From 2008.
The latest installments of the complete edition of P. G. Wodehouse from Overlook Press have arrived and all is sweetness and light. “Nothing Serious” (the title might serve for all of this author’s writing) and “Psmith, Journalist” (the p is silent) are, if my math is correct, numbers 62 and 63 in the Overlook series, which in years hence will run to more than 90 uniform volumes. And beautiful volumes they are, printed on Scottish cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, with piquantly illustrated dust jackets. Jeeves would no doubt approve. Perhaps more importantly, Wodehouse fans will approve: The Overlook Wodehouse revives many hard-to-find gems, not otherwise available in print.
You remember Jeeves, of course. He is Wodehouse’s most famous creation, a kind of super butler able to solve any problem in a single bound, able to answer any question or need, able to fix any fix that his master, the amiable but bumbling Bertie Wooster, has gotten himself into, all without breaking a sweat. Jeeves is so smart they named a search engine after him. His superior intelligence is attributed to a steady diet of fish – brain food.
The beauty of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, or one of them, is that it is Bertie who serves as our first-person narrator, a delightfully unreliable one, it turns out. Admittedly, he writes well, but his healthy self-esteem and the objective evidence supporting it are wildly out of whack. Bertie is in reality little more than a frat boy with independent means. His idea of hard work is getting out of bed in the (late) morning. His highest aspiration in life is to avoid marriage.
Wodehouse makes him into a likable idiot, though, a kind of British Homer Simpson. Bertie may mean well, but his intentions, far from hitting their targets, only get him in deeper. A good deal of the reader’s delight comes from seeing right through him. We know Bertie’s a dope; he doesn’t. The serenely deadpan Jeeves is in on it, too, but he wears his superiority lightly beneath a coat of loyalty. The stories sparkle with their duets, Jeeves on the violin, Bertie on the contrabassoon. Here’s one from the opening of “The Code of the Woosters”:
I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.
‘Good evening, Jeeves.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
This surprised me.
‘Is it morning?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Are you sure? It seems dark outside.’
‘There is fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’
‘Season of what?’
‘Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.’
‘Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?’
‘I have one in readiness, sir, in the ice-box.’
The note-perfect prose captures it all in a few deft strokes – Bertie the fool, Jeeves the all-knowing, the synergy of their relationship, the strict formalities observed even in intimacy. Wodehouse could get more into a single “sir” than most writers could get into a paragraph.
But the Jeeves and Wooster books are just a small part of the Wodehouse canon. As a writer, he was a going concern for more than 70 years (as a human being, more than 90 – he lived from 1881-1975). In addition to novels and short stories, he wrote screenplays and lyrics (his most famous song is probably “Bill,” from “Show Boat”) and an autobiography that manages to be as witty as anything he wrote without telling you much about P.G. Wodehouse. He was born in Surrey, England, and the manors and castles of that country are his preferred mise-en-scène, but he lived on Long Island for many years and became a U.S. citizen in the ’50s. Americans pop up often in his books, and not only the ugly variety.
He developed a Dickensian cast of characters, many surviving in their own series of short stories or novels. There is the Oldest Member in the delightful golf stories (collected in “The Clicking of Cuthbert” and “The Heart of the Goof”), a talkative codger who spins long-winded tales that no one, try though they might, ever escapes. There is the similar Mr. Mulliner (“Meet Mr. Mulliner,” “Mulliner Nights,” “Mr. Mulliner Speaking”), who tells his stories – of an array of nephews and cousins and cousin’s nephews – in a pub, the Anglers’ Rest:
People who enjoyed a merely superficial acquaintance with my nephew Archibald (said Mr. Mulliner) were accustomed to set him down as just an ordinary pinheaded young man. It was only when they came to know him better that they discovered their mistake. Then they realized that his pinheadedness, so far from being ordinary, was exceptional. Even at his Club, where the average intellect is not high, it was often said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.
The noble rhythm and deliberate wordiness, the mixture of high English and low, the judiciary argument establishing that Mulliner’s nephew was beyond all reasonable doubt a pinhead of the first magnitude, the perfect timing of the word “exceptional” – all pure Wodehouse. He is best read slowly, at the speed of speech. We may no longer know what cami-knickers are, but we get the idea.
In fact, Wodehouse’s books have dated little if at all. His books unfold in an aristocratic alternative universe where the only people who seem to have ever worked for a living are the butlers. It would seem to be a real world, dating to a certain place and time, but it probably never existed at all. At any rate, it is surprising how few contemporary references the books include. A book written by Wodehouse in the ’20s reads much the same as one written in the ’60s. Radio or television do not intrude, nor do wars or other news; transportation is provided by cars and trains, occasionally ships. There are telephones and telegrams. But the main activities are timeless – eating, drinking, smoking, conniving, and the pursuit of love. It seems familiar and remains funny, unlike much of the comedy of the past.
Lord Emsworth, the absent-minded proprietor of Blandings Castle, is yet another of Wodehouse’s lovable creations. He is a kind of single-minded Mr. Magoo, blind to everything but his prize pig, appropriately known as the Empress of Blandings. Something, of course, is always happening to the pig. In “Uncle Fred in the Springtime” (an intersecting of the Blandings Castle and Uncle Fred series), the Empress winds up hidden away in a bathroom (never mind why or how), to the surprise of her unsuspecting discoverers. But first, we get the objective pig’s-eye view:
The Empress of Blandings was a pig who took things as they came. Her motto, like Horace’s, was nil admirari. But, cool and even aloof as she was as a general rule, she had been a little puzzled by the events of the day. In particular, she had found the bathroom odd. It was the only place she had ever been in where there appeared to be a shortage of food. The best it had to offer was a cake of shaving-soap, and she had been eating this with a thoughtful frown when Mr. Pott joined her. As she emerged now, she was still foaming at the mouth a little and it was perhaps this that set the seal on Lord Bosham’s astonishment and caused him not only to recoil a yard or two with his eyes popping but also to pull the trigger of his gun.
Don’t worry, the cool and aloof, Latin-loving pig isn’t hurt. She lives on, as does Wodehouse.
Classical Life 