The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 14
‘Have you ever heard of Eunice Nugent?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘As she doesn’t sprint up and down the joy-way at the Hippodrome, I don’t suppose you would.’
I thought this rather uncalled for, seeing that, as a matter of fact, I scarcely know a dozen of the Hippodrome chorus. [Concealed Art]
‘The Booles have asked me down to their place for the weekend, and I don’t know whether to go or not. You see, they have family prayers at half-past eight sharp, and besides that there’s a frightful risk of music after dinner. On the other hand, young Roderick Boole thinks he can play piquet.’
‘I should go,’ I said. [Disentangling Old Percy]
Disentangling Old Percy, which did not make book publication, is the best of the Pepper stories. It is well plotted, with plenty of twists, and well written:
‘I hardly expected so sensible a suggestion from you, Reginald,’ she said. ‘It is a very good plan. It shows that you really have a definite substratum of intelligence; and it is all the more deplorable that you should idle your way through the world as you do, when you might be performing some really useful work.’
That was Florence all over. Even when she patted you on the head she did it with her knuckles.
The Florence in the story is Florence Craye, who with her brother Edwin was to appear in the Wooster chronicles. However by Wooster time her brother had become a boy scout; here he is her elder brother and is called Lord Weeting.
Reggie Pepper gets into fixes which he has to labour out of himself. He has no Jeeves to turn to, though his manservant appears in Rallying Round Old George and, whilst promising fidelity, double-crosses his master. The Good Angel features a butler, Keggs, who gets involved in manipulating the love lives of the guests for his own ends to ensure he wins the servants’ sweepstake as to whom the daughter of the house will marry. To this end Keggs rows out to an island to untie a boat so as to maroon a couple there, and offers advice on courtship to the guest whose name he has drawn. Wodehouse the great recycler returns to this idea in A Damsel In Distress, in which one of the sub-plots concerns Keggs the butler’s machinations to win the sweepstake, which involves blackmail and double-crossing. Whereas in The Good Angel the advice he offered was genuine, in the novel he offers deliberately misleading advice to Lord Percy, the eldest son of his employer, apparently in support of Lord Percy’s aims, but in fact to further his own interests only. The Good Angel - which was published in America as Matrimonial Sweepstakes - was collected into The Man Upstairs. Another story in this collection, By Advice Of Counsel, is about Gentleman Bailey double crossing a friend with advice on how to get married with the intention of keeping him single so as to maintain Gentleman Bailey’s way of life, which is supported by his bachelor friend.
Through these characters and situations Wodehouse was gathering together the ideas and characters which were to lead towards his greatest literary creation, the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster.
Jeeves
Jeeves is the most famous butler in the world, his fame so great that not even the fact that he is not a butler has been able to diminish it.
He is a gentleman’s gentleman, a valet, an employer’s personal attendant. The men of the families who lived in the grand houses when Wodehouse began his writing career would have been expected to have valets to look after their clothes. They might also have had their meals at table served by them, although this may have been done by butler and footmen, depending on the house’s particular arrangements.
The role of gentleman’s gentlemen is a product of the Edwardian period. They served a need which arose, and later disappeared, as a result of social change. Prior to marriage, the sons of the upper classes lived at home where all their domestic requirements were catered for. All they needed to do was turn up for events in the correct - and properly maintained - garb. For this they employed their own valet. When they left home to get married they would then establish their own domestic staff to run their household.
But when social fashions changed and, instead of remaining at the family home, bachelor sons of upper-class families started to move away, they needed someone to look after their domestic requirements. The choice was to move into rooms, where there would be someone to look after their needs, such as the situation Ukridge is in with Bowles, a former butler - though a more famous relationship of this kind in fiction is Sherlock Holmes’ with Mrs Hudson - or to take a flat, and employ a gentleman’s gentleman to look after them.
A gentleman’s gentleman is the personal servant of a gentleman, and usually his sole one. He would be responsible for his employer’s general welfare, combining the duties of a valet with that of cooking his employer’s meals.
The nature of the relationship between an employer and his gentleman depended upon the personalities concerned, both in terms of duties and their personal interaction. The Edwardian era saw a loosening of formality, with children growing to adulthood rebelling against the rigid codes of their parents’ generation, a process accentuated by the Great War, where all social classes stood, and fell, side by side in the trenches.
Bertie is very much part of this new generation, impatient with stuffy convention and constantly challenging it in respect to his clothing. He horrifies the older generation, as represented by his Aunt Agatha, by discussing his affairs in front of Jeeves, and his attitude towards Jeeves is generally a pally, confiding one. In return, Jeeves, presumably of the older generation, is guarded - and extremely formal - in his language, and will sometimes remark when asked to offer an opinion or do something that it is ‘hardly my place, sir.’ Bertie criticises Jeeves for not being ‘in tune with modern progressive thought, his attitude being described, perhaps, as hidebound’ [Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves], and his battles with him over choice of clothes is not just one of taste, it is one of the generation gap.
‘Oh Jeeves,’ I said, ‘about that check suit.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Is it really a frost?’
‘A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’
‘But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.’
‘Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.’
‘He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.’
‘I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.’ [Jeeves Takes Charge]
That a gentleman’s gentleman and his master lived in close confinement would also bring down barriers. Jeeves’ quarters one would expect to consist of the kitchen - where he can entertain his guests - and a bedroom, which is likely to be directly off the kitchen. When Jeeves types, Bertie can hear it; when Bertie needs Jeeves he does not summon him by bell from the far reaches of a voluminous house, closeted away behind a green baize door, he merely calls out for him.
A butler is usually the head of the household staff, which could number dozens of people, and is in charge of wines and the dining table as well as running the household staff, probably with the help of the housekeeper. Bachelor Bertie has no need of a butler. When he entertains guests to meals in his flat, Jeeves will butle for him, just as he does when Bertie eats alone at home. However, were Bertie to get married and set up his own household, then someone of his position and wealth would employ a butler with a household staff under him. He would no longer have the need for a gentleman’s gentleman. This is something Jeeves is acutely aware of:
I had no desire to sever a connection so pleasant in every respect as his and mine had been, and my experience is that when the wife comes in at the front door the valet of bachelor days goes out at the back. [Bertie Changes His Mind]
When Bertie is in danger of getting married, he can rely upon Jeeves to conspire to prevent it. As Bertie almost invariably wants out of the engagement himself, this leads him to believe that Jeeves is faithfully rallying round his young master, when Jeeves is merely acting self-interestedly. But Jeeves is prepared to break off an engagement of Bertie’s whether Bertie wants it or not - and does in the case of his engagement to Florence Craye in Jeeves Takes Charge.
The richness of the humour from the Wooster/Jeeves chronicles arises from the difference between perception and reality. The most obvious is the way that servant conspires against master, while master complacently congratulates himself on having someone who serves him so faithfully and selflessly.
Jeeves is highly selfish, always alert to how he can turn any situation to his own advantage. Asked to smooth a way for Bingo Little to gain an uncle’s consent to marry a waitress, Jeeves manipulates the situation so that Bingo’s uncle gets engaged to his own cook, who is Jeeves’ fiancée. Jeeves has tired of her and wants instead to move in on Bingo Little’s intended. When, in The Metropolitan Touch, Bingo Little’s latest love affair goes wrong, Jeeves, who has been advising Bingo, makes sure that he is in a position to benefit from it by buying the book that was being run on the outcome. The short stories often end with Jeeves financially enhanced. In Clustering Round Young Bingo Jeeves so successfully plays the parties off each other that he ends up being rewarded by all involved: £20 from Bingo Little, £25 from Aunt Dahlia, £25 from Uncle Tom Travers, £10 from Uncle George, and even £5 from Bertie even though he says, ‘I don’t know why I’m giving it to you.’
When asked by Lord Worplesdon how he might arrange to meet J. Chichester Clam in secret, he suggests Bertie take a cottage at Steeple Bumpleigh - where Bertie is dead set against going because it is the lair of his Aunt Agatha - purely because he wants to go fishing there. Jeeves contrives to take whatever holidays or trips he fancies, be it a jaunt to Monte Carlo to play the tables or a round-the-world cruise, under the guise of working for Bertie - and thus at Bertie’s expense - and normally in opposition to Bertie’s wishes.
Nor does Jeeves treat Bertie with much respect. Outwardly yes, but in subtle ways no:
‘I think it would be best for me to stop at Mr Fittleworth’s residence, appraise him of what has occurred, deposit the luggage and warn him of your coming.’
‘Is warn the word?’
‘“Inform” I should have said sir.’ [Joy In The Morning]
Or more subtly:
‘I give you fair warning that, if he tells me I have a face like a fish I shall clump his head.’
‘Bertie,’ cried the Wickham, contorted with anguish and apprehension and whatnot.
‘Yes, I shall.’
‘Then you’ll simply ruin the whole thing.’
‘I don’t care. We Woosters have our pride.’
‘Perhaps the young gentleman will not notice that you have a face like a fish, sir,’ suggested Jeeves. [The Episode Of The Dog McIntosh]
Jeeves is indifferent as to whether Bertie suffers or not. Indeed, he can take positive pleasure from seeing Bertie squirm. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of Jeeves’ schemes require Bertie to suffer privations. Jeeves arranges for Bertie to go through the humiliating experience of speaking to a girls’ school as part of his master plan to preserve the cosy bachelor existence he requires, and writes of it that: ‘It was an experience which I should have been sorry to have missed. Mr Wooster, I may say at once, indubitably excelled himself.’
This appears in the short story, Bertie Changes His Mind, which is the only one in the canon written by Jeeves. Incidentally, it contains a fine example of humour in Wodehouse’s writing which has eluded the anthologists and quotation-compiling merchants, when Jeeves describes the schoolgirls singing their song of welcome to Bertie, prior to him giving his speech:
Considerable latitude of choice was given to the singers in the matter of key, and there was little of what I might call co-operative effort. Each child went on till she reached the end, then stopped and waited for the stragglers to come up. It was an unusual performance, and I, personally, found it extremely exhilarating. It seemed to strike Mr Wooster, however, like a blow. He recoiled a couple of steps and flung up an arm defensively.
Jeeves’ schemes to ‘solve’ Bertie’s problems - which often are not Bertie’s at all, but those of others which he gets dragged into - often incur physical or mental discomfort to Bertie, frequently gratuitously. He is happy to make his employer writhe:
‘And if I am to stave off the Cheesewright challenge, I shall have the need of a weapon. His strength is the strength of ten, and unarmed I shall be corn before his sickle.’
‘Extremely well put, sir, if I may say so, and your diagnosis of the situation is perfectly accurate. Mr Cheesewright’s robustness would enable him to crush you like a fly.’
‘Exactly.’
‘He would obliterate you with a single blow. He would break you in two with his bare hands. He would tear you limb from limb.’
I frowned slightly. I was glad to see that he appreciated the gravity of the situation, but these crude physical details seemed to me uncalled for. [Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit]
One of Jeeves’ stock techniques is to make out that Bertie is insane. This was his solution to the problem of Bertie being credited with the authorship of Rosie M. Banks’ novels by Bingo Little. This was not Bertie’s problem but Bingo Little’s, and initially developed out of Jeeves’ suggestion as to how Bingo might convince his uncle of his intended’s suitability as a wife. That Bertie be depicted as a loony was also Jeeves’ solution to the problem which Aunt Dahlia and Sir Roderick Glossop face in Jeeves In The Offing. In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Jeeves gets Bertie out of his engagement to Madeline Basset by telling her that Bertie is a kleptomaniac producing, as evidence for his claim, the amber statuette that he was supposed to be returning to Pop Basset’s collection, announcing that he had found it in Bertie’s room. Bertie spends a night in the cells as a result. In this novel Jeeves also telephones Major Plank to come to Totleigh Towers to get Stinker Pinker’s address, which Jeeves could quite easily have given him over the telephone. Bertie is endangered by Plank’s arrival and has to dive behind a sofa, as Plank thinks that Bertie is a notorious crook. His source for this particular piece of misinformation had been Jeeves in the first place.
At the end of Right Ho, Jeeves, Jeeves sends Bertie on an 18-mile bicycle ride to retrieve the key to the back door of Brinkley Court after the house party is locked out, having exited the house summoned by the fire bell rung by Bertie at Jeeves’ suggestion. Jeeves has the key all along and lets the party back in after Bertie has left. The suffering of Bertie so cheers up the rest of the house party that animosities between them are quickly forgotten. Had Jeeves wished, there would have been no need for Bertie to make the whole 18-mile journey; Bertie could merely have bicycled around the corner, had a quiet smoke or whatever, and sneaked back into the house later. It would have had the same effect - for all bar Bertie, who, yet again, suffers at Jeeves’ hands.
Even when Jeeves does act to save, rather than endanger or embarrass, his employer, he can do so in a rather half-hearted way. When Jeeves intervenes during a scam being carried out on Bertie by Alice Hemmingway and Soapy Sam by deftly lifting a pearl case from Soapy Sam’s pocket when he helps him on with his coat, Bertie is all grateful thanks, and gives him £20 by way of appreciation. Yet Jeeves had recognised the man as a conman, from an earlier occurrence, but stood passively by, watching, while Bertie was relieved of £100. In this instance Jeeves has nothing to gain bar the pleasure of seeing his employer lose £100.
Another occasion where Jeeves strictly regulates the dispersal of his help occurs in the story The Episode Of The Dog McIntosh. The plot involves substituting a new Aberdeen terrier for Aunt Agatha’s one which, while being looked after by Bertie, had given by Roberta Wickham to the Blumenfield kid to suck up to his family for her own purposes. Bertie goes to retrieve the dog from the Blumenfields’ hotel suite, while the occupants are at the cinema. Roberta Wickham has a meeting with them afterwards, and is to be shown into their suite when she arrives. Pop Blumenfield, finding himself short of a dog and told by Roberta Wickham, on Jeeves’ suggestion, that Bertie is to blame, goes round to confront Bertie, whereupon Jeeves returns the dog, which is in fact another Aberdeen terrier, bought for the purpose. Why did Jeeves not send Bertie out with the replacement dog in the first place? Because by arranging the action as he did, Jeeves gets the chance to insult, very subtly, Pop Blumenfield to his face, humiliate Bertie, who is cowering behind the sofa and enrich himself - Pop Blumenfield gives him £5 in thanks and Bertie gives Jeeves a further £15 in his relief that the ordeal, created by Roberta Wickham and stage-managed by Jeeves, is over.
Not only is Jeeves happy to see Bertie suffer, he will also double-cross him. Asked to hold on to Uncle Willoughby’s manuscript of his memoirs prior to destroying them so as to prevent them from being published, Jeeves posts the manuscript to the publishers to break an engagement Bertie is in favour of but he is not. In Right Ho, Jeeves Bertie gets Jeeves to agree not to demand the disposal of his mess jacket as his price for helping out. Jeeves agrees to this, but ‘accidentally’ burns it when ironing.
Jeeves comes across in Bertie’s memoirs, despite the overwhelming niceness of its writer, as rather an unpleasant fellow. The characters of the two protagonists are vastly different. Jeeves is immoral, while Bertie has a very strict code. Bertie’s code is so strict that it constantly cramps his room for manoeuvre. It requires that he is chivalrous to females to the point where he is unable to break an engagement to a woman, however much he might dislike her. His code also requires that he always helps a pal in distress, and he prides himself on never letting down a friend in need. Jeeves, on the other hand, has no such scruples. He is prepared to steal, lie, bribe, double-cross, blackmail, break promises, and knock policemen unconscious with coshes if the need arises. Bertie is prepared to live a life of hell married to a girl he cannot stand rather than break his code. When Jeeves finds himself engaged to a girl he has grown tired of, he plots to offload her onto another.
