Sunshine pierced the haze that enveloped London. It came down Fleet Street, turned to the right, stopped at the premises of the Mammoth Publishing Company, and, entering through an upper window, beamed pleasantly upon Lord Tilbury, founder and proprietor of that vast factory of popular literature….
Considering what a pleasant rarity sunshine in London is, one might have expected the man behind the Mammoth to beam back. Instead, he merely pressed the buzzer. His secretary appeared. He pointed silently. The secretary drew the shade, and the sunshine, having called without an appointment, was excluded.
As you may recall, I’ve been following the adventures of P. G. Wodehouse’s character Monty Bodkin through the two novels in which he stars. I was then reminded that he actually shows up for the first time (as far as I’m aware) in the novel Heavy Weather, so I went back to that one. And it turns out HW is in fact a sequel to an earlier novel, Summer Lightning. So now I’ll have to read that one too (regretfully leaving Monty behind), caught like T.H. White’s Merlin in a reverse chronology.
This is one of Wodehouse’s more complex tales, so find a comfortable chair and pour yourself a cup of tea if you like.
Monty Bodkin, you’ll recall, tall, handsome, and rich, is in love with Gertrude Butterwick (who does not appear physically in this book; her character is still gestating). But she won’t agree to be married until she gets her father’s blessing. And her father has decreed that Monty won’t be given Gertrude’s hand unless he shows the enterprise to hold down a paying job for a full year.
He’s wangled a position at Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing, as assistant editor of Tiny Tots Magazine. In that capacity he commits the kind of blunder only a member of the Drones Club could make, and gets cashiered. However, he learns from a friend that Clarence (Threepwood), Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle in Shropshire, needs a secretary. Monty is an old family friend, so he calls Lord Emsworth’s imperious sister Constance, who is happy to hire him on her brother’s behalf.
Meanwhile, the other main plot picks up from the previous novel – Ronnie Fish, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, wants to marry Sue Brown, a charming chorus girl. Lady Constance firmly opposed the match, but agreed to it in return for a concession from her other brother, Galahad Threepwood. Gally, who was a notorious rake and London clubman in the 1890s, has written his memoirs, which contain enough old skeletons belonging to eminent English families to wreck numerous political careers and destroy the Threepwood family socially. Gally has agreed to withdraw publication of the memoirs (which were contracted to Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing) in return for Constance agreeing to the match and allowing her wooly-headed brother Clarence to release Ronnie’s trust fund.
Clarence, however, is barely aware of all this drama. His concern is with his suspicions that their neighbor, a fellow-pig fancier, is planning to poison the Empress of Blandings, his own beloved prize sow. When Lord Tilbury, who is not a man to let a certain bestseller slip through his fingers, arrives at Blandings Castle to pressure Uncle Galahad, and Lord Emsworth mistakes him for a pig poisoner, complications ensue. Which are not decreased by the arrival of Ronnie Fish’s mother Julia, who doesn’t care a fig about Gally’s scandals, but definitely does not want her son marrying some chorus girl. And, oh yes, Lord Emsworth thinks Monty Bodkin is a pig poisoner too.
What Heavy Weather offers that sets it apart from most of Wodehouse’s peak work is a small strain of pathos. Pathos doesn’t happen much in this fictional world; the reader doesn’t want it. Tragedy might be mentioned in passing, but it’s not dwelt on. However, here for once we do have a tragic subplot. There’s a reason Uncle Galahad is so strongly in favor of Ronnie’s and Sue’s wedding. Once, in his youth, he was in love with Sue Brown’s mother, but the family quelched their hopes and packed Gally off to South Africa. In Heavy Weather we get a rare glimpse into the regrets of an old man’s heart. I don’t think it’s overdone – I identified strongly and was moved. But I don’t recall a similar theme in any of Wodehouse’s other mature stories.
As an extra treat, I embed below a dramatic production of Heavy Weather done for the BBC in 1995. It features no less than the great Peter O’Toole as Lord Emsworth. I wasn’t entirely happy with it – I thought O’Toole (doing what seems like an imitation of Dame Edith Evans) insufficiently sympathetic here. And Richard Johnson, who was a fine actor, overdid the mugging, I thought, in the role of Lord Tilbury. In my opinion it’s almost always wrong to mug with Wodehouse – his humor depends on more subtle effects. (Though, come to think of it, Hugh Laurie mugged quite a lot as Bertie Wooster and I didn’t mind that.)