I say, Jeeves, is that giant rat coming to tea?
The novelist P. G. Wodehouse could be unexpectedly acerbic about his fellow authors. ‘I tried Jane Austen and was bored stiff,’ he wrote to his friend Guy Bolton in 1964. Nor was he all that keen on Nancy Mitford (‘dull’), henry James (‘a dull, pompous chump’) or Joseph Conrad (‘what a mess’).
But he was a devotee of the novels of Agatha Christie. Though they never met, they began a correspondence towards the end of their lives, and letters between the two of them have recently been lent to the British Library by the Wodehouse estate.
Correspondence with other friends reveals that he already had some misgivings towards Agatha. In 1946, he told his old schoolfriend Bill Townend of his annoyance that, in an age of food rationing, Christie’s publishers let the characters in her latest novel, The hollow, ‘gorge on roast duck and souffles and caramel cream and so on’ while his own publishers wanted him to cut back on his characters’ feasts. Accordingly, he had been forced to alter the size of Bertie Wooster’s breakfast: ‘I have changed the fried egg to a sardine and cut out the steak.’
When, in 1955, the two authors began a proper correspondence, it kicked off with a hiccup. Wodehouse had been told by Sir Allen Lane of Penguin that Agatha Christie was a great fan of his books and suggested that he write and tell her how much he liked hers, too. But his lavish compliments were not reciprocated.
‘With infinite sweat I wrote her a long gushing letter, and what comes back? About three lines, the sort of thing you write to an unknown fan. “So glad you have enjoyed my criminal adventures” — that sort of thing... And the maddening thing is that one has got to go on reading her, because she is about the only writer today who is readable.’
Despite it all, he remained such a fan of her books that he claimed to find them ‘even better’ on a second reading. This is remarkable, as for most of us the only point in carrying on reading them is to find out who did it: once that particular bridge has been crossed, there’s very little going back.
The elderly pen-friends would swap tales of their various ailments. ‘I am too much of a gentleman to ask her,’ he told his friend Guy Bolton, ‘ but I think she must have had the same treatment as me — i.e. pills to stimulate the kidneys. I sometimes say that it is hardly worth my while to come out of the bathroom, as I have to go in again almost immediately.’ You might think it odd that Wodehouse was such a fan of books so very different from his own. But elsewhere he reveals that his mind was bursting with ideas for stories that were not comical, but criminal or even slightly macabre. ‘I say, listen, old horse,’ he once wrote to his friend Townend, a struggling novelist who specialised in adventure stories set at sea. ‘Is this a crazy idea? The haunting Of The hyacinth or some such title. I suddenly thought the other day there are always rats on board ship, so why shouldn’t one rat, starting by being a bit bigger than the others, gradually grow and grow, feeding on his little playmates, till he became about the size of an Airedale terrier. Then there begin to be mysterious happenings on the ship. Men are found dead, etc. end with big scene where your hero discovers and is attacked by honble Rat in the dark of the hold or somewhere. Big fight and so on. ‘Is this any good to you? It certainly isn’t to me. I should have to put the rat in an eyeglass and have the hero trip over a tub of potatoes.’
LATeR, in 1953, he suggested another story with a creepy twist. This one involved a doctor travelling in Germany ‘ in about 1890’ who meets an agitated woman who says that her little boy is dying. ‘Doctor saves child. What is the little fellow’s name? “Adolf, sir.” “Well, goodbye, Frau hitler... The little chap will be all right now and will grow up to be a credit to you.”’
Six years later, another, very different, author came up with the very same idea.
Roald Dahl’s short story was first printed in Playboy magazine and later, in 1962, as Genesis And Catastrophe in Dahl’s collection Kiss Kiss. It was to become one of his most successful ever.
Did he, by any chance, pinch it from Wodehouse?