CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by P. G. Wodehouse
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction by Stephen Fry
P. G. Wodehouse Societies’ first choice Uncle Fred Flits By
Jeeves
The Great Sermon Handicap
Jeeves and the Impending Doom
Jeeves and the Song of Songs
Gussie Presents the Prizes
Roderick Spode Gets His Come-uppance
Blandings
Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend
PGW’s notes for a sequel to Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend
The Crime Wave at Blandings
Pighoo-o-o-oey!
Extract from Something New
Almost Entirely About Flowerpots
The Drones
Bingo and the Peke Crisis
The Amazing Hat Mystery
Goodbye to All Cats
Help Yourself
A Drones Money-making Scheme
Psmith
Mike Meets Psmith
Mike and Psmith visit Clapham
Golf and Other Stories
The Clicking of Cuthbert
The Magic Plus Fours
The Eighteenth Hole
A Plea for Indoor Golf
Bingley Crocker Learns Cricket
A Day with the Swattesmore
Ukridge
Ukridge’s Dog College
Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate
The Return of Battling Billson
Mr Mulliner
Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo
The Rise of Minna Nordstrom
The Nodder
Theatre/Hollywood
An Encounter with W.C. Fields
Hollywood
The Girl in the Pink Bathing Suit
Letters to Ira Gershwin
Essays, Verse and Thoughts on Writers and Writing
My World and What Happened to It
To the Editor, Sir
All About the Income Tax
Personal Details
Verse from Pigs Have Wings
Missed!
Printer’s Error
Good Gnus
Washy in the Hall of Fame
On Writers and Writing
Join the P.G. Wodehouse community
Copyright
About the Book
We all know Jeeves and Wooster, but which is the best Jeeves story? We all know Blandings, but which is the funniest tale about Lord Emsworth and his adored prize-winning pig? And would the best of Ukridge, or the yarns of the Oldest Member, or Wodehouse’s Hollywood stories outdo them? This bumper anthology allows you to choose, bringing you the cream of the crop of stories by the twentieth century’s greatest humorous writer.
There are favourites aplenty in this selection, which has been compiled with enthusiastic support from P.G. Wodehouse societies around the world. With additional material including novel-extracts, working drafts, articles, letters and poems, this anthology provides the best overall celebration of side-splitting humour and sheer good nature available in the pages of any book.
About the Author
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (always known as ‘Plum’) wrote more than ninety novels and some three hundred short stories over 73 years. He is widely recognised as the greatest 20th century writer of humour in the English language.
Wodehouse mixed the high culture of his classical education with the popular slang of the suburbs in both England and America, becoming a ‘cartoonist of words’. Drawing on the antics of a near-contemporary world, he placed his Drones, Earls, Ladies (including draconian aunts and eligible girls) and Valets, in a recently vanished society, whose reality is transformed by his remarkable imagination into something timeless and enduring.
Perhaps best known for the escapades of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse also created the world of Blandings Castle, home to Lord Emsworth and his cherished pig, the Empress of Blandings. His stories include gems concerning the irrepressible and disreputable Ukridge; Psmith, the elegant socialist; the ever-so-slightly-unscrupulous Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred; and those related by Mr Mulliner, the charming raconteur of The Angler’s Rest, and the Oldest Member at the Golf Club.
Wodehouse collaborated with a variety of partners on straight plays and worked principally alongside Guy Bolton on providing the lyrics and script for musical comedies with such composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. He liked to say that the royalties for ‘Just My Bill’, which Jerome Kern incorporated into Showboat, were enough to keep him in tobacco and whisky for the rest of his life.
In 1936 he was awarded The Mark Twain Medal for ‘having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’. He was made a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University in 1939 and in 1975, aged 93, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died shortly afterwards, on St Valentine’s Day.
To have created so many characters that require no introduction places him in a very select group of writers, lead by Shakespeare and Dickens.
Fiction
Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
The Adventures of Sally
Bachelors Anonymous
Barmy in Wonderland
Big Money
Bill the Conqueror
Blandings Castle and Elsewhere
Carry On, Jeeves
The Clicking of Cuthbert
Cocktail Time
The Code of the Woosters
The Coming of Bill
Company for Henry
A Damsel in Distress
Do Butlers Burgle Banks
Doctor Sally
Eggs, Beans and Crumpets
A Few Quick Ones
French Leave
Frozen Assets
Full Moon
Galahad at Blandings
A Gentleman of Leisure
The Girl in Blue
The Girl on the Boat
The Gold Bat
The Head of Kay’s
The Heart of a Goof
Heavy Weather
Hot Water
Ice in the Bedroom
If I Were You
Indiscretions of Archie
The Inimitable Jeeves
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
Jeeves in the Offing
Jill the Reckless
Joy in the Morning
Laughing Gas
Leave it to Psmith
The Little Nugget
Lord Emsworth and Others
Louder and Funnier
Love Among the Chickens
The Luck of Bodkins
The Man Upstairs
The Man with Two Left Feet
The Mating Season
Meet Mr Mulliner
Mike and Psmith
Mike at Wrykyn
Money for Nothing
Money in the Bank
Mr Mulliner Speaking
Much Obliged, Jeeves
Mulliner Nights
Not George Washington
Nothing Serious
The Old Reliable
Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin
A Pelican at Blandings
Piccadilly Jim
Pigs Have Wings
Plum Pie
The Pothunters
A Prefect’s Uncle
The Prince and Betty
Psmith, Journalist
Psmith in the City
Quick Service
Right Ho, Jeeves
Ring for Jeeves
Sam me Sudden
Service with a Smile
The Small Bachelor
Something Fishy
Something Fresh
Spring Fever
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
Summer Lightning
Summer Moonshine
Sunset at Blandings
The Swoop
Tales of St Austin’s
Thank You, Jeeves
Ukridge
Uncle Dynamite
Uncle Fred in the Springtime
Uneasy Money
Very Good, Jeeves
The White Feather
William Tell Told Again
Young Men in Spats
Omnibuses
The World of Blandings
The World of Jeeves
The World of Mr Mulliner
The World of Psmith
The World of Ukridge
The World of Uncle Fred
Wodehouse Nuggets (edited by Richard Usborne)
The World of Wodehouse Clergy
The Hollywood Omnibus
Weekend Wodehouse
Paperback Omnibuses
The Golf Omnibus
The Aunts Omnibus
The Drones Omnibus
The Jeeves Omnibus 1
The Jeeves Omnibus 3
Poems
The Parrot and Other Poems
Autobiographical
Wodehouse on Wodehouse (comprising Bring on the Girls, Over Seventy, Performing Flea)
Letters
Yours, Plum
‘What ho!’ I said.
‘What ho!’ said Motty.
‘What ho! What ho!’
‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
from ‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’, in Carry On, Jeeves
Introduction
What a very, very lucky person you are. Spread out before you are the finest and funniest words from the finest and funniest writer the past century ever knew.
Doctor Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronounced Wood-house) defies superlatives. Had his only contribution to literature been Lord Emsworth and Blandings Castle, his place in history would have been assured. Had he written of none but Mike and Psmith, he would be cherished today as the best and brightest of our comic authors. If Jeeves and Wooster had been his solitary theme, still he would be hailed as The Master. If he had given us only Ukridge, or nothing but recollections of the Mulliner family, or a pure diet of golfing stories, Wodehouse would nonetheless be considered immortal. That he gave us all those and more – so much more – is our good fortune and a testament to the most industrious, prolific and beneficent author ever to have sat down, scratched his head and banged out a sentence.
If I were to say that the defining characteristic of Wodehouse the man was his professionalism, that might make him sound rather dull. We look for eccentricity, sexual weirdness, family trauma and personal demons in our great men. Wodehouse, who knew just what was expected of authors, got used to having to apologize for a childhood that was ‘as normal as rice-pudding’ and a life that consisted of little more than ‘sitting in front of the typewriter and cursing a bit’.
The only really controversial episode of Wodehouse’s life, his broadcasts to friends from Berlin while an internee of the Germans in France and Belgium during the Second World War, is dug up from time to time by mischief makers and the ignorant. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning now if it hadn’t been unearthed yet again quite recently, together with wholly unjustifiable newspaper headlines in the British press linking the name Wodehouse with words like Nazi, Fascist and Traitor. Anyone who has examined the affair closely will agree with the Foreign Office official who wrote that it was unlikely
… that anyone would seriously deny that ‘L’Affaire Wodehouse’ was very much a storm in a teacup. It is perfectly plain to any unbiased outsider that Mr Wodehouse made the celebrated broadcasts in all innocence and without any evil intent. He is reported to be of an entirely apolitical cast of mind; much of the furore of course was the result of literary jealousies.
This was written in 1947 and it expresses a view shared by Malcolm Muggeridge, who was one of the officers sent to debrief Wodehouse when Paris was liberated, and by George Orwell in his celebrated 1945 essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse: ‘… in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.’ The fact remains too that for decades after they were made, Wodehouse’s broadcasts (which he made in order to communicate with his thousands of readers in the United States) were used by, amongst other, the CIA, as models of how to pull the wool over a captor’s eyes by the use of irony. For Wodehouse’s view on Fascists, one need only consult the descriptions of Sir Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters (included in this collection) to see how a political innocent may still be capable of scorching satire. Enough of all that. If the episode reveals anything it is Wodehouse’s other-worldliness – a quality that shines through in his work and a quality that in our muddied and benighted times ought in fact to be celebrated from the hilltops.
Many have sought to ‘explain’ Wodehouse, to psychoanalyse his world, to place his creations under the microscope of modern literary criticism. Such a project, as an article in Punch observed, is like ‘taking a spade to a soufflé’. His world of sniffily disapproving aunts, stern and gooseberry-eyed butlers, impatient uncles, sporty young girls, natty young men who throw bread rolls in club dining rooms yet blush and stammer in the presence of the opposite sex – all these might be taken as evidence of a man stuck in a permanently pre-pubescent childhood. Beds in Wodehouse are not locations of passion and lust, they are convenient furniture to hide under when pursued. Girls are angels of perfection, or hare-brained tomboys, or stern disciplinarians who want to improve and educate, or jolly sisters who present no threat to the perfect peace offered by the state of bachelorhood. Poverty too has no place in the world of Wodehouse. A chap might be hard up, his aunt, guardian or parent might be slow in disgorging the allowance and his friends may not be susceptible to having their ears bitten for a fiver to tide a fellow over, but hardship and squalor are absent from the feast. Wodehouse wrote throughout the First World War, yet not a mention is made of it. There are no returning soldiers or references to Zeppelins or the Front. All of this would certainly seem childish, irrelevant and frivolous if it were not for the extraordinary, magical and blessed miracle of Wodehouse’s prose, a prose which dispels doubt much as sunlight dispels shadows, a prose which renders any criticism, whether positive or negative, absolutely powerless and frankly silly. The prose vindicates a word often used in the discussion of Wodehouse, and that word is ‘innocence’. Wodehouse himself, as mentioned earlier, was a kind of innocent, but more importantly the fictional worlds he created were innocent too. Evelyn Waugh compared them to Eden before the fall, and that description – of a pre-lapsarian idyll – recurs again and again in reviews and articles about his work. Innocence, true adult innocence, is a characteristic so rare we often call it blessed and ascribe it only to saints. To inhabit a fictional world of true innocence is, so far as I can tell, unique to the experience of reading Wodehouse. It is all done with such apparent ease, with such unforced fluency that it would be easy to underestimate the sheer artistry and head-beatingly hard work that went into it.
When Hugh Laurie and I had the extreme honour and terrifying responsibility of being asked to play Bertie Wooster and Jeeves in a series of television adaptations we were aware of one huge problem facing us. Wodehouse’s three great achievements are Plot, Character and Language, and the greatest of these, by far, is Language. If we were reasonably competent then all of us concerned in the television version could go some way towards conveying a fair sense of the narrative of the stories and revealing too a good deal of the nature of their characters. The language however … we could only scratch the surface of the language. ‘Scratching the surface’ is a phrase often used without thought. A scratched surface, it is all too easy to forget, is a defiled surface. Wodehouse’s language lives and breathes in its written, printed form. It oscillates privately between the page and the reader. The moment it is read out or interpreted it is compromised. It is, to quote Oscar Wilde on another subject, ‘like a delicate, exotic fruit – touch it and the bloom is gone.’ Scratch its surface, in other words, and you have done it a great disservice. Our only hope in making the television series was that the stories and the characters might provide enough pleasure on their own to inspire the viewer to pick up a book and encounter The Real Thing.
Let me use an example, taken completely at random. I flip open a book of Jeeves and Wooster short stories and happen on Bertie and Jeeves discussing a young man called Cyril Bassington-Bassington …
‘I’ve never heard of him. Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?’
‘I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family – the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent Bassington-Bassingtons.’
‘England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons.’
‘Tolerably so, sir.’
‘No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?’
Well, try as hard as actors might, such an exchange will always work best on the page. It might still be amusing when delivered as dramatic dialogue, but no actors are as good as the actors we each of us carry in our head. And that is the point really, one of the gorgeous privileges of reading Wodehouse is that he makes us feel better about ourselves because we derive a sense of personal satisfaction in the laughter mutually created. The reader, by responding in his or her own head to the rhythm and timing on the page, has the feeling of having made the whole thing click. Of course we yield to Wodehouse the palm of having written it, but our response is what validates the whole experience. Every comma, every ‘sir’ every ‘what?’ is something we make work in the act of reading.
‘The greatest living writer of prose’, ‘The Master’, ‘the head of my profession’, ‘akin to Shakespeare’, ‘a master of the language’ … if you had never read Wodehouse and only knew about the world his books inhabit you might be forgiven for blinking in bewilderment at the praise that has been lavished on a ‘mere’ comic author by writers like Compton Mackenzie, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, Bernard Levin and Susan Hill. But once you dive into the soufflé, once you engage with all those miraculous verbal felicities, such adulation begins to make sense.
Example serves better than description. Let me throw up some more random nuggets. Particular to Wodehouse are the transferred epithets: ‘I lit a rather pleased cigarette’ or ‘I pronged a moody forkful of eggs and b.’ Characteristic too are the sublimely hyperbolic similes: ‘Roderick Spode. Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’ or ‘The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.’
Here is an example that certainly vindicates my point about his prose working best on the page. Reading this aloud isn’t much use …
‘Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?’ said Wilfred.
‘ffinch-ffarrowmere,’ corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.
Almost the very first Wodehouse story I ever read contained this passage, which mixes typical techniques of acutely accurate parody (romantic and detective fiction, grand journalism, the western), comically inappropriate simile, the extravagantly absurd and much else besides. It was enough to get me hooked.
‘Don’t blame me, Pongo,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can’t compare the lorgnettes of today with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he’d seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him around, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.’
I mean, what? Just occasionally Wodehouse allows himself what could almost be termed worldly satire:
Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.
Then there is a passage like this: Lord Emsworth musing on his feckless younger son, Freddie Threepwood.
Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
If you are immune to writing of this kind, then you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse’s favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone and analysis, ultimately, is useless.
The collection that lies before you is, like any anthology, by definition incomplete, personal and open to debate. Its source however is, I believe, unique. The selection has been made by canvassing the opinions of the membership of six different Wodehouse Societies around the world. No true Wodehousian would ever claim that his taste is better, finer and deeper than the next man’s, but you can at least rest assured that these stories and excerpts have been chosen by men and women who have read, if not everything that flowed from the Master’s typewriter (not everyone has access to rarer books like The Prince and Betty, for example, or William Tell) then at least close to everything. This book can be regarded as a teaser – something akin to the sampling cases that wine-merchants put together to awaken the palate. There is a representative of all the great vintages here, enough I would hope to give the first time reader a life-long love of the works and enough too to please the afficionado who wants to make a present of Wodehouse to a friend or needs one collection permanently on the bedside table. The man wrote over ninety books, after all, and if a craving comes over one during the night, it isn’t always convenient to pad down to the library and pluck a specific volume from the shelf. It can be extremely useful to have a compact selection made for you. It is in this spirit that What Ho! The Best of P.G. Wodehouse has been put together.
Chronology with Wodehouse is not necessarily reliable or relevant, but it seems sensible to describe his creations in a more or less historical order – an order compromised by the fact that it was not uncommon for him to introduce a character in a short story and only later pick up and, as it were, run with the ball. He started writing at the end of the nineteenth century and continued until his death, manuscript on lap, on the fourteenth of February nineteen seventy-five at the age of ninety-three.
It can however be clearly stated that Wodehouse’s first great creation and for some his finest, was Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent). Said to have been drawn from life (one Rupert D’Oyley Carte, of the Savoy Opera family) Psmith is a startling sophisticate, an expelled Old Etonian whose delicately attuned nervous system can be shocked by loud colours, celluloid cuffs and the mere mention of an inadequately pressed trouser crease. He has adopted his own brand of ‘practical socialism’ and retains to the end the habit of referring to everyone as ‘Comrade’. Much as Jeeves was to extricate Bertie time and time again from the soup, so Psmith is the eternal saviour of stolid, dependable Mike Jackson – the Doctor Watson to Psmith’s Sherlock Holmes. There is in fact a little thread of autobiography in the second Psmith novel, Psmith in the City. Mike, whose only real ambition is to play cricket, at which he excels to the point of genius, is denied by family ill-fortune his chance of going to Cambridge University and is forced instead to earn his crust at the ‘New Asiatic Bank’. The young Wodehouse too was obliged to work for some years at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in the City, until the time came when he realized that he was earning more from his writing than from his weekly stipend. Mike’s salvation, however, comes not through his own achievements as a writer, but through the help of Psmith.
When Psmith and Mike meet, at Sedleigh School, we witness for the first time the authentic Wodehouse manner. The scene is a turning point in Wodehouse’s writing. He develops here from a delightful and better than average writer of school stories (a huge genre in the opening years of the twentieth century) into a great comic stylist. The tones and mannerisms of Psmith might derive from character types that already existed in popular literature, but their realization and completeness is unique to Wodehouse. No one else in fiction talks like Psmith. Much of the reader’s pleasure comes from delight at his sheer impertinence and an envious desire to have been able to talk like that oneself to the schoolmasters and employers who harried us in our younger days. A Wodehousian sense of the world being divided into Us (feckless youth, the hopeful and the irrepressibly optimistic) and Them (schoolmasters, bank managers, vicars, aunts and sundry other authority figures) is already established. Psmith however is distinctly pre-War (First World War, that is) and, until the later novel Leave It To Psmith (1925) he was unconnected to any other Wodehousian circle.
The second Wodehouse immortal to come along at this time was Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge (pronounced Stanley Fanshawe Ewkridge). Ukridge keeps his pince-nez together by means of ginger-beer wire, wears pyjamas under a macintosh, calls his friends ‘old horse’, uses exclamations like ‘Upon my Sam’ and is eternally in search of funds. The master of the scam, he forever embroils his chief biographer Corky (there was one other in the novel Love Among The Chickens, 1906) in a series of terrible money-making schemes. Corky is himself an aspiring writer, but Wodehouse has not coloured him in as a narrator, he is not really much more than a long-suffering friend. The sums of money at stake are endearingly low and reveal both the date of the writing and the innocent existence of the heroes. It is usually half a crown that Ukridge needs and not much more. Not much more because his life has no horizons greater than the next great money-making scheme. With half a crown a man has enough to see him through. For the rest he needs no more than to borrow the top hat and morning suit ‘as worn’, and rely on charm. This is not yet the age of cocktails and nightclubs and sporty two-seaters. But Ukridge is for all that deeply lovable; his amorality and blithe disregard of others do not irritate. Imperishable optimism and a great spaciousness of outlook, (one of Ukridge’s ideals) informs the spirit of these stories. He too is capable when occasion demands of splendid speech:
‘Alf Todd,’ said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, ‘has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat’s left ear with a red-hot needle.’
Wodehouse never lost his own affection for Ukridge and continued writing about him until 1966, always setting the stories back in a pre-Wooster epoch.
In 1915 Wodehouse published Something Fresh, the first of the Blandings novels. I think he knew what he was doing when he chose that title (Something New is the American version – ‘fresh’ had, after all, a slightly racy implication to the American ear …) for with the creation of Blandings Castle, Wodehouse hit upon something original, something different. He was beginning his stride into mid-season form.
Wherever lovers of Wodehouse cluster together they fall into debate about whether it is the Jeeves stories or the Blandings stories that take the trophy as Wodehouse’s greatest achievements. The group will of course dispel, muttering embarrassedly, for they know that such questions are as pointless as wondering whether God did a better job with the Alps or the Rockies. The question is bound to be asked however, because each time you read another Blandings story, the sublime nature of that world is such as to make you gasp.
The cast of resident characters here is greater than that of the Wooster canon. There is Lord Emsworth himself, the amiable and dreamy peer, whose first love – pumpkins – is soon supplanted by the truest and greatest love of his life, The Empress of Blandings, that peerless Black Berkshire sow, thrice winner of the silver medal for fattest pig in Shropshire; Emsworth’s sister Connie (of whose lorgnette we heard earlier from Lord Ickenham, another frequent guest at the Castle) who, when sorely tried, which was often, would retire upstairs to bathe her temples in eau de cologne; the Efficient Baxter, Emsworth’s secretary and a hound from hell; Emsworth’s brother Galahad the last of the Pelicans (that breed of silk-hatted men-about-town who lived high and were forever getting thrown out of the Criterion bar in the eighties and nineties); the younger son Freddie, the bane of his father’s life – perhaps most especially so when he settles down and becomes the merchant prince of dogfood; there is Beach the butler, Sir Gregory Parsloe, Aunts Julia and Hermione and half a dozen others, Lord Bosham the heir, McAllister the gardener … the cast list goes on and is frequently supplemented by young men we will have met elsewhere, Ronnie Fish, Pongo Twistleton and even Psmith himself. Blandings comes, in the Wodehouse canon, to stand for the absolute ideal in country houses. Its serenity and beauty are enough to calm the most turbulent breast. It is an entire world unto itself and, one senses, Wodehouse pours into it his deepest feelings for England itself. Once you have drunk from its healing spring, you will return again and again. You must forgive my hyperbole, but Blandings is like that, it enters a man’s soul.
The young men I mention as visiting Blandings are all members of Wodehouses’s great fictional institution, the Drones Club in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. There are dozens of individual stories about members of the Drones, and two principal collections, Eggs Beans and Crumpets and Young Men in Spats. The title of the first derives from the Drones’ habit of referring to each other as ‘old egg’, ‘old bean’, ‘my dear old crumpet’ and so on. The Drones Club is a refuge for the idle young man about town. Such beings are for the most part entirely dependent on allowances from fat uncles. Indeed the name Drones is a reference to the drone bee, which toils not neither does it spin, unlike its industrious cousin, the worker. An archetypal member would be Freddie Widgeon, intensely amiable, not very bright up top and always falling in love. The only Drone who is distinctly unlikable is Oofy Prosser, the richest and meanest member. He sports pimples, Lobb shoes and the tightest wallet in London.
The second richest member of the club is, however, the most likable of all. He is Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, descendant of the Sieur de Wooster who did his bit in the crusades, and young Bertram retains the strict code of honour handed down from his ancestor, the code of the preux chevalier, the gentil parfit knight. Bertie Wooster is, of course, the employer of Jeeves, the supreme gentleman’s personal gentleman.
Jeeves made his first appearance in 1917 in the short story ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ which was part of a collection called The Man With Two Left Feet. Wodehouse liked to mock himself for not seeing straight away that he had hit a rich seam with Jeeves, but in fact it was only two years later that he wrote four more stories. From then on he gave the world Jeeves and Wooster right up until his last complete novel, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974).
Much has been written about Jeeves. His imperturbability, his omniscience, his unruffled insight, his orotund speech, his infallible way with a quotation … in short, his perfection. We all wish, sometimes, that we had such a guide, philosopher and friend. He stands alone. Others abide our question, thou art free, just about sums it up. It would be a pity, however, to overlook the character of Bertie Wooster. You will see from the mixture of complete stories and extracts offered here that Bertie is a great deal more than the silly ass or chinless wonder that people often imagine him to be. That he is loyal, kind, chivalrous, resolute and magnificently sweet-natured is apparent. But is he stupid? Jeeves is overheard describing him once as ‘mentally negligible’. Perhaps that isn’t quite fair. While not intelligent within the meaning of the act, Bertie is desperate to learn, keen to assimilate the wisdom of his incomparable teacher. He does his best, he may only half know the quotations and allusions with which he peppers his speech, but he is biddable and anxious to improve his range of reference. Proximity to the great brain has made him aware of the possibilities of exerting the cerebellum. When he struggles with a quotation or a scheme, his friends and relations will not appreciate the great Jeevesian world of allusion and ‘the psychology of the individual’ that Bertie is trying to enter and will all too readily snap ‘Talk, sense, Bertie!’ – showing an impatience that we, as readers, know to be unfair.
It is after all through Bertie’s language that we encounter Jeeves and through his eyes and ears that the stories work. Wodehouse’s genius in this canon lies in his complete realization of Bertie as first person narrator. All the other stories (with the exception of Ukridge) depend upon standard impersonal narration. The particular joy of a Jeeves story derives from the delicious feeling one derives from being completely in Bertie’s hands. His apparently confused way of expressing himself both reveals character and manages, somehow, to develop narrative with extraordinary economy and life. Since the Jeeves stories often lead one from the other, he will often need to repeat himself, which he manages to do with great ingenuity. He is called upon more than once, for example, to remind the reader about the dread daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop. The first example shows Bertie’s way with Victorian poetry (in this case the fragrant Felicia D. Hemans):
I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.
Another description of precisely the same characteristics in Honoria gives us a very Woosteresque mixture of simile:
Honoria … is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.
Sometimes Bertie’s speech moves towards a form of comic imagery so perfect that one could honestly call it poetic:
As a rule, you see, I’m not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps … the clan has a tendency to ignore me.
Or …
I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanor was rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the Down express in the small of the back.
Included in this selection of Jeeves stories – how could it not be? – is the masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school. This scene is frequently included in general collections of great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language. I would urge you, however, when you have read it, to head straight for a library or bookshop and get hold of the complete novel Right Ho, Jeeves where you will encounter it again, fully in context, and find that it leaps even more magnificently to life.
Throughout his life, Wodehouse continued to write golfing stories. Many are collected in two books, The Clicking of Cuthbert and The Heart of a Goof. Narrated, usually to a reluctant listener, by the Oldest Member of an unnamed golf club, they stand as surely the finest collection of stories about the game ever written. Even if you are not a golfing fan and understand very little of the rules, you will find them intensely readable, with every Wodehousian quality fully realized in them. You don’t, after all, get much better than this:
The least thing upsets him on the links. He misses short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.
Another strand of short stories is found in the Mulliner books. Mr Mulliner is the equable, charming raconteur of The Angler’s Rest, a public house situated, one imagines, on the River Thames. Mulliner appears to have an almost inexhaustible supply of young relatives (some of whom are also golfers and members of the Drones Club) whose adventures form amongst the very best examples of the art of the short story. You will see from two of the stories included here that Wodehouse, while primarily associated with England, also wrote knowledgeably about Hollywood.
I mentioned at the beginning of this introduction that the Berlin broadcasts were the only really controversial episode in Wodehouse’s life. This isn’t strictly true. In 1931 he caused all hell to break loose in Hollywood when he gave (again in all innocence) an interview on his life there as a writer. He had initially been invited over the West Coast, with the offer of a princely salary, to work on screenplays. He tinkered on one script, for a film called Rosalie, for months and months, drawing the salary, and quietly getting on with his books and proper writing. He was foolish enough to mention this to the Los Angeles Times as well as disclosing the full amount he had been paid for doing virtually nothing – $104,000.
It amazes me. They paid me $2,000 a week – and I cannot see what they engaged me for. They were extremely nice to me, but I feel as if I have cheated them.
This endearingly frank interview was reported in the New York press. The East Coast banks that payrolled Hollywood had been itching for an excuse to control the excesses of the movie business and Wodehouse’s words, it seems, became the catalyst that forced Hollywood to get out the broom and sweep itself clean. As Wodehouse’s biographer, Frances Donaldson, puts it:
… it has since become part of Hollywood legend, that this interview galvanized the bankers who supported the film industry into action to ensure reform – that single-handed Plum [Wodehouse’s nick-name, a contraction of Pelham] rang the death-knell of all those ludicrous practices.
You would think that the satire in his short stories would have done that work on its own, but it has ever been the fate of satire that it changes nothing.
Hollywood was not the only wing of the entertainment industry that had benefited from Wodehouses’s attention. To many admirers of musical comedy who have never read a novel or short story in their lives, Wodehouse has a permanent place in history as a lyricist and book writer of musicals. With his friend Guy Bolton, Wodehouse collaborated on dozens of musical comedies and straight plays. Dorothy Parker once described a Bolton-Wodehouse musical as her ‘favourite indoor sport’. He wrote for some of the greatest names in Tin Pan Alley history, such as Romberg, Kern and Gershwin and liked to say that the royalties from his lyrics for ‘Just My Bill’ alone, a song which Jerome Kern incorporated into Showboat, were enough to keep him in tobacco and whisky for the rest of his life. It is fitting then that this collection should include some of his writings on the subject of theatre as well as some of the lighter verse which reveals the qualities that attracted him to the great song writers of the age.
I think I should end on a personal note. I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be. In my teenage years the writings of P. G. Wodehouse awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind. He mocked himself sometimes because he knew that a great proportion of his readers came from prisons and hospitals. At the risk of being sententious, isn’t it true that we are all of us, for a great part of our lives, sick or imprisoned, all of us in need of this remarkable healing spirit, this balm for hurt minds?
I was fortunate enough to have received two letters and a signed photograph from the great man. I am looking at the latter now. Beneath the familiar bald head and benign grin is written in blue-black ink: ‘To Stephen Fry, All the best, P. G. Wodehouse’.
Well, that is what we hope to offer you with this book: All the best.
Stephen Fry
The first choice of the P. G. Wodehouse Societies
Uncle Fred Flits By