During the first lockdown, I often found myself going to bed with two especially charming gentlemen. The first was a boisterous Old Etonian called Bertie, who took understandable pride in his aptitude for theology (and, indeed, won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at his prep school), and whose conversation usually involved reference to his club, the Drones, and the unfortunate incident where he served a night in the cells for knocking off a policeman’s helmet during Boat Race festivities. And the other man – Reginald, though he preferred to be known as Jeeves – was of a more sombre and serious mien. Quieter and more reserved than his companion, he was less free with his opinions and chatter, but what he said revealed a serious and deep intellectual commitment and purpose, albeit one leavened with a degree of good-humoured and entirely understandable exasperation at his charge’s more whimsical and mercurial antics.
Everybody has those books, and authors, that they go to when they are in need of escapism. For me, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series have always been these tales. Nightly incursions into their pages during the pandemic made the misery and boredom of those long days and weeks considerably more bearable. He wrote 35 short stories and 11 novels featuring the duo, beginning in 1915 with Extricating Young Gussie (although purists prefer to begin with Leave it to Jeeves which appeared the following year and features the most recognisable incarnation of the characters), and ending shortly before his death in 1975 with 1974’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. Undoubtedly, if Wodehouse had somehow lived another five or ten years, there would have been more stories, but his prolific dedication to “the graft” has left us with a truly splendid collection of tales, all revolving around a pre-lapsarian world that was always a fantastical creation, even when Wodehouse began writing. By the time of the last book’s publication, when Britain was immersed in the three-day week and the dying days of the Heath government, the events depicted bore as much relation to readers’ everyday lives as if Wodehouse had been writing about events on Mars.
This was, of course, the point from the beginning. As Evelyn Waugh, a great admirer, famously said, “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Nobody has ever sat down to read about the adventures of Jeeves, Bertie, Bingo Little, Gussie Fink-Nottle, the terrifying Aunt Agatha and Roderick Spode (to say nothing of his black short-wearing followers) and expected gritty social realism.
Instead, they have come to marvel at the twentieth century’s greatest comic prose stylist’s apparently endless invention, in which matrimony is a predicament to be averted at all costs, where the distaste of one’s gentleman’s gentleman for an ill-considered sartorial faux pas can lead to a (happily temporary) breakdown in amicable relations, and where the sole work undertaken by Bertie is to contribute an article about “What the well-dressed man is wearing” to his aunt’s periodical. Like his prize for scripture knowledge, he remains proud of this modest achievement, and continually refers to it throughout his adventures.
Alexander Larman, “The enduring appeal of Jeeves and Wooster”, The Critic, 2020-10-16.
