Pick of the paperbacks; P. G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master (New Revised Edition), by David A. Jasen. New York: Continuum. $8.95.

Jasen's jolly and competent biography chronicles year by year the books Wodehouse wrote. The only large event outside that sphere was his broadcasts on German radio during World War II. Jasen does not shirk from this, and his discussion of the content of those broadcasts answers for all time questions about Wodehouse's actions.

Jasen says Wodehouse committed no treason. What he said on German radio constituted an ironic commentary on the Nazi mentality which held him prisioner from the moment invading armies arrived at his home in France.

This biography shows that the world of P. G. Wodehouse has always been a world of surpassing and idyllic Englishness.

He is to be saluted as a creative writer par excellence, who has written with no other purpose than to amu se.