Gussie's Predicament

FROM STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES, BY SIR P G WODEHOUSE KBE

BERTIE: "But what's happened?"

I faltered, if faltered's the word.

JEEVES: "I regret to inform you, sir, that Miss Bassett has insisted on Mr Fink-Nottle [Gussie] adopting a vegetarian diet. His mood is understandably disgruntled and rebellious."

I tottered.

In my darkest hour I had never anticipated anything as bad as this.

You wouldn't think it to look at him, because he's small and shrimplike and never puts on weight, but Gussie loves food.

Watching him tucking into his rations at the Drones [Club], a tapeworm would raise its hat respectfully, knowing that it was in the presence of a master.

Cut him off, therefore, from the roasts and boileds and particularly from cold steak and kidney pie, a dish of which he is inordinately fond, and you turned him into something fit for treasons, strategems and spoils, as the fellow said.

First published in June, 2013.

Belloc on Wodehouse

Hilaire Belloc

"In the course of a broadcast I gave, as the best writer of English now alive, Mr P G Wodehouse."

"His object is comedy in the most modern sense of that word: that is, his object is to present the laughable, and he does this with such mastery and skill that he nearly always approaches, and often reaches, perfection."

"There is yet another perfection which I note in him. It is one which most moderns [sic], I think, would not regard as a perfection at all."

"Well! I differ from them. It is the repeated use of one set of characters."

"The English country house and its setting, the aged absent-minded earl, the young ladies and gentlemen with too much leisure or too little, too much money, or (contrariwise) embarrassment - the club of the young, idle, and very-much-to-be-liked young Englishmen of the wealthier sort and the immortal, vivid glimpses of suburban life - all these form one set of "property" scenes..."

"... If in, say, fifty years Jeeves and any other of that great company - but in particular Jeeves - shall have faded, then what we shall have so long called England will no longer be."
  

HILAIRE BELLOC (1870-1953)

First published in July, 2011.

Bertie and Spode

Roderick Spode, Earl of Sidcup

FROM MUCH OBLIGED, JEEVES, BY SIR P G WODEHOUSE KBE, FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1971

"Oh, hullo, Spode, hullo. There you are, what? Splendid."

"Can I have a word with you, Wooster?"

"Of course, of course. Have several."

He did not speak for a minute or so, filling in the time by subjecting me to close scrutiny.

"I can't understand it", he said. "How Madeline can contemplate marrying a man like you ... as far as I can see, Wooster, you are without attraction of any kind. Intelligence? No. Looks? No. Efficiency? No".

"She is marrying you in the hope of reforming you, and let me tell you, Wooster, that if you disappoint that hope, you will be sorry ...

... you will probably think you are safe from me when you are doing your stretch in Wormwood Scrubs for larceny, but I shall be waiting for you when you come out, and I shall tear you limb from limb. And," he added ... "dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots".

"All that can be said of you is that you don't wear a moustache. They tell me you did grow one once, but mercifully shaved it off. That is to your credit, but it is a small thing to weigh in the balance against all your other defects".

First published in August, 2013.

Wodehouse Gems: III

BERTIE AND THE RT HON A B FILMER

Aunt Agatha to Bertie: "I want to have a word with you before you meet Mr Filmer."

"Who?"

"Mr Filmer, the Cabinet Minister. He is staying in the house. Surely even you must have heard of Mr Filmer?"

"Oh, rather," I said, though as a matter of fact the bird was completely unknown to me.

This man Filmer, you must understand, was not one of those men who are lightly kept from the tea-table. 

A hearty trencherman, and particularly fond of his five o'clock couple of cups and bite of muffin, he had until this afternoon always been well up among the leaders in the race for the food-trough. 

If one thing was certain, it was that only the machinations of some enemy could be keeping him from being in the drawing-room now, complete with nose-bag.

First published in March, 2012.

By Jeeves, what a Find!

PATRICK KIDD, DIARY EDITOR OF THE TIMES NEWSPAPER, WRITES ABOUT SIR P G WODEHOUSE KBE

Asked late in life for the secret to being a writer, PG Wodehouse flippantly said: “I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.”

Sixty years earlier, however, the young Wodehouse needed more constructive advice.

The response that led him into a career as creator of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves and a menagerie of other characters can be revealed after the discovery of a letter he wrote at the age of 16.

“How can one become a journalist?” asked “Mr Wodehouse, of Dulwich” in a letter to Chums, a boys’ weekly newspaper, published on May 18, 1898.

It received a lengthy reply from the editor that began, slightly pompously, “only if Providence has willed it” before giving more helpful tips.

The reply to Wodehouse in Chums magazine on May 18, 1898.

“The first requisite is not only that a man shall be able to write about the things he sees and hears, but that he shall be able to write about them in such a way that other people will be interested in his work,” the editor continued.

“If he have this gift, the rest is easy."

“If a man can write, editors will soon discover the fact and wish to employ him. It is the man who cannot write who is the nuisance to them."

"He deluges them and the waste-paper basket with his hopeless productions.”

The editor suggested that Wodehouse study the columns of “some journal that he likes” and attempt his own pieces.

“[They] should be brief; they should be bright; and they should deal with some subject a little out of the common,” he concluded.

Assuming that this is the Wodehouse, who was a student at Dulwich College at the time, the advice worked.

He soon started to write for The Alleynian, the college magazine, and his first bylined piece, a poem entitled On the New Football Ground, was published in 1899.

It had long been thought that this poem was the first time that Wodehouse’s name appeared beneath his own writing in print, but it is claimed in the latest Wooster Sauce, journal of the British PG Wodehouse Society, that the letter to Chums should be considered his debut.

Indeed, Don Taylor, whose research is reported in the journal, suggests that his debut may even have come a year earlier, with a piece of literary criticism about a short story in Chums.

“A letter reaches me from Mr Wodehouse,” the Chums editor wrote on March 17, 1897.

"I think that Rogues of the Fiery Cross is the best story I have ever read. It knocks spots off In Quest of Sheba’s Treasure, which I didn’t think was quite up to Chums’ usual standard’.”

It went on to ask advice on how to lose weight and whether 11.30pm was a “harmful” bedtime.

The editor replied that a couple of late nights a week were fine for “any lad under 21” as long as he was in bed by 10.30 on the other five.

“Until recently we believed that Mr Wodehouse’s first published words appeared in The Alleynian but now it seems that he may have started a year or two earlier,” Mr Taylor wrote in Wooster Sauce.

Of the letter in 1897, which did not include an address, he wrote: “We can’t be certain that this is PG Wodehouse but the date is plausible.”

He suggested that the careers advice letter was more certain.

“The mention of Dulwich is pretty conclusive.”

A decline in the family finances meant that Wodehouse was unable to go to Oxford when he left Dulwich in 1900.

He started work as a clerk at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, where he filled the ledgers with scribbled thoughts and plotted his escape.

He resigned in 1902 to take a job on the By The Way column of The Globe newspaper and published The Pothunters, the first of more than 90 novels and collections of short stories.

In 1938 it was reported that he was the most highly paid author in the world.

Chums was first published in 1892 with stories on such topics as football, Harrow School and Julius Caesar.

The last edition was published in 1941.

Wodehouse wrote a serial for the newspaper in 1908 called The Luck Stone under the pseudonym Basil Windham.

In 1933, the paper listed him at No 4 in Chums Gallery of Famous Men and asked for an interview.

Wodehouse suggested they speak instead to his daughter, Leonora, saying: “She knows more about me than I know myself.”

Neither Leonora, who told the paper that he was first published in The Alleynian, nor the Chums editor of the time seemed aware that the paper had given his career a vital spark 35 years earlier.

Gussie's Veggie Diet

JEEVES:  'I regret to inform you, sir, that Miss Bassett has insisted on Mr Fink-Nottle adopting a vegetarian diet. His mood is understandably disgruntled and rebellious.'

I tottered. In my darkest hour I had never anticipated anything as bad as this.

You wouldn't think it to look at him, because he's small and shrimplike and never puts on weight, but Gussie loves food.

Watching him tucking into his rations at the Drones [club], a tapeworm would raise its hat respectfully, knowing that it was in the presence of a master.

Cut him off, therefore, from the roasts and boileds and particularly from cold steak and kidney pie, a dish of which he is inordinately fond, and you turned him into something fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, as the fellow said - the sort of chap who would break any engagement as soon as look at you.

At the moment of my entry I had been about to light a cigarette, and now the lighter fell from my nerveless hand.

 BERTIE:  'She's made him become a vegetarian?'

'So Mr Fink-Nottle informed me, sir.'

'No chops?'

'No, sir.'

'No steaks?'

'No, sir.'

'Just spinach and similar garbage?'

'So I gather, sir.'

Wodehouse Gems: IV

Lady Glossop: Do you work, Mr Wooster?

Bertie: What, work? As in honest toil, you mean? Hewing the wood and drawing the old wet stuff and so forth?

Lady Glossop: Quite.

Bertie: Well... I've known a few people who worked. Absolutely swear by it, some of them. Boko Fittleworth almost had a job once.

Wodehouse Gems: I

CARRY ON, JEEVES, BY SIR P G WODEHOUSE, KBE

P G Wodehouse's mastery of the English Language was quite unsurpassed.

Here's Bertie Wooster's description of Lady Malvern in Carry On, Jeeves.

It always brings a smile to my face. Instanter, as Bertie would say:-

Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O. P. to the Prompt Side.

She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.

She had bright, bulging eyes and a lot of yellow hair, and when she spoke she showed about fifty-seven front teeth. She was one of those women who kind of numb a fellow's faculties.

First published in  July, 2011.

Wodehouse Gems: II

Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves by Sir P G Wodehouse, KBE, published  in 1963

Bertie Wooster's arch-adversary, Roderick Spode, Earl of Sidcup, features heavily in this book.

Spode, as Bertie calls him, is a character we all love to hate.

Here is one of my favourite passages that always makes me laugh:-

'...Spode pivoted round and gave me a penetrating look. He had grown a bit, I noticed, since I had last seen him, being now about nine foot seven. ...I had compared him to a gorilla, and what I had had in mind had been the ordinary run-of-the-mill gorilla, not the large economy size'. 

...'To ease the strain, I asked him if he would have a cucumber sandwich, but with an impassioned gesture he indicated that he was not in the market for cucumber sandwiches..."a muffin?" 


No, not a muffin, either. He seemed to be on a diet.

"Wooster", he said, his jaw muscles moving freely, "I can't make up my mind whether to break your neck or not."

And so on. Wodehouse's command of the English language was supreme. Brilliant.

Wodehouse's character, Spode, is believed to be modelled on the war-time fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley Bt.

The Mosleys had a connection with Staffordshire, the county where Spode pottery is made; hence the name.

First published in March, 2009.

Wodehouse Knighthood

A fellow National Trust volunteer of mine contacted me in 2020, cognizant of my esteem for Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, and their creator, Sir P G Wodehouse, KBE.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Robin sent me a cutting from The Times newspaper concerning the death of the Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, GCB, CVO, a very distinguished civil servant who served as Principal Private Secretary (PPS) to two Prime Ministers, viz. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath.

Lord Armstrong was also the Cabinet Secretary, from 1979 until 1987, during which period Margaret Thatcher served as Prime Minister.

While Wodehouse was in hospital in 1974, Armstrong, PPS to Harold Wilson at the time, persuaded the Prime Minister to 'fast-track' a knighthood for him.

Insignia: Knight Commander of the
Most Excellent Order of the British Empire

In this case the honour was Knight Commander of the British Empire ~ KBE.

So in the New Year Honours List of 1975, P G Wodehouse was appointed KBE, a mere six weeks before his death.

First published in April, 2020.

English Lesson

Jeeves in the Offing was published by Sir P G Wodehouse in 1960.

In Chapter Eighteen Bertie Wooster is discussing his old prep schoolmaster, Aubrey Upjohn MA:-

“Audacity,” I said, throwing her the line.

“The audacity to dictate to me who I shall have in my house.”

It should have been “whom”,  but I let it go.

“You have the ...”

“Crust”.

“...the immortal rind,” she amended, and I have to admit it was stronger, “to tell me whom” - she got it right that time - “I may entertain at Brinkley Court, and who” - wrong again - “I may not.”

Wogan on Wodehouse

Michael Hogan looks ahead to BBC Two's Wogan on Wodehouse, broadcast on BBC2 tonight at 9pm (except Wales) in which Wogan considers the work of the great comic author PG Wodehouse:

"Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse KBE was a consummate comic writer who died in 1975 aged 93. 

Sir Michael Terence Wogan KBE is a veteran broadcaster aged 73.

[Both men Knight Commanders of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire].

Put the two old twinklers together and you have a warm, evocative and gently enlightening hour of television, as Wogan explores his long-standing admiration for the work of the prolific author, lyricist and playwright.

Part of the Books on the BBC season, this film sees Wogan try to solve some of the paradoxes in the long life and 70-year career of the genius nicknamed “Plum”.

He learns about the childhood shuttling between aunts and boarding schools which shaped his values and the spell living in France which led to controversial accusations of collaborating with the Germans.

Through the observations of biographers and academics, as well as excerpts enthusiastically narrated by Alistair McGowan, Wogan explains how Wodehouse’s own experiences can be seen throughout his work, famed for its optimism and gentle fun-poking at the upper classes.

Wogan also meets fellow fans, including Joanna Lumley, Griff Rhys Jones, Richard Briers and Stephen Fry."