The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 16
Bertie Wooster writes in The Inimitable Jeeves:
I wouldn’t have said off-hand that there was anything particularly fascinating about me - in fact, most people look upon me as rather an ass.
Wodehouse’s great love was writing, and his favourite conversational topic was the mechanics and business of writing. Bertie never sought to be the centre of attention, and neither did Wodehouse, who would not set out to light up a room in the manner we envisage Oscar Wilde doing - though Wilde, too, had a reputation as a good and courteous listener. Although Wilde and Wodehouse worked in dissimilar ways, they worked on similar themes. Wilde’s finest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opens with Algernon playing the piano badly but enthusiastically and asking of his manservant:
‘Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?’
‘I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.’
Such dialogue would not be out of place in a Wooster-Jeeves conversation. Nor would the scene where Algernon, having scoffed all the sandwiches specifically requested by his guests before they arrive, picks up an empty plate in horror when he comes to offer them around:
‘Good heavens! Lane! Why are there no cucumber sandwiches? I ordered them specifically.’
‘There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice.’
‘No cucumbers!’
‘No, sir. Not even for ready money.’
It is in this play that Miss Prism tells Cecily to ‘read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational for a young girl. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.’ Wodehouse blamed the fall of the rupee on his not going to university:
My father, after many years in Hong Kong, had retired on a pension, and the authorities paid it to him in rupees. A thoroughly dirty trick, in my opinion, for the rupee is the last thing in the world - or was then - with anyone who valued his peace of mind would wish to be associated. It never stayed put for a second. It was always jumping up and down and throwing fits, and expenditure had to be regulated in the light of what mood it happened to be at the moment. ‘Watch that rupee!’ was the cry in the Wodehouse family. [Over Seventy]
Take any book of quotations and not only should it be stuffed full of Wodehouse quotes if it is any good, but the majority will be from the Wooster stories. It is Bertie who writes: ‘He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that while not exactly disgruntled, he was far from feeling gruntled’ [The Code Of The Woosters] and: ‘she fitted into my best armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew that they were wearing armchairs tight round the hips this season.’ [Jeeves And The Unbidden Guest] The Wooster stories were the best work that Wodehouse the craftsman produced, the flagship, as it were, of his writing. He was aware of this:
Do you find you write more slowly than you used to? I don’t know if it is because The Mating Season is a Jeeves story, and in a Jeeves story every line has to have some entertainment value, but I consider it a good day’s work if I can get three pages done. [Performing Flea]
That the stories are written in the first person is a handicap and a strength. The handicap is that nothing can happen for the reader unless Bertie sees or hears it - hence the reason he is always having to dive behind sofas - or gets told about it. They require that the reader must be able to understand Jeeves’ motives and intentions, while Bertie cannot, and that the conduit for us to comprehend Jeeves is Bertie himself. He must tell the reader what he himself does not know. In doing this so well, Wodehouse displays his genius. He is a far more subtle writer than his detractors have acknowledged.
One of the strengths of Wooster as a participant is that the action in his stories start very promptly. In some of his novels Wodehouse talks a leisurely stroll around the central characters, gently setting the scene and drawing together the various strands from which the plot will be launched, and the main action of the novel may only start a third of the way in. Bertie is always only a few pages away from imminent disaster wherever you might be in the book.
Though Wodehouse often writes in the first person, the Wooster tales are unusual in that the narrator is also a participant. The Ukridge stories are in the first person, but of a minor character, who has little action; indeed, it would not be remotely difficult to rewrite the Ukridge stories in the third person. The Mulliner tales are told by a non-combatant narrator. This device allows Wodehouse to unleash some fairly unlikely plot lines, on the excuse that they are the tall stories of a pub bore. Perhaps ‘bore’ is not the mot juste, but Wodehouse, in a letter to William Townend about correcting the proofs of the Mulliner omnibus wrote: ‘It humbled me a good deal, as the stuff didn’t seem that good. Still, I suppose nothing would, if you read 864 pages of it straight off.’ [Performing Flea] It is no coincidence that the name of the public house Mulliner tells his tales in is the Angler’s Rest. The first person Oldest Member stories also allow a certain licence with credibility. Wooster is also an exceptional Wodehouse narrator in that he is a comic narrator, the humour of his stories coming as much from how he says things as the action he describes.
Jeeves and Wooster started in short stories, the medium where their relationship works best. The best Jeeves book is The Inimitable Jeeves, the first one devoted solely to Jeeves and Wooster. It is a novel crafted from ten short stories, and thus combines the best of both worlds. There is a coherent narrative plot spreading from story to story and Jeeves has a major role to play throughout the book. Wodehouse followed this with two short story collections, Carry On, Jeeves, (which reprinted the four Jeeves stories from My Man Jeeves) and Very Good, Jeeves. The standard of these fail to match the consistent excellence of the stories of The Inimitable Jeeves. After that, Wooster and Jeeves were almost solely limited to novels.
When Wodehouse moved over to writing pure novels Jeeves dropped out of the picture rather, and the balance between Wooster and Jeeves was skewed. Jeeves cannot be on hand to provide succour. If he were, the book is in danger of ending dozens of pages too early. So Bertie labours on alone for much of the action. Indeed, in some of the later novels Jeeves hardly has a chance to plot away - or even direct strategy. Whereas in the earlier stories Jeeves was earning Bertie’s forfeits of purple socks or whatever, by the end of the chronicles Bertie is offering them up, perhaps for old times’ sake and to hide from the reader that Jeeves has really only been a bit-part player in the major action.
In Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit Jeeves does not contribute any schemes to save Bertie, nor is he ever called upon to do so. Jeeves does not even extract Bertie from his engagement to Florence Craye. This happens through the revelation that Percy Gorringe pawned his mother’s necklace purely so he can put on his dramatisation of Florence Craye’s Spindrift, which causes Florence to decide her future lies with this devoted admirer instead. Jeeves’ involvement is little more than being the one possessed of the knowledge of pearls required to unmask Ma Trotter’s necklace as a copy, and the one who provides the pick-me-up which restores LG Trotter’s happiness and leads him to take Milady’s Boudoir off Aunt Dahlia’s hands. This pick-me-up business is not a particularly credible piece of plotting and seems bunged in to try to justify Jeeves’ presence in the book. Jeeves could almost as easily, as far as the plot is concerned, have taken the book off. Indeed, he takes part of it off, returning to London to chair the monthly meeting of the Junior Ganymede.
The norm is for Jeeves to be kept out of great chunks of ‘his’ novels. In Jeeves In The Offing, he is off on his annual holiday, from which Bertie recalls him halfway through the book. In Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen he goes away to visit his aunt. In Joy In The Morning, Lord Worplesdon commandeers his services and makes him stay with him. In The Mating Season, Bertie is pretending to be Gussie, so Jeeves cannot make an appearance until Gussie arrives pretending to be Bertie, with Bertie’s manservant in tow, and even when he does, he departs again for London to attend a lecture. In Thank You, Jeeves, Jeeves departs from Bertie’s employment in the first chapter, and only rejoins it in the final one.
In The Code Of The Woosters, considered by many to be the best of the Wooster novels, Jeeves has little part in the plot, offering only suggestions or information about Spode’s ‘Eulalie’ rather than be allowed to run free to work his machinations. The book is excellent, and has both pace and a convoluted, smooth plot; but it is not one which would be chosen by Jeeves’ public relations advisors as an example of what he is capable of.
In the novels, Bertie Wooster was reverting towards being a Reggie Pepper figure.
Knight Draws In
The Wodehouses left France for America on 18 April 1947. The American authorities had studied the Cussen Report into his wartime ‘guilt’ before they had granted him a visa. Wodehouse gave a press conference on his arrival, arranged by his US publishers to publicise his new novel Full Moon. This was one of the novels he had written during the war. At Le Touquet, when he had been taken prisoner, he had been working on Joy In The Morning, and when Ethel joined him in Berlin after his release from camp, she brought the manuscript with her, and he finished it in Germany. Money In The Bank had been written in captivity and had been serialised in the Saturday Evening Post and then published as a book in America in January 1942. During the war Eggs, Beans And Crumpets had been published in Britain in April 1940 and in America a month later, and Quick Service had come out in October of that year, with the American edition appearing a month later.
Wodehouse had wanted that his book of his wartime experiences, provisionally entitled Wodehouse In Wonderland, be published soon after the war. However his agent in England and his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic fought shy of the idea. They wanted a policy of business as usual, with little reference being made to his wartime activities, and that the first post-war publication from Wodehouse be a novel. They wanted no reminders about his wartime broadcasts.
Whether Wodehouse was right to go along with this has been questioned. Many have argued that he should have taken on his accusers head on and dealt with the charges made against him. Instead a policy of ignoring them and trying to re-establish ‘normality’ in the ‘Wodehouse brand’, was decided upon. This might have served his publishers’ interests more than his own. Contrary to his publishers’ advice, Wodehouse sought to give his side of the argument for his wartime broadcasts in an interview to Hubert Cole of the British magazine Illustrated, which appeared in the issue of 7 December 1946, and in a letter to the Chairman of the Old Alleyians, extracts of which were published in The Alleyian of July 1945, and a letter to Variety, which was published on 8 May 1946.
Wodehouse could have been more insistent on trying to clear his name. But it is hard to be critical of a man who had suffered great deprivation both emotionally and physically during the war years. He had lost three stones in weight, had suffered the death of his beloved step-daughter, been denounced as a traitor in Parliament and seen old friends turn on him and the press publish repeated falsehoods about him. He was battered and bruised and one can sympathise if he did not have the fight in him to continue to take on the perceived wisdom ranged against him.
In time, he came to hate talk of his wartime broadcasts. He had intended to publish a version of these talks in Performing Flea, which came out in 1953. He re-read the broadcasts he had made and was upset to find that he had talked of ‘fraternising’ with the Germans and ‘beaming’; in addition there was the passage where he criticised the Belgians, allies of the British. He also felt that the talks’ humour could be improved, as he had originally rushed through the texts and had not had time to polish them. However, his publishers would only publish the texts as he had actually spoken them, and so Wodehouse decided not to publish the broadcasts in Performing Flea, partly because he feared they would be misunderstood, and also because of professional pride as he judged them an inferior piece of work. He later published the new, improved version of the broadcasts in Encounter in late 1954. The manuscript of Wodehouse In Wonderland is believed to have been deliberately destroyed, though when is not clear. When Richard Usborne planned to publish Wodehouse At Work, which had been commissioned by Wodehouse’s publishers, with a chapter on Wodehouse’s wartime activities, Wodehouse ensured that no such chapter appeared.
The first Wodehouse work to be published in Britain after the war was Money In the Bank. It sold 26,000 copies in the first month. 450,000 copies of Wodehouse’s works had been sold between 1941 and the end of the war which showed that some of his public were prepared to stand by him, either not judging him guilty of being a traitor, or able to separate the work from the man. However Wodehouse was sufficiently uncertain of his reputation in the land of his birth that when his collaboration with Guy Bolton Don’t Listen, Ladies was put on in London the playwrights were billed as Guy Bolton and Stephen Powys. Ethel visited England to see the production, but Wodehouse was unable to. It was only in the 1960s that he was unofficially assured that it would be safe for him to return to Britain free of potential arrest. By then, in his eighties, he had ceased to travel out of the country or, indeed, much out of the village he lived in.
Public opinion towards Wodehouse gradually became less hostile. When he returned to America the Saturday Evening Post refused to look at his work and the BBC were still continuing with their policy of banning his works. But in 1950 the BBC asked for permission to broadcast a dramatisation of A Damsel In Distress. Further acceptance back into the British literary world occurred when Wodehouse’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge took over the editorship of Punch and asked Wodehouse to write a regular column. In 1953 a further sign of re-acceptance came when Penguin published five of his back catalogue simultaneously: The Inimitable Jeeves; Leave It To Psmith; Big Money; Right Ho, Jeeves and The Code of The Woosters.
Just as Muggeridge, who had first met Wodehouse during the war when as a member of military intelligence he had investigated the author, remembered his friend, so too did Wodehouse remember those who stood by him, and those who did not. One of those who did was Arthur Thompson, a solicitors’ clerk whom he had met in 1913. Though they hardly saw each other from then on, their friendship continued by post for over 40 years. During the war Thompson was an active defender of Wodehouse and wrote to local papers in areas where councils had banned Wodehouse’s books. Wodehouse gave him the script of, and production rights to, Joy In The Morning. This was originally called Phipps and is the play from which The Old Reliable was written, and has no connection with the Jeeves and Wooster novel of the same name - Wodehouse’s recycling did not just extend to plots, but titles as well. This play had never been performed, and so the world premiere took place in Ashburton in Devon, performed by the amateur group the Buckfast Players.
Others were not remembered so fondly, and Wodehouse took the chance to have a mild revenge in The Mating Season. Gussie Fink-Nottle is arrested for going newt hunting in a fountain in Trafalgar Square and ‘showing unexpected intelligence, gave his name as Alfred Duff Cooper.’ Another passing swipe is made at another of his wartime critics, the Old Alleyian Eustace Pulbrook, when Eustacia Pulbrook gives a violin recital which ‘had that quality that which I have noticed in all violin solos, of seeming to last much longer than it did.’
But the person most in Wodehouse’s sights was AA Milne. Milne and Wodehouse had been friends, and Milne had been one of the backers of one of Wodehouse’s plays. But during the war Milne had turned on Wodehouse and wrote to The Daily Telegraph that:
I remember he told me once he wished he had a son; and he added characteristically (and quite sincerely): ‘But he would have to be born at the age of 15, when he was just getting into his House eleven.’ You see the advantage of that. Bringing up a son throws a considerable responsibility on a man; but by the time the boy is 15 one has shifted the responsibility onto the housemaster.’
Wodehouse was angered by this attack from someone he had considered a friend, if not a close one. Moreover Milne had taken a comment by one of Wodehouse’s characters, Mike, and made it out to be Wodehouse’s view instead. Milne’s exploitation of his own family was sent up in the golfing story Rodney Has A Relapse, in which Rodney Spelvin gives up writing detective fiction to write poems about his young son, which he hopes to publish in a slim volume. In one of the draft poems he describes his son as going ‘hoppity hoppity hop’. Rodney’s brother-in-law, William, does not approve:
‘What it comes to,’ said William, ‘is that he is wantonly laying up a lifetime of shame and misery for the wretched little moppet. In the years to come, when he is playing in the National Amateur, the papers will print photographs of him with captions underneath explaining that he is the Timothy Bobbin of the well-known poems -’
In The Mating Season, soppy Madeline Bassett wants Gussie to recite at the local concert. Bertie is pretending to be Gussie, with whom he is talking:
‘Those Christopher Robin poems. Here they are.’
He handed me a slim volume of verses and I gave it the perplexed eye.
‘What’s this for?’
‘You recite them at the concert. The ones marked with a cross. I was to have recited them, Madeline making a great point of it - you know how fond she is of the Christopher Robin poems - but now, of course, we have switched acts. And I don’t mind telling you that I feel extremely relieved. There’s one about the little blighter going hoppity-hoppity-hop which… well, as I say, I feel extremely relieved.’
The slim volume slipped from my nerveless fingers, and I goggled at him.
