by Barry Day
Bertie Wooster is a fellow whom it is dashed difficult to deceive. Old Lynx-Eye is about what it amounts to. I observe and deduce. I weigh the evidence and draw my con clusions.
It’s not all jam writing a story in the first person. The reader can know nothing except what Bertie tells him, and Bertie can know only a limited amount himself.
(Letter to William Townend, 6 March 1932)
He was a little clearer about Jeeves. Having read the American writer Harry Leon Wilson’s novel, Ruggles of Red Gap, ‘I remember feeling that he had got the English valet all wrong … I thought he had missed the chap’s dignity. I think it was then that the idea of Jeeves came into my mind.’ On the choice of name he was quite clear. He wrote in a letter to lifelong fan, Walter Simmons – ‘I was watching a county match on the Cheltenham ground before the first war and one of the Gloucestershire bowlers was called Jeeves. I suppose the name stuck in my mind, and I named Jeeves after him.’
The fast bowler was one Percy Jeeves and he was thought to have England potential. Unfortunately, he was to die at Flanders in 1916. Wodehouse took only his surname, giving Jeeves (as late as 1971 the rarely used Christian name of ‘Reginald’. (On a point of detail, he also misremembered his county affiliation. Jeeves actually played for Warwickshire against Gloucestershire.)
As for a real-life role model, Wodehouse was to admit in a late letter to Guy Bolton that he had misled his friend on the matter: ‘When we did Bring on the Girls, if you remember, I said that I drew Jeeves from a butler I had called Robinson. Untrue, of course. At the start I had no model for him except the conventional stage butler.’ (Another Wodehouse contradiction here, for at a 1920s London dinner party – ‘buttled’ by the aforesaid Robinson – he was heard to tell Bolton that the man was an author’s model and ‘a walking Encyclopaedia Britannica’. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the Jeeves of the novels from 1934 onwards was more demonstrably knowledgeable even than the Jeeves of the earlier short stories.)
Little is recorded of Jeeves’s early history, though it seems likely that he, too, saw action. When asked by Lord Rowcester: ‘Were you in the First World War, Jeeves?’ Jeeves replies, ‘I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m’lord.’ From his first job – as pageboy at a girls’ school – he was at various times in service with Lord Worplesdon, Mr Digby Thistleton (later Lord Bridgnorth), Montague Todd, Lord Brancaster, Lord Frederick Ranelagh (with Lord Rowcester and Lord Chufnell among later temporary postings) – before Fate brought him into the life of the Young Master:
I started writing in 1902 and every day I said to myself, ‘I must get a character for a series.’ In 1916 I wrote the first Jeeves story. About a year later I wrote another. But it wasn’t until I had done about six at long intervals that I realised I had got a series-character.
I find it curious, now that I have written so much about him, to recall how softly and undramatically Jeeves first entered my little world. On that occasion he spoke just two lines. The first was: ‘Mrs Gregson to see you, sir.’ The second, ‘Very good, sir. Which suit will you wear?’ … It was only some time later … that the man’s qualities dawned upon me. I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter.
(Introduction to The Jeeves Omnibus)
At their first meeting a hungover Bertie opens the door of his flat … ‘A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.’ Bertie tells him to ‘stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr … This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face …’ (‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ from Carry On, Jeeves).
As the character of Jeeves evolved, he steadily acquired the characteristics by which we now know him.
‘Jeeves is a wonder.’
‘A marvel.’
‘What a brain.’
‘Size nine-and-a-quarter, I should say.’
‘He eats a lot of fish.”
(Thank You, Jeeves)
There was his marked discretion …
It was the soft cough of Jeeves’s which always reminds me of the very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain top.’
(Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves)
… a low, gentle cough like a sheep with a blade of grass in its throat.
(‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ from The Inimitable Jeeves)
… his virtual invisibility …
Jeeves entered – or perhaps one should say shimmered into the room … tall and dark and impressive …
(Ring for Jeeves)
[He resembled] the High Priest of some refined and dignified religion …
One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.
(‘The Artistic Career of Corky’ from Carry On, Jeeves)
… the imperturbability …
Jeeves doesn’t exactly smile on these occasions, because he never does, but the lips twitch slightly at the corners and the eye is benevolent.
(Joy in the Morning)
[He] smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to smiling.
(‘The Artistic Career of Corky’ from Carry On, Jeeves)
The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s
(‘The Aunt and the Sluggard’)
… and, of course, eating all that fish explains the excess of grey matter – not to mention the way his head sticks out at the back. (‘Jeeves let his brain out another notch’ – The Mating Season).
‘Tell me, were you always like this or did it come on suddenly?’
‘Sir?’
‘The brain. The grey matter. Were you an outstandingly brilliant boy?’
‘My mother thought me intelligent, sir.’
‘You can’t go by that. My mother thought me intelligent.’
(‘Episode of the Dog McIntosh’ from Very Good, Jeeves)
Which raises the question of Jeeves’s age and physical appearance. In the late 1960s Wodehouse and his longtime collaborator, Guy Bolton, were contemplating a Bertie–Jeeves musical. Wodehouse was doubtful about a ‘Singing Jeeves’, although perhaps ‘it would be all right with Stanley Holloway as Jeeves’. The problem, as he saw it, was that ‘people have got such a fixed idea of Jeeves as an elderly, grave, rotund character’. Yet, if that were so – and since neither Jeeves nor Bertie age a smidgen from the beginning of the saga to the end – it is most unlikely that Jeeves could have established ‘understandings’ with ‘young persons’ from other establishments, when a Wooster gaffe required covert action on his part. A permanent and virile middle age would seem to be indicated.
Even though Jeeves bails Bertie out of more bouillon than master chef Anatole could shake a ladle at, the Young Master’s gratitude is often at a premium.
There are aspects of Jeeves’s character which have frequently caused coldness to arise between us. He is one of those fellows who, if you give them a thingummy, take a what-d’you-call-it. His work is often raw, and he has been known to allude to me as ‘mentally negligible’. More than once it has been my painful task to squelch in him a tendency to get uppish and treat the young master as a serf or peon. These are grave defects.
(Right Ho, Jeeves)
I was dashed if I was going to let Jeeves treat me like a bally one man chain-gang.
(‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ from Carry On, Jeeves)
To which Jeeves – who had always softened ‘mentally somewhat negligible’ with ‘but he has a heart of gold’ – predictably responds:
‘Yes, sir,’ said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.
(‘Clustering Round
Young Bingo’ from Carry On, Jeeves)
These are mere straws, Jeeves. Do not let us chop them.
(Right Ho, Jeeves)
After such a rift in the lute, Jeeves invariably manages to delete some offending item of attire from Bertie’s wardrobe:
Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.
(‘Jeeves and the Chump Cyril’ from My Man Jeeves)
… or manoeuvre to remove an offending temporary growth of facial hair. He describes one of Bertie’s two recorded moustaches as looking like ‘a stain of mulligatawny soup on the upper lip’.
‘Very good,’ I said coldly. ‘In that case, tinkerty-tonk.’ And I meant it to sting.
(Right Ho, Jeeves)
When two men of iron will live in close association with one another, there are bound to be occasional clashes.
(The Code of the Woosters)
Fortunately, it won’t be long before Jeeves is once again making the world safe for the Young Master to inhabit:
‘And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er in the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly, you took the words right out of my mouth.’
(The Code of the Woosters)
‘Do you know, Jeeves, you’re – well, you absolutely stand alone!’
‘I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir,’ said Jeeves.
If there is a chance that suavity will ease a situation, the Woosters always give it a buzz.
(Joy in the Morning)
* * * *
Jeeves knows his place and it is between the covers of a book.
(Introduction to The Jeeves Omnibus)
CHAPTER FOUR
Dulwich
The fashionable thing is to look back and hate your school, but I loved Dulwich … I always had a good time there.
The most deadly error mortal man can make, with the exception of calling a school a college, is to call a college a school.
(The Pothunters)
‘You don’t know anything about anything,’ Mr Pynsent pointed out gently. ‘It’s the effect of your English public school education.’
(Sam the Sudden)
To me the years between 1896 and 1900 seem like Heaven. Was the average man really unhappy at school? Or was Dulwich in our time an exceptionally good school?
(Letter to William Townend, 7 March 1946)
* * * *
From 2 May 1894, when he first passed through the gates of Dulwich College as a pupil, until he left six years later, Wodehouse felt at home for the first time in his life.
Founded in 1619 by the celebrated Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn – a contemporary of Shakespeare – it was originally known as Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift. By Wodehouse’s time the Upper School was known as Dulwich College and the Lower School as Alleyn’s School.
It was what you would call a middle-class school. We were all the sons of reasonably solvent but certainly not wealthy parents, and we all had to earn our living later on. Compared with Eton, Dulwich would be something like an American State University compared with Harvard or Princeton. Bertie Wooster’s parents would never have sent him to Dulwich, but Ukridge could very well have been there.
Later he would have his own fun with some of the alternative establishments:
Mr Bodkin, miss, so I understand from the ties in his drawer, was educated at Eton. That’s where he’s handicapped in these matters.
(The Luck of the Bodkins)
‘Didn’t Frankenstein get married?’
‘Did he?’ said Eggy. ‘I don’t know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.’
(Laughing Gas)
The average parent chose the Classical ‘side’, where [their sons] learned Latin and Greek, presumably with a vague idea that if all went well they would go to Oxford or Cambridge. In my day, to the ordinary parent, education meant Classics. I went automatically to the Classical side and, as it turned out, it was the best form of education I could have had as a writer.
The fact that older brother Armine was already firmly ensconced and making a name for himself was something of a mixed blessing but it made little difference in the long run. (‘Armine and I were always good friends … there was never any feeling of rivalry between us.’) Armine was the more academic and Wodehouse the more athletic. He was in the school cricket team for two years, the football team for one and was considered a fair boxer until that iffy eyesight once more made its presence felt.
* * * *
Cricket became a source of recurrent imagery in his fiction for the rest of his life:
There would have been serious trouble between David and Jonathan if either had persisted in dropping catches off the other’s bowling.
(Jackson Junior or Mike at Wrykyn – the first half of Mike)
There was the umpire with his hands raised, as if he were the Pope bestowing a blessing.
(‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ in Grand Magazine)
He gave me the sort of look a batsman gives an umpire when he gives him out leg-before-wicket.
(‘Concealed Art’ in Strand Magazine)
To American readers cricket is, of course, a sealed book. What puzzles them is how a game can go on for five days … Would not the two teams, they ask, have been better occupied staying at home with a good book? Why, in the time it takes to get through the normal England v. Australia game you could read the whole of Shakespeare’s output and quite a good deal of Erle Stanley Gardner’s.
(Introduction to US edition of Mike at Wrykyn)
* * * *
In later life golf became Wodehouse’s game of choice – a game he pursued with rather more enthusiasm than skill, as he was the first to admit:
For an untouchable like myself two perfect drives in a round would wipe out all memory of sliced approach shots and foozled putts, whereas if Jack Nicklaus does a sixty-four he goes home and thinks morosely that if he had not just missed that eagle on the seventh, he would have had a sixty-three.
(Introduction to The Golf Omnibus)
He had, it appeared, only one caveat in re the noble game – the Saturday foursome!
I am not an arrogant man. I am not one of those golfers who despise all humanity whose handicap is in double figures. If I ever find a worse player than myself – I have not done so yet – I shall pity him, not despise him. But, whatever you may say against my style of play, however much you may animadvert against my stance, my grip, and the buoyant manner in which I toss my head in the air – like a lion of the desert scenting his prey – just before my club descends on the ball, at least you must admit this in my favour, that there are not four of me.
I may be a rotten exponent of the Royal and Ancient: I will even concede a point by admitting that I am a bally rotten exponent: but at any rate I play alone as a rule, and, playing alone, have no standing. If I overtake people, I wait; if they overtake me, I withdraw into the undergrowth until they have whizzed by. In other words, my bad play is my own affair and does nobody any harm.
In the 1930s he played quite often with his friend, the thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, who remembered that ‘Plum Wodehouse’s golf … was of a curious fashion. He had only one idea in his mind when he took up his stance on the tee, and that idea was length … he went for the ball with one of the most comprehensive and vigorous swings I have ever seen. I am certain that I saw him hit a ball once which was the longest shot I have ever seen in my life without any trace of following wind.
‘You will never see that again!’ I remarked, after my first gasp of astonishment, mingled, I am afraid I must confess, with a certain amount of malevolent pleasure as the ball disappeared in the bosom of a huge clump of gorse.
‘I wonder how far it was,’ was the wistful reply.
Later that evening Wodehouse’s caddie arrived with the missing ball. ‘Got the distance?’ Wodehouse asked eagerly
. ‘Three hundred and forty-three yards, sir,’ the caddie replied promptly.
There was a glow of happiness in P.G.’s expression.
‘Beaten my own record by five yards,’ he confided with a grin.
‘But listen,’ I pointed out, ‘how many matches do you win?’
‘I never win a match,” was the prompt reply. ‘I spend my golfing life out of bounds. I never even count my strokes … All the same I get more fun out of my golf than any other man I know when I am hitting my drives.’
And he certainly gave more fun to any golfer capable of seeing the funny side of their particular religion:
It was a morning when all nature shouted ‘Fore!’ The breeze, as it blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope and cheer, whispering of chip-shots holed and brassies landing squarely on the meat.
(‘The Heart of a Goof’ from The Heart of a Goof)
* * * *
Reggie’s was a troubled spirit these days. He was in love, and he had developed a bad slice with his mid-iron. He was practically a soul in torment.
(A Damsel in Distress)
* * * *
‘After all, golf is only a game,’ said Millicent. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don’t realise what they are saying.
(‘Ordeal By Golf’ from The Clicking of Cuthbert)
* * * *
It is an excellent thing that women should be encouraged to take up golf … Golf humanises women, humbling their haughty natures, tends, in short, to knock out of their systems a certain modicum of that superciliousness, that swank, which makes wooing such a tough proposition for the diffident male.
