I enjoyed this interview with P.G. Wodehouse so much that I thought you might enjoy it too. He sounds like such a character, in fact like a character in one of his stories. In spite of being rather unfocused on the practical details of life, he managed to write 96 books, and countless short stories over a career that spanned 73 years (1902-1974).
Gerald Clark wrote this about Wodehouse in 1975, shortly before his death at 93.
Read the entire article here at the Paris Review.
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.
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