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The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

  • that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
  • that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
  • of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
  • (twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
  • of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
  • the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
  • the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
  • the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

  • There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
  • A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
  • She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
  • ‘What? Incredulous!’
    ‘Incredible, sir.’
    ‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
  • ‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
    ‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney 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 this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

  • ‘Hello, ugly’
  • my little chickadee
  • young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

  • aged relative
  • my fluttering old aspen
  • my dear old mysterious hinter
  • old ancestor
  • old flesh and blood
  • old thicker than water
  • My dear old faulty reasoner
  • my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

  • Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
  • Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
  • Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
  • Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

  • Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
  • Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
  • Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
  • Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
    • Butterfield – his butler
  • Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
  • Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
  • Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
    • Bartholomew – her dog
  • Constable Oates – the local policeman
  • Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

  • Grade A soup (content unknown)
  • a toothsome fish (species unknown)
  • a salmi of game which
  • asparagus
  • a jam omelette
  • some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

  • In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
  • ‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
    ‘Oh, psychological?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘The psychology of the individual?’
    ‘Precisely, sir.’
  • ‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

  • Bertie
  • Freddie Widgeon
  • Bingo Little
  • Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
  • Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
  • Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related links

Related reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

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Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1934)

The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it.

I curbed my resentment. We Woosters are fair-minded. We can make allowances for men who have been parading London all night in scarlet tights.

‘No. It is too late. Remarks have been passed about my tummy which it is impossible to overlook.’

I must say for Jeeves that—till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in and cavilling and obstructing—he makes a very good audience. I don’t know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that’s the great thing.

‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ is the second of the 11 full-length Jeeves and Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse. After the first novel took the characters off to the Somerset estate of Chuffy Chuffnell, this is a return to the more familiar setting of London, but the basic motor of the plot remains the same: one of Bertie Wooster’s old school friends falls in love, triggering a world of problems and complications which can only be solved by the miraculous powers of Jeeves. In this case the young chap in trouble is the unworldly nature fan, Gussie Fink-Nottle who has fallen in love with Madeline

All the usual mannerisms are here: farcical plots based on the complicated misunderstandings of posh young people falling in love and managing their eccentric parents, all refracted through the ludicrously upper class attitude of the wonderfully dim and self-deluding narrator, the upper-class idler Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster. And all the usual stylistic elements:

Comically dim references to classical literature

‘Well, let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself…’ I stepped to the door. ‘Jeeves,’ I called down the passage, ‘what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?’
‘Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’

It’s a running gag that Bertie regularly wants to quote some gem of English literature but can never remember the details:

I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something—a sculptor he would have been, no doubt—who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life.

Bertie forgets his words

Forgetting famous quotations is just one aspect of the broader comic topos of Bertie constantly forgetting the words for things:

There you will be, up on that platform, a romantic, impressive figure, the star of the whole proceedings, the what-d’you-call-it of all eyes.

‘Come, come, Tuppy, don’t let us let this little chat become acrid. Is ‘acrid’ the word I want?’

There’s a word beginning with r——“re” something——“recal” something—No, it’s gone. But what I am driving at is that is what this Angela was showing herself.

And needing to be corrected, generally by Jeeves:

She proceeded to develop her theme, speaking in ringing, enthusiastic tones, as if she loved the topic. Jeeves could tell you the word I want. I think it’s “ecstatic”, unless that’s the sort of rash you get on your face and have to use ointment for.

And:

‘To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become—what’s the word?’
‘I could not say, sir.’
‘Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly sight too clever.’
‘Elaborate, sir?’
‘That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves.’

And:

‘What do you call it when two people of opposite sexes are bunged together in close association in a secluded spot, meeting each other every day and seeing a lot of each other?’
‘Is ‘propinquity’ the word you wish, sir?’
‘It is. I stake everything on propinquity, Jeeves. Propinquity, in my opinion, is what will do the trick.’

Jeeves’s command of vocabulary is a small but significant aspect of his overall command of all situations. Jeeves’s interventions to correct Bertie’s speech, to suggest the correct word or phrase, to supply the quotations Bertie has forgotten, these are all verbal indications or equivalents of his role in the stories, which is to be the still point around which all the stormy plot complications rage.

And it’s not just on Bertie; the narrative notes Jeeves’s effect on everyone’s vocabulary:

‘Well, it’s a matter of psychology, he said.’
There was a time when a remark like that would have had me snookered. But long association with Jeeves has developed the Wooster vocabulary considerably.

The ‘the’

A really prominent part of Bertie’s diction (defined as: ‘the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing’) is his insistent use of ‘the’ where everyone else would use a personal pronoun such as ‘my’, ‘his’ and so on.

Until she spoke them, I had been all sweetness and light—the sympathetic nephew prepared to strain every nerve to do his bit. I now froze, and the face became hard and set.

Tuppy, old man. Your tone shocks me. One raises the eyebrows.

He did a sort of twiddly on the turf with his foot. And, when he spoke, one spotted the tremolo in the voice.

I stroked the chin thoughtfully.

The face was pale, the eyes gooseberry-like, the ears drooping, and the whole aspect that of a man who has passed through the furnace and been caught in the machinery

Bertram in the third person

There are the many times Bertie refers to himself in the third person, mockingly but also seriously, as ‘Bertram’, both in the narrative and in dialogue with others.

‘You have Bertram Wooster in your corner, Gussie.’

Bertram Wooster is not accustomed to this gluttonous appetite for his society.

Nobody is more eager to oblige deserving aunts than Bertram Wooster, but there are limits, and sharply defined limits, at that.

Well, as anybody at the Drones will tell you, Bertram Wooster is a pretty hard chap to outgeneral.

The Woosters

In the same spirit, Bertie strews his narrative with many comically mock heroic references to his family.

I mean to say, while firmly resolved to tick him off, I didn’t want to gash his feelings too deeply. Even when displaying the iron hand, we Woosters like to keep the thing fairly matey.

Half a dozen sentences start with the formula ‘we Woosters’ before going on to boast of their accomplishments.

A Wooster’s word is his bond. Woosters may quail, but they do not edge out.

I had won the victory, and we Woosters do not triumph over a beaten foe.

We Woosters are men of tact and have a nice sense of the obligations of a host

When we Woosters put our hands to the plough, we do not readily sheathe the sword.

Slang

Slang is language at play. It is so enjoyable because it represents energy and life and is often very funny, as, for example, in rhyming slang. Wodehouse’s stories are characterised from start to finish by their extreme deployment, their barrage, of upper-class slang, which is endlessly inventive and amusing.

The mystery had conked. I saw all.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile.

‘I like your crust, wiring that you would come next year or whenever it was. You’re coming now.’

The way I look at it is that, as the thing is bound to be a frost, anyway, one may as well get a hearty laugh out of it.

But I claim the right to have a pop at these problems, as they arise, in person, without having everybody behave as if Jeeves was the only onion in the hash.

I was heart and soul in favour of healing the breach and rendering everything hotsy-totsy once more between these two young sundered blighters.

The pathos of the thing gave me the pip.

He was smelling a rose at the moment in a limp sort of way, but removed the beak as I approached.

We had hit the great open spaces at a moment when twilight had not yet begun to cheese it in favour of the shades of night.

This time she shook the pumpkin.

Abbreviations

An increasingly prominent category of slang is abbreviations, abbreviating a word down to just one syllable or, increasingly often, just to one letter, ‘conspic. by its a.’ being an instance which combines both types. The abbreviated syllables cropped up in some of the short stories but I think these one-letter abbreviations only make their first appearance in the first novel i.e. are a newish innovation.

One syllable

Anybody been phoning or calling or anything during my abs.?

In the circs., no doubt, a certain moodiness was only natural.

‘No, Jeeves. No more. Enough has been said. Let us drop the subj.’

The persp., already bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.

‘Could?’ I said, for my attensh had been wandering.

‘I don’t suppose she said two words to anybody else, except, of course, idle conv. at the crowded dinner table.’

His manifest pippedness excited my compash, and I ventured a kindly word.

One letter

‘I wouldn’t have thought that this Fink-Nottle would ever have fallen a victim to the divine p, but, if he has, no wonder he finds the going sticky.’

However, on consideration, I saw that there was nothing to be gained by trying to lead up to it gently. It is never any use beating about the b.

I took another oz. of the life-saving and inclined my head.

I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.

There was no play of expression on his finely chiselled to indicate it. There very seldom is on Jeeves’s f-c.

Presently I was sauntering towards the drawing-room with the good old j. nestling snugly abaft the shoulder blades.

In the stress of recent happenings I had rather let that prize-giving business slide to the back of my mind; but I had speedily recovered and, as I say, was able to reply with a manly d.f.

‘This habit of the younger g. of scattering ‘darlings’ about like birdseed is one that I deprecate.’

‘I assumed that you were apologizing for your foul conduct in looping back the last ring that night in the Drones, causing me to plunge into the swimming b. in the full soup and fish.’

Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.

Binge

A note on the word ‘binge’ which in Bertie’s hands, sometimes means simply party or ‘do’ (synonymous with ‘beano’); but at other times means something more like that other fashionable ’20s and ’30s word, ‘stunt’.

a) Party

This birthday binge of his was to be on a scale calculated to stagger humanity…

These country binges are all the same. A piano, one fiddle, and a floor like sandpaper.

b) More general event

‘Gussie,’ I said, ‘take an old friend’s advice, and don’t go within a mile of this binge.’

I had told Jeeves that this binge would be fraught with interest, and it was fraught with interest.

Those interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner.

The Drones club

Bertie is a member of the Drones Club, a collection of like-minded posh wastrels. It’s been mentioned before, but felt a bit more prominent in this book.

I sent this [telegram] off on my way to the Drones, where I spent a restful afternoon throwing cards into a top-hat with some of the better element.

I remember Cats-meat Potter-Pirbright bringing a police rattle into the Drones one night and loosing it off behind my chair…

I sang as I dressed for dinner that night. At the Drones I was so gay and cheery that there were several complaints.

Long association with the members of the Drones has put me pretty well in touch with the various ways in which an overdose of the blushful Hippocrene can take the individual…

Bertie’s memoirs

It’s a small thing, but I’m struck by the detail that Bertie refers to the texts we’re reading as his memoirs.

If you have followed these memoirs of mine with the proper care, you will be aware that I have frequently had occasion to emphasise the fact that Aunt Dahlia is all right.

This self-consciousness about the status and genre of the text – mentioning their format and motivation – harks back to Victorian story-tellers and is just one way in which it echoes Conan Doyle.

Echoes of Sherlock: cases, clients and methods

Surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes casts a long shadow over Wodehouse. For example Bertie, author of ‘these memoirs’ (much as Dr Watson is the author of the Holmes accounts), routinely refers to the challenges and problems which make up the plot as ‘cases‘ (exactly as Watson refers to Holmes’s cases). (To be fair, plenty of other detectives used the same word, but it’s Holmes they most remind us of.)

My report of the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop and the cook, Anatole.

I nodded. ‘I remember. Yes, I recall the Sipperley case.’

He deliberately echoes Watson’s way of referring to Holmes’s cases when he talks about ‘the Sipperley Case, the Episode of My Aunt Agatha and the Dog McIntosh, and the smoothly handled Affair of Uncle George and The Barmaid’s Niece’.

They are so much conceived of as ‘cases’ that they need to be handled.

‘In handling the case of Augustus Fink-Nottle, we must keep always in mind the fact that we are dealing with a poop.’

Only a couple of days ago I was compelled to take him off a case because his handling of it was so footling.

And it’s not just the concept of ‘cases’ which echo the Holmes stories but his deliberate description of the people who come to him9 with their problems as ‘clients’.

In the excitement of getting Gussie fixed up I had rather forgotten about this other client. It is often that way when you’re trying to run two cases at once.

He jokingly refers to the way so many of his friends consult Jeeves about their problems that he in effect runs ‘a consulting practice’.

That’s how these big consulting practices like Jeeves’s grow. When he’s got A out of a bad spot, A puts B on to him. And then, when he has fixed up B, B sends C along. And so on, if you get my drift, and so forth.

At one point Wodehouse has Bertie deliberately citing a very famous quote which occurs in several the Holmes stories:

‘You know my methods, Jeeves. Apply them.’

And at not one but several points, the comparison is made absolutely explicit:

One can’t give the raspberry to a client. I mean, you didn’t find Sherlock Holmes refusing to see clients just because he had been out late the night before at Doctor Watson’s birthday party.

Or when Jeeves explains to Bertie that:

‘Possibly you may recollect that it was an axiom of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that the instinct of everyone, upon an alarm of fire, is to save the object dearest to them.’

The plot

Bertie returns to London from a holiday in Cannes spent in the company of his Aunt Dahlia Travers, her daughter Angela and her soppy friend, Madeline Bassett.

The white mess jacket

Before I get too far I need to mention that Bertie brought back from Cannes a white mess jacket (with brass buttons) and that when Jeeves sees it he takes strong objection to it. As you know, this squabble about clothes happens in many of the short stories and always follows the same pattern: the subject is established near the start, Bertie insists he’s going to put his foot down and stand no nonsense from Jeeves, then Jeeves repeatedly saves the day getting Bertie and chums out of dire situations, so that at the conclusion Bertie is so overcome with gratitude that he caves in to Jeeves and gets rid of the offending article of clothing.

Jeeves advises Gussie Fink-Nottle

Anyway, on his return he discovers that in his absence, his valet, Jeeves, has been advising Bertie’s old school friend, Gussie Fink-Nottle about a love affair. Gussie is an anti-social teetotaller who lives out in the countryside where he devotes himself to caring for newts. What has brought him to London is that he is smitten with the wet fish Madeline but is too timid to propose.

Fancy dress

When Bertie gets back to his flat after an evening at the Drones club, he discovers Gussie in conversation with Jeeves and dressed as (the devil) Mephistopheles. This is because Madeline has invited him to attend a fancy-dress ball and Jeeves has advised he doesn’t go as the standard poshboy outfit of Pierrot but something more virile and dashing (he had originally suggested a pirate outfit but Gussie ‘objected to the boots’).

In the event the fancy dress scheme is a washout because Gussie is so useless. He is staying in London with his uncle and takes a cab to the party, dressed as the devil, but en route realises he’s left his money back at his uncle’s. He thinks he’ll tap someone at the party to pay the taxi but when they arrive he finds he’s got the wrong address and the butler at the big house they’ve arrived at disclaims all knowledge of any party. He can’t even go back to his uncle’s because all the servants have been given the night off and he’s forgotten his key. So the best he can do is try to run off without paying the cab. But when the driver grabs his coat and pulls it off, Gussy is revealed in all his glory as the devil, freaking the driver out and terrifying passersby. So not, on the whole, the most successful of evenings.

Aunt Dahlia requests

The next theme is introduced when Bertie receives a telegram from his Aunt Dahlia demanding that he go down to her country seat immediately. When Bertie is too dim to do this, she storms up to London, into his flat and trumpets her plan at him: she is a governor of the local grammar school, Market Snodsbury Grammar School, which is due to have its summer prize-giving ceremony the next month and she wants Bertie to give the prizes. Incidentally, Aunt Dahlia calls Bertie:

  • you old ass
  • you maddening half-wit
  • a fathead
  • greedy young pig
  • poor fish
  • abysmal chump
  • eyesore
  • ‘What a pest you are, you miserable object,’ she sighed

Gussie leaves for Brinkley Court

Next morning young Gussie comes round to Bertie’s flat, and Bertie solemnly ticks him off for listening to Jeeves and not to him, Bertie. (This is hubris. We know that all Bertie’s plans end in disaster and that time after time he is only saved by Jeeves’s ingenuity.) Then Gussie informs him that his beloved Madeline is leaving London anyway. She’s going to the country, to stay with a family named Travers at a place called Brinkley Court! This is, of course, the home of Aunt Dahlia!!

So Bertie has, what for him, is a brainwave, sees he can kill two birds with one stone. First he tells Gussie he’ll get him an invite to Brinkley Hall so he can go see his lady love. But then he telegrams to Aunt Dahlia saying he is indisposed/too busy to perform the prize-giving she bullied him into, but has found a replacement, by which he of course means Gussie.

Bertie is summoned to Brinkley Court

All appears settled but the next thing that happens is that Bertie receives an anguished telegram from Aunt Dahlia telling him that the long-planned engagement between her daughter Angela and Tuppy Glossop has been cancelled. The couple has fallen out. Apparently he said that her new hat made her look like a Pekinese dog. But what clinched it is that during her holiday in Cannes, Angela was attacked by a shark (this is played for laughs although ever since the 1977 movie of the same name, no-one thinks a shark attack is funny) but when she retold the story, Tuppy mockingly said it was probably just a log, or a flatfish at most. Which led Angela to reply that he ought to lay off the carbs as he was getting pretty lardy. And so the argument unravelled.

The reader is a bit surprised that this appears to be a big enough crisis that Bertie feels obliged to hot foot it down to Brinkley Court to comfort his aunt. Here she lays out her troubles:

  • Tuppy and Angela have broken off their engagement
  • she has to find someone to conduct the school prize-giving
  • her husband just received a whopping income tax bill (which he is convinced symbolises the end of British civilisation as we known it)
  • at the same moment that she needs to find £500 to keep her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, afloat
  • but that in fact he gave her the necessary money but she lost it playing baccarat at Cannes, and can’t pluck up the courage to tell him

It’s important to emphasise that Aunt Dahlia thinks Bertie is a complete clot, thinks that every plan he suggests, in fact almost everything he says, is unmitigated idiocy. And that she prefers Jeeves. In fact it’s a recurring comic trope that everyone Bertie talks to sooner or later thanks him for coming but asks where Jeeves is. This begins to really rile Bertie.

The dinner refusal

Later, talking to Tuppy, Bertie comes up with a cunning plan. He will advise Tuppy to refuse dinner that evening, the point being is it will be a dinner cooked by Anatole, the legendary chef. And this unprecedented gesture well convince Angela he has gone off his food for love of her. And they’ll be reconciled.

When Aunt Dahlia comes to him, saying she’s had no opportunity of talking to her husband about the lost money, Bertie advises her to push away Anatole’s dinner, in order to persuade Uncle Tom how upset she is.

And when Gussie comes to him for help in wooing Madeline, he advises him to reject Anatole’s meal with the same aim in mind.

Unfortunately this cunning plan backfires big time because Anatole, like all culinary geniuses, is very sensitive, and when dish after dish is brought back to the kitchen untouched, the Frenchman decides it is a deliberate snub to his skills and quits! Vowing to return to his native Provence. Which pitches Tom Travers into depths of misery because his stomach was ruined by long years living Out East and Anatole is the only cook who can make dishes acceptable to Tom’s sensitive tum-tum.

Aunt Dahlia suggests suicide

Which is why when he next sees Aunt Dahlia she cheerfully suggests that he goes and drowns himself in the nearby pond. the plan failed for both Tuppy and Gussie as well.

So, as you can see, what we have here is five or six ‘issues’, problems or, as Bertie puts it, ‘cases’, which he sets out to solve with increasingly wayward results until, of course, finally, Jeeves steps in and saves the day.

But first things have to get worse before they can get better. And so:

1. Bertie roasts Tuppy

Bertie has the bright idea of using reverse psychology on Angela, taking her out into the garden and slagging off Tuppy to her, with the idea that she will jump to his defence. Unfortunately, the more Bertie vilifies Tuppy, the more Angela agrees with him, concluding she was wise to dump him before heading indoors. It’s at that moment that, as in a stage farce, Tuppy himself emerges from the bushes nearby where he heard every word, and proceeds to chase Bertie round the garden bench, with a view to smashing his face in.

The thing is Tuppy not only heard Bertie slagging him off but has become convinced that Angela is in love with another man and when Bertie innocently remarks that he (Bertie) and Angela were inseparable in their two-month holiday at Cannes, Tuppy puts 2 and 2 together and concludes that Angela dumped him because she is really in love with Bertie. Obviously Bertie goes to great lengths to emphasis that this isn’t true, but Tuppy still insists on thinking there must be some other man…

2. The drunken prize-giving

In an obvious set-piece, Gussie undertakes the prize-giving at the local grammar school (which Bertie had adroitly ducked) completely drunk. How come? Bertie has the disastrous idea that Gussie is failing to propose to Madeline because he is so cripplingly shy and the way to circumvent this is to pop some booze in his daily orange juice. Bertie starts from the comic premise that no man in his right mind would give up his bachelor freedom for the married state, or could bring himself to spout loads of romantic nonsense – and therefore a chap needs to be well-oiled to even try. The first problem is that, before he gets to the spiked orange juice, Gussie takes Bertie’s advice to heart and swigs half a bottle of Scotch. Realising this Bertie then tries to hide the spiked OJ but when his back is turned, Gussie swigs this as well.

Thus he is completely trolleyed when he is motored to the school by Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom (Jeeves and Bertie following in the latter’s car). There follows exactly the kind of comic set-piece you might expect, with Gussie shown to the place of honour on the stage in front of a hundred silent schoolboys and all their parents and proceeding, of course, to make an ass of himself.

3. The girls get engaged to the wrong men

When Gussie starts to single Bertie out for criticism from the stage, our hero legs it, gets back to Brinkley and goes for a lie-down. When he rises for dinner, he is astonished to learn that a) Angela has got engaged to drunken Gussie (!!!) and b) Madeline has gotten it into her head that she (Madeline) is engaged to Bertie. This is because the day before Bertie took her into the garden and described how there was someone staying at the house whose heart beat deeply for her – and listening to her vapourings about fairies and stars. Obviously he intended to be selling her on Gussie but Madeline got the wrong end of the stick and thinks i) he is in love with her and ii) his witless ramblings amounted to a proposal!

Aunt Dahlia is delighted

One silver lining in all this is that Aunt Dahlia, instead of being outraged at Gussie’s drunken shambles of a presentation speech, thought it was immensely entertaining, not least because he singled out her husband, Tom, for some drunken criticism, and then accused Bertie of cheating at school (in order to win the much-coveted Scripture Prize, which Bertie is very proud of and keeps reminding us of, mainly because it was the peak of his academic career). As she puts it:

‘What was there to be peeved about? I took the whole thing as a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could have produced such a majestic jag. It restores one’s faith in post-war whisky.’

Also, after a day of beseeching and wheedling, Dahlia has managed to persuade Anatole to withdraw his resignation. Tom (of the gyppy tummy) is delighted and so is the Aunt.

But no sooner has she finished explaining this than her butler, Seppings, enters the room to ask whether my lady gave permission for Gussie to be on the roof, making rude faces through the skylight of Anatole’s bedroom. There’s a little comic pastiche as Wodehouse describes Bertie, Aunt Dahlia and Seppings in the manner of racehorses charging up the stairs to see who can get to Anatole’s attic room first. (Aunt Dahlia won by a short head. Half a staircase separated second and third.)

At long last, Bertie asks Jeeves

Maybe I’d had a particularly trying day at work, but eventually all this farcical complexity began to wear a little. Wooster by himself eventually gets a bit much; it’s the dynamic between him and Jeeves which is so priceless. For most of this novel Bertie is not just narrating but the active protagonist of all the plot developments and this eventually starts to feel a bit monotonous.

Finally, about 83% into the text (according to my Kindle edition) Bertie swallows his pride and asks Jeeves if he can think of a way out of the terrible mess everything’s got into.

The fire alarm stunt

Jeeves proposes the old fire alarm stunt i.e. ring the house’s (very large) alarm bell as if there’s a fire, on the principle that the two erring couples will run to save each other and True Love be revealed.

The bell ringing goes easily enough but when all the inhabitants have evacuated the building and are standing around on the lawn, none of the estranged couples have gotten together. Seems like a failure.

Aunt Dahlia is amused at Bertie’s idiocy and doesn’t even mind too much when it is revealed that the front door has blown shut and all the other windows and doors are locked. Nobody has a spare key. Why not call the staff or ask the butler? Because the entire staff have gone off to Kingham Manor, the stately-home belonging to the Stretchley-Budd family, who are hosting a big dance party for servants. So it looks like all the posh inhabitants are going to have to spend the night on the lawn and everyone, accordingly, blames Bertie.

They have the bright idea to motor over to Kingham Manor to get the keys off the butler until they discover that the garage, also, is locked up and the chauffeur off at the party.

It’s at this point the Jeeves makes the suggestion that Bertie should cycle over to Kingham Manor and get the front door key. Bertie puts up every sort of objection, but Aunt Dahlia imperiously commands him to go. It’s a nightmare journey 9 miles along country lanes in the dark but there is a surprise in store. For when Bertie finally arrives at Kingham Manor, makes his way to the dance, identifies the butler and interrupts his dance, the man tells him he doesn’t have the key. More astonishing still, he tells Bertie that he gave the key to Jeeves!

Astonished and then furiously angry, Bertie sets off, with a saddle-sore bum and aching legs, the 9 mile return journey. but when he pulls up outside Brinkley Manor he discovers everyone has gone inside. And the person who answers the front door is wet Madeline who, to his vast relief, gaspingly asks Bertie to release her from their vow (their engagement that never was). This is because she realises that all along she has been bearing the flame of true love for Gussie, and wants to marry him. Bertie is amazed and relieved.

Next person he meets is Tuppy, breezily coming up from the wine cellar with bottles under his arm, who tells him they’re having a little party in the drawing room. As to the disagreement with Angela, all has been forgiven and forgotten and they are re-engaged.

As to Aunt Dahlia she is delighted because Anatole has finally decided to stay, which delights Uncle Tom so much that he has happily given her the £500 she needs to save her magazine.

In fact all the issues which have been plaguing the book have been completely sorted while Bertie was away. Of course he soon bumps into Jeeves and is too amazed at this reversal of fortune to be cross with him. And Jeeves explains: he explains that his family used to have a relative they all loved to hate; whenever she was around, she united the family in their dislike of her. Well, that’s what Jeeves did to Bertie. He let him go ahead with the fire alarm stunt precisely because it was such a bad idea that it would bring everyone together in complaining about him. Even more so when they could all complain about it being his fault they were all locked out of the house.

So while Bertie was cycling off, this rallying round a common hate figure made everyone forget their grievances and, once they’d done that, they naturally gravitated towards the people they really loved.

‘It occurred to me that were you, sir, to be established as the person responsible for the ladies and gentlemen being forced to spend the night in the garden, everybody would take so strong a dislike to you that in this common sympathy they would sooner or later come together.’

Then, when Jeeves ‘found’ the front door key (which he had had on him all the time) and it became obvious that Bertie’s long bicycle odyssey was pointless, they switched from hatred to humour and then feeling sorry for him. So by the time Bertie arrived back the bad feeling that had brought them together had evaporated and he was once again regarded as a harmless buffoon.

Very, very clever. Typically double-edged or multi-layered solution from Jeeves. And in the same way, Bertie’s anger which he nursed all the way back from the dance, dissipates when he sees the magical effects of Jeeves’s trick.

And one last thing: the clothes stunt. Like so many of the short stories, the argument between Jeeves and Bertie over an item of clothing the latter loves and the former loathes, is, as usual, decided in Jeeves’s favour. He regretfully informs Bertie that he accidentally burned the mess jacket while ironing it. To be honest, this is not a particularly clever way of solving the clothes issue; in other stories the destruction of the contentious item of clothing is intimately tied up with the denouement of the plt. Here it is just bolted on as a completely separate event. Still, as Bertie slangily sums the whole thing up:

‘The place is positively stiff with happy endings.’

The cast

  • Bertie Wooster – private school, Eton and Oxford, an ass and an idiot with a comically inflated sense of his own abilities
  • Jeeves – his valet
  • Augustus ‘Gussie’ Fink-Nottle – timid and anti-social, lives in Lincolnshire with his newts – ‘one of those timid, obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread-and-butter-offering yes-men whom women of my Aunt Dahlia’s type nearly always like at first sight’ – according to Bertie, ‘wabbling, shrinking, diffident rabbit in human shape’
  • Miss Madeline Bassett – only daughter of Sir Watkyn Bassett CBE – ‘a pretty enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of breath-taker that takes the breath’
  • Aunt Dahlia of Brinkley Court aka Mrs Travers, married to Tom Travers, editor of Milady’s Boudoir, ‘a large, genial soul, with whom it is a pleasure to hob-nob’
  • Uncle Tom Travers – Aunt Dahlia’s husband – ‘who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow’
    • Seppings – Aunt Dahlia’s butler, a cold, unemotional man
    • Anatole – Aunt Dahlia’s legendary cook – ‘a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops’
    • Waterbury – their chauffeur
  • Hildebrand ‘Tuppy’ Glossop – ‘was the fellow who, callously ignoring the fact that we had been friends since boyhood, betted me one night at the Drones that I could swing myself across the swimming bath by the rings—a childish feat for one of my lissomeness—and then, having seen me well on the way, looped back the last ring, thus rendering it necessary for me to drop into the deep end in formal evening costume’ – ‘In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog’
  • Pongo Twistleton – fellow member of the Drones Club whose birthday party goes on late into the night with the result that Bertie has a crushing hangover when Aunt Dahlia storms into his bedroom demanding that he officiate at her prize-giving

The Freudian presence

As you know I’ve been collecting references in 1920s and 1930s popular literature to Freud and Freudian ideas.

The nibs who study these matters claim, I believe, that this has got something to do with the subconscious mind, and very possibly they may be right. I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours. For directly I opened my eyes on the morrow, I saw daylight. Well, I don’t mean that exactly, because naturally I did. What I mean is that I found I had the thing all mapped out. The good old subconscious m. had delivered the goods.

And:

Jeeves, when I discussed the matter with him later, said it was something to do with inhibitions, if I caught the word correctly, and the suppression of, I think he said, the ego. What he meant, I gathered, was that, owing to the fact that Gussie had just completed a five years’ stretch of blameless seclusion among the newts, all the goofiness which ought to have been spread out thin over those five years and had been bottled up during that period came to the surface on this occasion in a lump—or, if you prefer to put it that way, like a tidal wave.

Jeeves’s miraculous mode of transportation

My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn’t have to open doors. He’s like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about—the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he’s not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas.

Jeeves’s character

One thing I have never failed to hand the man. He is magnetic. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.

Choice phrases

She unshipped a sigh that sounded like the wind going out of a rubber duck.

You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.

It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia, normally as genial a bird as ever encouraged a gaggle of hounds to get their noses down to it, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.

Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient’s complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative’s map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

Credit

‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ was published in 1934 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

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by Simon on December 5, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 5, 2025

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