All posts tagged Provence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mixture as Before

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

Bertie struggles to find the right word

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

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

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

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

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

Shelley crops up again later on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

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

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

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

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

Jeeves and clothes

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

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

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

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

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

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

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

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

Clash of registers

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

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

The village constable

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

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

Abbreviations

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

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

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

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

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

One letter

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

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

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

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

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

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

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

I turned on the h. again.

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

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

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

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

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

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

Inappropriate

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

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

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

Slang phrases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

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

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

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

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

Jeeves’s wisdom

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

Sir Roderick Spode

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

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

Bertie clarifies an important element:

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

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

Plot

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

As briefly as I can:

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

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

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

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

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

Cast

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

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

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

The Junior Ganymede club

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

Menus

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

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

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

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

But on the other hand:

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

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

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

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

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

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

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

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

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

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

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

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

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comic phrases

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

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

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

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

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

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

Animal similes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

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

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

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

The Drones club

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

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

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

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

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comically dim references to classical literature

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

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

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

Bertie forgets his words

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

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

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

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

And needing to be corrected, generally by Jeeves:

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

And:

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

And:

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

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

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

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

The ‘the’

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

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

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

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

I stroked the chin thoughtfully.

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

Bertram in the third person

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

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

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

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

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

The Woosters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slang

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

The mystery had conked. I saw all.

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

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

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

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

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

The pathos of the thing gave me the pip.

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

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

This time she shook the pumpkin.

Abbreviations

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

One syllable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Binge

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

a) Party

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

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

b) More general event

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

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

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

The Drones club

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

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

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

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

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

Bertie’s memoirs

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

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

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

Echoes of Sherlock: cases, clients and methods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or when Jeeves explains to Bertie that:

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

The plot

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

The white mess jacket

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

Jeeves advises Gussie Fink-Nottle

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

Fancy dress

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

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

Aunt Dahlia requests

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

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

Gussie leaves for Brinkley Court

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

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

Bertie is summoned to Brinkley Court

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

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

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

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

The dinner refusal

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

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

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

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

Aunt Dahlia suggests suicide

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

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

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

1. Bertie roasts Tuppy

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

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

2. The drunken prize-giving

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

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

3. The girls get engaged to the wrong men

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

Aunt Dahlia is delighted

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

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

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

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

At long last, Bertie asks Jeeves

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

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

The fire alarm stunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The place is positively stiff with happy endings.’

The cast

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

The Freudian presence

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

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

And:

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

Jeeves’s miraculous mode of transportation

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

Jeeves’s character

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

Choice phrases

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

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

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

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

Credit

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

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by Simon on December 5, 2025 • Permalink

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The Legend of Cleopatra by Geoffrey Chaucer (1386)

And as for me, thogh that I can but lyte,
On bokes for to rede I me delyte
And in myn herte have hem in reverence;
And to hem yeve swich lust and swich credence,
That ther is wel unethe game noon
That from my bokes make me to goon.

(The narrator describing his love of books in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women by Geoffrey Chaucer, 1380s)

The Legend of Good Women is a long-ish poem by the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 to 1400). Like so many poems from the period, it features a dream vision i.e. the narrator falls asleep and then has a supernatural fantasy (in this case of the god of Love) which is described in a naturalistic manner. Chaucer wrote three other dream vision poems (The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls) and it was a very popular genre for other poets of the period (for example, William’s Vision of Piers Plowman, written by William Langland about a decade earlier).

In the prologue to the poem, after he has fallen asleep, the god of Love appears to the narrator (pretty obviously Chaucer) and reprimands him for giving a negative image of women in a) his translation of the long French poem, The Romance of the Rose ‘that is an heresye ayeins my lawe’, and b) his portrayal of the fickle and inconstant Criseyde, in his very long poem, Troilus and Criseyde. The god of Love demands that Chaucer correct this breach of manners by depicting women from myth or legend who have lived well according to the medieval religion of courtly love i.e. lived and died for Love. Who have been ‘Cupid’s saints’.

This is meant to be a poetic version of the real-life story behind the commissioning of the poem, for it is said that Anne of Bohemia, the wife of King Richard II, expressed the same sentiments of gentle disapproval and so laid on Chaucer the commission of writing a poem in praise of women and hence The Legend. Nice, if it’s true.

Courtly love

In the Middle Ages the cult of Courtly Love arose, stemming supposedly from the south of France and spreading to all the courts of Europe. Courtly love wittily and sophisticatedly reworked the format and rhetoric surrounding Christian saints and, indeed, the Christian religion itself, into a mock-serious ‘religion’ centred around the adoration of a courtier knight or poet for his semi-divine mistress or Lady.

Courtly love, or the ars amandi, applied the same medieval technique of intricate elaboration which had produced scholasticism and the codes of chivalry, to relations between the sexes. To quote my review of Medieval English lyrics 1200 to 1400 edited by Thomas G. Duncan (1995):

The twelfth century saw the flourishing and spread of the poetry of courtly love pioneered by the troubadours in the south of France in the period from about 1100 to 1150. The feudal concept of service to a male lord was converted into the idea of service of a noble knight to an aristocratic lady in the name of love. The troubadours took the idea to extremes, claiming in their poems that service to the Lady was the only thing that made life worth living, while her disdain and scorn made a man want to die.

As it spread, the cult of Courtly Love grew into a highly complex, ritualised, ornate and delightful cornucopia, a delicate Gothic tracery of manners, behaviours and modes of address recommended to courtiers who wanted to play this sophisticated game. As the Dutch historian of the late Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga, put it, back in 1919:

Just as scholasticism represents the grand effort of the medieval spirit to unite all philosophic thought in a single centre, so the theory of courtly love, in a less elevated sphere, tends to embrace all that appertains to the noble life.
(The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga, Penguin paperback edition, page 105)

Works of courtly love grew bigger, longer and more complex as they redefined all aristocratic behaviour in light of the knight’s reverence for his distant and unattainable Lady. Thousands of books, tens of thousands of poems, were devoted to elaborating this one subject, the more elaborate it became the more remote from the often brutal reality of rulers selling off each other’s daughters in order to make strategic alliances.

And so Chaucer is reprimanded by the stern god of Love for having been discourteous to women as a whole in his portrayal of Criseyde, and must – by the rules of Courtly Love – atone to all noble women for this transgression.

A ‘legendary’

The structure of the poem is based on the ‘legendary’, a well-established medieval format of a collection of lives of saints. Thus each section of the poem is the courtly love equivalent of a saint’s life, except that these saints died not out of devotion to the Christian God, but as martyrs to the god of Love.

Thus, for example, the very title of the legend of Cleopatra invokes Christian rhetoric in a light, sophisticated play on ideas: Incipit Legenda Cleopatrie, Martiris, Egipti Regine, meaning ‘Here starts the legend of Cleopatra, martyr, queen of Egypt.’ She was, quite obviously, not a martyr to the Christian religion, which didn’t exist when she committed suicide (in 30 BC); but viewed through the prism of Courtly Love, she and any number of other fine ladies from pre-Christian myth and legend were martyrs to the religion of Love.

The Legend of Good Women devotes a chapter or legend to each of nine virtuous women from myth and legend, being:

The legend of Cleopatra
The Legend of Thisbe
The Legend of Dido
The Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea
The Legend of Lucretia
The Legend of Ariadne
The Legend of Philomela
The Legend of Phyllis
The Legend of Hypermnestra

Unfinished

Like Chaucer’s most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, the Legend appears to be unfinished. The Retraction or Apology for the Canterbury Tales mentions 25 legends and we only have nine, so maybe some are lost or maybe he never completed it. The balade embedded in the prologue mentions several women — Esther, Penelope, Marcia Catonis (wife of Cato the younger), Lavinia, Polyxena and Laodamia — who don’t appear in the legends we have; were they meant to be included?

At the end of the Prologue the god of Love indicates that the nineteen women who are attending Queen Alceste must all be included in the poem (though he doesn’t name any of them):

Thise other ladies sittinge here arowe
Ben in thy balade, if thou canst hem knowe,
And in thy bokes alle thou shalt hem finde;
Have hem now in thy Legend alle in minde.

It’s discrepancies like this which lead scholars to conclude the poem was abandoned. Whether the poem’s state is due to Chaucer becoming bored with it is uncertain, but it is now regarded as very much a lesser work, despite being popular when first written. The legends are a bit repetitive, with the same high-minded behaviour tending to recur again and again, so that it lacks the drama of Troilus and and the wonderful variety and vivid characterisation which is key to The Canterbury Tales.

Iambic pentameter

The poem is among the first works in English to use the iambic pentameter, which Chaucer later used throughout The Canterbury Tales. A pentameter is a line with five beats:

When I consider how my light is spent

Lines of poetry can be divided up into units surrounding a beat. A long time ago, the Greeks categorised all this and called these units ‘feet’. When you write a line of verse it naturally has strong or emphasised or accented syllables, and weak or soft or unaccented syllables, and a moment’s reflection makes you realise there’s a certain amount of variety to these.

For a start, a ‘foot’ can have one, two, three or possibly more syllables. And the accented syllable can come first, second, third in the order of these syllables. All the possible permutations were defined and named by the ancient Greeks two and a half thousand years ago, which explains why we still use unusual (Greek) words to describe them.

A Wikipedia article lists all the possible permutations of beat within a foot, with their Greek names. By far the most common ‘foot’ in English is the ‘iamb’, where the unit has two syllables and the emphasis falls on the second syllable. If you emphasise the syllables in bold you’ll get it straightaway:

When I consider how my light is spent

Or just:

di dum di dum di dum di dum di dum

It is a pentameter because it has five beats. It is a iambic pentameter because each of the beats comes in a pairing with a softer, unaccented syllable, which comes before it. The accent falls on the second syllable of each unit or ‘foot’. di dum.

Anyway, the point is that, even if he didn’t introduce it to English poetry, Chaucer was the first poet to write extensively in this metre. With the vast examples of Troilus and the Canterbury Tales, he helped to establish it as the basic, default metre for English poetry, which it has remained ever since.

Reading Chaucer’s verse

The single most important thing to do when reading Chaucer’s medieval verse is to pronounce the final ‘e’ in every word – then the lines will scan as five-beat pentameters. Here I’ve bolded the e’s which need to be pronounced, not the beats.

The moste party of thy tyme spende

Don’t pronounce these e’s as eee, but as schwa, or ‘er’.

The most-er party of thy tym-er spend-er

Now the line has five regular beats and is a iambic pentameter (nobody minds that it has a final unstressed syllable dangling at the end, this dangling syllable is very common in Chaucer’s verse and gives it a nice bouncy feel).

If you do this with all the lines (unless the e comes before a vowel, in which case don’t pronounce it), they all become regular, and the thing comes into focus as a jolly rhythmic canter (s is pronounced as z in this excerpt) (and now I am bolding the syllables to emphasise):

Of good-er wommen, maiden-ez and wyv-ez,
That weren trewe [don’t pronounce the e because it is followed by a vowel: so true-win] in lovinge [omit the e] al hir lyv-ez.

Obviously there are other differences in pronunciation between Chaucer’s English and ours but I’m not writing a book. If you just pronounce the e’s, emphasise the beat and pause at the end of every line, it will start swimming into focus. Above all don’t worry if you don’t understand half of it. Don’t stop to look up individual words. Get into the swing and the rhythm first and the general gist will emerge. Years ago I was taught how to pronounce it and remember most of the principles but, listening to myself say it out loud, I suddenly realised I sound a bit like the Swedish chef from the Muppets, especially if you really pronounce those final e’s.

The prologues

Actually there are two prologues, one scholars think was the original (Prologue A), and a second one which survives in just one copy and critics think was a later version, maybe composed when Chaucer revised the poem some time in the 1390s (Prologue B).

There’s a lot of overlap but also passages unique to each prologue. The solution (well, a solution) is to have an edition like the old OUP Complete Chaucer which is big enough to print both versions side by side. To compare and contrast, if you’re feeling scholarly: or just to jump from one to the other to make sure you catch everything he wrote.

They both begin with a characteristically invocation of the importance of ‘olde bokes’ from which we study and learn. Book learning.

Than mote we to bokes that we finde,
Through which that olde thinges been in minde,
And to the doctrine of these olde wyse,
Yeven credence, in every skilful wyse,
And trowen on these olde aproved stories,
Of holinesse, or regnes, of victories,
Of love, of hate, of other sundry thinges,
Of whiche I may not maken rehersinges.
And if that olde bokes were a-weye,
Y-loren were of remembraunce the keye.
Wel oghte us than on olde bokes leve,
Ther-as ther is non other assay by preve.

Lightly translated:

Then must we to the books that we find
Through which the old things are kept in mind,
And to the doctrine of these old ways
Give credence in every skillful ways
And believe in these old approved stories,
Of holiness, or reigns, or victories,
Of love, of hate, of other sundry things,
Of which I need not make rehearsings.
And if that old books were put away,
Lost would be of memory the key.
Well ought we, then, in old books to believe,
Because there is no other way to prove.

In praise of the daisy

As soon as the poem has got settled in it turns into an extended passage in praise of the humble daisy.

Now have I than swich a condicioun,
That, of alle the floures in the mede,
Than love I most these floures whyte and rede,
Swiche as men callen daysies in our toun.
To hem have I so great affeccioun,
As I seyde erst, whan comen is the May,
That in my bed ther daweth me no day
That I nam up, and walking in the mede
To seen this flour agein the sonne sprede,
Whan hit upryseth erly by the morwe;
That blisful sighte softneth al my sorwe,
So glad am I whan that I have presence
Of hit, to doon al maner reverence,
As she, that is of alle floures flour,
Fulfilled of al vertu and honour,
And ever y-lyke fair, and fresh of hewe;
And I love hit, and ever y-lyke newe,
And ever shal, til that myn herte dye…

It barely needs translating, but:

Now have I then such a condition
That, of all the flowers in the meed,
Then love I most these flowers white and red,
Such as men call daisies in our town.
To them have I so great affection,
As I said before, when comes in the May,
That in my bed there dawns for me no day
But I am up and walking in the meed
To see this flower against the sun spread,
When it uprises early in the morrow.
That blissful sight softens all my sorrow,
So glad I am when I am in its presence,
To do it all manner of reverence,
As she that is of all flowers the flower,
Fulfilled of every virtue and honour,
And always alike, fair and fresh of hue,
And I love it and ever like new,
And always will until my heart dies…

Why is it so effective? Because it has a sweet and touching innocence without being naive or sentimental. Plus the language of Middle English has an intrinsic simplicity about it, a simplicity of vocabulary, for example, a pure English which was to become increasingly cluttered with new-fangled foreign imports and made-up words as we move into the Renaissance but, back in Chaucer’s time, feels simple and fresh.

But it’s also important to note that this passage is the product of tremendous poetic sophistication. Many Italian and French poets had already written poems in praise of various flowers – there is a vast epic poem named The Romance of the Rose – and Chaucer has read them and knowingly references lines and ideas from them. He tells us as much:

For wel I wot, that ye han her-biforn
Of making ropen, and lad awey the corn;
And I come after, glening here and there,
And am ful glad if I may finde an ere
Of any goodly word that ye han left.

For well I know that you have here-before,
Of making rope and led away the corn,
And I come after gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I may find an ear
Of any goodly word that you have left.

If you think about it, praise of flowers is very compatible with the ideas of Courtly Love. It is a soft and beautiful subject very appropriate for a feminised court (as, for example, grittier stories of knights and wars, anything from the bloodthirsty ancient world, emphatically were not).

So popular did the cult of flowers as a kind of sub-category of Courtly Love become that we have records of courts dividing into factions who, in a witty, sophisticated spirit, staged debates about the relative merits of different flowers.

There are records of debates between defenders of the flour and defenders of the leaf. In the hands of this culture everything becomes allegorical, symbolic of something else, and so the flower came to be associated with beauty and sensual pleasure which is intense but, alas, fleeting; whereas the leaf symbolises fidelity and endurance – and so these debates and poems displayed the participants’ skill and graciousness, but always circled round to alight on a firm Christian moral.

An entire medieval poem survives on the subject – The Floure and the Leafe – and Chaucer references this cult, too:

Ye lovers, that can make of sentement;
In this cas oghte ye be diligent
To forthren me somwhat in my labour,
Whether ye ben with the leef or with the flour.

You lovers, that can write of sentiment,
In this cause ought you to be diligent
To further me somewhat in my labour,
Whether you are with the leaf or with the flower.

That poem is invoked half a dozen times, with Chaucer humorously clarifying that he is not coming down on one side or other of the Great Debate, but wishes to speak of ancient stories from well before the Great Strife began:

But natheles, ne wene nat that I make
In preysing of the flour agayn the leef,
No more than of the corn agayn the sheef:
For, as to me, nis lever noon ne lother;
I nam with-holden yit with never nother.
Ne I not who serveth leef, ne who the flour;
Wel brouken they hir service or labour;
For this thing is al of another tonne,
Of olde story, er swich thing was begonne.

And so the Prologue wends its lazy way, weaving a complex tapestry of references to ancient authors, to the cult of the leaf and the flower, praising the daisy but also praising a Grand Lady or muse figure to whom the narrator speaks.

The narrator describes rising early one May morning and going out into the fields to kneel down ‘Upon the smale softe swote gras’ and admire the sweet daisy (‘The Empress, and flower of flowers all’) and its lovely scent.

He hears the birds singing their songs and imagines they are taunting the hunters who hunted them in winter and lay traps for them. Some of the birds are singing lays of love in honour of their mates, some sing in praise of St Valentine, on whose day they met, and they nuzzle their beaks against each other. Any who have erred promise repentance. And the gods Zephyr and Flora give to the flowers their sweet breath.

This is all a magnificent preparation, sweet and sensitive and beautiful. For after this hard day admiring flowers and listening to the birds, the narrator makes his way home, has his servants rig up a couch in a little arbour, and there he falls asleep, and at this point the Dream Vision commences:

The Dream Vision

The narrator dreams he is in a meadow and sees come walking the god of Love, with two small wings and holding two fiery darts. He is holding hands with a queen, dressed in green with a fret of gold about her hair and a white crown, looking, in other words, very like his beloved daisy. The narrator says people say the god of Love is blind but this god of Love is looking at him very sternly and makes his blood run cold!

The queen is named ‘Alceste the debonayre’. Behind them come ‘ladyes nyntene’ in attendance, followed by a vast concourse of other women, making up maybe a quarter, maybe a third of the world’s population! (At the very end of the Prologue, the god of Love suggests that the figure is 20,000. Small world.)

It is at this point that the ladies spy the daisy the narrator is worshipping and stop to sing a ballad with a repeated refrain. Each verse lists a number of famously beautiful women from antiquity and tells them to hide or retire, because none of them can compare with the lady they are accompanying i.e. Alceste. In one version of the prologue the refrain runs:

Alceste is here, that al that may desteyne.

The other version has:

My lady cometh, that al this may desteyne.

Where I think ‘desteyne’ means ‘disdain’ in the sense of triumphs over or puts all that – all those other women – in the shade. The second version feels fractionally better, more powerful.

Now this entourage notice the narrator and call him over to them and the god of Love proceeds to reprimand him for translating the Romance of the Rose and writing Troilus and Criseyde and generally portraying women, and love, in a bad light. Why has he shown women in such a negative light?

‘Why noldest thow as wel han seyd goodnesse
Of wemen, as thow hast seyd wikedness?’

Couldn’t Chaucer find in all his fancy books stories of women who were ‘good and trewe’? After all, he has no fewer than sixty books in his library, telling of ancient Greeks and Romans, featuring many stories of women who preferred to die than betray their love, who preserved their virginity, or were faithful to their husbands, or were dutiful in their widowhood. This is a fierce indictment.

But then queen Alceste intervenes on the narrator’s behalf, reminding the angry god of Love (at great length) of the mercy of great kings and even of beasts, such as the noble lion. Such should be the mercy the god should show this errant servant who was only translating matter out of old books. (You can see how the intercession of a compassionate queen softening the wrath of a stern ruler echoes the role assigned to Mary in Catholic theology, interceding on the part of us poor sinners; a posture which could also be mapped onto countless medieval courts, where hard-headed kings and princes could (possibly) be softened by appeals for mercy from their queens.)

Alceste proceeds to plead the poet’s cause and it becomes clear (if it wasn’t before) that the sleeper and narrator of the vision is Chaucer himself, because she cites his many works which do speak favourably of love, to wit, The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, the story of Palamon and Arcite (i.e. the Knight’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales). And ‘to speke of other holynesse’ he has translated the popular medieval philosopher, Boethius.

Alceste concludes her defence of Chaucer by promising that, if the god of Love forgives him:

“Now as ye been a god, and eek a king,
I, your Alceste, whylom quene of Trace,
I aske yow this man, right of your grace,
That ye him never hurte in al his lyve;
And he shal sweren yow, and that as blyve,
He shal no more agilten in this wyse;
But he shal maken, as ye wil devyse,
Of wommen trewe in lovinge al hir lyve,
Wher-so ye wil, of maiden or of wyve,
And forthren yow, as muche as he misseyde
Or in the Rose or elles in Creseyde.”

Out of reverence for the queen (and obeying the Courtly Love injunction to cede to your Mistress’s requests), the god of Love quickly and graciously forgives the narrator, who promptly kneels and delivers his own justification. Chaucer grovellingly points out that he never meant to do any harm. He only repeated what his source authors wrote. His purpose was only ever to promote ‘trouthe in love’ and to warn his readers away from falseness and from vice. ‘This was my menynge’.

By which point I’m realising that this has turned into a court case, or a trial, comparable in structure to the debates about the floure and leefe. It has the same formal structure of accusation and two figures arguing for the prosecution and the defence.

Anyway, Chaucer is still wittering on when Alceste, rather winningly, tells him to shut up. No pleading can influence the forgiveness of a god, which proceeds by his own grace alone. And she then proceeds to itemise the penance Chaucer must undertake:

“Now wol I seyn what penance thou shald do
For thy trespas, and understond hit here:
Thou shalt, whyl that thou livest, yeer by yere,
The moste party of thy tyme spende
In making of a glorious Legende
Of Gode Wommen, maidenes and wyves,
That weren trewe in lovinge al hir lyves;
And telle of false men that hem bitrayen,
That al hir lyf ne doon nat but assayen
How many wommen they may doon a shame;

“For in your world that is now holde [considered] a game.
And thogh thee lyke nat a lover be,
Spek wel of love; this penance yive I thee.

“And to the god of love I shal so preye,
That he shal charge his servants, by any weye,
To forthren thee, and wel thy labour quyte.”

And she concludes his penance with a sudden surprising reference to the real world.

“Go now thy wey, this penance is but lyte.
And whan this book is maad, yive hit the quene
On my behalfe, at Eltham, or at Shene.”

Chaucer is grovellingly grateful. The god of Love is amused and tells him of the high ancestry of this forgiving queen, for the first time explaining why it is Alceste of all ancient women who accompanies him. It is because, according to legend, Alcestis was the wife of Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly. To prolong his life, she offered to die in his stead. Later she was rescued from hell by Hercules.

Thus she is an eminently fitting figure to herald a book about feminine loyalty and ‘trouthe’ unto death. What is not in any ancient version of the story is the association the poet goes on to make between Alceste, queen of women, and the daisy, queen of flowers whose colours, as we observed above, she is dressed in (green and white and gold).

The god of Love concludes the vision with two points: first, he indicates (as mentioned above) that all nineteen of the unnamed escorts of Queen Alceste should appear in this poem he has to write. Lastly, he tells Chaucer to start with Cleopatra. He gives no strong reason, just the general thought:

“For lat see now what man that lover be,
Wol doon so strong a peyne for love as she.”

‘Let’s see what man would ever suffer for love as much as she did!’ In other words, Cleopatra is arguably the most eminent example from the ancient world of a woman who died for love.

The Legend of Cleopatra, approach

And she hir deeth receyveth, with good chere,
For love of Antony, that was hir so dere.

Well, after all the buildup (the Prologue is about 800 lines long), the actual legend of Cleopatra is disarmingly short, a mere 126 lines long.

I’ve read the several Plutarch biographies which underpin modern knowledge of Antony and Cleopatra (Julius Caesar, Antony) and Suetonius’s life of Augustus, as well as half a dozen histories of the period but there’s not much point applying them here. This is an entertainingly cartoon version of the story, short and simple with sweet medieval details and phrasing thrown in.

In fact this lack of historical rigour is something the author was conscious of and expresses through the god of Love, who is made to explicitly order Chaucer to keep his legends short and sweet:

“I wot wel that thou mayest nat al hit ryme,
That swiche lovers diden in hir tyme;
It were so long to reden and to here;
Suffyceth me, thou make in this manere,
That thou reherce of al hir lyf the grete,
After thise olde auctours listen to trete.
For who-so shal so many a storie telle,
Sey shortly, or he shal to longe dwelle.”

“I know well that you may not it all rhyme,
What such lovers did in their time,
It were too long to read and to hear.
Suffices me, you write in this manner,
That you rehearse of all their life the great,
Following what those old authors liked to treat.
For whoso shall so many a story tell,
Should say shortly or he shall too long dwell.”

The Legend of Cleopatra, plot summary

After the deeth of Tholomee the king, regned his daughter, quene Cleopataras. Out of Rome was sent a senatour to rule Egypt and he was named Antonius. He abandoned his legal wife, the sister of Octavian, because he wanted another wife: ‘For whiche he took with Rome and Cesar stryf’.

Antonius was brought to such a rage and tied himself in a noose (the noose of fate), ‘Al for the love of Cleopataras, That al the world he sette at no value.’

Cleopataras loved this knight for his ‘persone and of gentilesse, And of discrecioun and hardinesse’. So they got married.

The narrator complains that, as he has so many stories to write, he doesn’t have time ‘The wedding and the feste to devyse’ so he’ll get right to the point:

And forthy to th’effect than wol I skippe,
And al the remenant, I wol lete hit slippe.

Octavian was infuriated by this marriage and so led a host of brave Romans against Antonius.

Interestingly, the longest passage in this short poem is a vivid if cartoony description of a battle at sea, the decisive Battle of Actium. The description keeps talking about ‘he’ as if referring to one person, but translations indicate it is a generic pronoun, like ‘one’, and best translated as ‘they’, thus describing the behaviour of countless sailors in incidents from the battle.

And in the see hit happed hem to mete —
Up goth the trompe — and for to shoute and shete,
And peynen hem to sette on with the sonne.
With grisly soun out goth the grete gonne,
And heterly they hurtlen al at ones,
And fro the top doun cometh the grete stones.

In goth the grapnel so ful of crokes
Among the ropes, and the shering-hokes.
In with the polax presseth he and he;
Behind the mast beginneth he to flee,
And out agayn, and dryveth him over-borde;
He stingeth him upon his speres orde;
He rent the sail with hokes lyke a sythe;
He bringeth the cuppe, and biddeth hem be blythe;
He poureth pesen upon the hacches slider;
With pottes ful of lym they goon to-gider;

And thus the longe day in fight they spende
Til, at the laste, as every thing hath ende,
Anthony is shent, and put him to the flighte,
And al his folk to-go, that best go mighte.

As:

And in the sea it happened that they meet —
Up sounds the trumpet — and to shout and beat,
And urged them to set on with the sun.
With grisly sound out booms the great gun,
And fiercely they hurtled all at once,
And from the top down came the great stones.

In goes the grapnel, so full of crooks,
Among the ropes, and the shearing-hooks.
In with the poleaxe presses one and another;
Behind the mast one begins to flee,
And out again, and drives him overboard.

One stabs himself upon his own spear;
One tears the sail with hooks like a scythe;
One brings a cup, and bids them to be blithe;
One pours out peas, so on the deck they slither;
With pot full of lime they fall together;

And thus the long day in fight they spend
Til, at the last, as every thing has end,
Anthony is beat and put to flight,
And all his folk run off as best they might.

Chaucer follows the sources so much as to say that it was the flight of Cleopatra’s fleet which plunged Anthony into despair but jumps over all the events which followed in order to get straight to his suicide. He laments the day that he was born and runs himself through the heart with his sword. Unlike Plutarch and Shakespeare’s Antony, Chaucer’s one conveniently dies on the spot.

Knowing she will get no forgiveness from Caesar, Cleopatra flees back to Egypt, ‘for drede and for distresse.’ And now we come to her suicide, but first Chaucer repeats the moral mentioned in the Prologue, that all men who make great boasts about the sacrifices they’ve made for love, should observe how it’s really done.

Ye men, that falsely sweren many an ooth
That ye wol die, if that your love be wrooth,
Here may ye seen of women such a trouthe!

Cleopatra is so bitterly pained with lost love and despair that she gets her workmen to build a shrine with all the rubies and fine stones of Egypt. She has Antony’s body laid in it, along with plenty of with ‘spycerye’. Then has a pit built next to it and gets all the serpents that she owns put into it.

And then Cleopatra delivers the point, the message, in an extended speech – for she says that on the day they were married she swore an oath to be with Antony night and day, and as he suffered wele or wo, to accompany him, to bear all with him, ‘lyf or deeth’.

“And this same covenant, while me lasteth breath,
I will fulfill, and that shall well be seen.”

She made an oath, a covenant, a promise and now – far excelling most women and all men – she will fulfil it unto death. And so she jumps naked into the pit full of snakes (!). Immediately the snakes began to bite her and she received her death ‘with good chere.’

“Was never unto hir love a trewer quene.”

Thoughts

It’s not worth wasting time pointing out the many facts Chaucer has simply dropped, he’s in a hurry to get to the only bit that matters for the purposes of his royal commission, the moment of Cleopataras’s outstanding fidelity to love:

And forthy to th’effect than wol I skippe,
And al the remenant, I wol lete hit slippe.

True to his commission, Chaucer has exonerated Cleopatra. She is not at all the wicked, oriental seductress, the Egyptian whore who seduced a noble Roman away from his family and duty, as depicted in Augustan propaganda and later male, Roman accounts.

On the contrary, in this brisk telling of her story Cleopatra emerges as an epitome, a role model of fidelity unto death, a type of fidelity no man could ever aspire to. And not just included in a collection of loyal women, but carefully and deliberately placed as the first in the list, the loyalest and truest of all the loyal and true women of antiquity. A role model for love.

Other medieval reviews

For practical purposes I date the Middle Ages from the Norman Conquest of 1066 until about 1500, and so exclude all texts from and histories about the Dark Ages, thus excluding my reviews of Anglo-Saxon poetry or the Icelandic sagas which, although written in the 13th century, refer to events before the Conquest.

Books & Boots

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

The Mixture as Before

Bertie struggles to find the right word

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

Jeeves’s literary quotes

Jeeves and clothes

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Clash of registers

The village constable

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

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Bertie forgets his words

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The Woosters

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Abbreviations

One syllable

One letter

Binge

a) Party

b) More general event

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Aunt Dahlia requests

Gussie leaves for Brinkley Court

Bertie is summoned to Brinkley Court

The dinner refusal

Aunt Dahlia suggests suicide

1. Bertie roasts Tuppy

2. The drunken prize-giving

3. The girls get engaged to the wrong men

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At long last, Bertie asks Jeeves

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The Legend of Cleopatra by Geoffrey Chaucer (1386)

Courtly love

A ‘legendary’

Unfinished