Sunset at Blandings

by P. G. Wodehouse

  [8] When Beach, in his pantry, was being suborned by Ronnie Fish to help him steal Lord Emsworth’s pig, Empress of Blandings, he put a green baize cover over his bullfinch’s cage lest it should be shocked by what it heard (Summer Lightning).

  [9] Clearly this means that the action of Sunset at Blandings (1977) follows that of A Pelican at Blandings (1969) by a week. Heavy Weather (1939) followed Summer Lightning (1929) by a fortnight.

  [10] Beach has been butler at the castle since Something Fresh (1915), when he had an under-butler, Meredew. But now (1977), and in several post World War II books, he calls it eighteen years, and for all we know he would have called it eighteen years at the time of Something Fresh. Wodehouse has never treated time with anything other than irreverence. It shows that time does not quite stand still for Gally when he says that he is fed up with London. We have always seen Galahad as a deep-dyed Londoner, seldom far from the bars and barmaids, theatres and clubs of the West End: essentially a visitor to, rather than a resident at, Blandings. In Full Moon (1947), Gally said that he had never been able to understand his brother’s objections to London, a city which he himself had always found an earthly Paradise. Now we know that, though he still has rooms in London, he regards his family home, in spite of sisters on the premises and Sir Gregory Parsloe across the fields, as his home and ‘as near resembling an enchanted fairyland as dammit’.

  [11] Lady Diana, with Lady Florence still to come. This gives Lord Emsworth and Galahad ten sisters at last count. Wodehouse had a pleasant devil-may-care attitude to the Threepwood sisters. On page 50 Gally can count up only five sisters, and those include the newcomer Diana. Wodehouse would have checked and corrected this number before publication. Nine times out of ten (literally) Wodehouse’s purpose in dragging in sisters is to provide ‘heavies’, people to boss Lord Emsworth, disapprove of Gaily, say ‘No’ to lovers of daughters and nieces. Lady Florence and Lady Diana have never been mentioned before. And for the first time the benevolent old author has given us a Threepwood sister whom we can like. But she speaks no word and never comes onto stage. The roster of sisters now and, alas, for ever, is: Lady Ann Warblington [Something Fresh]; Lady Charlotte (what was her married name?) [‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Constance (first Keeble, now Schoonmaker. Both her husbands have been American millionaires, both nicer than she deserved) [Leave it to Psmith, Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Blandings Castle, ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’, Pigs Have Wings, Service with a Smile, Galahad at Blandings, ‘Sticky Wicket at Blandings’, Plum Pie, A Pelican at Blandings]; Georgiana, Marchioness of Alcester [Blandings Castle]; Lady Hermione Wedge (who looked like a cook and whose daughter Veronica was the dumbest blonde of all) [Full Moon, Pigs Have Wings, ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Garland [Full Moon, Pigs Have Wings, ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Julia Fish [Heavy Weather, Summer Lightning]; Lady Jane (what was her married name? Geoffrey Jaggard in Blandings the Blest deduces ‘Allsop’ via Galahad at Blandings. Perhaps. Her charming daughter Angela was the one whose fiancé, James Belford, produced for the distracted Lord Emsworth the wonder-working hog-call that got the Empress back to eating properly [‘Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’, Blandings Castle]; and now Lady Florence (Wodehouse in his notes seems undecided whether it should be Moresby, Ormsby or Appleby) and Lady Diana Phipps, soon to be Lady Diana Piper, wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She was the only sister Galahad approved of. He disliked all the others and they disliked him. He had said to Lord Emsworth in Galahad at Blandings, ‘I’ve always said it was a mistake to have sisters. We should have set our faces against them from the outset’.

  [12] Wodehouse had scored out a last sentence to this first paragraph of the chapter. It read, ‘And this had always struck him as odd, for his sister Florence, her mother, had even in childhood been constructed of aristocratic ice’ . Wodehouse took it out, probably, because Florence wasn’t Vicky’s mother, but step-mother. But ‘constructed of aristocratic ice’ is too good to lose.

  [13] Dolly Henderson married Jack Cotterleigh of the Irish Guards, and their delightful daughter (Sue Brown was her stage name) married Ronnie Fish, son of Galahad’s sister Julia (Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather).

  [14] It is only in the last three Blandings books that the eighth earl of Emsworth, father of the current ninth, of Galahad and of ten daughters, gets more than a mention, and he is shaping up to being retrospectively, rather a nasty character: here, ‘a bully and a tyrant’. It is odd that the benign Wodehouse dragged the eighth earl from his grave to make an ogre of him. If you try to work out when the ninth earl succeeded to the title, you must take into account that Vicky says she just remembers the eighth and he terrified her.

  [15] See Full Moon and Galahad at Blandings.

  [16] Lord Emsworth is still trying to get his beloved Empress painted for the Portrait Gallery at the castle. This quest was a strong strand in the plot of Full Moon, and there, too, the portrait painter came in under the assumed name of Messmore Breamworthy. Galahad, in that story, also told Lord Emsworth that his name was Landseer.

  [17] Eastbourne on the east coast? No, south, and 62 miles further west along the south coast is the town of Emsworth, on the Sussex/Hampshire border.

  [18] At this stage in the novel Dame Daphne Winkworth does not come nearer than being a voice over the telephone (page 100). But that enables her to puncture Jeff’s alias at Blandings. She has just sacked him as drawing master in her school even as, in Galahad at Blandings, she has sacked little Wilfred Alsop, the piano teacher. Dame Daphne, who has appeared in two previous novels, is one of the few links (Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor, is another) between the worlds of Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth. She was prominent in The Mating Season: widow of an historian, godmother of Madeline Bassett, mother of Gertrude, whom Catsmeat Potter Pirbright loves and courts. Her mother wishes Gertrude would be loved and courted by rich Squire Haddock, but Squire Haddock loves and courts Catsmeat’s sister, Hollywood star Corky Pirbright (‘Cora Starr’).

  Dame Daphne is described by Bertie Wooster as ‘a rugged light-heavyweight with a touch of Wallace Beery in her make-up’. When Bertie and Esmond Haddock drink a large decanter of port together after the ladies have left the dinner table, and are ‘discovered’ by Dame Daphne waving the empties and singing a hunting song, she emits a memorably described four-letter word:

  ‘Well!’

  There are, of course, many ways of saying ‘Well!’ The speaker who had the floor at the moment— Dame Daphne Winkworth—said it rather in the manner of the prudish Queen of a monarch of Babylon who has happened to wander into the banqueting hall just as the Babylonian orgy is beginning to go nicely.

  Curiously, in The Mating Season, ‘she used to be headmistress of a big girls’ school’. But in her next two scriptural appearances she is a headmistress. In Galahad at Blandings, she has a small and unpleasant son, Huxley. She seems to have been thought to have been an early flame of Lord Emsworth’s (not that Lord Emsworth can remember anything of the sort) . It is now his sister Constance’s idea, and briefly Dame Daphne’s, that she ought to become Lord Emsworth’s second Countess. (He has been a widower for twenty years.) Lord Emsworth is strongly against the whole thing, not least the idea of being Huxley’s step-father. Huxley teases the Empress and tries to let her out of her sty for gallops in the meadow. He gets his deserts when the Empress bites him in the leg. His mother overhears Lord Emsworth telephoning the vet to make sure that the Empress can take no harm from this biting of the beastly boy. Any prospect of romance between Dame Daphne and Lord Emsworth after that is dead.

  [19] Claude Duff and Gally, after their chance meeting, ending so cordially, seem to have separated. We would like to know how, and would surely have been told when the typescript had been finally revised for print.

  [20] Fortnum & Mason (which I have always supposed to be Wodehouse’s recurrent ‘Duff & Trotter’) tell me that a raised pie is made as follows: pastry, lightly cooked, is moulded round, or rai
sed up, a wooden mould. The mould is removed and the pastry then filled with meat, usually game or pork, and the contents closed over with pastry again. The pie is then baked and served cold after a savoury jelly has been poured into the top to surround and seal off the meat.

  [21] Second son of Lord Emsworth, originally a sore trial to his father. But then he married the daughter of an American millionaire (she is a ‘sort of cousin’, too, of the Blandings head gardener, McAllister) and rose to great heights in his father-in-law’s dog-biscuit business in America. Freddie’s father is glad to have him married and a success and, especially, far away in America. At his first appearance, in Something Fresh (1915), Freddie is described as ‘a heavy, loutish youth’. But in later books it might seem as though he had taken Slimmo and ‘come over all slender’ (Full Moon, 1952). He started as an ass and he remains a bit of an ass. But at no time is he such an ass as his elder brother, the heir, Lord Bosham (see especially Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939)).

  [22] Yes, Hermione Wedge was a Threepwood sister, and she would probably have been changed to ‘Florence’ in a final draft here.

  [23] ‘Blandings Castle has impostors like other houses have mice’, Galahad has said on another occasion. Many of them have been introduced by him.

  [24] Ovens’s pub, the Emsworth Arms (see picture, page 150) in Market Blandings, famed for its home-brew ale served at all times of the day or night, has been just offstage from the very first Blandings book to this last. It is almost an ante-room to the castle. And its home-brew, taken in sufficient quantities, has changed many a man’s mood as a hinge in the plots. It is strange that in this typescript here Piper seems to have escaped from his guardian Murchison. Stranger, because in Wodehouse’s preparatory notes, Murchison is sitting in a corner of the bar, guarding the gloomy Cabinet Minister, as his duty is.

  [25] Wodehouse had had a classical education and he ought to have remembered that the Gorgon, in Greek mythology, turned people to stone, not ice.

  [26] This sentence is a good example of Wodehouse ‘writing short’. He would, of course, have made much more, in later drafts of the action sequence here. After the Second World War, when the Saturday Evening Post was no longer serializing his novels, Wodehouse was sometimes asked, by other and lusher American magazines, to submit his novels for pre-publication as one-shotter’s — a whole 70,000-word book to be carved down to 25,000 words for a single issue of the magazine. Wodehouse could do it, and he did it, for substantial rewards. But to the reader brought up on his 70,000-word point-to-points, these 25,000-word one-shotters read like five-furlong sprints: very good, but not Wodehouse’s natural distance. The sixteen chapters of Sunset at Blandings, in the barebones form to which Wodehouse had brought them when he went into hospital, remind me of his one-shotters in pace and discipline. He would have had every intention of filling the chapters out and slowing the book down. He had every intention of living to his century.

  [27] The typescript is here scored out, and the handwritten correction is impossible to read. But a page of the notes provides an alternative, ‘the older Mr. Bessemer’s companies’.

  [28] Three times in these chapters Wodehouse equates a character’s look of despondency with the Mona Lisa. And he has done the same, several times, in earlier novels. In The Code of the Woosters, it is clear that Bertie Wooster has learnt this piece of imagery from Jeeves. But Wodehouse, Jeeves and Bertie have got it wrong. Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance had been published in 1873, and no doubt the passage about the sensuous Mona Lisa (which is in Quiller-Couch’s 1925 Oxford Book of English Prose) was already, at the very end of the nineties and in Wodehouse’s Classical Sixth days at Dulwich, being set to boys for scholarly rendering into Greek. My guess is that Wodehouse, having tackled the passage as a schoolboy translator, misremembered it and that for ‘Hers is the head upon which all the “ends of the world are come”,’ he was substituting, ‘all the sorrows of the world are come’. Neither in Pater’s view, nor in that of any other published critic that I have come across, had ‘Lady Lisa’ a sorrowful countenance. It is odd that Wodehouse’s misremembering should have persisted beyond 1934 when Anything Goes was produced on Broadway and in London. Wodehouse and Bolton wrote the book, Cole Porter the lyrics and music and it was in this musical that Porter’s ‘You’re the Top!’ was first sung, containing the lines:

  You’re the Nile, you’re the Tow’r of Pisa,

  You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa …

  [29] We haven’t heard of a croquet lawn (see end-papers map 26P) at Blandings before. Clock golf, yes. Bowling green (26P), yes. Tennis courts (27Q), yes. But the croquet lawn is new. Gally says they didn’t play croquet in South Africa in the days of his banishment. They do now, and they take it very seriously.

  [30] The song-writer is Noël Coward, and the song ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. This was a bit of rhyming that Wodehouse, himself a past master lyric-writer (he used the word ‘lyrist’) for the stage, very much admired.

  [31] Why can’t he call Jeff ‘Jeff’ ? He might be Jeff Smith. It’s the surname, Bennison, which might remind Lord Emsworth of the man (Jeff’s father) who got away with thousands of pounds of his cash. But, again, why not ‘Jeff’?

  [32] It is not a bit clear why Gally says that the job Jeff is after is to be Lord Emsworth’s secretary. Why not to paint the Empress?

  [33] This is the first Bentley reported as belonging to the castle. We have seen an Antelope and a Hispano-Suiza in earlier books.

  [34] How did Jeff know about J. B. Underwood being notoriously popular with the other sex? Not clear yet.

  [35] The Bill Lister incident. See Full Moon.

  [36] Rooks’ eggs are green mottled with olive. Bill-stamps are that violet-indigo-blue colour from ink-pads for rubber stamping, as on the backs of cheques.

  [37] Wodehouse, on his typescript, has a big cross against the next four lines of dialogue, and the word ‘fix’ scrawled big. I cannot see what difficulty he had to surmount here. But ‘fix’ in his language to himself meant ‘Do it again and get it right’.

  [38] Blissful Blandings weather: hammocks by day and a warm moon at night! The Californian climate is normal for Wodehouse’s England, especially in Shropshire. Changes in the weather are always purposeful, as on page 83 to get Jeff off the terrace and to the realization that he has been locked out. On page 53 we find that strong sunshine (‘get the lady a large hat’) is used to arrange an entrance. In an earlier Blandings book, Heavy Weather, a sudden downpour of rain drives the sundered lovers into each other’s arms in a deserted cottage in the West Wood. In Full Moon, if you can believe young Prudence Garland, a fortnight of rain had driven Freddie Threepwood to propose marriage to his first cousin Veronica Wedge as ‘a way of passing the time when bored with backgammon’.

  [39] Still this slur on Sir Gregory. His is the face at the window of the Empress’s sty in Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Pigs Have Wings and one story in Blandings Castle. In another story in that book his is the face peering into the pumpkin frame. But had he really done anything worse than bad neighbourliness to the Blandings lot? He has certainly ‘lured’ George Cyril Wellbeloved away from the curacy of the Empress, to take up the ditto, for more cash, of the Pride of Matchingham across the fields. And he has bought a great fat pig in Kent, named her Queen of Matchingham and entered her against the Empress for the Shrewsbury Fat Pigs prize. This (see Pigs Have Wings) is considered unsporting, but there is nothing against it in the rule-book, he claims. And, in the theft and counter-theft of pigs in that book, Sir Gregory is a laggard compared with Gally and his accessories, Penny Donaldson and Beach. ‘Tubby’ Parsloe had been a rip-roaring young man about town, though such a past is always to a middle-aged man’s credit in Wodehouse (see Jimmy Piper here, and Gally himself; see also Lord Worplesdon). Gally may still bear rancour that the young, untitled Gregory Parsloe had nobbled his (Gally’s) dog Towser in a ratting contest. But in his heart Gally must surely admire a man who has stol
en Lord Burper’s false teeth and pawned them in the Edgware Road, and has been thrown out of the Café de l’Europe for trying to raise the price of a bottle of champagne by raffling his trousers.

  [40] Flask of strong drink emptied into the Empress’s food-trough. See Galahad at Blandings.

  [41] Lord Emsworth’s favourite book is referred to in the texts variously as Whiffle’s On the Care of the Pig, Whiffle’s The Care of the Pig, Whiffle on the Care of the Pig and just Whiffle. It is published by Popgood and Grooly, and the true name of its author may remain one of the minor mysteries of English letters. Lord Emsworth had a shelf devoted to pig books in his library, we know. In Summer Lightning he was reading ‘his well thumbed copy of British Pigs’ and, later in the same novel, Disease in Pigs. We are not told the name of the author of either book. Then, in ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’, Lord Emsworth is shown harassed by his sister Constance, his niece Jane, his grandson George and his bête noir, Rupert Baxter: