When I first went to see him, I telephoned P. G. Wodehouse and asked for directions from New York to his house on Long Island. He merely chuckled, as if I had asked him to compare Euclid with Einstein or attempt some other laughably impossible task. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I don’t have a clue.” I learned the route anyway, and my arrival for lunch, only ten minutes late, seemed to astonish him. “You had no trouble? Oh, that is good. That’s wonderful!” His face beaming at having in his house such a certified problem-solver, a junior Jeeves almost, he led me without further to-do to a telephone, which he had been dialing all morning in a futile effort to reach a number in New York. He had, of course, done everything right but dial the area code, an addition to the Bell system that had somehow escaped his attention since he had last attempted long distance. He was intensely pleased when New York answered, and I sunned myself in the warm glow of his gratitude for the rest of the day. All of which is by way of saying that Wodehouse, who lived four months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long life: he simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome, or confusing in the world around him.

His wife, Ethel, or his sister-in-law, Helen, did the worrying for him. On my three visits Ethel would hover around him at the beginning of our conversation to plump his pillow or fill his sherry glass, then discreetly disappear to tend to an ailing dog or cat. They had about a half-dozen of each, most of them strays that had come begging to the door. Wodehouse himself had not found it necessary to carry money in twenty years, and though he had spent most of his adult life in America, he still reckoned such things as book prices in pounds and shillings. His accent, like his arithmetic, remained pure English. Aside from his writing, his two passions were the New York Mets and a soap opera called The Edge of Night. On those extremely rare occasions when he had to leave the house for the day, Ethel was assigned to watch the program and write down exactly what had happened. “I understand that you’re going to watch The Edge of Night with me,” he said on one of my visits. “That’s splendid!”

Wodehouse lived on twelve acres in Remsenburg, a pretty, quiet little town in eastern Long Island, and from his glass-enclosed study, and most of the rest of the house, all that he could see was greenery. He was as happily isolated there as if he were living in Blandings Castle itself. He enjoyed all the hoopla that surrounded him in his old age, but he also found the attention very tiring. “Everything more or less quiet here now,” he wrote me a week after he had been dubbed Sir Pelham, “but it has been hell with all the interviewers.” A month after that he died, as peacefully and as quietly as he had lived, according to all accounts.

INTERVIEWER

The last time I saw you was at your ninetieth birthday party in 1971.

WODEHOUSE

Oh, yes. All that ninetieth-birthday thing gave me not exactly a heart attack. But I had to have treatment, you know. I’m always taking pills and things. One good effect of the treatment, however, is that I lost about twenty pounds. I feel frightfully fit now, except my legs are a bit wobbly.

INTERVIEWER

You’re ninety-one now, aren’t you?

WODEHOUSE

Ninety-one and a half! Ninety-two in October.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t have any trouble reading now, do you?

WODEHOUSE

Oh, no!

INTERVIEWER

How about writing?

WODEHOUSE

Oh, as far as the brain goes, I’m fine. I’ve just finished another novel, in fact. I’ve got a wonderful title for it, Bachelors Anonymous. Don’t you think that’s good? Yes, everybody likes that title. Peter Schwed, my editor at Simon and Schuster, nearly always alters my titles, but he raved over that one. I think the book is so much better than my usual stuff that I don’t know how I can top it. It really is funny. It’s worked out awfully well. I’m rather worried about the next one. It will be a letdown almost. I don’t want to be like Bernard Shaw. He turned out some awfully bad stuff in his nineties. He said he knew the stuff was bad but he couldn’t stop writing.

INTERVIEWER

What is your working schedule these days?

WODEHOUSE

I still start the day off at seven-thirty. I do my daily dozen exercises, have breakfast, and then go into my study. When I am between books, as I am now, I sit in an armchair and think and make notes. Before I start a book I’ve usually got four hundred pages of notes. Most of them are almost incoherent. But there’s always a moment when you feel you’ve got a novel started. You can more or less see how it’s going to work out. After that it’s just a question of detail.

INTERVIEWER

You block everything out in advance, then?

WODEHOUSE

Yes. For a humorous novel you’ve got to have a scenario, and you’ve got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in . . . splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible.

INTERVIEWER

Is it really possible to know in a scenario where something funny is going to be?

WODEHOUSE

Yes, you can do that. Still, it’s curious how a scenario gets lost as you go along. I don’t think I’ve ever actually kept completely to one. If I’ve got a plot for a novel worked out and I can really get going on it, I work all the time. I work in the morning, and then I probably go for a walk or something, and then I have another go at the novel. I find that from four to seven is a particularly good time for working. I never work after dinner. It’s the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out. I like to think of some scene, it doesn’t matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story.

INTERVIEWER

How many words do you usually turn out on a good day?

WODEHOUSE

Well, I’ve slowed up a good deal now. I used to write about two thousand words. Now I suppose I do about one thousand.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work seven days a week?

WODEHOUSE

Oh, yes, rather. Always.

INTERVIEWER

Do you type or do you write in longhand?

WODEHOUSE

I used to work entirely on the typewriter. But this last book I did sitting in a lawn chair and writing by hand. Then I typed it out. Much slower, of course. But I think it’s a pretty good method; it does pretty well.

INTERVIEWER

Do you go back and revise very much?

WODEHOUSE

Yes. And I very often find that I’ve got something which ought to come in another place, a scene which originally I put in chapter two and then when I get to chapter ten, I feel it would come in much better there. I’m sort of molding the whole time.