All posts tagged Pirbright

Heavy Weather by P.G. Wodehouse (1933)

It is always embarrassing for a young man of sensibility to realize that he is making a priceless ass of himself.
(Poor Ronnie Fish, so oversensitive, so easily offended)

‘Has he shown any aptitude for journalism?’ This seemed to amuse Lady Julia. ‘My dear man,’ she said, tickled by the quaint conceit, ‘no member of my family has ever shown any aptitude for anything except eating and sleeping.’
(Lady Julia Fish displaying her superior aristocratic attitudes)

‘He tried to break my neck once,’ said Pilbeam, throwing out the information for what it was worth.
‘And of course that forms a bond, doesn’t it?’ said Lady Julia sympathetically.
(Nothing fazes the true aristocrat)

‘Wheels within wheels.’
(Monty Bodkin’s catchphrase)

‘Ha h’r’m’ph!’ said Sir Gregory, rather neatly summing up the sentiment of the meeting.

A sequel

‘Heavy Weather’ is the fifth novel in P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle series. It is a direct sequel to its predecessor ‘Summer Lightning’, following straight on from that work’s events, starting only about 5 days later, continuing the central storyline, and featuring most of the same characters in pretty much the same plights.

In their original editions, many of Wodehouse’s novels contained a brief synopsis. This is how the synoptic introduction to ‘Heavy Weather’ reads:

As a young man the Honourable Galahad Threepwood had earned the reputation for being wild and irresponsible, and the passing of thirty years had done little to diminish his piratical, die-hard spirit. Although he no longer organized bread-throwing contests within the gilded halls of Mayfair, he kept in close touch with his former days by compiling a book of reminiscences which, it was averred, contained more tales of the youthful escapades of Bishops and Cabinet Ministers than any book of its kind.

A deputation of his victims, headed by his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, did its utmost to suppress this book, but Gally was adamant. He would, he said, withdraw his manuscript only if his nephew, Ronnie Fish, were allowed to marry the charming chorus girl, Sue Brown. And so a bargain was struck.

All went well until Lady Julia Fish, Ronnie’s mother, arrived on the scene. She, good woman, did not appreciate the terms of the arrangement, and pointed out in no indefinite manner that it was not her intention to have her son’s future happiness sacrificed upon the altar of other people’s reputations, and straightway forbade the union.

Summary of Summer Lightning

To expand that a little, the previous novel, ‘Summer Lightning’, concluded, after a good deal of comic complication, with Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood using the threat of publishing his memoirs to blackmail 1) his sister, Lady Constance, into giving her permission for the marriage of her nephew Ronnie Fish, to the pretty chorus girl, Sue Brown, and 2) his brother, Lord Emsworth, into releasing Ronnie Fish’s trust fund money early so Ronnie has the wherewithall to marry.

The deal unravels

In the first pages of this novel that deal unravels ,for several reasons. 1) Ronnie’s mother, the redoubtable Julia Fish, returns from abroad and arrives at Blandings Castle telling all and sundry that the marriage is unacceptable.

‘Am I mad?’ [Lady Julia] cried. ‘Or is everybody else? You seriously mean that I am supposed to acquiesce in my son ruining his life simply in order to keep Galahad from publishing his Reminiscences?’

2) The publisher of the famous memoirs, Lord Tilbury, owner of the publishing conglomerate Mammoth Publishing, is infuriated to have been let down by Gally. He was hoping the memoirs would be a publishing sensation, and reckons he’s lost out on at least £20,000. So, also, sets off to Blandings in order to either talk Gally back into giving permission to publish them or, if pushed, to pay someone to steal them for him.

But most importantly 3) Ronnie himself loses heart. Despite all its superficially comic mannerisms, I found this a sad and rather dispiriting book, because at its core is the inability of Ronnie and his lady love, Sue, to be happy. Or their gift for being repeatedly unhappy. In fact Sue spends most of the book moping around and crying and, after a while, the reader feels like joining her.

Ronnie’s jealousy

The immediate cause of her unhappiness that short, pink-faced Ronnie can be insanely jealous, is, to quote Uncle Gally:

‘a blasted jealous half-wit, always ready to make heavy weather about nothing.’

In ‘Summer Lightning’ he was jealous of the private detective Percy Pilbeam who he foolishly thought was having an affair with Sue because he came across them at the same table in a nightclub, unaware that Pilbeam had been creepily stalking Sue and had only just sat down with her. Now he is going to have a new object of his jealousy….

Enter Monty Bodkin

In this book a new character is introduced whose function is to cause recurring breakups of the happy couple. This is the dimwitted, useless young man, Montague ‘Monty’ Bodkin, and it is this ‘popinjay’ that Ronnie foolishly comes to believe Sue is really in love with. It doesn’t help that Monty and Sue were actually engaged, years ago, when she was little more than a girl (aged 17).

Wodehouse contrives several scenes designed to give Ronnie the completely erroneous impression that they are still an item, with the result that Ronnie repeatedly switches from being passionately ardent for Sue, to being presented with yet another (erroneous) piece of evidence that she still loves Monty, and so switching his manner to being cold, formal and distant.

With the result that, with what comes to feel like monotonous regularity, Sue has scenes with kindly old Galahad where she tells her sorrows and bursts into tears.

Why Gally has a soft spot for Sue

Gally is so fervently for her union with Ronnie because thirty years earlier he, Gally, had a passion for Sue’s mother, the music hall performer Dolly Henderson. He recognises the features of his old flame in sweet young Sue and hence his warm avuncular support for her, standing up to the redoubtable aunts, Constance and Julia, and being there for Sue every time Ronnie goes off in a huff.

Monty loves Gertrude

Meanwhile, dim-witted Monty has an agenda of his own. He’s actually worth a fortune i.e. has a guaranteed annual income of £15,00 a year or so. But he is in love with a young lady called Gertrude Butterwick and, as the name suggests, she doesn’t come from posh aristocratic stock but is the daughter of a self-made businessman, J.G. Butterwick of Butterwick, Price, and Mandelbaum, export and import merchants.

So even though Monty has a guaranteed income, this Mr Butterwick has insisted that before he’ll hand over Gertrude in marriage, Monty must prove himself by managing one continuous year in gainful employment.

Monty had been hoping to achieve this by working at Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing Company, but this novel opens with him being given the sack for (stupidly) inserting some advice about how to win a bet about how much whiskey you can fit into Scotch bottles into a children’s magazine. Lord Tilbury had been wanting to fire the useless popinjay and this gives him the perfect excuse.

Monty becomes Lord Emsworth’s secretary

The pivot on which the narrative swivels is that, having been fired, Monty wanders down to the Drones Club (which also appears in all the Jeeves and Wooster stories) where he bumps into Hugo Carmody who was one of the young male leads in ‘Summer Lightning’. When Hugo explains that he has just resigned as Lord Emsworth’s personal secretary, Monty spots an opportunity and pulls family contacts to secure the now-vacant position.

So down to Blandings Castle goes Monty. Along with angry Aunt Julia Fish. And angry Lord Tilbury. To encounter Percy Pilbeam, the private detective, who’s still staying there after being invited down to steal the famous memoirs. And Sue Brown, who’s still staying there from the previous novel. Monty’s arrival triggers the series of misunderstandings which lead to Ronnie’s bouts of jealousy.

The Empress of Blandings

Oh and the pig. If you remember from the first novel, a major sub-plot was Lord Emsworth’s paranoia about his prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings which, in a crazy manoeuvre, Ronnie Fish kidnapped and hid in a remote cottage with the idea that, after a few days, he would be able to reveal the hiding place as the Discoverer and Rescuer of the pig and Lord Emsworth would be so grateful he would happily let him get married (to sweet Sue) and release his legacy.

Inevitably, it didn’t pan out like that with the other young male lead, Hugo Carmody, being the one who discovered the Empress, and then moving it to a temporary hiding place in the caravan of Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s former secretary who, through a series of unfortunate incidents, Lord Emsworthy had sacked in the novel before ‘Summer Lightning’.

This led Gally, Lord Emsworth’s much smarter brother, to decide that Baxter was just the front man for their neighbour, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, who also rears pigs and so is Lord Em’s main rival in the upcoming annual Shewsbury Agricultural Show Best Pig competition. In ‘Summer Lightning’, the pig is restored to its rightful stye, but Gally remains convinced that Sir Gregory is still out to either steal or nobble it, and gets Lord Emsworth to get his pig man, Jas Pirbright, to keep extra guard on it.

This explains why, having had an angry stand-off with Gally in his study at Blandings Castle, Lord Tilbury decides he needs to walk back to the pub in the village (the Emsworth Arms) but is distracted by the strong smell of pig and, when he comes up to the stye where the vast Empress of Blandings is feeding, and sees that she’s trying to get at a potato which has rolled under the metal gate, and picks it up with a view to giving it back to her – he finds himself literally collared, seized by the collar by big strong Pirbright, who leaps to the conclusion that Lord Tilbury is an agent of Sir Gregory sent to poison Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, and so locks him up in the gardeners shed. Which is where, an hour or so later, dim Monty strolling buy, hears his cries and sets him free.

The travelling manuscript

Lord Tilbury isn’t so pleased to be free from captivity by the very ‘popinjay’ he fired about three days earlier BUT he is very interested when Monty reveals that he is now employed as Lord Emsworth’s personal secretary. Ha. Maybe he can be paid to steal the famous manuscript of Gally’s memoirs. Monty drives a hard bargain because, as I’ve mentioned, he needs to be able to show Gertrude Butterwick’s father that he’s been employed for at least a year in one job – so he insists that Tilbury employs him for a full 12 months, which the latter reluctantly agrees to do.

What you have to know is that earlier on, the private investigator Percy Pilbeam had been commissioned by Lady Constance to get his hands on the manuscript as well. So now you have two young men vying to steal the manuscript.

What turns this into farce is that Gally realises various people are after it (realises as much when the Castle butler, Beach, tells him he discovered Pilbeam rifling about in his study) and so decides that, in order to be perfectly safe, he should give it to someone else. And after a bit of thought, settles on the irreproachable Beach, who should be a safe pair of hands.

And Beach is a safe pair of hands right up to the moment when Monty strolls round the corner and discovers Beach reading the famous manuscript in a garden. Monty tries to bribe him to hand it over but Beach backs towards the Castle. Except that on the way, he is spotted by Pilbeam who also tries to cut him off and offer money, but Beach dodges out the way of both of them and makes it back inside.

This is all proving very stressful for Beach, not least because it forces him to disobey direct orders from the master’s guests which goes against the grain and so he is relieved to hand the manuscript over to Ronnie Fish.

The storm breaks

Throughout the book much emphasis has been placed on how scorching hot the weather is. Finally the storm which has been gathering all day breaks in a great downpour. Monty is out walking the grounds and gets soaked. Ronnie sees him coming back to the castle, tells him to get changed and pops round to his room with some warming embrocation. Unfortunately, when he sees Monty with his wet shirt off, it reveals to Ronnie the fact he has a massive tattoo reading SUE on his chest, which of course another of Ronnie’s surly jealous moods. Monty makes a feeble attempt to explain it away as initials standing for ‘Sarah Ursula Ebbsmith’ but Ronnie isn’t having any of it.

Ronnie’s latest coldness is the last straw for poor Sue. He is so cold that she says maybe they better call the whole thing off.

They stared at one another. Ronnie’s eyes were hot and miserable. But they did not look hot and miserable to Sue. She read in them only dislike the sullen, trapped dislike of a man tied to a girl for whom he has ceased to feel any affection, so that merely to speak to her is an affliction to his nerves. She drew a deep breath, and walked to the window.
‘Sorry,’ said Ronnie gruffly. ‘Shouldn’t have said that.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ said Sue. ‘It’s better to come right out with these things.’
She traced little circles with her finger on the glass A heavy silence filled the room.
‘I think we might as well chuck it, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Just as you say,’ said Ronnie.
‘All right,’ said Sue.

At moments like this the book is not funny any more. It feels genuinely sad.

Anyway, still under the misapprehension that things are fine between Ronnie and Sue, Monty goes to find him on the pool room and explains that he needs Gally’s manuscript in order to give it to Lord Tilbury in order to get a job for a year in order to marry the woman that he loves. Like an imbecile, Ronnie thinks he is referring to Sue but, what the hell, he’ll show everyone what a gentleman he is, and so he hands over the famous manuscript to Monty who scampers off happy as Larry.

Sue comes in from the terrace and confides her sorrows to nice Galahad. Gally is infuriated and storms in on Ronnie to tell him what an idiot he’s being, how Sue loves nobody but him, and to stop being an infernal ass.

Well, you’d have thought that, with the central love story pretty much resolved, the novel would trickle to an end, but far from it. There’s 70 pages of complications still to go, which I’ll summarise briefly. They almost all concern the seemingly endless quest by four or five different players to get their hands on the wretched manuscript.

Bodkin had hired Pilbeam to find the book but, having been given it by Ronnie, tells the detective he is no longer needed, in the process revealing where he has hidden the manuscript (under his bed). Angered, Pilbeam steals it, planning to hold an auction for it between Tilbury and the Connie-Parsloe syndicate i.e. Sir Gregory and Lady Constance.

Bodkin plans to walk to the pub and hide the manuscript there but it almost immediately starts raining so he pops into a handy shed with good clean tiling. He stashes the manuscript in among some straw. Back in the Castle, Pilbeam tells Lord Emsworth that it was Bodkin who released Tilbury (from imprisonment in the potting shed, after Pirbright found him attempting to ‘poison’ the Empress) so Lord Em promptly fires Bodkin.

Pilbeam is summoned to see Lady Constance and fortifies himself with a few glasses of champagne on an empty stomach. After ten minutes he’s sloshed and so the interview goes badly. Connie becomes frankly insulting, and so a drunk and angry Pilbeam staggers out of the room determined to sell the book to Tilbury. He phones Tilbury at the Emsworth Arms and promises to deliver it but first heads to bed to sleep off the booze.

While Pilbeam is passed out, Lord Emsworth insists (against Pirbright’s advice) on moving the pig to a new location (to forestall any attempts to kidnap her) and it turns out to be none other than… the shed where Pilbeam had hidden the manuscript. As you might expect, the different characters then discover that the Empress has eaten the manuscript.

As with so many Wodehouse novels, the plot in the last 50 pages becomes increasingly clotted and I found it hard to take onboard the endless abrupt turns of events, and hard to care. When Pilbeam realises the manuscript he took such trouble to hide has been eaten, he hurries to meet Connie and Parsloe-Parsloe and extract money from them before they find out. He claims to have found and burned the manuscript and so, half disbelieving, they start to write him out a cheque for the job they wanted doing, at which point Lord Emsworth comes running in, panicking and telling Beach to phone the vet, because his beloved pig has just eaten a load of paper. When he hands over some of the said paper, everyone in the room realises it’s the famous manuscript and so Lady Constance and Sir Gregory promptly put their checkbooks away.

More or less kicked out, Pilbeam then has the bright idea of trying to sell his knowledge of the manuscript’s whereabouts to his original sponsor, Lord Tilbury, to he rushes down to the Emsworth Arms. Tilbury is just as sceptical as Constance and Gregory were but, when Pilbeam draws him a map of the potting shed’s location, he reluctantly writes Pilbeam a cheque for £1,000, then heads off into the night to find the shed and his precious manuscript.

However, angry Bodkin is standing right behind him, snatches the cheque out of his hand, and tears it up in front of him. Pilbeam is tempted to pop him except Monty is 8 inches taller than him and stronger so he stomps off into another room at the pub. Monty then phones up Lord Emsworth and warns him that someone (Lord Tilbury) is heading for the Empress’s hideout and to put Pirbright on double extra alert.

But then Monty has a few drinks and starts, under the influence of the pub’s strong beer, to feel a little sorry for Pilbeam. When he tore up the cheque it was purely performative, he imagined Pilbeam would simply get Tilbury to write out another one; he didn’t realise that was a one-off opportunity.

Then a chance remark of the barmaid gives him a brainwave. She is bragging to another customer that the oily Pilbeam is actually head of a huge detective agency with hundreds of experienced assistants. Monty runs into the snug where Pilbeam is nursing a drink and overcomes the other’s anger with a brilliant solution: he (Monty) has loads of money, what he doesn’t have is a job, a job he can hold down for a year and thus fulfil the requirement of Old Man Butterwick. So he makes Pilbeam a proposition: he, Monty, will pay Pilbeam to employ him. Suddenly Pilbeam is back in the money, £1,000 up, and hires him on the spot. Both men are sorted.

But there’s still more, as the plot drags on. Lord Emsworth is dragged into a room and is being harangued by his sisters when a mud-spattered Lord Tilbury is brought in. Tilbury had innocently followed Pilbeam’s directions to the new pig sty which was, of course, being super zealously guarded by big Pirbright who promptly jumped on him, squashing him into 4 inches of post-rainstorm mud, which is why he is barely recognisable when dragged into the Castle drawing room.

When Lord Tilbury finally makes himself known, he is shattered to be told that the manuscript he’s been through all these tribulations to get his hands on has been eaten. But Gally invites him to stay up at the castle, not just tonight but to come on an extended stay, and tells Beach to order his stuff brought up from the hotel, a room made ready, and a nice warm bath to be run.

Gally and Sue then appear. First of all Gally makes a spirited case that, contra Constance and Julia, Sue is a fine woman and any young man would be lucky to have her; before going on to inform the Emsworth siblings that Ronnie has the pig in his car and will drive off with it if Emsworth doesn’t consent to the marriage and cough up at least some of Ronnie’s legacy. So Lord Emsworth hurriedly writes a cheque to get his pig back, the pig is removed from Ronnie’s car, and the happy couple finally, at last, drive off towards London to get married.

The ending is sweet. Gally knows it was Beach who helped the young couple kidnap the Empress (for the second time; Ronnie stole her in the first book, if you remember, also with Beach’s reluctant help) and tells him he’s done a man’s work. Then reflects on how happy he is to have been able to help lovely Dolly Henderson’s daughter. And the last sentences go to the pig.

The Empress turned on her side and closed her eyes with a contented little sigh. The moon beamed down upon her noble form. It looked like a silver medal.

Thoughts

This novel felt like a slog. I was glad to get to the end. If you like brainless jollity I suppose it is very well done but I began to feel manipulated. The moment when Monty takes his shirt off and reveals a big tattoo SUE on his chest, in front of Ronnie, who he knows is quick to jealousy, is wildly improbable. Wodehouse tells us Monty sees it every day and so just forgot it was there. You buy that? Me neither. It’s neither plausible nor particularly funny.

There are plenty of funny moments in the story but, beneath them, the narrative started to feel contrived and manipulating; the last 50 pages felt like a real grind. And I began to feel really sorry for Sue. She seems to be in tears almost all the time. I began to feel that Wodehouse was bullying her.

The pig plot was hilarious the first time it appeared in the short story ‘Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ Now, stretched out to novel length for the second time, it begins to feel formulaic. It certainly no longer has the shock of the unexpected. Like the palavah around the controversial memoirs, it feels entirely predictable and very, very, long drawn-out. Hard not to find yourself muttering, ‘Oh just get on with it, already!’

Cast

Lord Emsworth, the ninth Earl of Blandings – ‘an elderly gentleman of quiet tastes’ he is, in fact, 60 – tall dim aristo, proud owner of the prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings
Lady Constance Keeble – his sister, fierce
The Honourable Galahad Threepwood – 57, their brother, small and dapper, had a disreputable youth which he has written up in his memoirs, when a dashing young man about town in the nineties had wanted to marry Sue’s mother
George Alexander Pyke, first Viscount Tilbury aka Lord Tilbury – founder and proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company, publisher his nasty little scandal sheet, Society Spice, and its nasty little editor, Percy Pilbeam – a ‘stout, stumpy man’, ‘Napoleonic of aspect, being short and square and stumpy and about twenty-five pounds overweight’
Lady Julia Fish – sister of Lord Emsworth and Lady Constance Keeble, ‘a handsome middle-aged woman of the large blonde type, of a personality both breezy and commanding’
Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish – her only son, short and pink-faced and touchy, possessor of a real inferiority complex – ‘a bird of strong feelings and keen sensibilities, old Ronnie’, engaged to Sue Brown the chorus girl but keeps getting irrationally jealous and breaking it off
Montague ‘Monty’ Bodkin – a holiday acquaintance in Biarritz persuades Lord Tilbury to employ him on one of his papers but he turns out to be useless and is fired – ‘rather an attractive popinjay, as popinjays go. He was tall and slender and lissom, and many people considered him quite good-looking’ – also turns out to be the nephew of…
Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe – 52, neighbour of Lord Emsworth and rival in prize flower, vegetable and pig competitions, uncle of Monty Bodkin, owns a pig called Pride of Matchingham
Huge Carmody – young man, one of the two male leads in ‘Summer Lightning’ who only has a walk-on part here, telling recently fired Monty about the vacant position as Lord Emsworth’s secretary
Sue Brown – a very pretty, tiny girl, with an enchanting smile and big blue eyes
P. Frobisher Pilbeam – former editor of Lord Tilbury’s scandal sheet, Society Spice, and now a private detective, originally hired by Lord Emsworth to find his kidnapped pig
- Beach – the butler, really big and fat, ‘mountainous’, ‘vast’, with a ‘moonlike face’
- Voules – the chauffeur
- Jas Pirbright – Lord Emsworth’s pig-man
Robinson – taxi-driver in Market Blandings
Mr Webber – the Blandings vet

Detectives

Given that the head of a detective agency is a fairly central character and that there’s a certain amount of cloak and dagger stuff (though not much, to be honest), it’s no surprise that Wodehouse slips various detective references into the text, not forgetting the obligatory reference to Sherlock Holmes. Just to amplify the theme, Wodehouse makes Beach the butler a big fan of detective books.

On his marriage to the daughter of Donaldson’s Dog-Biscuits, of Long Island City, N.Y., and his subsequent departure for America, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s younger son, who had assembled in the days of his bachelorhood what was pretty generally recognized as the finest collection of mystery thrillers in Shropshire, had bequeathed his library to Beach; and the latter in his hours of leisure had been making something of a study of the literature of Crime.

Like a lot of themes in Wodehouse, it’s surprising that this isn’t developed more or somehow taken to more farcical extremes. Instead there are just a few jokey references, which are interesting but not really tied in to the plot.

He [Beach] wished that life were as the writers of the detective stories which he had become so addicted portrayed it. In those, no matter what obstacles Fate might interpose in the shape of gangs, shots in the night, underground cellars, sinister Chinamen, poisoned asparagus and cobras down the chimney, the hero always got his girl.

Funny lines

‘I regard the entire personnel of the ensembles of our musical comedy theatres as—if you will forgive me being Victorian for a moment—painted hussies.’
‘They’ve got to paint.’
‘Well, they needn’t huss.’

The whole point of the Eton manner, as of a shotgun, is that you have to be at the right end of it.

‘Well, I will merely content myself with remarking that of all the young poops I ever met…’
‘He is not a poop!’ said Sue.
‘My dear,’ insisted the Hon. Galahad, ‘I was brought up among poops. I spent my formative years among poops. I have been a member of dubs which consisted exclusively of poops. You will allow me to recognize a poop when I see one.’

Beau Brummell himself could not have remained spruce after lying in four inches of mud with a six-foot pig-man on top of him.

‘I consider you a snob and a mischief maker, but may be quite sure I shall not dream of saying so.’

Aunts

Monty explains to Sue about posh aunts:

‘When you get to know that family better, you’ll realize that there are dozens of aunts you’ve not heard of yet—far-flung aunts scattered all over England, and each the leading blister of her particular county.’

Recurring comparisons…

It feels like Napoleon is referred to in pretty much every Wodehouse story…

Almost immediately Psmith saw what Napoleon would have done in this crisis.
(Leave It To Psmith)

‘Liz,’ said Mr. Cootes, and his voice was husky with such awe as some young officer of Napoleon’s staff might have felt on hearing the details of the latest plan of campaign,
(Leave It To Psmith)

From time to time, as he paced the tent devoted to the exhibition of vegetables, he might have been seen to bite his lip, and his eye had something of that brooding look which Napoleon’s must have worn at Waterloo.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

As a general rule, Lord Emsworth was an early and a sound sleeper, one of the few qualities which he shared with Napoleon Bonaparte being the ability to slumber the moment his head touched the pillow.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

He made his decision. Better to cease to be a Napoleon than be a Napoleon in exile.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

Mac had many admirable qualities, but not tact. He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.
(Summer Lightning)

And ‘Heavy Weather’ continues the habit:

[Lord Tilbury] rose from his chair and began to pace the room. Always Napoleonic of aspect, being short and square and stumpy and about twenty-five pounds overweight, he looked not unlike a Napoleon taking his morning walk at St. Helena.
(Heavy Weather)

Upon most men listening to this eloquent appeal there might have crept a certain impatience. Lord Tilbury, however, listened to it as though to some grand sweet song. Like Napoleon, he had had some lucky breaks in his time, but he could not recall one luckier than this…
(Heavy Weather)

Monty was plucking feebly at the lapel of his coat. This was new stuff to him. What with being invited to become a sort of Napoleon of Crime and hearing himself addressed as Lord Tilbury’s dear boy, his head was swimming.
(Heavy Weather)

Comparisons with Cleopatra tend to crop up regularly:

Though genial enough when she got her way, on the rare occasions when people attempted to thwart her she was apt to comport herself in a manner reminiscent of Cleopatra on one of the latter’s bad mornings.
(Leave It To Psmith)

Here is one [photo] of which my friends have been good enough to speak in terms of praise—as Cleopatra, the warrior-queen of Egypt, at the Pasadena Gas-Fitters’ Ball. It brings out what is generally considered my most effective feature, my nose.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

Lady Constance intervened. Her eye was aflame, and she spoke like Cleopatra telling an Ethiopian slave where he got off.
(Summer Lightning)

The sight of Lady Constance, staring haughtily from a high-backed chair like Cleopatra about to get down to brass tacks with an Ethiopian slave, merely entertained him.
(Heavy Weather)

And the Crusaders:

‘Fetch ’em!’ said Mr. Schnellenhamer in the voice a Crusader might have used in giving the signal to start against the Paynim.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

Had that call been made, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, would have answered it with as prompt a ‘Bless my Soul! Of course. Certainly!’’ as any of his Crusader ancestors.
(Summer Lightning)

‘It’s wonderful to watch you in action I admit–one seems to hear the bugles blowing for the Crusades and the tramp of the mailed feet of a hundred steel-clad ancestors but there’s no getting away from it that you do put people’s back up.’
(Heavy Weather)

He is fond of the Mona Lisa:

Lady Constance sat rigid in her chair. Her fine eyes were now protruding slightly, and her face was drawn. This and not the Mona Lisa’s, you would have said, looking at her, was the head on which all the sorrows of the world had fallen.
(Summer Lightning)

There was an infinite sadness in Monty Bodkin’s gaze. He looked like a male Mona Lisa.
(Heavy Weather)

I doubt if there’s any wider significance or symbolism in any these references. Rather the reverse: they are extremely obvious historical figures, clichés of history, and so can be safely used for comic effect in a popular entertainment.

… and phrases

As well as recurring figures from History, Wodehouse also has a few phrases which feel like they crop up in every book:

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.

Let the dead past bury its dead.

Paradise enow.

When Monty says:

‘Not long ago I became betrothed to a girl, and her ass of a father won’t let me marry her unless I get a job and hold it down for a year. And, dash it, my every effort to do so seems to prove null and void, if null and void is the expression I want.’

‘If it’s the expression I want’ – this wondering whether he’s using the right phrase is a really strong feature of Bertie Wooster’s speech. Coming across it in other people’s mouths, along with the same kind of cultural references, the same phrases and sometimes the same jokes, makes you realise how recycled and fundamentally samey Wodehouses’s text are.

The south of France

I’m fascinated by the way the South of France suddenly became fashionable in the early 1920s.

‘I’ve lost touch with Blandings a bit. It must be three years since I was there. Somehow, ever since this business of going to the South of France in the summer started. I’ve never seemed to be able to get down.’

Film

By 1929 cinema and the movies were, of course, a major part of the cultural landscape, everyone went to them, everyone knew the names of the stars, and so Wodehouse can confidently make casual cultural references to them.

An astonishing change had come over the demeanour of P. Frobisher Pilbeam. One has seen much the same thing, of course, in the film of Jekyll and Hyde, but on a much less impressive scale.

In fact within the Blandings Castle saga, Lord Emsworth’s second son, Freddie Threepwood, is made a complete slave to the movies, recognising movie scenarios in every situation and likely to quote movie dialogue whenever triggered, much to the irritation of his interlocutors.

Credit

‘Heavy Weather’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1933 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

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Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (3)

Working for King Leopold, 1879 to 1885

The biggest blot on Stanley’s reputation is that he devoted the longest single part of his working life to working for King Leopold II of Belgium helping to map out and establish the core infrastructure for what would become the notorious Congo Free State. This was the enormous area, corresponding to the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, which Leopold managed to get assigned to his own personal rule at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Leopold posed as a great philanthropist, a promoter of civilisation and Christianity and doughty abolisher of the widespread Arab slave trade which Stanley and all the other explorers had discovered.

It took until the late 1890s for news to leak out of the atrocities Belgian soldiers and overseers were committing on the native population, which slowly brewed up into an international scandal, which led Leopold to hand over the colony to the Belgian government, and the whole humanitarian catastrophe to become the quintessential example of imperialist hypocrisy, exploitation and brutality. The stories which leaked out of unimaginable brutality against the native peoples of the region formed the basis of Joseph Conrad’s harrowing novella, Heart of Darkness (1899). The whole story is told in Adam Hochschild’s harrowing history, King Leopold’s Ghost (published exactly one hundred years after the Conrad, in 1999).

Anyway, the point is that Stanley was approached by representatives of the king, entered discussions and finally agreed to sign a five-year contract to use his knowledge of the Congo to establish a basic transport infrastructure. This consisted of a road from the coast via a succession of small settlements he established or created trading stations at (Boma, Vivi, Isangile, Manyanga, Mfwa) up to the so-called Stanley Pool, designed to bypass the river’s many impassible rapids and cascades. He was a hands-on manager of the other Europeans and the many African labourers co-opted for the work, earning him the humorous nickname Bula Matari or ‘Breaker of Rocks’. Stanley was paid £1,000 a year.

Five years is a long time and much happened, notably: 1. Stanley became incensed by the brutality and racism of the Belgian officers under his nominal command. 2. He very slowly began to suspect Leopold was not the benevolent philanthropist he was posing as and Jeal notes the many letters he wrote Leopold insisting that the white man only had the right to lease property and no right to seize or claim ownership of native land. Stanley insisted that no Belgian officer was entitled to treat the Congolese:

‘as though they were conquered subjects ..This is all wrong. They are subjects – but it is we who are simply tenants.’

Up the roads he built were transported steamships, broken into sections and reassembled above the rapids, which hugely expanded access to the upper Congo.

3. Stanley faced the rivalry of the French explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who entered the Congo from the north and tried repeatedly to claim the entire north bank of the river and its hinterland for France, requiring repeated negotiations, threats and recriminations, carried out not only on the ground in Congo, but in Paris, London and Brussels, as Leopold managed the threat from the French, while Stanley invoked the possibility of the British stepping in – the last thing both the continentals wanted.

Jeal is writing a revisionist biography. His aim is to exonerate Stanley. As such he describes in detail the various meetings between Stanley and Leopold, quotes from letters between them, the contract Stanley signed, correspondence with intermediaries, diary and journal extracts, all tending in the same direction, which is to show that Stanley took Leopold at his word and believed him a genuine philanthropist. To be fair, so did plenty of other politicians, statesmen, journalists, missionaries and concerned parties.

The crimes against humanity Leopold sanctioned (the most notorious was cutting off the hands of natives who had failed to collect a set amount of rubber per week) only began to take place in the 1890s, well after Stanley had completed his five year contract in 1884 – although he was kept on by Leopold on a retainer and a fractious relationship for a few more years. And news about the atrocities only began to leak out to the press via reports of a handful of activists in the later 1890s, over ten years after Stanley had ceased all contact with the king.

King Leopold juxtaposed with just some of the millions of Congolese who were mutilated during his personal rule

Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1886 to 1889

When the Khedive of Egypt had gone bankrupt in 1882 the British had stepped in to administer Egypt and Sudan. Partly as a response to Western ‘occupation’ there had arisen the Mahdi, a low-born Egyptian who presented himself as a charismatic Islamic leader and raised impressive numbers of followers. General Gordon had been administering the southernmost province of British Egypt, named Equatoria, since 1873.

Alarmed at the rise of the Mahdist forces, the British government sent General Gordon to Khartoum with instructions to secure the evacuation of loyal soldiers and civilians and to depart with them. In defiance of those instructions, after evacuating about 2,500 civilians he retained a smaller group of soldiers and non-military men and remained, fortifying the town against a siege which lasted almost a year.

During this time there was huge publicity in the press about plucky Gordon holding out against the mad Mahdi and the forces of barbarism. The government hesitated and worried about the cost but eventually sent an expeditionary force to fight its way through to Gordon and rescue him. As is fairly well known they were too late. After a long siege, the Mahdist forces finally breached the defences of Khartoum on 26 January 1885 and killed the entire British garrison including Gordon and most of the population of the town. An estimated 10,000 were killed.

Apart from the penny-pinching reluctance of the government to launch the relief expedition, and the way the British public memorialise British heroic failures (the charge of the Light Brigade, the siege of Mafeking, the Somme, Dunkirk) the other notable thing about the incident is the immense power of the press. Gordon’s heroics were very widely reported and the matter became one of general public interest, forcing the government to act.

All the same forces came into play in the Emin Pasha affair. With Gordon dead, there remained a British force even further south into Sudan, led by one Emin Pasha, and the issue now arose of how to rescue him and his ‘heroic’ soldiers. Pasha was depicted as a brave soldier of the Empire and a noble fighter against the evils of slavery. On the back of the outcry over Gordon, a committee was set up to lobby for the rescue of Pasha and his men, whose whereabouts was not known exactly. The money came pouring in from public subscriptions (the campaign raised a total of £32,000) and who was chosen to lead the expedition into a particularly obscure region of central Africa? Stanley.

In Jeal’s account almost every element of the two year long expedition was a fiasco and what wasn’t a fiasco was a catastrophe. It can be divided, maybe, into three components.

1. Pasha’s background

It is quite staggering to discover the discrepancy between the stereotype of the noble Christian administrator and abolisher of slavery which Pasha was painted as by the popular press, and the disappointing reality. The beauty of a biography as long and detailed as Jeal’s is you get to learn so much about minor or secondary figures that it at times has the richness and complexity of a novel.

Pasha was no dauntless Briton but had been born Eduard Schnitzer, to Lutheran parents in the Prussian province of Silesia. In 1864, aged twenty-four, this bearded and bespectacled German had qualified as a doctor in Berlin, but had failed on a bureaucratic technicality to be granted a government licence to practise, he settled in Albania – then a Turkish province – where he set up as a doctor. A brilliant linguist, he soon added Albanian and Turkish to the five other languages he already spoke. He was a first-rate pianist and chess player, and also excelled as a botanist and ornithologist. In 1870 Emin joined the staff of Ismail Hakki Pasha, Governor of northern Albania, and served with him till his death three years later. During this time he had an affair with the Pasha’s wife, and after she became a widow, lived with her as she were his own spouse. In 1875, he ran out of money and took Madame Hakki, her four children and six slave girls to stay with his parents in Germany. While there – realising he could not support ten people indefinitely – he abandoned Madame Hakki, and fled the country. He would not contact his family again for fourteen years. (p.315)

See what I mean by ‘like a novel’? By 1875 Emin had made his way to Khartoum (as far away from h is angry wife as he could get), set up practice as a doctor. He now posed as an Arab of Arab birth and came to the attention of General Gordon, Governor-General of the Sudan. In 1878 Gordon appointed Pasha Governor of Equatoria, then the Mahdi rising occurred, Gordon was massacred after a prolonged siege, and the British press clamoured for the noble Pasha to be found and rescued.

2. The expedition

It was the most gruelling and death-ridden of Stanley’s big three expeditions. The cause was starvation. The expedition was very well funded, it was the largest and best-equipped to go to Africa, had plenty of native porters and more white officers than Stanley had had before. It landed on the west coast with the aim of travelling thousands of miles up the Congo before branching off where the Congo makes its great turn to the south, to head east along the Aruwimi river, in order to strike overland to Lake Albert at the southernmost tip of Equatoria.

Leopold had promised Stanley use of his steamers above the Stanley Pool, which the explorer had been responsible for transporting there several years earlier, but in the event all but one were out of commission, which significantly delayed and complicated logistics.

At Yambuya on the Aruwimi, the expedition was running so low on food, and so many porters had deserted that Stanley took the fatal decision of dividing it in two, leaving the majority of goods with several white officers in the rear, depending on a promise from the notorious Arab slaver, Tippu Tip, that he would provide hundreds of additional carriers. Leaving the rear column behind, Stanley forged on through what turned out to be ruinously difficult terrain through the Ituri forest where his own men died of starvation and disease, before emerging into the territory of inhospitable and violent tribes. Of the 389 who set out from Yambuya, only 169 survived the gruelling trek through Ituri. But they had hired many more porters along the way, not least from the slave trader Tippu Tip, so it’s estimated that over 400 lives were lost in total (p.370).

It took some time to fight off the local tribes, try to negotiate alliances and safe passage, before Stanley located Pasha and his motley garrison of Arabs and Sudanese. The two men finally met on 29 April 1888 and Stanley was disconcerted to discover that Emin was in perfectly good health and none too keen on being ‘discovered’ or ‘rescued’. In fact Pasha and his men were able to feed Stanley’s emaciated and fever-stricken followers, thus ‘rescuing the rescuers.’

And, in a major disillusionment, it turned out Pasha wasn’t very keen to be taken back to ‘civilisation’ where he strongly suspected Madame Hakki would quickly take him to court (he was to be proved right about this) but more importantly he deceived Stanley about the paper-thin authority he had over his own troops, who didn’t want to take Stanley’s route of travelling east along the familiar slave route back to Zanzibar, and preferred to travel back north through their own native lands. Pasha’s men mutinied.

Meanwhile, Stanley trekked back towards the rear column with supplies. It is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around the incredible delays and protracted timeframes. The rear column had, by this stage, not had any word or instructions from Stanley for over a year. Half way back they encountered an officer named William Bonny who told them the disastrous fate of the rear column.

3. Pasha’s downfall

There were a lot of issues persuading Pasha to take the eastwards route to Zanzibar, and managing the potentially dangerous defection of many of his most senior officers, which Jeal describes in great documentary detail. What stood out for me was Pasha’s fate. When the survivors of this huge, devastating and gruelling expedition finally made it back to Zanzibar, the consul’s residence and ‘civilisation’, a big party was held. At the height of the festivities, Emin Pasha, the centre of the entire £32,000, three-year operation which had cost so many lives, was found badly injured in the street outside, having fallen from a second-storey balcony.

Did he get drunk, wander onto the balcony and, being short sighted, not see the low balustrade and simply fallen over it? Or was it a suicide attempt, given that the enormous publicity surrounding the affair, all across Europe, had alerted his long-abandoned wife, Madame Hakki, that Pasha was alive, and she had begun proceedings in German courts, which would not only ruin him financially, but blow the cover he had dedicated years and years to creating in Africa (p.378).

Pasha didn’t recover from his fall for months, till the end of January 1890 but he did not return to Europe. He found employment with the Germans who were Britain’s fiercest rivals in East Africa, but his hopes of claiming Buganda for Germany and being appointed its governor were dashed by the careful arrangements of the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement. Pasha fell out with his German employers and set out for the interior on a mission of his own which has never been clarified.

In 1892, a hundred miles from the Congo, Pasha was beheaded by Arabs in alliance with a warlord called Kibongo. The Pasha’s sixty Sudanese followers were all shot. (p.380)

A. J. Mounteney-Jephson, Stanley’s most loyal lieutenant on the trip, made a different calculation, estimating that they set out on the lower Congo with 708 people of whom only 210 survived (p.381). The numbers are variable because extra porters were hired all along the route, and the number of camp followers (wives and children) fluctuated. But the main point is clear. Hundreds and hundreds of natives and over half the white men who started on the expedition, perished, and for what?

The Emin Pasha relief expedition turned out to be the last of its kind, run by a freelance explorer, funded by a private committee. The era of freelance exploration had come to an end and from this point onwards, expeditions were to be funded and managed by the government departments which were taking over all aspects of colonial administration.

Stanley with the officers of the Advance Column, safely back in Cairo in 1890. From left to right, Dr Thomas Heazle Parke, Robert H. Nelson, Henry M. Stanley, William G. Stairs, and Arthur J. M. Jephson

Marriage and frustration

Jeal gives detailed accounts of Stanley’s many attempts to find a bride. Obviously his prospects changed overnight when he became super well-known as the hero who had found and supplied Dr Livingstone, a fame boosted by swift publication of his bestselling account, How I Found Livingstone (1871).

It is interesting to read about the rather cold-blooded practicality with which Stanley and his friends set about trying to find an eligible partner for him (p.300). It is pretty clear that the best candidate would have been May French Sheldon, an interesting character in her own right. Born and bred in America, May married a banker and developed as a journalist, essayist and novelist. She and husband Eli moved to London, where she corresponded with and then met Stanley who she found fascinating and inspiring. According to Jeal, May and her husband enjoyed an ‘open marriage’, something she informed Stanley about, and they were much in each other’s company.

However, Stanley wanted a wife and children, not a mistress and so, ultimately, May didn’t work out. This was a shame as she continued to worship him and, after Eli died in 1890, she herself undertook several expeditions to Africa, travelling up the Congo (funded and directed by Leopold’s people who gained good publicity out of her) and, on another trip, travelling from Mombassa to Mount Kilimanjaro unaccompanied by any other white person (p.385). She wrote up her travels and undertook lecture tours, becoming well known and was one of the first women to be made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In other words, she was right up Stanley’s street, and it would have been a match made in heaven

But instead Stanley was hooked by Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Tennant, scion of a rich family, a socialite and reasonably well known artist, exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Tennant came from a rich, well connected family, a family friend was the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. Dolly appears in the narrative on page 300 and then recurrently till the end of the book.

Dolly’s father, Charles Tennant, a lawyer and politician, was 58 when Dolly was born and died when she was 18. For years after his death she kept a diary in which she started each entry ‘Dear father’. With transparent psychology, she was attracted to father figures, men 10 or 20 years older than her, of high status, wealthy and married. She and Stanley became involved soon after he’d been invited to a dinner party at her family’s swanky London house in Richmond Terrace (June 25 1885), exchanging letters and love tokens.

Dorothy Tennant who married Stanley in 1890, painted by George Frederic Watts

However, Dolly was calculating. Jeal shows us how she spent most of the three years that Stanley was away on the gruesome Emin Pasha expedition (1886 to 1889), carrying on an impassioned (though presumably platonic) affair with Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, Privy Councillor, member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and, like most of Dolly’s crushes, twenty years older than her and married. There is no doubt she was in love with him. But, eventually, his detachment, his gloomy personality, and his married status forced her to acknowledge that he was never going to marry her.

Instead, as news arrived back in London that Stanley had reached Zanzibar, and as his fame exploded off the scale, she was happy to revive her correspondence with him and began telling all her friends that she had always had an understanding with the world famous explorer. Stanley, for his part, was naive, inexperienced, all too used to being rejected by the women he wooed, and so was bowled over when this beautiful, clever, rich and well connected young woman agreed to become engaged.

It was a massive, almost a state wedding. They were married in Westminster Abbey to which the blushing bride drove in a closed carriage along Whitehall through cheering crowds (p.400). The bishop of Ripon conducted the service, the signing of the register was witnessed by Gladstone and the two society painters, Millais and Leighton. What more could a girl wish for?

It took a while for them to realise that they were total opposites: she loved living in London, lived for socialising, loved being the centre of attention at high society parties, was perfectly at home with the very cream of London society, Prime Minsters and so on. Stanley was the extreme opposite, self consciously aware of his lower class origin, hating publicity and attention, preferring to be left alone to think and ponder. Stanley records the moment he realised it, after one of their first arguments because he had asked her to leave him alone for just a few hours to write his next book and she couldn’t understand why he wanted to be apart from her and burst into tears.

‘It struck me that is married life was to be a conflict of this nature, between marital duty and that which one owes to the public, there will be little happiness in future. The utter hopelessness of compatibility between her ideas and mine [was] revealed to me so suddenly that I was speechless for a time…’ (Stanley in his diary entry 4 September 1890, quoted page 403)

This caused much conflict until Stanley eventually bought a country house in Pirbright, Surrey, which he devoted himself to doing up and landscaping.

In 1885 Stanley had hoped that Leopold would invite him to become Governor of the new Congo state he was carving out. A large part of the evidence for Stanley’s lack of complicity in Leopold’s crimes of the 1890s is that Leopold never seriously considered this. He realised that Stanley was too fond of Africans and standing up for their rights to be the kind of obedient servant he (Leopold) was looking for. Then came the opportunity of the Emin Pasha expedition and Stanley was totally absorbed in that through till late 1889, then got married in 1890.

When he’d returned from that trip, an exhausted man, Stanley had hoped for several years that he might be asked by the British government to become a governor of the new colonies being legally defined, mapped and established across Africa. His good friend Sir William Mackinnon had been lobbying the government for years to carve out a legally defined British colony in Buganda and Kenya in order to compete against and contain the aggressive colonisation of the area by Germany, to finally stamp out the slave trade and to open the area for British trade.

In December 1892 Mackinnon, by now an old and ailing man, made a final offer of the governorship of the region to Stanley. To his everlasting disappointment, Dolly persuaded Stanley to turn down the offer, saying she couldn’t be parted from him, he was too old and ill, and so on. Instead she strongarmed him into standing for parliament, so he would become more like… her father, the politician. Stanley campaigned for and narrowly lost the election to become Liberal MP for Lambeth North, hating every minute of it, the public scrutiny, the big meetings, the heckling. In July 1895 there was another general election, Dolly again forced Stanley to stand, and he was elected Liberal Unionist MP for Lambeth, serving from 1895 to 1900. He hated it. For a man used to the widest, openest spaces in Africa, being cooped up for 14 hours a day in a badly ventilated, stuffy chamber listening to pontificating windbags, was his idea of hell.

It is heartening to report that the final years of Stanley’s life were made bright and happy after he adopted the six month son of one of his many distant Welsh relatives. The boy was brought to Pirbright and named Denzil and, as Stanley grew older and suffered a series of strokes, the small boy was to become the light of his life. He died in his bed at Pirbright on 10 May 1904, aged 63. Having read this long, thoroughly researched, ultra-detailed, and convincingly argued biography, I’m astonished he managed to last that long. What a life!

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