Letters to the New York Tribune by Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse occasionally wrote letters to the New York Tribune. They are short and circumstantial, but it may be as well to put them together here, with some context.

The first is a brief disclaimer printed in F. P. Adams' famous column "The Conning Tower" on August 28, 1917:

Those verses of Freckles's have provoked many communications. "When Guy Bolton and I were writing 'The Riviera Girl' months and months ago," writes Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, "I turned off a little bijou entitled 'Let's Build a Little Bungalow in Quogue.' I wish you would tell Freckles this, as I don't want to be thought to have lifted his idea. Quogue is a much superior location for a bungalow than is Bablyon, there being no jellyfish."

The poem in question by "Freckles" [pseudonym of publicist Howard Dietz] had been published on August 22 bore the title "Babylon Ballad". It begins:

I've a bungalow in Babylon on Great South Bay,
With a living room, a laving room, and kitchen,
And the windows screened to keep the great mosquito fleet away,
(A squadron which the Lengthy Isle is rich in.)
The air is more than open, and the winds blow free,
And the moon o' nights is wan and pale and dreamy,
And my door is on the latch, because I never use a key,
So you hardly have to knock to come to see me.

Compare the refrain of Wodehouse's lyrics:

Let's build a little bungalow in Quogue,
In Yaphank, or in Hicksville or Patchogue,
Where we can sniff the scented breeze
And pluck tomatoes from the trees,
Where there is room to exercise the dog.
How pleasant it will be through life to jog
With Bill the bull and Hildebrand the hog;
Each morn we'll waken from our doze
When Reginald, the rooster, crows
Down in our little bungalow in Quogue.

* * *

The second is a clarification concerning the Balboa/Cortez confusion in his story "A Woman is Only a Woman", published on October 27, 1919:

"About this Balboa business," writes P. G. Wodehouse. "A few months ago I wrote a story for 'The Saturday Evening Post,' in which I described a golfer who had just laid his ball dead, gazing at the pill like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific. Two days later I received a copy of the magazine, with these words inscribed on the first page of my story: 'It was Balboa, you big stiff.' But why shouldn't Cortez have stared at the Pacific, too? The Pacific was surely open for being stared at about that time. Anyway, don't weaken on stout Cortez. If he was good enough for Keats he's good enough for us. I can't see Balboa in the thing at all."

Wodehouse used this paragraph (slightly abridged) a few years later in the foreword to The Clicking of Cuthbert.

* * *

The third, printed on January 22, 1920 again in "The Conning Tower", is much better known, since it was unearthed in 2011 and discussed e.g. in The Telegraph for July 17. It is a comment on a boxing article published a few days before in Grantland Rice's column "The Sportlight":

Grantland, Priceless Old Bean, Is Off in Florida, But He Shall Ever So Well Be Spoken To, We Mean to Say

My Dear Old Soul:

I hate to bother you and all that sort of thing, but if you've a spare moment I wish you'd toddle down the passage and speak to Grantland Rice. I mean to say, all that stuff he wrote in yesterday's jolly old issue about chappies being "chopped into pink ribbons" and the blighter with the "red grin that bubbled gore." What I mean is, he doesn't seem to realize that we lads who take in The Tribune read it at breakfast, and, believe me, dear lod son, when Jeeves, my man, slipped a couple of fried eggs in front of me just at what you might call the psychological moment, it was a near thing, laddie, a very near thing. Jolly Old Rice, I've n doubt, is one of those healthy, hearty fellows who skip out of bed like two-year-olds and feel perfectly topping before breakfast, but in my case—well, you know how it is. I'm never much of a lad until after the morning meal. And, when it comes to having to breakfast on red grins and bubbling gore, well, I mean to say, what! I mean, you know what I mean, I mean!

Well, that's all. Cheerio and all that sort of rot! Good-bye-ee!

BERTIE WOOSTER.
(per pro P. G. Wodehouse, Secy.)

(Here are some of the phrases in Rice's article that revolted Bertram: "The kid was chopped to pink ribbons the next eight rounds, but he finished on his feet still swinging away. He could take it." "And he was still taking with a red grin that bubbled gore when the bell rang." "Facing Nelson, Young Corbett in the sixth or seventh round after punishing the Battler, let a punch fly that landed over Nelson's heart, breaking one of his ribs. It floored the Dane with a noisy thud." "He took it in such vast and copious quantities that he was blind and reeling at the finish, a gory ghost still weaving and pawing in the general direction of his antagonist, beaten and battered to a ghastly pulp, but still on his feet and still trying when the referee decided to stop the bout.")

It is not absolutely certain whether this is genuine Wodehouse or the work of an early admirer. The main argument against authenticity is that the style is overdone, cramming into a few lines every Wooster-like mannerism the writer could think of. In favor of it is the unlikelihood that Wodehouse would allow his name and his fictional character to be used freely like this. Note that "per pro P. G. Wodehouse, Sec[retar]y." appears to indicate that the letter was actually sent under his name.

The two first letters copied above, on the other hand, show that he had already engaged in correspondence with the Tribune, and more specifically with Adams' column. This may lend force to the argument for authenticity, but of course is not conclusive.