P.G. Wodehouse in his Own Words

by Barry Day

  (‘The Shadow Passes’ from Nothing Serious)

  *

  His nose … was twitching like a rabbit’s, and in the eyes … there was dawning slowly a look of incredulous horror. It was as if he had been cast for the part of Macbeth and was starting to run through Banquo’s ghost scene.

  (Uncle Fred in the Springtime)

  *

  His manner had nothing in it of the jolly innkeeper of the old-fashioned comic opera. He looked more like Macbeth seeing a couple of Banquos.

  (Frozen Assets)

  *

  She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest room.

  (Joy in the Morning)

  *

  The butler was looking nervous, like Macbeth interviewing Lady Macbeth after one of her visits to the ‘spare room’.

  (‘Buried Treasure’ from Lord Emsworth and Others)

  *

  But throughout his whole career he was never really at ease in the medium of the ‘straight play’:

  I wish you would take my script and pull it to pieces and supply a new layout. I know my limitations so well as regards stage work. I think my dialogue is good, but, left to myself, I am apt to fall down on the story. I have never had a success on stage when I have written the story, and I have never had a failure when the story had been supplied by someone else. The Play’s the Thing, The Cardboard Lover and Candlelight, all of which I adapted following the original story closely, were all big hits. So, if you can suggest a new story-line, I could dialogue it.

  (Letter of 22 April 1951 to Prof. Conkle (University of Texas), with whom Wodehouse was attempting to collaborate on a play about headhunters.)

  There was a distinct touch of incredulous horror in the air when Wodehouse came to contemplate the ‘kitchen sink’ drama of the late 1950s, although there is absolutely no evidence that he ever actually saw any of it …

  They had all gone on to the opening performance at the Flaming Youth Group Centre of one of those avant-garde plays which bring the scent of boiling cabbage across the footlights and in which the little man in the bowler hat turns out to be God.

  (Service with a Smile)

  * * * *

  In the last years of his life Wodehouse became a television addict. Nothing – not even his writing – was allowed to come between him and his ‘daytime soaps’. Presumably one popular entertainer recognised another successful formula when he saw it. But it was not always thus.

  In 1952 he was writing to Townend:

  What a loathsome invention it is. You hear people say it’s going to wipe out books, theatre, radio and motion pictures, but I wonder. I don’t see how they can help running out of material eventually. The stuff they dish out is bad enough now, and will presumably get worse. (Not that you can go by what I predict. I was the man who told Alexander Graham Bell not to expect too much of that thing he had invented called the telephone or some such name, as it could never be more than an amusing toy.)

  And later:

  I sometimes think, looking back to the time when I was a viewer, that I could have endured television with more fortitude if they had not laughed so much all the time … The gruesome thing is that this is not always the laughter of a real studio audience. Frequently, it is tinned or bottled. They preserve it on sound tracks, often dating back for years, so that what you are getting is the mummified mirth of people who, in many cases, died way back in about 1946 … It used to be obligatory to laugh whenever anyone on the television mentioned Brooklyn … and now there has been a change of policy, and today you have to laugh at Texas.

  You may have formed the impression that I dislike television. I would not go as far as to say that. Apart from thinking it the foulest, ghastliest, loathsomest nightmare ever inflicted by science on a suffering human race, it can carry on, provided – I say provided – I have not to excite the derision of the mob by appearing on the screen myself …

  Were he with us to look back down the corridor of the years, he might find it mildly amusing to contemplate that several generations have discovered his printed prose, having first enjoyed seeing it adapted – for television.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Clubs and Codes …

  ‘Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?’ said Wilfred. ‘ffinch-ffarrowmere,’ corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capital letters.

  (‘A Slice of Life’ from Meet Mr Mulliner)

  *

  Reluctant though one may be to admit it, the entire British aristocracy is seamed and honeycombed with immorality. If you took a pin and jabbed it down anywhere in the pages of Debrett’s Peerage, you would find it piercing the name of someone who was going about the place with a conscience as tender as a sunburned neck.

  (‘The Smile That Wins’ from Mulliner Nights)

  ‘Do you know what you are, my lad? You’re an obstinate relic of an exploded feudal system.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  (‘Comrade Bingo’ from The Inimitable Jeeves)

  * * * *

  Wodehouse’s childhood visits with his assembly of ‘aunts’ had made him well aware of the social hierarchy of Victorian England. Well into the Edwardian era – in which he admitted himself to be happily stuck – it was perfectly normal for the well-to-do, quite apart from the aristocracy, to have ‘somewhere in town’ from which they could retreat to their ‘country place’. It was a world with which Trollope or Wilde would have been perfectly familiar.

  The characters he created were, of course, his own unique variations on established themes but the social rules by which they lived were – in the view of their creators – the bedrock on which society was built. And Wodehouse found them endlessly fascinating.

  Turn a page and you turn up a peer of the realm:

  I do realise that in the course of my literary career I have featured quite a number of these fauna, but as I often say – well, perhaps once a fortnight – why not? I see no objection to earls … Show me the Hon. who, by pluck and determination, has raised himself step by step from the depths till he has become entitled to keep a coronet on the hat-peg in the downstairs cupboard, and I will show you a man of whom any author might be proud to write.

  With the occasional exception, they were destined for a comedy role in the Wodehouse ‘musical comedy’ world. For instance, it is hard to take a man seriously who has facial hair with a life of its own …

  The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb tide … foaming upwards as if a gale had struck it, broke like a wave on the stern and rockbound coast of the Dunstable nose.

  (Uncle Fred in the Springtime)

  *

  If he had a moustache he would have looked like a baronet.

  (Spring Fever)

  *

  He was fingering his moustache nervously, like a foiled baronet in an old-time melodrama.

  (Money in the Bank)

  *

  A sort of writhing movement behind the moustache showed that Sir Aylmer was smiling.

  (Uncle Dynamite)

  *

  Like all Baronets, he had table-thumping blood in him.

  (Summer Moonshine)

  *

  SLINGSBY: A man with noble ancestors might possibly use a fish knife for the ontray but he would never mop up his gravy with his bread.

  (If I Were You – play)

  One could be fairly sure that he would have little aesthetic sense and that his physical surroundings would reflect it:

  Whatever is 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.

  (Summer Moonshine)

  … on the other hand, they had a finely calibrated set of rules as to what one did and did not do:

  It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

  (‘The Man Upstairs’ from The Man Upstairs)

/>   *

  He had had to ask him to stay, but he had neutralised the man’s menace by cleverly having all his meals in the library and in between meals keeping out of his way. A host can always solve the problem of the unwanted guest if he has certain animal cunning and no social conscience.

  (A Pelican at Blandings)

  … and there are, of course, certain fixed points of reference that it does not do to question:

  ‘I am not going to marry Lord Rowcester,’ she said curtly. It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he sat himself down to jog her memory.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he reminded her. ‘It was in The Times.’

  (Ring for Jeeves)

  *

  TONY: What does this so-called ‘Social Life’ amount to? Spending money you didn’t earn for things you don’t want, to impress people you don’t like.

  (If I Were You – play)

  Perhaps the greatest impediment to the continued well-being of the aristocracy was the younger generation:

  The British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

  (‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’ from Blandings Castle)

  *

  Inherited wealth, of course, does not make a young man nobler or more admirable; but the young man does not always know this.

  (A Gentleman of Leisure)

  This is the age of the specialist, and even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had become convinced that his speciality, the thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.

  (‘Ways to Get a Gal’ from Dream World, February 1957)

  * * * *

  But running a close second as a blot on the aristocratic landscape was the omnipresent Secretary. Of whom primus inter pares was undoubtedly the Efficient Baxter.

  Rupert Baxter (‘a swarthy-complexioned young man with a supercilious expression’), ‘the Earl of Emsworth’s indefatigable private secretary, was one of the men whose chief characteristic is a vague suspicion of their fellow human beings. He did not suspect them of this or that definite crime: he simply suspected them’ (Something Fresh).

  *

  You may freeze a Baxter’s body, but you cannot numb his active brain.

  (Summer Lightning)

  *

  ‘That is Mr Baxter,’ Lord Emsworth replied.

  ‘Looks a bit of a blister,’ said George, critically.

  (Summer Lightning)

  But then, in Wodehouse the female of the secretary species is scarcely less deadly than the male:

  Her voice was as cold as her eye. Lavender Briggs disapproved of Lord Emsworth, as she did all of those who employed her … When holding a secretarial post, she performed her duties faithfully, but it irked her to be a wage slave …

  (Service with a Smile)

  *

  Lord Emsworth was, and always had been, allergic to secretaries.

  (Galahad at Blandings)

  *

  ‘She covers my desk with letters which she says I must answer immediately. She keeps producing them like a dashed dog bringing his dashed bones into the dining-room. Where she digs them out from I can’t imagine.

  (Galahad at Blandings)

  *

  There was always something about his secretary’s voice, when it addressed him unexpectedly, that gave him a feeling that he was a small boy again and had been caught by the authorities stealing jam.

  (Service with a Smile)

  * * * *

  The only sensible course of action for an embattled aristocrat was to take firm steps in the direction of one’s club and seek commiseration from similarly situated colleagues:

  The club was a richly but gloomily furnished building in Pall Mall, a place of soft carpets, shaded lights, and whispers. Grave, elderly men moved noiselessly to and fro, or sat in meditative silence in deep armchairs. Sometimes the visitor felt that he was in a cathedral, sometimes in a Turkish bath …

  One of those birds in tight morning-coats and grey toppers whom you see toddling along St. James’s Street on fine afternoons, puffing a bit as they make the grade.

  (‘Ahead of Schedule’ from The Man Upstairs)

  *

  There are clubs in London where talk is the crackling of thorns under a pot and it is de rigeur to throw lumps of sugar across the room at personal friends, and other, more sedate clubs where silence reigns and the inmates curl up in armchairs, close their eyes and leave the rest to Nature. Lord Uffenham’s was one of the latter. In its smoking room … were some dozen living corpses, all breathing gently with their eyes closed and letting the world go by.

  (Something Fishy)

  *

  The floor was crowded with all that was best and noblest … so that a half-brick, hurled at any given moment, must infallibly have spilt blue blood.

  (A Damsel in Distress)

  Not that rest and relaxation were the only activities in clubland. Food and drink had their proper place …

  To attract attention in the dining-room of the Senior Conservative Club between the hours of one and two-thirty, you have to be a mutton-chop, not an earl.

  (Something Fresh)

  * * * *

  The inner man looms large in the Wodehouse canon:

  What with excellent browsing and sluicing … and what-not the afternoon passed quite happily.

  *

  [Galahad Threepwood] had gone blithely on, ever rising on stepping-stones of dead whiskies and sodas to higher things. He had discovered the prime grand secret of eternal youth – to keep the decanter circulating and never to go to bed before four in the morning.

  (Full Moon)

  *

  He tottered blindly towards the bar like a camel making for an oasis after a hard day at the office.

  (‘Life With Freddie’ from Plum Pie)

  *

  For years everybody had been telling Eggy that it’s hopeless to try and drink up all the alcoholic liquor in England, but he keeps on trying.

  (Laughing Gas)

  *

  He died of cirrhosis of the liver. It costs money to die of cirrhosis of the liver.

  (‘Success Story’ from Nothing Serious)

  *

  I was so darned sorry for poor old Corky that I hadn’t the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.

  (‘Leave it to Jeeves’ from My Man Jeeves)

  At times the stuff takes on a life of its own …

  The stoppered bottle does not care whose is the hand that removes the cork – all it wants is the chance to fizz.

  (Money for Nothing)

  *

  … one of those innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your system so that, before you know what you’re doing, you’re starting out to reform the world, by force if necessary …

  (‘The Artistic Career of Corky’ from Carry On, Jeeves)

  [He] addressed her in a voice like a good sound burgundy made audible.

  (Do Butlers Burgle Banks?)

  Depending on mood and circumstance, the liquor made audible might be ‘old tawny port’ – but as far as beer was concerned, he was inclined to agree with Kipling that:

  A woman is only a woman, but a frothing pint is a drink.

  (Pigs Have Wings)

  … a sentiment that one may not continue to pursue with impunity …

  The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down to the mezzanine floor.

  (‘Chester Forgets Himself’ from The Heart of a Goof)

  *

  The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’

  (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’ from Very Good, Jeeves)

  * * * *

  Then when the delights of Pall Mall palled …

  I knew quite a lot about what went on in English country houses with their earls and butlers and younger sons. In my childhood in Worces
tershire and later in my Shropshire days I had met earls and butlers and younger sons in some profusion.

  Hosts in English country houses are divided into two classes: those who, when helpless guests are in their power, show them the stables, and those who show them the model dairy. There is also a sub-division which shows them the begonias.

  (Uncle Dynamite)

  *

  In all properly regulated country houses the hours between tea and dinner are set aside for letter-writing. The strength of the company retire to their rooms, heavy with muffins, and settle down to a leisurely disposal of their correspondence. Those who fall asleep try again next day.

  (Pigs Have Wings)

  *

  [It was a country house dinner party.] No fewer than ten of Hampshire’s more prominent stiffs had been summoned to the trough, and they stuck on like limpets long after any competent chucker-out would have bounced them. No doubt, if you have gone to the sweat of driving twenty miles to a house to dine, you don’t feel like just snatching a chop and dashing off. You hang on for the musical evening and the drinks at ten-thirty.

  (The Mating Season)

  Whether the lady of the house was, in fact, a Lady, she always seemed to see herself as Lady Bountiful …

  ‘I’d like to settle down in this sort of place and spend the rest of my life milking cows and taking bowlfuls of soup to the deserving villagers.’