Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131644 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-30
• Binding: Paperback
• 800 pages

Synopsis
From the introduction by Hugh Laurie: "The first thing you should know and probably the last too is that PG Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to put words on paper. This much is uncontested by all but the most irretrievably insane. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral; every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear and considerably funnier."

Customer Reviews

Simply the best.
This is the very best of Jeeves. Recommended to anyone who wants a starter collection. Classic stuff!

Simply the Best
If Wodehouse is the best Comedy writer (and he is)
And Jeeves & Wooster are his best creation (which they are)
What can you say about the three best J&W novels?
Simply the Best
Only one minor gripe, couldn't they have put them in the right order? Plots do get carried through (some might say repeated)

England, Athens or Eden?
In a short story by Woody Allen called "The Kugelmass Episode" there is a machine allowing you to be projected into the world of your favourite novel. If I were asked what book I would like to visit I would almost certainly name P G Wodehouse, as his world is just enough like the real world to find your way around, but everything in it exists in its most archetypal form.

In one short story, the barmaid has been reading a novelette in which a viscount has pushed his family solicitor over a cliff "because he knew his secret", someone says that he bets that sort of thing is going on all the time, and Mr Mulliner agrees, saying that whenever a family solicitor is found in pieces at the bottom of a cliff, Scotland Yard routinely rounds up all the viscounts in the neighbourhood. That is the key to Wodehouse. There is a thin layer of realism: no one has depicted better the effects of a sweltering summer day or the feeling of being present on some thoroughly embarrassing occasion. Underneath this, we have a timeless Aesopian world in which all crows are black, all foxes are cunning, all young aristocrats are gullible chinless wonders and all theatrical agents are greasy birds lurking up a flight of stairs in the Charing Cross Road. In this respect there is a resemblance to two other fictional universes: the Damon Runyon Broadway stories and the Dear Bill letters. In each case the author takes a thoroughly uninteresting group -- bread-throwing Old Etonians, New York gangsters or drunken golfers -- and turns it into something beautiful. By inventing a language for his subjects and taking everything about them to its logical conclusion, the author makes you love them for being so utterly what they are.

Is this just nostalgia? And if so, for what period is one supposed to be nostalgic? Wodehouse agreed with the suggestion that his fictional world started in the 1920s and has not altered in any material respect since. Orwell, by contrast, believed that in all essential respects the stories belong to the Edwardian world of the Knut and Gilbert the Filbert, and that if Bertie Wooster ever lived he died before 1914. Evelyn Waugh suggests that the stories belong before the Fall of Man and that the Blanding lawns are the Garden of Eden, and this is perhaps the best guess yet.

I would reach a similar conclusion by a different route. Wodehouse defined his fiction as "musical comedy without the music". Anglo-American musical comedy descends from Feydeau's French farce. That descends from the French classical comedy of Moliere and Beaumarchais. That in turn descends from Plautus and Terence, and ultimately from Menander. Menander was the pupil of Theophrastus, author of the "Characters" (think Ben Jonson with his "Humours") and himself a pupil of Aristotle. The theme is "normal life", but this means life in fourth century BC Athens, extrapolated into a timeless philosophical world consisting not of what happens but of what typically would happen, immanent within our world rather than projected into an isolated Platonic Heaven. "O Menander! O Life! Which of you has imitated the other?"

Throughout this period of well over two thousand years, the same formula is preserved with remarkably little change: stern dynastic parents, mildly unsuitable young love, conniving slaves helping the young master, impersonations, blackmail, desperate expedients at an ever accelerating rate, revelations of identity, and all coming out right in the end with young love triumphant but the social system undisturbed. From Plautus to Moliere the setting of Greek family life remains unchanged: the main characters have Greek names, and only the servants give any clue to contemporary Roman or French life, and then only for comic effect. In my view this is what is going on in Wodehouse. The essential structure of his world is Athenian, and the apparent setting in twentieth-century England is comic machinery and no more.

The Menandrian formula lends itself to infinite extension, and Wodehouse wrote nearly a hundred books of very varying quality. At the highest pinnacle of genius are the short story "Uncle Fred Flits By" and the novels "Leave it to Psmith", "Summer Lightning" and "Right Ho Jeeves": Gussie Fink-Nottle's drunken speech to the school is one of the few passages in literature that provoke continuous laughter throughout. (Don't skip to it: the skill is in the twisted allusions to everything that has gone before.) Then come the Jeeves books in general, the quality mildly diminishing in order of publication. After these, but still in the top band, come the Blandings books in general, with the same qualification, and the Drones Club stories. In the upper-middle band come the remaining Mike and Psmith books, and some of the early stories with an American setting, distinguished from his other works by a rather greater seriousness of tone. In the middle band come the Mulliner stories and the better golf stories, all frankly frivolous. After that come the Valley Fields books and the rest of a long-drawn-out trail of miscellanea of often indifferent quality, which one reads for the sake of the occasional linguistic flash which reminds one of his better work.

The Jeeves books have a special place within the Wodehouse canon, in that they reverse the usual formula in one crucial respect: the same pattern can be observed in Beaumarchais. The Barber of Seville is the mixture as before. In the Marriage of Figaro, however, all is reversed: the conniving servant of the previous story is himself the subject of mistaken identity and the bearer of the young love interest, and the pretensions of aristocracy are not reaffirmed but exploded. (And, like "Leave it to Psmith", it contains an episode "almost entirely about flowerpots".)

The reversal in the Jeeves books is just as startling, but comes in a different place. Most of the rest of Wodehouse follows the tested formula, except that the person laying plots to help young love is often a kindly uncle rather than a servant (a tradition that may descend from Troilus and Cressida). Jeeves himself takes this role in relation to Bertie's friends. For Bertie himself, however, far from assisting young love, he does his very best to ensure that no such thing can ever arise, and the only real love interest is between Jeeves and Bertie themselves. Jeeves confesses that he is "fond of Mr Wooster" and almost relents from following through one of his schemes when he sees the distress on Bertie's face. Bertie marks every parting from Jeeves as a solemn moment, and admits that any pleasure taken while Jeeves is away is more or less a mockery.

By that I do not mean to claim the Jeeves stories as gay fiction, even though that might assist my case for a Greek line of descent. The clue is elsewhere. It is clear, if only by omission, that Bertie, like his creator, lost his parents at an early age and was brought up by a series of terrifying aunts. Jeeves' real part in Bertie's life, then, is as his mother: at one point Bertie even says so. One of Bertie's ex-fiancees says that "there is a sort of woolly-headed duckiness about you", and that is the abiding image: a small fluffy thing burrowing into its mother's fur for shelter from the terrors of the world. It is in this light that we must see Jeeves' readiness to extract Bertie from a hole and his petty tyrannies over him in matters of dress and appearance. Here we have a further instance of the theme of the return to Eden. As in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, the degeneration of the aristocracy finally turns full circle and produces a being of primal innocence.

Given this background Bertie has an understandable fear of women, and indeed Wodehouse women can generally be divided into three groups. There are the soulful/masterful types (Florence Craye, Madeline Bassett, Honoria Glossop and most of the aunts) who want to "mould" Bertie. There are the sexually enticing ticking bombs (Bobby Wickham, Stiffy Byng) who are always ready to start something which will stagger civilisation and leave Bertie to carry the can; and no doubt his good and deserving Aunt Dahlia is a graduate of this class. And there are the understanding ones, usually American, who have had to struggle against a background of hardship, and who will look after you. And Bertie's code of honour as a preux chevalier makes him unable to tell any of them to get lost.

Much of the pleasure of the Jeeves stories is linguistic. Wodehouse notices that the formal language of service superficially resembles that of scholarship, and devises a thought-experiment: what if this formal and orotund manservant actually WERE a scholar? Jeeves is there on call with all the riches of culture, and is ready to give his recommendations in the manner of a wine waiter: he advises Bertie that he will not enjoy Nietzsche, as "he is fundamentally unsound", while a favourite Shakespearean tag "has, I believe, given uniform satisfaction". Bertie has been saved from the ill-conceived educational projects of the sisterhood, but all the time his own cultural level is being painlessly raised by his association with Jeeves, who only occasionally "looks just like an aunt". Similarly Jeeves is capable on occasion of pushing Bertie into the soup for his own amusement, but always fishes him out again. And, just to make sure that all three female roles are covered, he looks after him (and how); even when Bertie, poor fool, believes that he is grinding Jeeves "beneath the iron heel" ...

As well as its link with the past, Wodehouse's writing has an important link to the future: the combination of formally comic language, lovable characters and tight but utterly unrealistic plot formation is bequeathed to John Mortimer's Rumpole stories (which cross Wodehouse with Sherlock Holmes) and to the works of Douglas Adams (which cross Wodehouse with Gulliver's Travels or Alice, see my other reviews). As so often, it is intelligently-crafted middle-brow work (Gilbert and Sullivan, Ogden Nash), rather than the artistic succes d'estime, which is most truly part of the classical tradition, and will have the most enduring appeal. Somewhere C S Lewis suggests that, possibly, the early twentieth century will be remembered in the future as the age of Buchan and Wodehouse rather than the age of Auden and Pound, and, as concerns Wodehouse, we may be getting there.