It is always embarrassing for a young man of sensibility to realize that he is making a priceless ass of himself.
(Poor Ronnie Fish, so oversensitive, so easily offended)
‘Has he shown any aptitude for journalism?’ This seemed to amuse Lady Julia. ‘My dear man,’ she said, tickled by the quaint conceit, ‘no member of my family has ever shown any aptitude for anything except eating and sleeping.’
(Lady Julia Fish displaying her superior aristocratic attitudes)
‘He tried to break my neck once,’ said Pilbeam, throwing out the information for what it was worth.
‘And of course that forms a bond, doesn’t it?’ said Lady Julia sympathetically.
(Nothing fazes the true aristocrat)
‘Wheels within wheels.’
(Monty Bodkin’s catchphrase)
‘Ha h’r’m’ph!’ said Sir Gregory, rather neatly summing up the sentiment of the meeting.
A sequel
‘Heavy Weather’ is the fifth novel in P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle series. It is a direct sequel to its predecessor ‘Summer Lightning’, following straight on from that work’s events, starting only about 5 days later, continuing the central storyline, and featuring most of the same characters in pretty much the same plights.
In their original editions, many of Wodehouse’s novels contained a brief synopsis. This is how the synoptic introduction to ‘Heavy Weather’ reads:
As a young man the Honourable Galahad Threepwood had earned the reputation for being wild and irresponsible, and the passing of thirty years had done little to diminish his piratical, die-hard spirit. Although he no longer organized bread-throwing contests within the gilded halls of Mayfair, he kept in close touch with his former days by compiling a book of reminiscences which, it was averred, contained more tales of the youthful escapades of Bishops and Cabinet Ministers than any book of its kind.
A deputation of his victims, headed by his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, did its utmost to suppress this book, but Gally was adamant. He would, he said, withdraw his manuscript only if his nephew, Ronnie Fish, were allowed to marry the charming chorus girl, Sue Brown. And so a bargain was struck.
All went well until Lady Julia Fish, Ronnie’s mother, arrived on the scene. She, good woman, did not appreciate the terms of the arrangement, and pointed out in no indefinite manner that it was not her intention to have her son’s future happiness sacrificed upon the altar of other people’s reputations, and straightway forbade the union.
Summary of Summer Lightning
To expand that a little, the previous novel, ‘Summer Lightning’, concluded, after a good deal of comic complication, with Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood using the threat of publishing his memoirs to blackmail 1) his sister, Lady Constance, into giving her permission for the marriage of her nephew Ronnie Fish, to the pretty chorus girl, Sue Brown, and 2) his brother, Lord Emsworth, into releasing Ronnie Fish’s trust fund money early so Ronnie has the wherewithall to marry.
The deal unravels
In the first pages of this novel that deal unravels ,for several reasons. 1) Ronnie’s mother, the redoubtable Julia Fish, returns from abroad and arrives at Blandings Castle telling all and sundry that the marriage is unacceptable.
‘Am I mad?’ [Lady Julia] cried. ‘Or is everybody else? You seriously mean that I am supposed to acquiesce in my son ruining his life simply in order to keep Galahad from publishing his Reminiscences?’
2) The publisher of the famous memoirs, Lord Tilbury, owner of the publishing conglomerate Mammoth Publishing, is infuriated to have been let down by Gally. He was hoping the memoirs would be a publishing sensation, and reckons he’s lost out on at least £20,000. So, also, sets off to Blandings in order to either talk Gally back into giving permission to publish them or, if pushed, to pay someone to steal them for him.
But most importantly 3) Ronnie himself loses heart. Despite all its superficially comic mannerisms, I found this a sad and rather dispiriting book, because at its core is the inability of Ronnie and his lady love, Sue, to be happy. Or their gift for being repeatedly unhappy. In fact Sue spends most of the book moping around and crying and, after a while, the reader feels like joining her.
Ronnie’s jealousy
The immediate cause of her unhappiness that short, pink-faced Ronnie can be insanely jealous, is, to quote Uncle Gally:
‘a blasted jealous half-wit, always ready to make heavy weather about nothing.’
In ‘Summer Lightning’ he was jealous of the private detective Percy Pilbeam who he foolishly thought was having an affair with Sue because he came across them at the same table in a nightclub, unaware that Pilbeam had been creepily stalking Sue and had only just sat down with her. Now he is going to have a new object of his jealousy….
Enter Monty Bodkin
In this book a new character is introduced whose function is to cause recurring breakups of the happy couple. This is the dimwitted, useless young man, Montague ‘Monty’ Bodkin, and it is this ‘popinjay’ that Ronnie foolishly comes to believe Sue is really in love with. It doesn’t help that Monty and Sue were actually engaged, years ago, when she was little more than a girl (aged 17).
Wodehouse contrives several scenes designed to give Ronnie the completely erroneous impression that they are still an item, with the result that Ronnie repeatedly switches from being passionately ardent for Sue, to being presented with yet another (erroneous) piece of evidence that she still loves Monty, and so switching his manner to being cold, formal and distant.
With the result that, with what comes to feel like monotonous regularity, Sue has scenes with kindly old Galahad where she tells her sorrows and bursts into tears.
Why Gally has a soft spot for Sue
Gally is so fervently for her union with Ronnie because thirty years earlier he, Gally, had a passion for Sue’s mother, the music hall performer Dolly Henderson. He recognises the features of his old flame in sweet young Sue and hence his warm avuncular support for her, standing up to the redoubtable aunts, Constance and Julia, and being there for Sue every time Ronnie goes off in a huff.
Monty loves Gertrude
Meanwhile, dim-witted Monty has an agenda of his own. He’s actually worth a fortune i.e. has a guaranteed annual income of £15,00 a year or so. But he is in love with a young lady called Gertrude Butterwick and, as the name suggests, she doesn’t come from posh aristocratic stock but is the daughter of a self-made businessman, J.G. Butterwick of Butterwick, Price, and Mandelbaum, export and import merchants.
So even though Monty has a guaranteed income, this Mr Butterwick has insisted that before he’ll hand over Gertrude in marriage, Monty must prove himself by managing one continuous year in gainful employment.
Monty had been hoping to achieve this by working at Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing Company, but this novel opens with him being given the sack for (stupidly) inserting some advice about how to win a bet about how much whiskey you can fit into Scotch bottles into a children’s magazine. Lord Tilbury had been wanting to fire the useless popinjay and this gives him the perfect excuse.
Monty becomes Lord Emsworth’s secretary
The pivot on which the narrative swivels is that, having been fired, Monty wanders down to the Drones Club (which also appears in all the Jeeves and Wooster stories) where he bumps into Hugo Carmody who was one of the young male leads in ‘Summer Lightning’. When Hugo explains that he has just resigned as Lord Emsworth’s personal secretary, Monty spots an opportunity and pulls family contacts to secure the now-vacant position.
So down to Blandings Castle goes Monty. Along with angry Aunt Julia Fish. And angry Lord Tilbury. To encounter Percy Pilbeam, the private detective, who’s still staying there after being invited down to steal the famous memoirs. And Sue Brown, who’s still staying there from the previous novel. Monty’s arrival triggers the series of misunderstandings which lead to Ronnie’s bouts of jealousy.
The Empress of Blandings
Oh and the pig. If you remember from the first novel, a major sub-plot was Lord Emsworth’s paranoia about his prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings which, in a crazy manoeuvre, Ronnie Fish kidnapped and hid in a remote cottage with the idea that, after a few days, he would be able to reveal the hiding place as the Discoverer and Rescuer of the pig and Lord Emsworth would be so grateful he would happily let him get married (to sweet Sue) and release his legacy.
Inevitably, it didn’t pan out like that with the other young male lead, Hugo Carmody, being the one who discovered the Empress, and then moving it to a temporary hiding place in the caravan of Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s former secretary who, through a series of unfortunate incidents, Lord Emsworthy had sacked in the novel before ‘Summer Lightning’.
This led Gally, Lord Emsworth’s much smarter brother, to decide that Baxter was just the front man for their neighbour, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, who also rears pigs and so is Lord Em’s main rival in the upcoming annual Shewsbury Agricultural Show Best Pig competition. In ‘Summer Lightning’, the pig is restored to its rightful stye, but Gally remains convinced that Sir Gregory is still out to either steal or nobble it, and gets Lord Emsworth to get his pig man, Jas Pirbright, to keep extra guard on it.
This explains why, having had an angry stand-off with Gally in his study at Blandings Castle, Lord Tilbury decides he needs to walk back to the pub in the village (the Emsworth Arms) but is distracted by the strong smell of pig and, when he comes up to the stye where the vast Empress of Blandings is feeding, and sees that she’s trying to get at a potato which has rolled under the metal gate, and picks it up with a view to giving it back to her – he finds himself literally collared, seized by the collar by big strong Pirbright, who leaps to the conclusion that Lord Tilbury is an agent of Sir Gregory sent to poison Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, and so locks him up in the gardeners shed. Which is where, an hour or so later, dim Monty strolling buy, hears his cries and sets him free.
The travelling manuscript
Lord Tilbury isn’t so pleased to be free from captivity by the very ‘popinjay’ he fired about three days earlier BUT he is very interested when Monty reveals that he is now employed as Lord Emsworth’s personal secretary. Ha. Maybe he can be paid to steal the famous manuscript of Gally’s memoirs. Monty drives a hard bargain because, as I’ve mentioned, he needs to be able to show Gertrude Butterwick’s father that he’s been employed for at least a year in one job – so he insists that Tilbury employs him for a full 12 months, which the latter reluctantly agrees to do.
What you have to know is that earlier on, the private investigator Percy Pilbeam had been commissioned by Lady Constance to get his hands on the manuscript as well. So now you have two young men vying to steal the manuscript.
What turns this into farce is that Gally realises various people are after it (realises as much when the Castle butler, Beach, tells him he discovered Pilbeam rifling about in his study) and so decides that, in order to be perfectly safe, he should give it to someone else. And after a bit of thought, settles on the irreproachable Beach, who should be a safe pair of hands.
And Beach is a safe pair of hands right up to the moment when Monty strolls round the corner and discovers Beach reading the famous manuscript in a garden. Monty tries to bribe him to hand it over but Beach backs towards the Castle. Except that on the way, he is spotted by Pilbeam who also tries to cut him off and offer money, but Beach dodges out the way of both of them and makes it back inside.
This is all proving very stressful for Beach, not least because it forces him to disobey direct orders from the master’s guests which goes against the grain and so he is relieved to hand the manuscript over to Ronnie Fish.
The storm breaks
Throughout the book much emphasis has been placed on how scorching hot the weather is. Finally the storm which has been gathering all day breaks in a great downpour. Monty is out walking the grounds and gets soaked. Ronnie sees him coming back to the castle, tells him to get changed and pops round to his room with some warming embrocation. Unfortunately, when he sees Monty with his wet shirt off, it reveals to Ronnie the fact he has a massive tattoo reading SUE on his chest, which of course another of Ronnie’s surly jealous moods. Monty makes a feeble attempt to explain it away as initials standing for ‘Sarah Ursula Ebbsmith’ but Ronnie isn’t having any of it.
Ronnie’s latest coldness is the last straw for poor Sue. He is so cold that she says maybe they better call the whole thing off.
They stared at one another. Ronnie’s eyes were hot and miserable. But they did not look hot and miserable to Sue. She read in them only dislike the sullen, trapped dislike of a man tied to a girl for whom he has ceased to feel any affection, so that merely to speak to her is an affliction to his nerves. She drew a deep breath, and walked to the window.
‘Sorry,’ said Ronnie gruffly. ‘Shouldn’t have said that.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ said Sue. ‘It’s better to come right out with these things.’
She traced little circles with her finger on the glass A heavy silence filled the room.
‘I think we might as well chuck it, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Just as you say,’ said Ronnie.
‘All right,’ said Sue.
At moments like this the book is not funny any more. It feels genuinely sad.
Anyway, still under the misapprehension that things are fine between Ronnie and Sue, Monty goes to find him on the pool room and explains that he needs Gally’s manuscript in order to give it to Lord Tilbury in order to get a job for a year in order to marry the woman that he loves. Like an imbecile, Ronnie thinks he is referring to Sue but, what the hell, he’ll show everyone what a gentleman he is, and so he hands over the famous manuscript to Monty who scampers off happy as Larry.
Sue comes in from the terrace and confides her sorrows to nice Galahad. Gally is infuriated and storms in on Ronnie to tell him what an idiot he’s being, how Sue loves nobody but him, and to stop being an infernal ass.
Well, you’d have thought that, with the central love story pretty much resolved, the novel would trickle to an end, but far from it. There’s 70 pages of complications still to go, which I’ll summarise briefly. They almost all concern the seemingly endless quest by four or five different players to get their hands on the wretched manuscript.
Bodkin had hired Pilbeam to find the book but, having been given it by Ronnie, tells the detective he is no longer needed, in the process revealing where he has hidden the manuscript (under his bed). Angered, Pilbeam steals it, planning to hold an auction for it between Tilbury and the Connie-Parsloe syndicate i.e. Sir Gregory and Lady Constance.
Bodkin plans to walk to the pub and hide the manuscript there but it almost immediately starts raining so he pops into a handy shed with good clean tiling. He stashes the manuscript in among some straw. Back in the Castle, Pilbeam tells Lord Emsworth that it was Bodkin who released Tilbury (from imprisonment in the potting shed, after Pirbright found him attempting to ‘poison’ the Empress) so Lord Em promptly fires Bodkin.
Pilbeam is summoned to see Lady Constance and fortifies himself with a few glasses of champagne on an empty stomach. After ten minutes he’s sloshed and so the interview goes badly. Connie becomes frankly insulting, and so a drunk and angry Pilbeam staggers out of the room determined to sell the book to Tilbury. He phones Tilbury at the Emsworth Arms and promises to deliver it but first heads to bed to sleep off the booze.
While Pilbeam is passed out, Lord Emsworth insists (against Pirbright’s advice) on moving the pig to a new location (to forestall any attempts to kidnap her) and it turns out to be none other than… the shed where Pilbeam had hidden the manuscript. As you might expect, the different characters then discover that the Empress has eaten the manuscript.
As with so many Wodehouse novels, the plot in the last 50 pages becomes increasingly clotted and I found it hard to take onboard the endless abrupt turns of events, and hard to care. When Pilbeam realises the manuscript he took such trouble to hide has been eaten, he hurries to meet Connie and Parsloe-Parsloe and extract money from them before they find out. He claims to have found and burned the manuscript and so, half disbelieving, they start to write him out a cheque for the job they wanted doing, at which point Lord Emsworth comes running in, panicking and telling Beach to phone the vet, because his beloved pig has just eaten a load of paper. When he hands over some of the said paper, everyone in the room realises it’s the famous manuscript and so Lady Constance and Sir Gregory promptly put their checkbooks away.
More or less kicked out, Pilbeam then has the bright idea of trying to sell his knowledge of the manuscript’s whereabouts to his original sponsor, Lord Tilbury, to he rushes down to the Emsworth Arms. Tilbury is just as sceptical as Constance and Gregory were but, when Pilbeam draws him a map of the potting shed’s location, he reluctantly writes Pilbeam a cheque for £1,000, then heads off into the night to find the shed and his precious manuscript.
However, angry Bodkin is standing right behind him, snatches the cheque out of his hand, and tears it up in front of him. Pilbeam is tempted to pop him except Monty is 8 inches taller than him and stronger so he stomps off into another room at the pub. Monty then phones up Lord Emsworth and warns him that someone (Lord Tilbury) is heading for the Empress’s hideout and to put Pirbright on double extra alert.
But then Monty has a few drinks and starts, under the influence of the pub’s strong beer, to feel a little sorry for Pilbeam. When he tore up the cheque it was purely performative, he imagined Pilbeam would simply get Tilbury to write out another one; he didn’t realise that was a one-off opportunity.
Then a chance remark of the barmaid gives him a brainwave. She is bragging to another customer that the oily Pilbeam is actually head of a huge detective agency with hundreds of experienced assistants. Monty runs into the snug where Pilbeam is nursing a drink and overcomes the other’s anger with a brilliant solution: he (Monty) has loads of money, what he doesn’t have is a job, a job he can hold down for a year and thus fulfil the requirement of Old Man Butterwick. So he makes Pilbeam a proposition: he, Monty, will pay Pilbeam to employ him. Suddenly Pilbeam is back in the money, £1,000 up, and hires him on the spot. Both men are sorted.
But there’s still more, as the plot drags on. Lord Emsworth is dragged into a room and is being harangued by his sisters when a mud-spattered Lord Tilbury is brought in. Tilbury had innocently followed Pilbeam’s directions to the new pig sty which was, of course, being super zealously guarded by big Pirbright who promptly jumped on him, squashing him into 4 inches of post-rainstorm mud, which is why he is barely recognisable when dragged into the Castle drawing room.
When Lord Tilbury finally makes himself known, he is shattered to be told that the manuscript he’s been through all these tribulations to get his hands on has been eaten. But Gally invites him to stay up at the castle, not just tonight but to come on an extended stay, and tells Beach to order his stuff brought up from the hotel, a room made ready, and a nice warm bath to be run.
Gally and Sue then appear. First of all Gally makes a spirited case that, contra Constance and Julia, Sue is a fine woman and any young man would be lucky to have her; before going on to inform the Emsworth siblings that Ronnie has the pig in his car and will drive off with it if Emsworth doesn’t consent to the marriage and cough up at least some of Ronnie’s legacy. So Lord Emsworth hurriedly writes a cheque to get his pig back, the pig is removed from Ronnie’s car, and the happy couple finally, at last, drive off towards London to get married.
The ending is sweet. Gally knows it was Beach who helped the young couple kidnap the Empress (for the second time; Ronnie stole her in the first book, if you remember, also with Beach’s reluctant help) and tells him he’s done a man’s work. Then reflects on how happy he is to have been able to help lovely Dolly Henderson’s daughter. And the last sentences go to the pig.
The Empress turned on her side and closed her eyes with a contented little sigh. The moon beamed down upon her noble form. It looked like a silver medal.
Thoughts
This novel felt like a slog. I was glad to get to the end. If you like brainless jollity I suppose it is very well done but I began to feel manipulated. The moment when Monty takes his shirt off and reveals a big tattoo SUE on his chest, in front of Ronnie, who he knows is quick to jealousy, is wildly improbable. Wodehouse tells us Monty sees it every day and so just forgot it was there. You buy that? Me neither. It’s neither plausible nor particularly funny.
There are plenty of funny moments in the story but, beneath them, the narrative started to feel contrived and manipulating; the last 50 pages felt like a real grind. And I began to feel really sorry for Sue. She seems to be in tears almost all the time. I began to feel that Wodehouse was bullying her.
The pig plot was hilarious the first time it appeared in the short story ‘Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ Now, stretched out to novel length for the second time, it begins to feel formulaic. It certainly no longer has the shock of the unexpected. Like the palavah around the controversial memoirs, it feels entirely predictable and very, very, long drawn-out. Hard not to find yourself muttering, ‘Oh just get on with it, already!’
Cast
- Lord Emsworth, the ninth Earl of Blandings – ‘an elderly gentleman of quiet tastes’ he is, in fact, 60 – tall dim aristo, proud owner of the prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings
- Lady Constance Keeble – his sister, fierce
- The Honourable Galahad Threepwood – 57, their brother, small and dapper, had a disreputable youth which he has written up in his memoirs, when a dashing young man about town in the nineties had wanted to marry Sue’s mother
- George Alexander Pyke, first Viscount Tilbury aka Lord Tilbury – founder and proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company, publisher his nasty little scandal sheet, Society Spice, and its nasty little editor, Percy Pilbeam – a ‘stout, stumpy man’, ‘Napoleonic of aspect, being short and square and stumpy and about twenty-five pounds overweight’
- Lady Julia Fish – sister of Lord Emsworth and Lady Constance Keeble, ‘a handsome middle-aged woman of the large blonde type, of a personality both breezy and commanding’
- Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish – her only son, short and pink-faced and touchy, possessor of a real inferiority complex – ‘a bird of strong feelings and keen sensibilities, old Ronnie’, engaged to Sue Brown the chorus girl but keeps getting irrationally jealous and breaking it off
- Montague ‘Monty’ Bodkin – a holiday acquaintance in Biarritz persuades Lord Tilbury to employ him on one of his papers but he turns out to be useless and is fired – ‘rather an attractive popinjay, as popinjays go. He was tall and slender and lissom, and many people considered him quite good-looking’ – also turns out to be the nephew of…
- Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe – 52, neighbour of Lord Emsworth and rival in prize flower, vegetable and pig competitions, uncle of Monty Bodkin, owns a pig called Pride of Matchingham
- Huge Carmody – young man, one of the two male leads in ‘Summer Lightning’ who only has a walk-on part here, telling recently fired Monty about the vacant position as Lord Emsworth’s secretary
- Sue Brown – a very pretty, tiny girl, with an enchanting smile and big blue eyes
- P. Frobisher Pilbeam – former editor of Lord Tilbury’s scandal sheet, Society Spice, and now a private detective, originally hired by Lord Emsworth to find his kidnapped pig
- Beach – the butler, really big and fat, ‘mountainous’, ‘vast’, with a ‘moonlike face’
- Voules – the chauffeur
- Jas Pirbright – Lord Emsworth’s pig-man
- Robinson – taxi-driver in Market Blandings
- Mr Webber – the Blandings vet
Detectives
Given that the head of a detective agency is a fairly central character and that there’s a certain amount of cloak and dagger stuff (though not much, to be honest), it’s no surprise that Wodehouse slips various detective references into the text, not forgetting the obligatory reference to Sherlock Holmes. Just to amplify the theme, Wodehouse makes Beach the butler a big fan of detective books.
On his marriage to the daughter of Donaldson’s Dog-Biscuits, of Long Island City, N.Y., and his subsequent departure for America, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s younger son, who had assembled in the days of his bachelorhood what was pretty generally recognized as the finest collection of mystery thrillers in Shropshire, had bequeathed his library to Beach; and the latter in his hours of leisure had been making something of a study of the literature of Crime.
Like a lot of themes in Wodehouse, it’s surprising that this isn’t developed more or somehow taken to more farcical extremes. Instead there are just a few jokey references, which are interesting but not really tied in to the plot.
He [Beach] wished that life were as the writers of the detective stories which he had become so addicted portrayed it. In those, no matter what obstacles Fate might interpose in the shape of gangs, shots in the night, underground cellars, sinister Chinamen, poisoned asparagus and cobras down the chimney, the hero always got his girl.
Funny lines
‘I regard the entire personnel of the ensembles of our musical comedy theatres as—if you will forgive me being Victorian for a moment—painted hussies.’
‘They’ve got to paint.’
‘Well, they needn’t huss.’
The whole point of the Eton manner, as of a shotgun, is that you have to be at the right end of it.
‘Well, I will merely content myself with remarking that of all the young poops I ever met…’
‘He is not a poop!’ said Sue.
‘My dear,’ insisted the Hon. Galahad, ‘I was brought up among poops. I spent my formative years among poops. I have been a member of dubs which consisted exclusively of poops. You will allow me to recognize a poop when I see one.’
Beau Brummell himself could not have remained spruce after lying in four inches of mud with a six-foot pig-man on top of him.
‘I consider you a snob and a mischief maker, but may be quite sure I shall not dream of saying so.’
Aunts
Monty explains to Sue about posh aunts:
‘When you get to know that family better, you’ll realize that there are dozens of aunts you’ve not heard of yet—far-flung aunts scattered all over England, and each the leading blister of her particular county.’
Recurring comparisons…
It feels like Napoleon is referred to in pretty much every Wodehouse story…
Almost immediately Psmith saw what Napoleon would have done in this crisis.
(Leave It To Psmith)
‘Liz,’ said Mr. Cootes, and his voice was husky with such awe as some young officer of Napoleon’s staff might have felt on hearing the details of the latest plan of campaign,
(Leave It To Psmith)
From time to time, as he paced the tent devoted to the exhibition of vegetables, he might have been seen to bite his lip, and his eye had something of that brooding look which Napoleon’s must have worn at Waterloo.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)
As a general rule, Lord Emsworth was an early and a sound sleeper, one of the few qualities which he shared with Napoleon Bonaparte being the ability to slumber the moment his head touched the pillow.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)
He made his decision. Better to cease to be a Napoleon than be a Napoleon in exile.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)
Mac had many admirable qualities, but not tact. He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.
(Summer Lightning)
And ‘Heavy Weather’ continues the habit:
[Lord Tilbury] rose from his chair and began to pace the room. Always Napoleonic of aspect, being short and square and stumpy and about twenty-five pounds overweight, he looked not unlike a Napoleon taking his morning walk at St. Helena.
(Heavy Weather)
Upon most men listening to this eloquent appeal there might have crept a certain impatience. Lord Tilbury, however, listened to it as though to some grand sweet song. Like Napoleon, he had had some lucky breaks in his time, but he could not recall one luckier than this…
(Heavy Weather)
Monty was plucking feebly at the lapel of his coat. This was new stuff to him. What with being invited to become a sort of Napoleon of Crime and hearing himself addressed as Lord Tilbury’s dear boy, his head was swimming.
(Heavy Weather)
Comparisons with Cleopatra tend to crop up regularly:
Though genial enough when she got her way, on the rare occasions when people attempted to thwart her she was apt to comport herself in a manner reminiscent of Cleopatra on one of the latter’s bad mornings.
(Leave It To Psmith)
Here is one [photo] of which my friends have been good enough to speak in terms of praise—as Cleopatra, the warrior-queen of Egypt, at the Pasadena Gas-Fitters’ Ball. It brings out what is generally considered my most effective feature, my nose.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)
Lady Constance intervened. Her eye was aflame, and she spoke like Cleopatra telling an Ethiopian slave where he got off.
(Summer Lightning)
The sight of Lady Constance, staring haughtily from a high-backed chair like Cleopatra about to get down to brass tacks with an Ethiopian slave, merely entertained him.
(Heavy Weather)
And the Crusaders:
‘Fetch ’em!’ said Mr. Schnellenhamer in the voice a Crusader might have used in giving the signal to start against the Paynim.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)
Had that call been made, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, would have answered it with as prompt a ‘Bless my Soul! Of course. Certainly!’’ as any of his Crusader ancestors.
(Summer Lightning)
‘It’s wonderful to watch you in action I admit–one seems to hear the bugles blowing for the Crusades and the tramp of the mailed feet of a hundred steel-clad ancestors but there’s no getting away from it that you do put people’s back up.’
(Heavy Weather)
He is fond of the Mona Lisa:
Lady Constance sat rigid in her chair. Her fine eyes were now protruding slightly, and her face was drawn. This and not the Mona Lisa’s, you would have said, looking at her, was the head on which all the sorrows of the world had fallen.
(Summer Lightning)
There was an infinite sadness in Monty Bodkin’s gaze. He looked like a male Mona Lisa.
(Heavy Weather)
I doubt if there’s any wider significance or symbolism in any these references. Rather the reverse: they are extremely obvious historical figures, clichés of history, and so can be safely used for comic effect in a popular entertainment.
… and phrases
As well as recurring figures from History, Wodehouse also has a few phrases which feel like they crop up in every book:
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.
Let the dead past bury its dead.
Paradise enow.
When Monty says:
‘Not long ago I became betrothed to a girl, and her ass of a father won’t let me marry her unless I get a job and hold it down for a year. And, dash it, my every effort to do so seems to prove null and void, if null and void is the expression I want.’
‘If it’s the expression I want’ – this wondering whether he’s using the right phrase is a really strong feature of Bertie Wooster’s speech. Coming across it in other people’s mouths, along with the same kind of cultural references, the same phrases and sometimes the same jokes, makes you realise how recycled and fundamentally samey Wodehouses’s text are.
The south of France
I’m fascinated by the way the South of France suddenly became fashionable in the early 1920s.
‘I’ve lost touch with Blandings a bit. It must be three years since I was there. Somehow, ever since this business of going to the South of France in the summer started. I’ve never seemed to be able to get down.’
Film
By 1929 cinema and the movies were, of course, a major part of the cultural landscape, everyone went to them, everyone knew the names of the stars, and so Wodehouse can confidently make casual cultural references to them.
An astonishing change had come over the demeanour of P. Frobisher Pilbeam. One has seen much the same thing, of course, in the film of Jekyll and Hyde, but on a much less impressive scale.
In fact within the Blandings Castle saga, Lord Emsworth’s second son, Freddie Threepwood, is made a complete slave to the movies, recognising movie scenarios in every situation and likely to quote movie dialogue whenever triggered, much to the irritation of his interlocutors.
Credit
‘Heavy Weather’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1933 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.
Books & Boots 