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
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