England's answer to Annie Oakley."

P: Pongo Twistleton, Uncle Fred's nephew, who goes all "white and shaken, like a dry martini" on seeing the punctured topper fly through the air.

P: Barrister Sir Raymond Bastable, owner of the hat and an "overbearing dishpot," who assumes that the David behind the slingshot is a youthful delinquent, and is inspired to write (anonymously) a bitter exposure of British youth in the form of a novel named Cocktail Time.

P: The Bishop of Stortford, who denounces Cocktail Time ("obscene, immoral, shocking, impure, corrupt, shameless, graceless and depraved") from the pulpit of Belgravia's St. Jude the Resilient. "All over the sacred edifice you could see eager men jotting the name down on their shirt cuffs . . ."

P: Albert Peasemarch, butler to Sir Raymond, who has "about as much brain as you could comfortably put in an aspirin bottle," but whose skill in giving her cocker spaniel an emetic awakens the love of Sir Raymond's sister Phoebe.

Cocktail Time shows that though now (to use his own words) "a spavined septuagenarian," P. G. Wodehouse still has more to offer than most unspavined zanies of younger generations.

A longtime expatriate, Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) has not lived permanently in England since 1929. Captured by the Nazis in 1940 in his villa in Le Touquet near Boulogne, Wodehouse was soon released from prison camp, sat out the war in comfortable hotels in Berlin and Paris, made several broadcasts over the Nazi radio that created a storm of criticism in Britain. Though later cleared (dithered Wodehouse later: "A terrible mistake. [I intended them] in the spirit of the British soldier who spoke on the radio to get messages back home"), Wodehouse chose not to return to Britain, came to the U.S. in 1947.

The man who invented Jeeves and had 13 successive butlers when he lived in Europe, now lives in quiet, butlerless Remsenburg, on Long Island, about two hours from Manhattan. "Plummie" (a schoolboy nickname) now makes do with a part-time gardener who tends his twelve beautifully kept acres, and a four-day-a-week maid who helps wife "Bunny" run a charming ten-room white-shingled house. At 76, Wodehouse still does his "getting-up" exercises at 7:30, walks three to five miles a day, keeps the two birdbaths filled.

Wodehouse laments the fact that "the Edwardian butler . . . has joined the Great Auk, Mah Jong and the snows of yesterday in limbo." Says he: "The change in conditions in English life has made it rather difficult for my kind of writing. Comedy does so depend on prosperity." Once a professional drama critic (for Vanity Fair), in recent years he has habitually left any play after the first act, no matter how good or bad. Rather sadly he recalls that England was once full of the dotty people he wrote about. "But I suppose a couple of wars have made the English more earnest. Yet there are still, I think, people who behave oddly. The Duke of Kent is always behaving like someone out of my novels."

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