www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_04/10595

... Of twentieth-century writers, [P G Wodehouse] liked the work of Agatha Christie, Anthony Powell, and Waugh, all of whom he corresponded with. Perhaps more surprisingly, he enjoyed George Herriman's Krazy Kat strip, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (though he found it "filthy"), Lawrence Durrell, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. And, if we are to believe his letters to his lifelong friend William ("Bill") Townend, the works of William Townend.

Just as Wodehouse's most famous creation, Jeeves the omniscient valet, initially had the smallest of bit parts in an otherwise forgotten character's story, Townend (humorously dubbed "Villiam" or "V. T.") first appears fleetingly, in Wodehouse's impassioned letters to their fellow Dulwichian Eric George. Townend turned down a scholarship to Cambridge to become an artist. Wodehouse encouraged him to try his hand at writing, which he did with respectable productivity but to scant notice. "I often brood on your position as a writer as compared with what it ought to be," Wodehouse wrote in 1949. "I can't see, for instance, why Conrad is looked on as a sort of magician while you don't get reviewed. And I believe it's because you have never sought publicity in any form." Astonishingly, by this point in time, Townend had written "thirty-odd books."

Wodehouse disingenuously puts his friend's obscurity down to the fact that Townend has "never mixed with the literary gang." Today, the one Townend title that is known, if at all, is Performing Flea, a "Self-Portrait in Letters by P. G. Wodehouse, With an Introduction and Additional Notes by W. Townend" (1953). The book, they hoped, would present Wodehouse in a softer light after the divisive Berlin broadcasts, as well as boost Townend's literary stature. There is a vertiginous moment in A Life in Letters when we read Wodehouse discussing how to not simply edit but rewrite their correspondence for publication. "The great thing, as I see it, is not to feel ourselves confined to the actual letters. I mean, nobody knows what was actually in the letters, so we can fake it as much as we like." (Regarding a similar project involving his showbiz comrade Guy Bolton, Wodehouse wrote: "I think we shall have to let truth go to the wall if it interferes with entertainment... WE MUST BE FUNNY!!!!!!")

Townend lives on because Wodehouse lives on. Love Among the Chickens (1909), Wodehouse's seventh book, introduces his first great comic (anti)hero, Ukridge, who derives partly from stories that Townend related of an actual acquaintance, Carrington Craxton. Throughout A Life in Letters, Wodehouse asks Townend for help with plot and character. "For Heaven's sake rally to the old flag & lend a hand with the plot," he wrote in 1908, while composing a pseudonymous serial. Twenty-four years later, putting together a Jeeves and Wooster confection, he was still sending out the call: "Now, one other S.O.S., if you have time."

"I haven't developed mentally at all since my last year at school," Wodehouse confessed to Townend in 1933, at the age of fifty-two. "All my ideas and ideals are the same." When Wodehouse got his agent, Paul Reynolds, to take on a Townend story, he wrote, "He is an awfully good chap, and I would rather see him land in some big market than sell my next serial for forty thousand. We were at school together and have been friends since 1897. I feel sort of responsible for him, as I egged him on to be a writer. He used to be an artist before that."

Two of Wodehouse's novels have "Bill" in the title, and he might have had his pal in mind when suggesting to Leonora that she name his grandchild – if a boy – William instead of Edward: "Then we should have a good honest Bill, which would be great." Most affecting is the song "Bill," from 1918's Oh, Lady! Lady!! (and later Show Boat), in which Wodehouse's lyric extols the ordinariness of the titular man, with a beautiful pause in the penultimate line:

And I can't explain
It's surely not his brain
That makes me thrill
I love him because he's – I don't know –
Because he's just my Bill.

Townend's letters, like those of Wodehouse's other correspondents, do not appear in this book, but Bill emerges as one of its domineering presences – a secret sharer and a glimpse of what Wodehouse might have become had he met with failure instead of success. Whether the best-selling novelist actually needed his friend's advice, or even esteemed his novels (he characterized them as "gloomy studies" to Reynolds), is beside the point. Wodehouse regularly gave money to his less prosperous friend. In 1933 he wrote, "My idea is to guarantee an overdraft, so that you will feel safe. If you don't need it, then it's still there. But if you want to take six months off to write a novel, that will be at the back of you." He attached terse postscripts, knowing that his wife might read letters from Townend and disapprove of the financial support: "Well cheerio. Don't refer to any of this in your next letter."

For a novelist, writing letters is writing that is not writing: "What a lot there is about Pekes and football!" Wodehouse bemoaned to Townend while prepping their correspondence for publication. But a collection of letters is the unconscious narrative the author generates over the years. The complexity of Wodehouse's long relationship with Townend is more poignant than anything in his fiction – a mix of loyalty, guilt, and generosity that is most moving when it approaches the invisible: "Don't mention the enclosure when you write." In this way, P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters is like nothing Wodehouse published in his lifetime, though the sentences are all his, as are the spaces between the lines.