The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 15
Bertie likes to flatter himself, regarding his various battles with Jeeves, that: ‘I suppose when two men of iron will live in close association with one another, there are bound to be occasional clashes.’ [The Code Of The Woosters]. The joke, of course, is that Bertie is weak and allows others to bulldoze their wishes upon him. But Bertie does display great strength of character in living up to his beliefs despite the peril in which they constantly place him. He is aware that his values, so deep-rooted as they are, are often self-defeating:
I drew no comfort from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sydney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind that was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass. Sydney Carton and Bertie Wooster, I felt - nothing to choose between them. Sydney, one of the mugs - Bertram, the same. [The Code Of The Woosters]
Part of the humour is that Bertie is sometimes aware of what happens to him, but his overwhelming generosity of spirit blanks it out. He talks of ‘the hideous revelation of Jeeves treachery’ [Jeeves And The Yule-Tide Spirit] but consistently allows his fate to rest in Jeeves’ hands. He talks bitterly of aunts, in which he quite clearly includes his Aunt Dahlia, but he always comes running when she calls, and declares that: ‘There are few males or females whose society I enjoy more than that of this genial sister of my late father.’ [Much Obliged, Jeeves] Yet right at the end of the final Wooster novel, Wooster tells Jeeves:
We are tranquil. And I’ll tell you why. There are no aunts here. And in particular we are three thousand miles away from Mrs Dahlia Travers of Brinkley Manor, Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire. Don’t get me wrong Jeeves, I like the old flesh and blood. In fact I revere her. Nobody can say she isn’t good company. But her moral code is lax. She cannot distinguish between what is according to Hoyle and what is not according to Hoyle. If she wants to do anything, she doesn’t ask herself ‘would Emily Post approve of this?,’ she goes on and does it.
Yet, despite being capable of this very shrewd assessment of Dahlia, he continually refers to her as his ‘good and deserving aunt’, as opposed to Agatha, who gets damned in the strongest terms, with Bertie suggesting that she is a werewolf who eats her young. Yet what does Aunt Agatha ever do to Bertie? All she wants is for him to make a good marriage, get a respectable job and take his family responsibilities with the seriousness that she takes them. Whereas at Dahlia’s hands Bertie suffers all forms of degradation and anxiety, and she requires him to do things which risk his going to jail. Indeed, one of his sojourns with Dahlia ends with him spending a night in the cells. Bertie is determined to take the rap for something he had not done, and go to jail rather than allow his aunt to give up her cook, Anatole, which is the price of Bertie’s freedom. Dahlia is fundamentally immoral and, unlike Agatha, has great respect for Jeeves, and is fan of his methods. One of these is blackmail, of which Dahlia declares: ‘Good old blackmail! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall!’ [The Code Of The Woosters] Whereas Agatha might be sniffily condescending towards Bertie, she never reaches the height of invective which Dahlia will hurl at her nephew:
To look at you, one would think you are just an ordinary sort of idiot - certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are a worse scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post. [Right Ho, Jeeves]
But Aunt Dahlia is a pal, and Bertie always supports his pals, and excuses them their trespasses on his good nature. Jeeves is another pal, and Bertie is always benevolent towards him in his deeds. He often voluntarily gives up a valued item of clothing as a kindness to Jeeves. Bertie is also generous to him in word: ‘I rely on him in every crisis and he never lets me down’ [Jeeves And The Hard Boiled Egg] and, even more generously:
There’s one thing you have to give Jeeves credit for. He lets the dead past bury its d. He and the young master may have had their differences about Alpine hats with pink feathers in them, but when he see the y. m. on the receiving end of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he sinks his dudgeon and comes through with the feudal spirit at his best. [Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves]
The point being, of course, that Jeeves does not always come to Bertie’s aid. Sometimes he pretends to, but acts on his own agenda instead; at other times - when he has the hump with Bertie, such as over his purple socks - he declines to. Bertie, albeit only rather vaguely, is aware of this, but he blots it from his mind. He is not a great rationaliser or analyst. He prefers to presume that everyone is like him, ever eager and conscientious in aiding pals overcome their problems. Unfortunately his pals are not so conscientious. Bertie is perhaps unfortunate in his choice of friends, for he is let down regularly by them. As Lord Chuffnell remarks, ‘I wish I had a quid for every time I’ve seen him take the blame for somebody else’s dirty work on his own shoulders.’ [Thank You, Jeeves] Ma Cream thinks him a half-wit because she discovers him in her son’s room searching for a cow-creamer in another’s cause. She finds him thus because Roberta Wickham, who was supposed to be keeping guard, abandoned her post to go to the telephone and forgot then all about him. Lord Bittlesham thinks Bertie a loony because he believes Bertie was claiming authorship of Rosie M. Banks’ novels, when in fact this claim was foisted on him by Bingo Little.
There is a strong case for saying that Bertie’s perceived stupidity is in part a generosity of spirit and a strict adherence to his code. Bertie is a prisoner of his own character and beliefs as much as his intelligence. Quite how stupid is Bertie? Not nearly as much as he is painted, that is for sure. Much of the propaganda concerning Bertie’s stupidity comes from Jeeves, who is constantly dropping him in it, by having to rectify situations by a public declaration that Bertie is a loony. When Bertie complains to Jeeves about this, Jeeves dismisses his complaint complacently with ‘only to your immediate circle now resident at Brinkley Court, sir.’ Bertie retorts that ‘You keep saying that, and you must know it is the purest apple sauce. You don’t really think the Creams will maintain a tactful reserve? They’ll dine out on it for years. Returning to America they’ll spread the story from the rock-bound coasts of Maine to the Everglades of Florida.’ [Jeeves In The Offing]
Bertie’s main advocate for his imbecility is himself. He is always telling us that either he or other people believe him to be an ass, though he does let slip that his mother thought him intelligent. We also know that he went to Oxford University, albeit at a time when money as much as intelligence was a requirement of entry, and that he enjoys doing crosswords. Bertie is not scholarly, but then scholarship is not the same as intelligence. Bertie is always puffing Jeeves’ intelligence, but how much of what Bertie describes thus is in fact better viewed as cunning and learning? Jeeves is always keen to display the products of his reading - and he is certainly widely read - but someone of Bertie’s class and upbringing is unlikely to show off his cleverness; it is not the done thing. It is rather a British trait, especially amongst the upper classes, to downplay one’s abilities, and most certainly one’s intellectual talents. Sometimes, when Bertie is at pains to make himself look stupid, he clearly is not because he is in on the joke:
I remember something Jeeves had once called Gussie. ‘A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’ [The Code Of The Woosters]
Or when Bertie is telling Jeeves a story and he wishes the protagonists to be anonymous. Jeeves has suggested calling them A and B, overruling Bertie’s suggestion to call them North and South. A third person enters the story and needs a name:
‘Shall we call him C, sir?
‘Caesar is as good a name as any, I suppose.’ [Jeeves And The Greasy Bird]
All in all, Bertie need not be taken as a totally reliable witness where matters of his own intelligence are concerned. He cottons on to the implications of Gussie losing his notebook, when Gussie does not and he realises the jeopardy the syndicate is in from Steggles’ discovery that Harold the choirboy can sprint quickly, which had passed Bingo by.
We are led to view Jeeves as a genius because Bertie keeps telling us to. In the first story in My Man Jeeves, Leave It To Jeeves, Bertie introduces Jeeves as his capable confidant, without whom he would not know what to do. Previously, in the story Extricating Gussie in The Man With Two Left Feet, Jeeves had been a valet of no significance whatsoever. When Bertie runs into troubles in this story he does not look towards Jeeves for advice, but towards an aunt.
The problem Jeeves is asked to solve in Leave It To Jeeves is that of an artist friend of Bertie’s, Corky, who has two ambitions: to marry his fiancée and to become a portrait painter. The snags are that he is dependent upon his uncle for a quarterly allowance and no-one has yet commissioned him to paint a portrait. Jeeves takes the case in hand and, as a result, Corky’s fiancée ends up married to the uncle instead, and she presents him with an heir, which cuts Corky out of his inheritance. Given his first portrait commission, to paint this child’s picture, Corky produces the painting, but his uncle takes exception to it and cuts off Corky’s allowance. Jeeves rescues something from the embers by suggesting that Corky use the painting as a basis of a comic series ‘The Adventures of Baby Blobbs.’ When the series takes off, Corky generously - in view of the fact that he views Jeeves as a ‘fool’ for his previous scheme that backfired so - rewards Jeeves. But Corky ends up further away from his ambitions than before Jeeves came to his ‘help’.
In another of the stories in My Man Jeeves, Jeeves And The Hard Boiled Egg, Jeeves comes to the aid of Bicky and ends up losing him his allowance. He rescues the situation by suggesting to Bicky a blackmail scheme.
In Jeeves And The Old School Chum, Jeeves conspires to break up Mrs Bingo Little’s friendship with her old school friend, a food faddist, by depriving the party of its picnic lunch, thus turning Mrs Little against the other’s belief in a minimal food intake. Mrs Little is not bothered by missing lunch, and Bertie points out to Jeeves that it is men who object to missing lunch, not women, whose important meal is tea. So Jeeves arranges that the car will run out of petrol in the middle of nowhere when they are returning for tea. This does the trick.
Like Wodehouse, in relation to his skills as a banker, Wooster was self-deprecating:
Every year, starting about the middle of November, there is a good deal of anxiety and apprehension among owners of the better-class of country-house throughout England as to who will get Bertram Wooster’s patronage for the Christmas holidays. It may be one it may be another. As my Aunt Dahlia says, you never know where the blow will fall.
This year, however, I had decided early. It couldn’t have been later than Nov. 10 when a sigh of relief went up from a dozen stately homes as it became known that the short straw had been drawn by Sir Reginald Witherspoon, Bart, of Bleaching Court, Upper Bleaching, Hants. [The Ordeal Of Young Tuppy]
Like Wodehouse, Wooster is related to the aristocracy. Indeed, Bertie could well become a leading member of it. The head of the Wooster family is the Earl of Yaxley, formerly Sir George Wooster Bart, Bertie’s Uncle George. As this uncle is childless, the earldom will be inherited by a nephew. Which one? The contenders appear to be Bertie and his first cousins Claude and Eustace. The question is: which of George’s brothers is the elder? Bertie’s father, or his Uncle Henry, Claude and Eustace’s begetter? No clues are offered. Bertie does not talk of his father, and Henry is noted only for doing ‘some rummy things’ amongst them ‘keeping eleven pet rabbits in his bedroom. In fact he wound up his career, happy to the last and completely surrounded by rabbits in some sort of home.’ [The Inimitable Jeeves] The second Earl of Kimberley became a recluse after the death of his wife. When necessity forced a visit to a London doctor, he arrived at the train station just too late to catch his train, threw a turnip at the station clock and broke it, and stomped off back to Kimberley, where he would allow no visits. After his death, his executors came from London and found living at Kimberley in harmony together a string of mistresses and their offspring.
Bertie writes of his white mess jacket that: ‘I jolly well intend to fight for it with all the vim of grand old Sieur de Wooster at the Battle of Agincourt.’ [Right Ho, Jeeves] A Wodehouse ancestor fought at the Battle of Agincourt. Sir John Wodehouse, a Wodehouse 16 generations before Plum, was a Commissioner of Array for Norfolk charged with raising troops for French campaign, and an executor to Henry V’s will. His descendants took ‘Agincourt’ as their motto. Bertram is a name which appears on the Wodehouse family tree. Sir Bertram de Wodehouse married the daughter of Hamo, Lord of Felton and distinguished himself fighting for Edward I against the Scots in the 13th century. Bertie defends his decision to keep playing the banjo with: ‘A fellow simply can’t go on truckling - do I mean truckling? I know it begins with a t - to his valet for ever. There comes a time when he must remember that his ancestors did dashed well at the Battle of Crecy and put the old foot down.’ [Thank You, Jeeves]
Wooster and Wodehouse have more in common in the matter of names, which extended to Christian names they preferred to suppress, in Bertie’s case his second:
‘I didn’t know your name was Wilberforce.’
I explained that except in moments of great emotion one hushed it up. [The Mating Season]
Bertie gained the name Wilberforce because his father won a packet on an outsider of that name in the Grand National the day before his christening. Over money the author and his creation share similarities. Both were wealthy men - at least by the time the Wooster novels were being written - and so untroubled by worries of how to pay the next bill, but neither was reckless with their money. Bertie turns down the chance to invest £1,000 in a play and could be keenly aware of small sums:
The going was sticky and took about eight and elevenpence off the value of my Sure-grip tennis shoes in the first two yards. [Jeeves And The Impending Doom]
A man who has just become engaged to a girl whose whole personality gives him a sinking feeling and who has had to pay thirty-five quid to a blood-sucker and another twopence to a lending library for a dud book is seldom in mid-season form. [Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen]
Bertie could be generous to his friends with his largesse. So, too, could Wodehouse when dealing with his own family and close friends; in particular William Townend, a prolific, but worst-selling author. Wodehouse supported Townend financially for many years, and ran a separate bank account for him to enable this married man to continue writing. Wodehouse also used his connections and reputation to try to boost his friend’s prospects. This was down to friendship, not from a belief in Townend’s books which, as he confessed after Townend’s death, he found dull.
In playing the banjo, the two Ws share a short-lived hobby. Wodehouse was learning the instrument as a young man until, so the story goes, Westbrook pawned it and then lost the ticket. Longer lived activities that they shared were a love for golf and music theatre. Bertie had a cousin who was a theosophist; Plum’s brother was head of the Theosophical College in Benares. Both went to a prep school called Malvern House. Bertie tried to marry into musical comedy; his ghostwriter succeeded at it. Both hated public speaking and were no good at it. At the dinner after the ceremony granting his honorary doctorate from Oxford, Wodehouse was called upon, by the hall shouting ‘we want Wodehouse!’, to say a few words after the formal speeches. A few words were all his audience got. The microphone was passed down the table to him, he stood and mumbled into it ‘thank you,’ and sat down.
It is unavoidable that a writer writing in the first person will end up putting something of themselves into the ‘I’ character. But Wodehouse put a considerable deal of himself into Bertie Wooster, and on one occasion Bertie seems to be talking more of Wodehouse than himself:
‘The whole trouble is due to your blasted aunt.’
‘Which blasted aunt? Specify, old thing. I have so many.’ [Clustering Round Young Bingo]
Bertie only reveals four aunts of his own in his chronicles. Wodehouse had five times this number. When Bertie writes that: ‘I don’t wonder that all these author blokes have bald heads’ [Clustering Round Young Bingo] it is Wodehouse he is describing.
Like Wooster, Wodehouse was not a witty man. His conversation did not sparkle over the dinner table with bon mots. Bertie Wooster is one of the funniest writers in the English language, yet he seldom cracks a joke. One of the extremely rare witticisms he ventures occurs when, asked how he was after a night in the cells, he replies ‘I have a pinched look’ [Jeeves And the Feudal Spirit]. Bertie’s memoirs may be considered humorous because of many factors - the juxtaposition of images, the mangling of phrases and similes, the undercurrents of tension between the various protagonists, the deceits and conceits, the cock-eyed view of the world - but never because Bertie has set out to write an overtly funny piece.
Those who met Wodehouse hoping to be dazzled by witticisms or badinage were disappointed. What they encountered instead was a well-mannered, polite upper-class gentleman who was as happy, and normally happier, listening than talking. As Duff Copper remembers: ‘I sat next to a man I thought was charming [and] because he was humble I was patronising. When I left, I casually asked the head waiter who the gentleman was I had been sitting next to. ‘Mr PG Wodehouse.’ I wish I had been nicer. [A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper 1890-1954] Frank Crowninshield wrote of PG Wodehouse:
Judged by exterior appearances only, he seemed merely a stodgy and colourless Englishman; silent, careful with his money, self-effacing, slow-witted and matter-of-fact… In all those years - at dinners, at his cottage in the country, on the golf-links, at the Coffee House Club, over a weekend, at the theatre - I never heard him utter a clever, let alone brilliant, remark. No alienist could possibly have guessed him to be the fanciful, erudite and highly intellectual man he actually was.
