Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "p-g-wodehouse"

Intimitable: so good or unusual as to be impossible to copy; unique.

P.G. Wodehouse (1881 - 1975) was one of the most prolific and famous writers of the twentieth century, creating a slew of characters who became cultural bywords in his home country of Britain and in English-speaking countries everywhere; he was also a noteworthy presence in Hollywood for many years, and his stinging criticisms of the film industry's stupidities and excesses are just as timely today as they were a century ago when he made them. His fame has dimmed considerably with time, particularly on this, the Americas, side of the Atlantic, but his most enduring character, the farseeing, all-knowing butler Jeeves, is still referenced today by countless people who have never heard of Wodehouse. He remains one of the very few authors whose fictional creations have achieved the level of immortality where knowledge of the context is totally irrelevant.

I came to my knowledge of Wodehouse sideways, by reading George Orwell's essay "In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse." The writer had been captured by the Nazis in 1940 when they conquered France, and was accused of collaboration with them, a charge which lingered over him for many years and led him to live the balance of his life in America. It was a charge which was largely unfair, and such legitimacy as it possessed stemmed more from Wodehouse's combination of political naivete, an indifference to the age in which he was living, and an utter inability to work up any belligerent feeling against foreigners. Wodehouse was a humorist, his lens was comedic, and he seems to have been both unwilling and unable to look up from it.

"The Intimitable Jeeves" is a loosely assembled series of farcical incidents involving the narrator, a useless young Englishman of means named Bertie Wooster, and his all-knowing, impreturbable, implacable butler, Jeeves. Wooster personifies the idle rich man of the Edwardian Era, someone who has no real morals, convictions, intellect or substance of any kind, but -- to paraphrase Orwell -- possesses the reflexes of a gentleman. He is fairly harmless himself, but is continually being dragged into moronic situations by his old school friend, the even more useless Bingo Little, who is forever falling into romantic or economic disaster and demanding that Wooster get him out of Dutch. Wooster is, of course, incapable of this -- he is incapable of anything, really, except eating copious breakfasts -- but when his own well-intentioned but clumsy efforts inevitably fail, Jeeves steps in with equal inevitability, and pulls the strings in young master's favor. Jeeves is at once a counselor, confidant, friend, father figure, and confessor, but he is also the brain Wooster lacks, and what's more, he acts as a kind of reinforcing rod on Wooster's wobbly sense of propriety, ever nudging him toward what Jeeves perceives as "correct" behavior. The book's humor relies primarily on the inventiveness with which Bingo gets his long-suffering friend into trouble, and the greater inventiveness with which the omniscient, omnipotent Jeeves gets him out of it. Also in gentle if steady ridicule of the English society, both its upper classes and its more radical, pro-Marxist elements.

It would be a mistake, I think, to presume that Wodehouse is himself any type of social critic. His tone is not on that level, and it was said of him by the Germans who captured him when they overran France that he "lacked any political sense." Its true he mocks the stupidity of the narrator, and therefore the narrator's entire class, without mercy; but this mockery is also without cruelty, or any indication that he thinks society could or should be any different. Indeed, he pokes fun at the would-be revolutionists and feminists of the era with just as much quiet abandon: for example, one would-be Lenin is only too eager to stuff himself to bursting at the table of a lord, all the while denouncing the nobility. If there is a central theme to this novel, it is that there is always a man behind the throne: Wodehouse never once suggests what the reader already knows, to wit: that Jeeves ought to be the one with the money and the societal standing. But since Jeeves already has all the power, including the power to withhold his genius when young master does something he disapproves of like buying spats in the wrong colors, such trappings are unnecessary. Indeed, Jeeves himself is the most ferocious guardian of the social class which employs him and defines his horizons.

I am perhaps reading more into a lightweight period English comedy novel than I ought; this book is meant to make you laugh, and it is funny if you enjoy watching wealthy people make asses of themselves, especially when Jeeves ever-so-tactfully sees fit to remind Wooster that it is he, Jeeves, who is the true master. Take, for example, the incident where Wooster insists on wearing spats in the garish colors of his old university: the conservative Jeeves mightily disapproves, leading to a cold war between them. But when Jeeves saves Wooster for the umpteenth time from one of Little's idiocies, we get the following, conciliatory exchange:

"Jeeves...those spats?"
"Yes, sir?"
"You really dislike them?"
"Intensely, sir."
"You don't think time might induce you to change your views?"
"No, sir."
"All right then. Say no more. You may burn them."
"Thank you very much, sir. I have already done so. Before breakfast this morning. A quiet grey is far more suitable, sir. Thank you, sir."

This was my first exposure to Wodehouse and the plane of light comedic fiction upon which he spent his entire life and career. It was light, silly, and modestly engaging. It is the sort of fiction that does not make any pretense whatever at being more than it is, which in a day and age as pretentious and hollow as ours, was quite refreshing.