Tag Archives: Jeeves and Wooster

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Code of the Woosters,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

The first Jeeves and Wooster book I ever bought was The Code of the Woosters. That was about 50 years ago. I recall pausing a moment, in the B. Dalton’s aisle, to wonder whether I’d like the book. I was young then, I need hardly say, and knew nothing.

The Code of the Woosters is Wodehouse (as he himself might have put it) at his fruitiest. It’s such a tightly plotted farce that I, for one, was forced to pause my reading every few pages, just to get my breath back.

The plot, even in a broad sketch, requires some setting up. So curl up on the nearest chesterfield and pour yourself a restorative libation.

The tale begins with Bertie Wooster getting a call from his Aunt Dahlia, asking him (for once) to do what seems to be a fairly simple task. He is to go to a particular antique shop and sneer at a silver cow-creamer. Her husband, Tom Travers, a silver collector. yearns to buy that creamer. Aunt Dahlia hopes Bertie’s scorn will demoralize the shopkeeper, who will then knock down the price for Uncle Tom. Then she can touch him for a loan for the insolvent magazine she publishes.

The upshot is, of course, disastrous. On arriving, Bertie finds Sir Watkyn Basset, a retired judge, already at the shop. Sir Watkyn is Uncle Tom’s rival, also coveting the cow-creamer. He and Bertie are acquainted, as Sir Watkyn once fined him for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night. Accompanying Sir Watkyn is the gorilla-like Roderick Spode, leader of an English Fascist party. Caught unprepared, Bertie ends up stumbling over a cat in a manner that convinces Sir Watkyn that he’s attempting to steal the creamer.

Back in his flat, Bertie gets a telegram from his fatuous friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who wants him to come to the country estate where he’s staying. The estate just happens to belong to Sir Watkyn, as Gussie is engaged to Sir Watkyn’s daughter Madeline. Except that Madeline, Gussie reports, has broken the engagement off, This horrifies Bertie, since Madeline has conceived the erroneous idea that Bertie is in love with her, and threatens to marry him if it doesn’t work out with Gussie.

Then there’s a visit from Aunt Dahlia, who reports that Sir Watkyn has now acquired the cow-creamer. So she needs Bertie to go to the same estate and steal the thing. If he refuses, she’ll bar his access to the cooking of Anatole, her incomparable French chef.

Clear so far?

After that it gets complicated.

Oh yes, I need to remember Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng, Sir Watkyn’s niece, who is also on site. She is engaged to an old friend of Bertie’s, whom she is pressuring to steal (recurring theme here) the local constable’s police helmet.

It’s all hilarious. Brilliant. Incomparable.

Most highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Very Good, Jeeves,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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He was fat then, and day by day in every way has been getting fatter ever since, till now tailors measure him just for the sake of the exercise.

It’s kind of a waste of time to review a P. G. Wodehouse book. The intelligent consumer knows the quality of the product. But it’s possible some reader (for some incomprehensible reason) has resisted the delights of “Plum’s” work to date, so here goes.

Very Good, Jeeves!, a story collection, is obviously a Jeeves and Wooster book, so there’s no mystery about what we’re getting. Idle London clubman Bertie Wooster – or one of his equally dimwitted friends – gets into some kind of ridiculous trouble. In the end, they turn to Bertie’s valet (not butler), Jeeves, of whom Bertie testifies: “There are no limits to Jeeves’s brain-power. He virtually lives on fish.”

The basic scenario is consistent (we’d be disappointed if it weren’t) but there are minor variations from story to story – sometimes Bertie turns to Jeeves at the very beginning, but unforeseen complications stretch the problem out. Sometimes Bertie delays resorting to Jeeves because some coldness has arisen between the two of them, over a disagreement about socks or golf attire or something. Once Jeeves is absent on holiday, and on another occasion Bertie’s imperious Aunt Agatha refuses to ask help from a mere servant.

But in the end Jeeves comes through, and the sun shines once again on the Edenic world of Wodehouse.

There are plenty of familiar characters in this collection – Bingo Little, Tuppy Glossop, and – most dramatically – Bobbie Wickham, the beautiful, red-haired, walking attractive nuisance.

Also, I noted, with interest, that at one point Bertie describes a portrait of himself as featuring a monocle. Bertie used to be portrayed with monocles in illustrations all the time, but I don’t recall actually finding one in a story before (there are probably others I’ve overlooked, though).

I think several of the stories in Very Good, Jeeves were actually new to me, which was delightful. The ones I’d read before were also delightful, though, so I had a thoroughly good time.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Right Ho, Jeeves,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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“You have a splendid, chivalrous soul.”

“Not a bit.”

“Yes, you have. You remind me of Cyrano.”

“Who?”

“Cyrano de Bergerac.”

“The chap with the nose?”

“Yes.”

I can’t say I was any too pleased. I felt the old beak furtively. It was a bit on the prominent side, perhaps, but, dash it, not in the Cyrano class. It began to look as if the next thing this girl would do would be to compare me to Schnozzie Durante.

I suppose there must be a time when it would be a mistake to read a P. G. Wodehouse novel, but I can’t think of one offhand. And for this reader, the Jeeves and Wooster stories are supreme. It’s Bertie Wooster’s narration that makes all the difference.

Opinions differ, naturally, on what is the best J&W novel, but I think Right Ho, Jeeves must be in anybody’s top two or three. John Le Carre called it one of his all-time favorite novels. An internet poll in 2009 voted it the best comic novel ever penned by an English writer. Published in 1934, RH,J was Wodehouse’s second full-length Jeeves novel. Critics have noted that these first two books share the common theme of Bertie attempting to assert himself in the face of Jeeves’ intelligence and personality; that element was reduced in later stories. But it can’t have been because it was ineffective as a plot element – it’s irresistible.

When we join our heroes, Bertie has just returned from a holiday in Cannes. He soon clashes with his valet Jeeves over his new dinner jacket – a “white mess jacket with brass buttons” that was all the rage on the Riviera that summer. Bertie insists that he will wear the garment, creating a coldness between master and servant.

So when Bertie gets word that his cousin Angela Travers has broken her engagement to his old friend Tuppy Glossop, he refuses to appeal to Jeeves to solve the problem, but comes up with a plan of his own. Similarly, when his old school chum Gussie Fink-Nottle tells him he can’t work up the nerve to propose to Madeline Bassett (a girl Bertie considers too goopy to live, but just right for the feckless Gussie) he hands him a scheme of his own (based on “the psychology of the individual”).

Needless to say, all Bertie’s plans lead to disaster, and in the end only Jeeves’ fantastic brain can bring about a resolution – a resolution that will involve a considerable amount of discomfort for Bertie himself. One notes a certain refined vindictiveness in Jeeves here, but it’s the affectionate vindictiveness of a parent who wants to teach an errant child a lesson they won’t forget.

No review of Right Ho, Jeeves would be complete without a mention of the classic scene when Gussie, drunk as a lord for the first time in his life, distributes prizes to students at Market Snodsbury grammar school. Here is farce raised to Olympian heights.

What a treat. If you haven’t read Right Ho, Jeeves, do yourself a favor.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Carry On, Jeeves,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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‘I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee line for me with the light of love in her eyes. I don’t know how to account for it, but it is so.’

I am at one of those points in life where I find it prudent to re-read beloved books from my past, rather than spend money on new ones. Having made that determination, it was but the work of a moment for me to ankle off to the bookshelf and pull a book out of my P. G. Wodehouse shelf. And so I offer my review of Carry On, Jeeves.

The characters of Bertie and Jeeves first appear in a story called “Extricating Young Gussie”, (not in this collection) which was published in 1915. In it, Bertie is dispatched to New York by his formidable Aunt Agatha, because his cousin Gussie has formed an ill-advised attachment to a vaudeville performer. Bertie crosses the Atlantic on this mission, but in the end the whole thing is resolved through a farcical coincidence.

What’s rummy about this story (as Wodehouse himself would have put it) is that, first of all, we’re never told Bertie’s last name (it appears, in fact, to be Mannering-Phipps). Also, Jeeves does nothing brainy at all. He answers doors and takes people’s hats. That’s it. This is a nascent Jeeves and Wooster story. The concept remains in embryo.

It wasn’t until the next story, “The Artistic Career of Corky” (1916), that Wodehouse faced the challenge of solving a plot problem without letting Bertie do anything smart, which would violate his character. It was then that he hit on the idea of making Jeeves a super-intellect. And a wonderful phenomenon came into being.

“The Artistic Career of Corky” is included in the collection, Carry On, Jeeves. But its first story is “Jeeves Takes Charge” (also published in 1916). Here we get the origin story, as “rebooted” (as they say of movie franchises) by Wodehouse himself. The story opens with a wonderful scene in which Bertie, hung-over and temporarily valet-less, opens his door to “a kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnny” who immediately diagnoses his complaint and mixes up his proprietary anti-hangover concoction. Bertie engages him on the spot, and as the story continues, Jeeves contrives to disentangle him from an ill-advised engagement to Florence Cray (“seen sideways, most awfully good-looking”), who had a plan for “making something of him.”

And so it goes on through ten wonderful stories. Sometimes Bertie helps a friend out with a spot of matrimonial trouble. Sometimes Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia enlists him in an insane quest to steal some ridiculous object. It’s all light, implausible, and hilarious.

As I read, I couldn’t help thinking about Heaven (see my review on the book about Near Death Experiences, a few inches below). I think Heaven may turn out to be a lot like a Wodehouse story. We never grow old, and the world never changes (Wodehouse attempts to keep up with the times in a couple stories, but they jar). And above all stands the great God of whom Jeeves is a symbol, who (in this life, anyway) allows us to go our wayward ways, knowing that in the end we have no resource but Him, and no one who cares more for our welfare.

Anyway, highly recommended.

Goofing, Uncategorized

Bertie’s cat crisis

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Busy, busy today — and it’s a good time to be busy, to keep one’s mind off… things. Translation, big job, deadline, you know the drill.

So, in lieu of my comforting prose, I offer a moment of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Wooster, from way back in 1990. Bertie Wooster, it appears, has imprudently allowed himself to stumble into engagement with Honoria Glossop, daughter of the eminent lunacy expert, Sir Roderick Glossop. Bertie has invited Sir and Madame Glossop to dine in his flat. But Jeeves, in his wisdom, knows the match is unsuitable, and so finds a subtle way to put a boot up the pipe. (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds about right.)

Nobody’s ever done Jeeves and Wooster better, even though Hugh Laurie took the coward’s way out and didn’t work with a monocle.