Jeeves

Jeeves is the most famous butler in the world, his fame so great that not even the fact that he is not a butler has been able to diminish it.

He is a gentleman’s gentleman, a valet, an employer’s personal attendant. The men of the families who lived in the grand houses when Wodehouse began his writing career would have been expected to have valets to look after their clothes. They might also have had their meals at table served by them, although this may have been done by butler and footmen, depending on the house’s particular arrangements.

The role of gentleman’s gentlemen is a product of the Edwardian period. They served a need which arose, and later disappeared, as a result of social change. Prior to marriage, the sons of the upper classes lived at home where all their domestic requirements were catered for. All they needed to do was turn up for events in the correct - and properly maintained - garb. For this they employed their own valet. When they left home to get married they would then establish their own domestic staff to run their household.

But when social fashions changed and, instead of remaining at the family home, bachelor sons of upper-class families started to move away, they needed someone to look after their domestic requirements. The choice was to move into rooms, where there would be someone to look after their needs, such as the situation Ukridge is in with Bowles, a former butler - though a more famous relationship of this kind in fiction is Sherlock Holmes’ with Mrs Hudson - or to take a flat, and employ a gentleman’s gentleman to look after them.

A gentleman’s gentleman is the personal servant of a gentleman, and usually his sole one. He would be responsible for his employer’s general welfare, combining the duties of a valet with that of cooking his employer’s meals.

The nature of the relationship between an employer and his gentleman depended upon the personalities concerned, both in terms of duties and their personal interaction. The Edwardian era saw a loosening of formality, with children growing to adulthood rebelling against the rigid codes of their parents’ generation, a process accentuated by the Great War, where all social classes stood, and fell, side by side in the trenches.

Bertie is very much part of this new generation, impatient with stuffy convention and constantly challenging it in respect to his clothing. He horrifies the older generation, as represented by his Aunt Agatha, by discussing his affairs in front of Jeeves, and his attitude towards Jeeves is generally a pally, confiding one. In return, Jeeves, presumably of the older generation, is guarded - and extremely formal - in his language, and will sometimes remark when asked to offer an opinion or do something that it is ‘hardly my place, sir.’ Bertie criticises Jeeves for not being ‘in tune with modern progressive thought, his attitude being described, perhaps, as hidebound’ [Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves], and his battles with him over choice of clothes is not just one of taste, it is one of the generation gap.

‘Oh Jeeves,’ I said, ‘about that check suit.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Is it really a frost?’

‘A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’

‘But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.’

‘Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.’

‘He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.’

‘I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.’ [Jeeves Takes Charge]

That a gentleman’s gentleman and his master lived in close confinement would also bring down barriers. Jeeves’ quarters one would expect to consist of the kitchen - where he can entertain his guests - and a bedroom, which is likely to be directly off the kitchen. When Jeeves types, Bertie can hear it; when Bertie needs Jeeves he does not summon him by bell from the far reaches of a voluminous house, closeted away behind a green baize door, he merely calls out for him.

A butler is usually the head of the household staff, which could number dozens of people, and is in charge of wines and the dining table as well as running the household staff, probably with the help of the housekeeper. Bachelor Bertie has no need of a butler. When he entertains guests to meals in his flat, Jeeves will butle for him, just as he does when Bertie eats alone at home. However, were Bertie to get married and set up his own household, then someone of his position and wealth would employ a butler with a household staff under him. He would no longer have the need for a gentleman’s gentleman. This is something Jeeves is acutely aware of:

I had no desire to sever a connection so pleasant in every respect as his and mine had been, and my experience is that when the wife comes in at the front door the valet of bachelor days goes out at the back. [Bertie Changes His Mind]

When Bertie is in danger of getting married, he can rely upon Jeeves to conspire to prevent it. As Bertie almost invariably wants out of the engagement himself, this leads him to believe that Jeeves is faithfully rallying round his young master, when Jeeves is merely acting self-interestedly. But Jeeves is prepared to break off an engagement of Bertie’s whether Bertie wants it or not - and does in the case of his engagement to Florence Craye in Jeeves Takes Charge.

The richness of the humour from the Wooster/Jeeves chronicles arises from the difference between perception and reality. The most obvious is the way that servant conspires against master, while master complacently congratulates himself on having someone who serves him so faithfully and selflessly.

Jeeves is highly selfish, always alert to how he can turn any situation to his own advantage. Asked to smooth a way for Bingo Little to gain an uncle’s consent to marry a waitress, Jeeves manipulates the situation so that Bingo’s uncle gets engaged to his own cook, who is Jeeves’ fiancée. Jeeves has tired of her and wants instead to move in on Bingo Little’s intended. When, in The Metropolitan Touch, Bingo Little’s latest love affair goes wrong, Jeeves, who has been advising Bingo, makes sure that he is in a position to benefit from it by buying the book that was being run on the outcome. The short stories often end with Jeeves financially enhanced. In Clustering Round Young Bingo Jeeves so successfully plays the parties off each other that he ends up being rewarded by all involved: £20 from Bingo Little, £25 from Aunt Dahlia, £25 from Uncle Tom Travers, £10 from Uncle George, and even £5 from Bertie even though he says, ‘I don’t know why I’m giving it to you.’

When asked by Lord Worplesdon how he might arrange to meet J. Chichester Clam in secret, he suggests Bertie take a cottage at Steeple Bumpleigh - where Bertie is dead set against going because it is the lair of his Aunt Agatha - purely because he wants to go fishing there. Jeeves contrives to take whatever holidays or trips he fancies, be it a jaunt to Monte Carlo to play the tables or a round-the-world cruise, under the guise of working for Bertie - and thus at Bertie’s expense - and normally in opposition to Bertie’s wishes.

Nor does Jeeves treat Bertie with much respect. Outwardly yes, but in subtle ways no:

‘I think it would be best for me to stop at Mr Fittleworth’s residence, appraise him of what has occurred, deposit the luggage and warn him of your coming.’

‘Is warn the word?’

‘“Inform” I should have said sir.’ [Joy In The Morning]

Or more subtly:

‘I give you fair warning that, if he tells me I have a face like a fish I shall clump his head.’

‘Bertie,’ cried the Wickham, contorted with anguish and apprehension and whatnot.

‘Yes, I shall.’

‘Then you’ll simply ruin the whole thing.’

‘I don’t care. We Woosters have our pride.’

‘Perhaps the young gentleman will not notice that you have a face like a fish, sir,’ suggested Jeeves. [The Episode Of The Dog McIntosh]

Jeeves is indifferent as to whether Bertie suffers or not. Indeed, he can take positive pleasure from seeing Bertie squirm. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of Jeeves’ schemes require Bertie to suffer privations. Jeeves arranges for Bertie to go through the humiliating experience of speaking to a girls’ school as part of his master plan to preserve the cosy bachelor existence he requires, and writes of it that: ‘It was an experience which I should have been sorry to have missed. Mr Wooster, I may say at once, indubitably excelled himself.’

This appears in the short story, Bertie Changes His Mind, which is the only one in the canon written by Jeeves. Incidentally, it contains a fine example of humour in Wodehouse’s writing which has eluded the anthologists and quotation-compiling merchants, when Jeeves describes the schoolgirls singing their song of welcome to Bertie, prior to him giving his speech:

Considerable latitude of choice was given to the singers in the matter of key, and there was little of what I might call co-operative effort. Each child went on till she reached the end, then stopped and waited for the stragglers to come up. It was an unusual performance, and I, personally, found it extremely exhilarating. It seemed to strike Mr Wooster, however, like a blow. He recoiled a couple of steps and flung up an arm defensively.

Jeeves’ schemes to ‘solve’ Bertie’s problems - which often are not Bertie’s at all, but those of others which he gets dragged into - often incur physical or mental discomfort to Bertie, frequently gratuitously. He is happy to make his employer writhe:

‘And if I am to stave off the Cheesewright challenge, I shall have the need of a weapon. His strength is the strength of ten, and unarmed I shall be corn before his sickle.’

‘Extremely well put, sir, if I may say so, and your diagnosis of the situation is perfectly accurate. Mr Cheesewright’s robustness would enable him to crush you like a fly.’

‘Exactly.’

‘He would obliterate you with a single blow. He would break you in two with his bare hands. He would tear you limb from limb.’

I frowned slightly. I was glad to see that he appreciated the gravity of the situation, but these crude physical details seemed to me uncalled for. [Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit]

One of Jeeves’ stock techniques is to make out that Bertie is insane. This was his solution to the problem of Bertie being credited with the authorship of Rosie M. Banks’ novels by Bingo Little. This was not Bertie’s problem but Bingo Little’s, and initially developed out of Jeeves’ suggestion as to how Bingo might convince his uncle of his intended’s suitability as a wife. That Bertie be depicted as a loony was also Jeeves’ solution to the problem which Aunt Dahlia and Sir Roderick Glossop face in Jeeves In The Offing. In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Jeeves gets Bertie out of his engagement to Madeline Basset by telling her that Bertie is a kleptomaniac producing, as evidence for his claim, the amber statuette that he was supposed to be returning to Pop Basset’s collection, announcing that he had found it in Bertie’s room. Bertie spends a night in the cells as a result. In this novel Jeeves also telephones Major Plank to come to Totleigh Towers to get Stinker Pinker’s address, which Jeeves could quite easily have given him over the telephone. Bertie is endangered by Plank’s arrival and has to dive behind a sofa, as Plank thinks that Bertie is a notorious crook. His source for this particular piece of misinformation had been Jeeves in the first place.

At the end of Right Ho, Jeeves, Jeeves sends Bertie on an 18-mile bicycle ride to retrieve the key to the back door of Brinkley Court after the house party is locked out, having exited the house summoned by the fire bell rung by Bertie at Jeeves’ suggestion. Jeeves has the key all along and lets the party back in after Bertie has left. The suffering of Bertie so cheers up the rest of the house party that animosities between them are quickly forgotten. Had Jeeves wished, there would have been no need for Bertie to make the whole 18-mile journey; Bertie could merely have bicycled around the corner, had a quiet smoke or whatever, and sneaked back into the house later. It would have had the same effect - for all bar Bertie, who, yet again, suffers at Jeeves’ hands.

Even when Jeeves does act to save, rather than endanger or embarrass, his employer, he can do so in a rather half-hearted way. When Jeeves intervenes during a scam being carried out on Bertie by Alice Hemmingway and Soapy Sam by deftly lifting a pearl case from Soapy Sam’s pocket when he helps him on with his coat, Bertie is all grateful thanks, and gives him £20 by way of appreciation. Yet Jeeves had recognised the man as a conman, from an earlier occurrence, but stood passively by, watching, while Bertie was relieved of £100. In this instance Jeeves has nothing to gain bar the pleasure of seeing his employer lose £100.

Another occasion where Jeeves strictly regulates the dispersal of his help occurs in the story The Episode Of The Dog McIntosh. The plot involves substituting a new Aberdeen terrier for Aunt Agatha’s one which, while being looked after by Bertie, had given by Roberta Wickham to the Blumenfield kid to suck up to his family for her own purposes. Bertie goes to retrieve the dog from the Blumenfields’ hotel suite, while the occupants are at the cinema. Roberta Wickham has a meeting with them afterwards, and is to be shown into their suite when she arrives. Pop Blumenfield, finding himself short of a dog and told by Roberta Wickham, on Jeeves’ suggestion, that Bertie is to blame, goes round to confront Bertie, whereupon Jeeves returns the dog, which is in fact another Aberdeen terrier, bought for the purpose. Why did Jeeves not send Bertie out with the replacement dog in the first place? Because by arranging the action as he did, Jeeves gets the chance to insult, very subtly, Pop Blumenfield to his face, humiliate Bertie, who is cowering behind the sofa and enrich himself - Pop Blumenfield gives him £5 in thanks and Bertie gives Jeeves a further £15 in his relief that the ordeal, created by Roberta Wickham and stage-managed by Jeeves, is over.

Not only is Jeeves happy to see Bertie suffer, he will also double-cross him. Asked to hold on to Uncle Willoughby’s manuscript of his memoirs prior to destroying them so as to prevent them from being published, Jeeves posts the manuscript to the publishers to break an engagement Bertie is in favour of but he is not. In Right Ho, Jeeves Bertie gets Jeeves to agree not to demand the disposal of his mess jacket as his price for helping out. Jeeves agrees to this, but ‘accidentally’ burns it when ironing.

Jeeves comes across in Bertie’s memoirs, despite the overwhelming niceness of its writer, as rather an unpleasant fellow. The characters of the two protagonists are vastly different. Jeeves is immoral, while Bertie has a very strict code. Bertie’s code is so strict that it constantly cramps his room for manoeuvre. It requires that he is chivalrous to females to the point where he is unable to break an engagement to a woman, however much he might dislike her. His code also requires that he always helps a pal in distress, and he prides himself on never letting down a friend in need. Jeeves, on the other hand, has no such scruples. He is prepared to steal, lie, bribe, double-cross, blackmail, break promises, and knock policemen unconscious with coshes if the need arises. Bertie is prepared to live a life of hell married to a girl he cannot stand rather than break his code. When Jeeves finds himself engaged to a girl he has grown tired of, he plots to offload her onto another.

Bertie likes to flatter himself, regarding his various battles with Jeeves, that: ‘I suppose 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]. The joke, of course, is that Bertie is weak and allows others to bulldoze their wishes upon him. But Bertie does display great strength of character in living up to his beliefs despite the peril in which they constantly place him. He is aware that his values, so deep-rooted as they are, are often self-defeating:

I drew no comfort from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sydney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind that was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass. Sydney Carton and Bertie Wooster, I felt - nothing to choose between them. Sydney, one of the mugs - Bertram, the same. [The Code Of The Woosters]

Part of the humour is that Bertie is sometimes aware of what happens to him, but his overwhelming generosity of spirit blanks it out. He talks of ‘the hideous revelation of Jeeves treachery’ [Jeeves And The Yule-Tide Spirit] but consistently allows his fate to rest in Jeeves’ hands. He talks bitterly of aunts, in which he quite clearly includes his Aunt Dahlia, but he always comes running when she calls, and declares that: ‘There are few males or females whose society I enjoy more than that of this genial sister of my late father.’ [Much Obliged, Jeeves] Yet right at the end of the final Wooster novel, Wooster tells Jeeves:

We are tranquil. And I’ll tell you why. There are no aunts here. And in particular we are three thousand miles away from Mrs Dahlia Travers of Brinkley Manor, Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire. Don’t get me wrong Jeeves, I like the old flesh and blood. In fact I revere her. Nobody can say she isn’t good company. But her moral code is lax. She cannot distinguish between what is according to Hoyle and what is not according to Hoyle. If she wants to do anything, she doesn’t ask herself ‘would Emily Post approve of this?,’ she goes on and does it.

Yet, despite being capable of this very shrewd assessment of Dahlia, he continually refers to her as his ‘good and deserving aunt’, as opposed to Agatha, who gets damned in the strongest terms, with Bertie suggesting that she is a werewolf who eats her young. Yet what does Aunt Agatha ever do to Bertie? All she wants is for him to make a good marriage, get a respectable job and take his family responsibilities with the seriousness that she takes them. Whereas at Dahlia’s hands Bertie suffers all forms of degradation and anxiety, and she requires him to do things which risk his going to jail. Indeed, one of his sojourns with Dahlia ends with him spending a night in the cells. Bertie is determined to take the rap for something he had not done, and go to jail rather than allow his aunt to give up her cook, Anatole, which is the price of Bertie’s freedom. Dahlia is fundamentally immoral and, unlike Agatha, has great respect for Jeeves, and is fan of his methods. One of these is blackmail, of which Dahlia declares: ‘Good old blackmail! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall!’ [The Code Of The Woosters] Whereas Agatha might be sniffily condescending towards Bertie, she never reaches the height of invective which Dahlia will hurl at her nephew:

To look at you, one would think you are just an ordinary sort of idiot - certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are a worse scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post. [Right Ho, Jeeves]

But Aunt Dahlia is a pal, and Bertie always supports his pals, and excuses them their trespasses on his good nature. Jeeves is another pal, and Bertie is always benevolent towards him in his deeds. He often voluntarily gives up a valued item of clothing as a kindness to Jeeves. Bertie is also generous to him in word: ‘I rely on him in every crisis and he never lets me down’ [Jeeves And The Hard Boiled Egg] and, even more generously:

There’s one thing you have to give Jeeves credit for. He lets the dead past bury its d. He and the young master may have had their differences about Alpine hats with pink feathers in them, but when he see the y. m. on the receiving end of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he sinks his dudgeon and comes through with the feudal spirit at his best. [Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves]

The point being, of course, that Jeeves does not always come to Bertie’s aid. Sometimes he pretends to, but acts on his own agenda instead; at other times - when he has the hump with Bertie, such as over his purple socks - he declines to. Bertie, albeit only rather vaguely, is aware of this, but he blots it from his mind. He is not a great rationaliser or analyst. He prefers to presume that everyone is like him, ever eager and conscientious in aiding pals overcome their problems. Unfortunately his pals are not so conscientious. Bertie is perhaps unfortunate in his choice of friends, for he is let down regularly by them. As Lord Chuffnell remarks, ‘I wish I had a quid for every time I’ve seen him take the blame for somebody else’s dirty work on his own shoulders.’ [Thank You, Jeeves] Ma Cream thinks him a half-wit because she discovers him in her son’s room searching for a cow-creamer in another’s cause. She finds him thus because Roberta Wickham, who was supposed to be keeping guard, abandoned her post to go to the telephone and forgot then all about him. Lord Bittlesham thinks Bertie a loony because he believes Bertie was claiming authorship of Rosie M. Banks’ novels, when in fact this claim was foisted on him by Bingo Little.

There is a strong case for saying that Bertie’s perceived stupidity is in part a generosity of spirit and a strict adherence to his code. Bertie is a prisoner of his own character and beliefs as much as his intelligence. Quite how stupid is Bertie? Not nearly as much as he is painted, that is for sure. Much of the propaganda concerning Bertie’s stupidity comes from Jeeves, who is constantly dropping him in it, by having to rectify situations by a public declaration that Bertie is a loony. When Bertie complains to Jeeves about this, Jeeves dismisses his complaint complacently with ‘only to your immediate circle now resident at Brinkley Court, sir.’ Bertie retorts that ‘You keep saying that, and you must know it is the purest apple sauce. You don’t really think the Creams will maintain a tactful reserve? They’ll dine out on it for years. Returning to America they’ll spread the story from the rock-bound coasts of Maine to the Everglades of Florida.’ [Jeeves In The Offing]

Bertie’s main advocate for his imbecility is himself. He is always telling us that either he or other people believe him to be an ass, though he does let slip that his mother thought him intelligent. We also know that he went to Oxford University, albeit at a time when money as much as intelligence was a requirement of entry, and that he enjoys doing crosswords. Bertie is not scholarly, but then scholarship is not the same as intelligence. Bertie is always puffing Jeeves’ intelligence, but how much of what Bertie describes thus is in fact better viewed as cunning and learning? Jeeves is always keen to display the products of his reading - and he is certainly widely read - but someone of Bertie’s class and upbringing is unlikely to show off his cleverness; it is not the done thing. It is rather a British trait, especially amongst the upper classes, to downplay one’s abilities, and most certainly one’s intellectual talents. Sometimes, when Bertie is at pains to make himself look stupid, he clearly is not because he is in on the joke:

I remember something Jeeves had once called Gussie. ‘A sensitive plant, what?’

‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’

‘Oh, am I?’ [The Code Of The Woosters]

Or when Bertie is telling Jeeves a story and he wishes the protagonists to be anonymous. Jeeves has suggested calling them A and B, overruling Bertie’s suggestion to call them North and South. A third person enters the story and needs a name:

‘Shall we call him C, sir?

‘Caesar is as good a name as any, I suppose.’ [Jeeves And The Greasy Bird]

All in all, Bertie need not be taken as a totally reliable witness where matters of his own intelligence are concerned. He cottons on to the implications of Gussie losing his notebook, when Gussie does not and he realises the jeopardy the syndicate is in from Steggles’ discovery that Harold the choirboy can sprint quickly, which had passed Bingo by.

We are led to view Jeeves as a genius because Bertie keeps telling us to. In the first story in My Man Jeeves, Leave It To Jeeves, Bertie introduces Jeeves as his capable confidant, without whom he would not know what to do. Previously, in the story Extricating Gussie in The Man With Two Left Feet, Jeeves had been a valet of no significance whatsoever. When Bertie runs into troubles in this story he does not look towards Jeeves for advice, but towards an aunt.

The problem Jeeves is asked to solve in Leave It To Jeeves is that of an artist friend of Bertie’s, Corky, who has two ambitions: to marry his fiancée and to become a portrait painter. The snags are that he is dependent upon his uncle for a quarterly allowance and no-one has yet commissioned him to paint a portrait. Jeeves takes the case in hand and, as a result, Corky’s fiancée ends up married to the uncle instead, and she presents him with an heir, which cuts Corky out of his inheritance. Given his first portrait commission, to paint this child’s picture, Corky produces the painting, but his uncle takes exception to it and cuts off Corky’s allowance. Jeeves rescues something from the embers by suggesting that Corky use the painting as a basis of a comic series ‘The Adventures of Baby Blobbs.’ When the series takes off, Corky generously - in view of the fact that he views Jeeves as a ‘fool’ for his previous scheme that backfired so - rewards Jeeves. But Corky ends up further away from his ambitions than before Jeeves came to his ‘help’.

In another of the stories in My Man Jeeves, Jeeves And The Hard Boiled Egg, Jeeves comes to the aid of Bicky and ends up losing him his allowance. He rescues the situation by suggesting to Bicky a blackmail scheme.

In Jeeves And The Old School Chum, Jeeves conspires to break up Mrs Bingo Little’s friendship with her old school friend, a food faddist, by depriving the party of its picnic lunch, thus turning Mrs Little against the other’s belief in a minimal food intake. Mrs Little is not bothered by missing lunch, and Bertie points out to Jeeves that it is men who object to missing lunch, not women, whose important meal is tea. So Jeeves arranges that the car will run out of petrol in the middle of nowhere when they are returning for tea. This does the trick.

Like Wodehouse, in relation to his skills as a banker, Wooster was self-deprecating:

Every year, starting about the middle of November, there is a good deal of anxiety and apprehension among owners of the better-class of country-house throughout England as to who will get Bertram Wooster’s patronage for the Christmas holidays. It may be one it may be another. As my Aunt Dahlia says, you never know where the blow will fall.

This year, however, I had decided early. It couldn’t have been later than Nov. 10 when a sigh of relief went up from a dozen stately homes as it became known that the short straw had been drawn by Sir Reginald Witherspoon, Bart, of Bleaching Court, Upper Bleaching, Hants. [The Ordeal Of Young Tuppy]

Like Wodehouse, Wooster is related to the aristocracy. Indeed, Bertie could well become a leading member of it. The head of the Wooster family is the Earl of Yaxley, formerly Sir George Wooster Bart, Bertie’s Uncle George. As this uncle is childless, the earldom will be inherited by a nephew. Which one? The contenders appear to be Bertie and his first cousins Claude and Eustace. The question is: which of George’s brothers is the elder? Bertie’s father, or his Uncle Henry, Claude and Eustace’s begetter? No clues are offered. Bertie does not talk of his father, and Henry is noted only for doing ‘some rummy things’ amongst them ‘keeping eleven pet rabbits in his bedroom. In fact he wound up his career, happy to the last and completely surrounded by rabbits in some sort of home.’ [The Inimitable Jeeves] The second Earl of Kimberley became a recluse after the death of his wife. When necessity forced a visit to a London doctor, he arrived at the train station just too late to catch his train, threw a turnip at the station clock and broke it, and stomped off back to Kimberley, where he would allow no visits. After his death, his executors came from London and found living at Kimberley in harmony together a string of mistresses and their offspring.

Bertie writes of his white mess jacket that: ‘I jolly well intend to fight for it with all the vim of grand old Sieur de Wooster at the Battle of Agincourt.’ [Right Ho, Jeeves] A Wodehouse ancestor fought at the Battle of Agincourt. Sir John Wodehouse, a Wodehouse 16 generations before Plum, was a Commissioner of Array for Norfolk charged with raising troops for French campaign, and an executor to Henry V’s will. His descendants took ‘Agincourt’ as their motto. Bertram is a name which appears on the Wodehouse family tree. Sir Bertram de Wodehouse married the daughter of Hamo, Lord of Felton and distinguished himself fighting for Edward I against the Scots in the 13th century. Bertie defends his decision to keep playing the banjo with: ‘A fellow simply can’t go on truckling - do I mean truckling? I know it begins with a t - to his valet for ever. There comes a time when he must remember that his ancestors did dashed well at the Battle of Crecy and put the old foot down.’ [Thank You, Jeeves]

Wooster and Wodehouse have more in common in the matter of names, which extended to Christian names they preferred to suppress, in Bertie’s case his second:

‘I didn’t know your name was Wilberforce.’

I explained that except in moments of great emotion one hushed it up. [The Mating Season]

Bertie gained the name Wilberforce because his father won a packet on an outsider of that name in the Grand National the day before his christening. Over money the author and his creation share similarities. Both were wealthy men - at least by the time the Wooster novels were being written - and so untroubled by worries of how to pay the next bill, but neither was reckless with their money. Bertie turns down the chance to invest £1,000 in a play and could be keenly aware of small sums:

The going was sticky and took about eight and elevenpence off the value of my Sure-grip tennis shoes in the first two yards. [Jeeves And The Impending Doom]

A man who has just become engaged to a girl whose whole personality gives him a sinking feeling and who has had to pay thirty-five quid to a blood-sucker and another twopence to a lending library for a dud book is seldom in mid-season form. [Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen]

Bertie could be generous to his friends with his largesse. So, too, could Wodehouse when dealing with his own family and close friends; in particular William Townend, a prolific, but worst-selling author. Wodehouse supported Townend financially for many years, and ran a separate bank account for him to enable this married man to continue writing. Wodehouse also used his connections and reputation to try to boost his friend’s prospects. This was down to friendship, not from a belief in Townend’s books which, as he confessed after Townend’s death, he found dull.

In playing the banjo, the two Ws share a short-lived hobby. Wodehouse was learning the instrument as a young man until, so the story goes, Westbrook pawned it and then lost the ticket. Longer lived activities that they shared were a love for golf and music theatre. Bertie had a cousin who was a theosophist; Plum’s brother was head of the Theosophical College in Benares. Both went to a prep school called Malvern House. Bertie tried to marry into musical comedy; his ghostwriter succeeded at it. Both hated public speaking and were no good at it. At the dinner after the ceremony granting his honorary doctorate from Oxford, Wodehouse was called upon, by the hall shouting ‘we want Wodehouse!’, to say a few words after the formal speeches. A few words were all his audience got. The microphone was passed down the table to him, he stood and mumbled into it ‘thank you,’ and sat down.

It is unavoidable that a writer writing in the first person will end up putting something of themselves into the ‘I’ character. But Wodehouse put a considerable deal of himself into Bertie Wooster, and on one occasion Bertie seems to be talking more of Wodehouse than himself:

‘The whole trouble is due to your blasted aunt.’

‘Which blasted aunt? Specify, old thing. I have so many.’ [Clustering Round Young Bingo]

Bertie only reveals four aunts of his own in his chronicles. Wodehouse had five times this number. When Bertie writes that: ‘I don’t wonder that all these author blokes have bald heads’ [Clustering Round Young Bingo] it is Wodehouse he is describing.

Like Wooster, Wodehouse was not a witty man. His conversation did not sparkle over the dinner table with bon mots. Bertie Wooster is one of the funniest writers in the English language, yet he seldom cracks a joke. One of the extremely rare witticisms he ventures occurs when, asked how he was after a night in the cells, he replies ‘I have a pinched look’ [Jeeves And the Feudal Spirit]. Bertie’s memoirs may be considered humorous because of many factors - the juxtaposition of images, the mangling of phrases and similes, the undercurrents of tension between the various protagonists, the deceits and conceits, the cock-eyed view of the world - but never because Bertie has set out to write an overtly funny piece.

Those who met Wodehouse hoping to be dazzled by witticisms or badinage were disappointed. What they encountered instead was a well-mannered, polite upper-class gentleman who was as happy, and normally happier, listening than talking. As Duff Copper remembers: ‘I sat next to a man I thought was charming [and] because he was humble I was patronising. When I left, I casually asked the head waiter who the gentleman was I had been sitting next to. ‘Mr PG Wodehouse.’ I wish I had been nicer. [A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper 1890-1954] Frank Crowninshield wrote of PG Wodehouse:

Judged by exterior appearances only, he seemed merely a stodgy and colourless Englishman; silent, careful with his money, self-effacing, slow-witted and matter-of-fact... In all those years - at dinners, at his cottage in the country, on the golf-links, at the Coffee House Club, over a weekend, at the theatre - I never heard him utter a clever, let alone brilliant, remark. No alienist could possibly have guessed him to be the fanciful, erudite and highly intellectual man he actually was.

Bertie Wooster writes in The Inimitable Jeeves:

I wouldn’t have said off-hand that there was anything particularly fascinating about me - in fact, most people look upon me as rather an ass.

Wodehouse’s great love was writing, and his favourite conversational topic was the mechanics and business of writing. Bertie never sought to be the centre of attention, and neither did Wodehouse, who would not set out to light up a room in the manner we envisage Oscar Wilde doing - though Wilde, too, had a reputation as a good and courteous listener. Although Wilde and Wodehouse worked in dissimilar ways, they worked on similar themes. Wilde’s finest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opens with Algernon playing the piano badly but enthusiastically and asking of his manservant:

‘Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?’

‘I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.’

Such dialogue would not be out of place in a Wooster-Jeeves conversation. Nor would the scene where Algernon, having scoffed all the sandwiches specifically requested by his guests before they arrive, picks up an empty plate in horror when he comes to offer them around:

‘Good heavens! Lane! Why are there no cucumber sandwiches? I ordered them specifically.’

‘There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice.’

‘No cucumbers!’

‘No, sir. Not even for ready money.’

It is in this play that Miss Prism tells Cecily to ‘read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational for a young girl. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.’ Wodehouse blamed the fall of the rupee on his not going to university:

My father, after many years in Hong Kong, had retired on a pension, and the authorities paid it to him in rupees. A thoroughly dirty trick, in my opinion, for the rupee is the last thing in the world - or was then - with anyone who valued his peace of mind would wish to be associated. It never stayed put for a second. It was always jumping up and down and throwing fits, and expenditure had to be regulated in the light of what mood it happened to be at the moment. ‘Watch that rupee!’ was the cry in the Wodehouse family. [Over Seventy]

Take any book of quotations and not only should it be stuffed full of Wodehouse quotes if it is any good, but the majority will be from the Wooster stories. It is Bertie who writes: ‘He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that while not exactly disgruntled, he was far from feeling gruntled’ [The Code Of The Woosters] and: ‘she fitted into my best armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew that they were wearing armchairs tight round the hips this season.’ [Jeeves And The Unbidden Guest] The Wooster stories were the best work that Wodehouse the craftsman produced, the flagship, as it were, of his writing. He was aware of this:

Do you find you write more slowly than you used to? I don’t know if it is because The Mating Season is a Jeeves story, and in a Jeeves story every line has to have some entertainment value, but I consider it a good day’s work if I can get three pages done. [Performing Flea]

That the stories are written in the first person is a handicap and a strength. The handicap is that nothing can happen for the reader unless Bertie sees or hears it - hence the reason he is always having to dive behind sofas - or gets told about it. They require that the reader must be able to understand Jeeves’ motives and intentions, while Bertie cannot, and that the conduit for us to comprehend Jeeves is Bertie himself. He must tell the reader what he himself does not know. In doing this so well, Wodehouse displays his genius. He is a far more subtle writer than his detractors have acknowledged.

One of the strengths of Wooster as a participant is that the action in his stories start very promptly. In some of his novels Wodehouse talks a leisurely stroll around the central characters, gently setting the scene and drawing together the various strands from which the plot will be launched, and the main action of the novel may only start a third of the way in. Bertie is always only a few pages away from imminent disaster wherever you might be in the book.

Though Wodehouse often writes in the first person, the Wooster tales are unusual in that the narrator is also a participant. The Ukridge stories are in the first person, but of a minor character, who has little action; indeed, it would not be remotely difficult to rewrite the Ukridge stories in the third person. The Mulliner tales are told by a non-combatant narrator. This device allows Wodehouse to unleash some fairly unlikely plot lines, on the excuse that they are the tall stories of a pub bore. Perhaps ‘bore’ is not the mot juste, but Wodehouse, in a letter to William Townend about correcting the proofs of the Mulliner omnibus wrote: ‘It humbled me a good deal, as the stuff didn’t seem that good. Still, I suppose nothing would, if you read 864 pages of it straight off.’ [Performing Flea] It is no coincidence that the name of the public house Mulliner tells his tales in is the Angler’s Rest. The first person Oldest Member stories also allow a certain licence with credibility. Wooster is also an exceptional Wodehouse narrator in that he is a comic narrator, the humour of his stories coming as much from how he says things as the action he describes.

Jeeves and Wooster started in short stories, the medium where their relationship works best. The best Jeeves book is The Inimitable Jeeves, the first one devoted solely to Jeeves and Wooster. It is a novel crafted from ten short stories, and thus combines the best of both worlds. There is a coherent narrative plot spreading from story to story and Jeeves has a major role to play throughout the book. Wodehouse followed this with two short story collections, Carry On, Jeeves, (which reprinted the four Jeeves stories from My Man Jeeves) and Very Good, Jeeves. The standard of these fail to match the consistent excellence of the stories of The Inimitable Jeeves. After that, Wooster and Jeeves were almost solely limited to novels.

When Wodehouse moved over to writing pure novels Jeeves dropped out of the picture rather, and the balance between Wooster and Jeeves was skewed. Jeeves cannot be on hand to provide succour. If he were, the book is in danger of ending dozens of pages too early. So Bertie labours on alone for much of the action. Indeed, in some of the later novels Jeeves hardly has a chance to plot away - or even direct strategy. Whereas in the earlier stories Jeeves was earning Bertie’s forfeits of purple socks or whatever, by the end of the chronicles Bertie is offering them up, perhaps for old times’ sake and to hide from the reader that Jeeves has really only been a bit-part player in the major action.

In Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit Jeeves does not contribute any schemes to save Bertie, nor is he ever called upon to do so. Jeeves does not even extract Bertie from his engagement to Florence Craye. This happens through the revelation that Percy Gorringe pawned his mother’s necklace purely so he can put on his dramatisation of Florence Craye’s Spindrift, which causes Florence to decide her future lies with this devoted admirer instead. Jeeves’ involvement is little more than being the one possessed of the knowledge of pearls required to unmask Ma Trotter’s necklace as a copy, and the one who provides the pick-me-up which restores LG Trotter’s happiness and leads him to take Milady’s Boudoir off Aunt Dahlia’s hands. This pick-me-up business is not a particularly credible piece of plotting and seems bunged in to try to justify Jeeves’ presence in the book. Jeeves could almost as easily, as far as the plot is concerned, have taken the book off. Indeed, he takes part of it off, returning to London to chair the monthly meeting of the Junior Ganymede.

The norm is for Jeeves to be kept out of great chunks of ‘his’ novels. In Jeeves In The Offing, he is off on his annual holiday, from which Bertie recalls him halfway through the book. In Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen he goes away to visit his aunt. In Joy In The Morning, Lord Worplesdon commandeers his services and makes him stay with him. In The Mating Season, Bertie is pretending to be Gussie, so Jeeves cannot make an appearance until Gussie arrives pretending to be Bertie, with Bertie’s manservant in tow, and even when he does, he departs again for London to attend a lecture. In Thank You, Jeeves, Jeeves departs from Bertie’s employment in the first chapter, and only rejoins it in the final one.

In The Code Of The Woosters, considered by many to be the best of the Wooster novels, Jeeves has little part in the plot, offering only suggestions or information about Spode’s ‘Eulalie’ rather than be allowed to run free to work his machinations. The book is excellent, and has both pace and a convoluted, smooth plot; but it is not one which would be chosen by Jeeves’ public relations advisors as an example of what he is capable of.

In the novels, Bertie Wooster was reverting towards being a Reggie Pepper figure.