Posted By BillHeise on March 18, 2010

As I said in my previous post, I’m planning on venturing out my safe and secure space of talking about music, which, it is held, is a matter of individual taste and conscience. As I also said in my previous post the world of books is generally held to express a greater purpose. They connect us to others, and thus they bind us to a greater, common purpose.

So I thought about which novel I was going to start with and I have chosen P. G. Wodehouse’s Code of the Woosters, one of the funniest books ever written. And it’s not just me. Look at his Wikipedia page, where Christopher Hitchens says “there is not, and never will be anything to touch him.” This guy thinks so, too:

P G Wodehouse is widely regarded as the master of the English comic novel. Many writers — among them, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Hilaire Belloc, V S Pritchett, Tom Sharpe, Douglas Adams and Joe Keenan — have rated him as one of the finest English prose writers of the twentieth century.

My purpose in starting out with this novel in particular is two-fold.

• It’s one of my favorite novels of all time.
• More importantly, it defies the usual reasons—given to us by the academic community and by those who are concerned with aesthetic thought—that we say we like to read. There is no moral value to reading the book. We’re not better for having read it. It’s just pure fun.

The Plot

(Copied outright from Wikipedia with intervening comments by me.)

The Code of the Woosters is the first instalment in the Totleigh Towers saga. It introduces the characters of Sir Watkyn Bassett, the owner of Totleigh Towers, and Roderick Spode, later known as Lord Sidcup after his ascension to Earldom.

The story opens with Bertie recovering from a bachelor party he has thrown the night before for Gussie Fink-Nottle, his fish-faced newt-fancying friend.

Gussie is one of the perennial favorites in the Wodehouse cast of recurring characters. He is known as a man who collects newts. He is so well-drawn that even after having read thousands of books, I can still see him and his newts as though I had read about him for the first time only this morning.

While still convalescing, he is summoned before his somewhat-beloved Aunt Dahlia, and ordered by her to go to a particular antique shop and “sneer at a cow creamer”. This is an effort to sap the confidence of the shop’s owner (and thus drive down the price) before the antique silver piece is purchased by Dahlia’s collector husband Tom Travers.

The whole plot revolves around the fortunes of this cow creamer, an absolutely ridiculous object to focus any—much less so much—attention on.

While in the shop, Bertie has his first run-in with Sir Watkyn (another collector of silver pieces) and Spode (whose aunt Sir Watkyn is planning to marry).

Bertie has just been caught taking the wrong umbrella and Roderick Spode—Bertie calls him the Dictator on account of his affiliation with the Nazi party—makes way too much of Bertie’s guilt in the matter of the umbrella and not enough of his innocence.

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. But he shook his head.
‘No, Roderick. I couldn’t. Not today – the happiest day of my life.
The Dictator pursed his lips, as if feeling that the better the day, the better the deed.
‘But listen,’ I bleated, ‘it was a mistake.’
‘Ha!’ said the Dictator.
‘I thought that umbrella was mine.’
‘That,’ said old Bassett, ‘is the fundamental trouble with you, my man. You are totally unable to distinguish between meum and tuum. Well, I am not going to have you arrested this time, but I advise you to be very careful. Come, Roderick.’ (This bit of dialog, as all bits of dialog, are copied from Google Books)

For the rest of the novel, Spode is constantly threatening to beat Bertie into a jelly. This threat alters Berties’s behavior, as he constantly (and somewhat unamanfully, in my opinion) struggles to avoid him at all costs.

Bertie escapes this ordeal relatively unscathed, but later learns that, via underhanded skulduggery involving lobsters and cold cucumbers, Sir Watkyn has obtained possession of the creamer instead of Uncle Tom, and spirited it away to Totleigh Towers.

Bertie was already headed there, in a frantic attempt to patch over the sudden rupture in the engagement of Gussie and Madeline Bassett, Sir Watkyn’s droopy and overly-sentimental daughter,

Madeline Bassett, Bertie says, is a ghastly girl:

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds. A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits. I remember her telling me once that rabbits were gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen and that the stars were Gods daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course. They’re nothing of the sort.

We learn that Bertie has been engaged to the ghastly girl and has squeezed out of it some months or years before.

but now he has been assigned an additional impossible task by Aunt Dahlia: recovery of the cow creamer, which is being guarded both by Spode and the local police. His situation is only complicated further by the presence at Totleigh Towers of Stiffy Byng, Sir Watkyn’s anarchic young ward, who draws Bertie into her plan to marry the local curate, another old pal of Bertie’s named “Stinker” Pinker, and a certain leather-covered notebook of Gussie’s, in which he has lovingly and extensively detailed Sir Watkyn and Spode’s many character failings, and which has escaped Gussie’s possession to roam freely about the local community.

Jeeves’s intellect is strained to the utmost, but in the end, the two couples are still engaged to be married, the cow-creamer is headed back towards the hands of its rightful owner, and Bertie has not been beaten to a pulp by Spode, thrown in jail for stealing a policeman’s helmet, roped into marriage with either Madeline or Stiffy, or cut off from partaking in the cooking of the famed Anatole. In gratitude, he agrees to take the Round-The-World cruise which Jeeves has been promoting, thinking that at absolute worst, he won’t be seeing Stiffy Byng.

10 Questions I Find Interesting

1. Bertie Wooster really is a twit. The opening pages reveal that he has been up late drinking. That is the usual opening for a Jeeves and Wooster novel. Why do we read Wodehouse if his main character is Bertie Wooster, a hopelessly naïve twit (see the Upper Middle Class Twit of the Year. John Cleese says that when he comes to America he feels he has come to an alien land, and so he brings along a Wodehouse novel or two to remind him of home).

2. My own sense is that we delight in Bertie’s sense of ease with the language of nothing. Wodehouse was an early precursor of Larry David and George Constanza. What is your opinion of Bertie? Do you find him fascinating (like me?), or just annoying (like my father?)?

3. What is the source of comedy in the novel? Is the source of humor simply something that’s in yourself and that you and you alone can appreciate? This is the answer that we bring to the question of music: to each his own and leave me alone. Can we stop asking questions so soon when we are reading a novel, even one as silly as this?

4. Or is there something more, something on which we can find a common ground for discussion? If so, what is it? Is its source cultural (in other words is it based in the specific universe of Britain in the 1930s, the era where all of Wodehouse’s books are set, even those written in the 60s and 70s?) Why, if that is so, do Americans and other laugh at Bertie? Where is that cultural line? Is there a line at all, or is it an illusion created by those who think about things too much?

5. What is the importance of Bertie’s reliance on tautology: the fault of style of repeating the same thought in different words, or even the same thought in the same words, as “I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl.” Is it fair for me to complain that this is an effort at subverting the logical processes by which human beings advance their thought, or is this part of the key to reading Wodehouse? It’s just fun to be in the hands of such a master on nonsense as this.

6. Metaphor. Although Wodehouse has Bertie effortlessly knock logic out of the park (he does it by seeming to have Bertie give no thought to logic), he does make Bertie a skilled user of metaphor, as for example here:

A most unnerving experience all this had been for a man of sensibility, as you may imagine, and my immediate reaction was a disposition to give Aunt Dahlia’s commission the miss-in-balk and return to the flat and get outside another of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups. You know how harts pant for cooling streams when heated in the chase. Very much that sort of thing. I realized now what madness it had been to go into the streets of London with only one of them under my belt, and I was on the point of melting away and going back to the fountain head, when the proprietor of the shop emerged from the inner room, accompanied by a rich smell of stew and a sandy cat, and enquired what he could do for me.

7. Uncles are about as useless as Bertie himself is. Aunts function as the spurs to action. Not to any socially useful action, mind you. In Mr. Wodehouse’s environment (but surely not in mine) women are the curators of useless purposes like talking down the asking price for cow creamers and, when it has become apparent that Sir Watkyn Bassett has bought the cow creamer from under Uncle Tom’s nose, stealing it back from him. It is up to Bertie’s aunts to spur him into action and to get the action of the novel started by waking up the listless and hungover Bertie to action. Why do you think that Wodehouse has women as the callers to spurious action in his novels?

8. Roderick Spode turns out to be a Nazi. Is there any irony if the fact that Wodehouse was captured by the Nazis during the war and made to broadcast his Nazi sympathies to the people of Great Britain? (Wodehouse was so ashamed by his behavior that he lived in America after the war until his death). Are the excuses offered by the apologists for Wodehouse enough? Do you feel sorry for Wodehouse, as he felt sorry for himself? How differently do you perceive him after you read this article from the Guardian, which appeared in 1999?

9. Roderick Spode as a cross-dresser. It this fair? The Nazis could have portrayed Americans or their enemies the British as cross-dressers (and no dougbt did). Doesn’t the interest in pursuing the metaphysical severely damaged, if not undone, by the fact that rhetoric can be made to say anything? And what about the cross-dressers’ feelings? In my view, the PC debates in this country are a matter of people wanting to hold on to views that are nevertheless unable to completely hold their grasp on the human imagination. Rather than questioning ourselves (us), we hold on to the past or the future and blame the opposition party (others) for our present discomfort with the status quo. ‘Things would be alright if it wasn’t for the opposition party.’ This relieves us of our duty to think outside the collapsing box.

10. At the beginning of the book, Jeeves wants to go on vacation. ‘Travel is highly educational, sir,’ he says. But Jeeves is constantly underestimating Bertie’s lack of care about anything other than Bertie, and Bertie will have nothing to do with it.

‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago. No, Jeeves, I know what’s the matter with you. That old Viking strain of yours has come out again. You yearn for the tang of the salt breezes. You sec yourself walking the deck in a yachting cap. Possibly someone has been telling you about the Dancing Girls of Bali. I understand, and I sympathi7.e. But not for me. I refuse to be decanted into any blasted ocean-going liner and lugged off round the world.’

This may cause the reader to puzzle over Bertie’s change in attitude when he agrees to Jeeves’ request to travel forth at the end of the book. It is not that he has any desire whatsoever to travel outside of his own meum and experience the tuum of the world. He, in himself, is enough. He doesn’t because of his own severe limitations. He needs teams to rescue him from his illogical life. Jeeves’ superior logic always ends up saving the day for Bertiehas no logic in him at all. That logic, and not a self-indulgent sense of metaphor, is the way to salvation in the world of Wooster, if not in the world itself.

Where to Turn Next

The first book I ever read by Wodehouse was a late masterpiece entitled Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. I had picked it up as one of several books for a trip to give a paper on “Gower’s View of Nature” at a conference in Oklahoma. I asked my wife which book she wanted me to put in the tape deck—this was several years ago and the book on CD had not yet taken off—and she said she didn’t care, so I put in the Wodehouse book not knowing what to expect and expecting very little. Within five minutes, my wife and I were laughing so hard that we had to turn of the tape and we considered pulling over to the side of the road.

The moment came when Bertie meets a Major Plank at the offices of E. Jimpson Murgatroyd, his doctor. Major Plank has forgotten Bertie’s name, much to Bertie’s relief. He thinks he’s changed his name:

‘Secret enemies after you?’
‘No, no secret enemies.’
‘That’s generally why one changes one’s name. I had to change mine that time I shot the chief of the ‘Mgombis. In self-defence, of course, but that made no difference to his widows and surviving relatives who were looking for me.

And major Plank has some medical advice for Bertie, who has woken up with spots on his chest and has gone to see his doctor.

‘Might be bubonic plague or possibly sprue or schistosomiasis. One of my native bearers got spots on his chest, and we buried him before sundown. Had to. Delicate fellows, these native bearers, though you wouldn’t think so to look at them. Catch everything that’s going around – sprue, bubonic plague, schistosomiasis, jungle fever, colds in the head – the lot. Well, Wooster, it’s been nice seeing you again. I would ask you to lunch, but I have a train to catch. I’m off to the country.’

This, of course, scares the pants off Bertie, as it would you or I if we had no more sense than Bertie.

For a complete bibliography of Wodehouse’s massive catalog, follow this link. For a basic bibliography of articles on Wodehouse (including appreciations by Steven Fry and Hugh Laurie (of House fame), and George Orwell), follow this link.

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