P.G. Wodehouse's World of Bliss
O'Sullivan, John
Jonn O'Sullivan P.G. WODEHOUSE'S WORLD OF BLISS Fortunate is he who has yet to meet Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, and Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer. Other people's visions of paradise are notoriously...
...He is an ideal subject for a "literary biography" which is, in effect, only one-third biography and two-thirds literary detective work, with occasional criticism thrown in...
...This similarity of sympathies pays off in unexpected ways...
...He and his adherents wear black shorts...
...WODEHOUSE'S WORLD OF BLISS Fortunate is he who has yet to meet Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, and Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer...
...electric light the most efficient policeman...
...Two years earlier, Roberta Sega...
...Green is a humorist in his own right...
...How perfectly foul...
...I t is nonsense," he wrote, "to talk of fascist tendencies in Wodehouse's books...
...For Mr...
...He is referred to simply as "the Dictator" in several passages of The Code of the Woosters: And, even as late as Much Obliged, Jeeves, published in Wodehouse's ninetieth year, his sadistic and goriUa-like qualities are still remarked upon: "You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken...
...Green revives Wodehouse's forgotten reputation as a brilliant lyricist who helped to transform the American musical from imitation Viennese operetta to the distinctive colloquial easiness of Kern, Gershwin, and Porter...
...But someone, who has come in late and missed the credits, enquires who Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are...
...Time and again, a particular twist of plot, glimpsed a moment before it is fully revealed, overwhelms the reader as irresistibly comic and absurd...
...Green requires a prelifninary account of Wodehouse's famous wartime broadcasts over German radio...
...Not that Wodehouse was a saint, though it seems to have been a near thing...
...It is this touch of cynicism which equips him so well to trace back the comic absurdities of Mr...
...Much though Mr...
...Green clearly loves Wodehouse, fondly though he has written about him, is he perhaps temperamentally on a different wave-length when it comes to humor...
...President Franklin Roosevelt and the leaders of the 73rd Congress resisted this pressure...
...She s~aw herS:elf as responding to Kennedy's call for aNew Frontier and more or less took for granted that both her own ambitions and the public interest would be served by prosecuting novel cases "where I might push the law io a new froniier...
...or the loony doctor, Sir Roderick Glossop, the newt-fancier, Augfistus Fink-Notfle, the Hollywood moguls, Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer of ColossalExquisite, Isidore Fishbein of PerfectoFishbein, Benjamin Zizzbaum of Zizzbaum-Celluloid, and Sigismund Glutz of Medulla Oblongata...
...How could a fellow, he reasons, possibly love a girl who is prepared to expose him to such dangers...
...But how lightly, neatly, and economically he did so...
...I take as my example "Jeeves and the Song of Songs," in which Tuppy Glossop agrees to perform at a charity concert in the slum area of Bermondsey East at the bidding of a stern, muscular soprano, with whom'he is in love, and prevails upon Bertie to do the same...
...I t seems," he reflects in somber mood, "that Wodehouse's once universal benevolence no longer extended to the Mother of Parliaments...
...I envy him...
...There was nothing remotely treasonable about the broadcasts which, if anything, poked mild fun at his German captors...
...Throughout this colorful saga, however, he seems to have shown almost no interest in anything outside his work...
...Fortunately, I had my elephant gun and my trusted native bearer with me...
...But no critic's job is done without some mean-spirited carping...
...She also watched the Nixon Administration from the outside, reaffirming her early c6nvictions--first formed in reaction to Senator Joseph McCarthy's red-hunts--that abuse of government power poses a greater threat to the Constitution than i-ndividual or corporate misdeeds...
...Another instance is Wodehouse's revenge On his old persecutor, Duff Cooper...
...When Gussie Fink-Nottle is arrested for dancing in the fountain in Trafalgar Square in The Mating Season, he escapes social disgrace because "showing unexpected intelligence, [he] gave his name as Alfred Duff Cooper...
...I can recall only one version of heavenly bliss that ever really captured the imagination...
...Trapped in Northern France by the speed of the German breakthrough in 1940...
...Toynbee, who died a year ago, is now enjoying this beatific vision and not still paying for his socialist sins by hav!ng to watch, strapped to his seat, the endless repertory of Bertolt Brecht plays in purgatory...
...Yes...
...Could such a man have written " a virulently anti-totalitarian novel...
...Even Wodehouse's novels were scanned for signs of crypto-fascism...
...But sometimes it also misleads him into ~seeing a dark significance in what is merely a light joke...
...The nearest we get to a designing woman is Stiffy Byng and her attempts_to blackmail Bertie into pinching a policeman's helmet...
...For this reason, Wodehouse's life is interesting principally as a guide to his works...
...For me, however, Jeeves and Bertie retire the cup...
...He devoted himself to the craft of writing with the single-minded intensity of a dervish in a whirl...
...It is clear from this episode that only utter mutual incomprehension could have existed between the Nazi mind and the decent, cricketing, ex-public school novelist ~vho had been protected by his single:minded dedication to writing from any but a supet~cial'understanding of the nastier developments o f international politics...
...the insane naivety of the request is perhaps the most vivid example of the extent to which Wodehouse failed to understand the nature of the world he had tumbled into...
...Even his light Wodehousian remark (made when, as Minister for War, he announced the mechanization of...
...She left the SEC in 1968 for private practice, where she developed an appreciation of the importance of business investment to the economy and concluded that most businessmen are neither dishonest nor anti-social...
...One Hollywood studio, for instance, spent six months searching high and low for Wodehouse, on the grounds that he was the only man capable of writing a certain kind of English dialogue, only to discover that he had been on the payroll all along, working quietly somewhere in the salt mines...
...Green such as: that a popular song of the 1930s was entitled "They wanted a song-bird in Heaven, So God Took Caruso Away," parodied by Wodehouse in "There's a place for me in Heaven, for my baby boy is there...
...The former Cabinet Minister is at once reduced to the rank of a minor comic character in a farce...
...And, in the novels, these twists come so fast and furious that the reader is reduced to helpless hysterical laughter (which makes Wodehouse a dangerous author to read in public...
...Evelyn Waugh, a great admirer of Wodehouse's litei~ary achievement, once described him as the dullest man he had ever met...
...The general agreement that the book is a consistently weightless masterpiece is still further evidence that no jarring intrusion of modern politics has really occurred...
...Politicians howled for a federal regulatory agency with power to ban the sale of dubious stocks and bonds...
...In Wodehouse, miraculously, the string never breaks...
...Wodehouse behaved on these occasions like a complete goof or, in Mr...
...But public opinion in Britain, then fighting alone against the Third Reich at its apogee of power, was in no mood for fine distinctions...
...By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left...
...B ertie is an idle young rentier, his sole contribution to intellectual ' life and commerce an article on "What the Welldressed Man is Wearing" in the fashionable women's magazine, Milady's Boudoir, who makes the social round from country house to country house where, inspired by the feudal Code of t h e Woosters, he attempts to patch up lovers' quarrels and to restore objets d' ari to their rightful, though not always legal, owners and in consequence avoids only narrowly the perils of jail and matrimony...
...Even crooks like Soapy Molloy, selling his bogus silver mine shares, and wicked baronets like Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, intent on nobbling the Empress of Blanding so that his own Pride of Matchingham shou.ld be victorious, have no malevolence in them...
...Does he express anti-Semitic opinibns, or lust for military glory, or denounce the parliamentary talking Shop...
...Green denies Orwell's arguments and contends that, far from there being no post-1918 tendencies in Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters is a "virulently antitotalitarian novel...
...The serpent has still not been sighted there...
...9 I t l t o . . . . ~ . ~ 1 7 6 1 6 2 1 4 9 * l e o r * * e * * o , . * . * o _9 **~l*.J~o~.t=o*~**=~ **al*~176149 " ~ - " Fred D. Baldwin NO TIME FOR FRAUD: ROBERTA KARMEL ON THE S.E.C...
...Green adheres to a school of criticism which dismisses Wodehouse's brilliantly convoluted plotting as a minor virtue, thoroughly subordinate to his inimitable style: "Nothing matters but th6 language, which sparkles and scintillates, twisting and turning doyen the most arcane by-ways of syntactical and exegetical mannerism . . . . " Wodehouse took a different view, laboring endlessly over the intricate somersaults of the story line...
...Forcing firms to disclose material facts about their financial condition would not only discharge the government's duty toward investors, who could then make fools of themselves if they chose, but it would tend to improve business ethics...
...certain cavalry units) that "it is like asking a great musica ! performer to throw away his violin and devote himself in future to a gramaphone" brings On in Mr...
...Brinkmeyer to the real vices of Louis B. Mayer and the Hollywood moguls...
...Angst may have seized my soul in its vice-like grip, as angst is wont to do from time to time, but Jeeves has only to shimmer in with a beaker of his neverfailing pick-me-up and an apposite quote from Spinoza, and the sun shines again...
...This provokes the rowdies in the audience to hurl eggs, tomatoes, a large banana, etc...
...Exactly so...
...Thatcher's government) is a picture of an innocent ambling through Bedlam...
...Wodehouse was interned...
...His researches reveal that some of the most fanciful satires in Wodehouse's stories of Hollywood had a solid basis in fact...
...man, William O. Douglas, got into some lively battles with the officers of the New York Stock Exchange, and he put teeth into the agency's campaign against utility holding companies (under legislationthat was more directive than the Securities Acts...
...I n n recent book, Regulation by Prosecution,* and in an interview for this article, Roberta Karmel explains why she no longer believes that the public interest is being served by pushing the law <into new areas...
...After Douglas left the Commission for the Supreme Court, however, the SEC entered a long rpe~iod of steady, and often dull, prosecuti0n~ fraud...
...Some liberals grumbled that it was too cautious, conservatives would now and then complain that it was swinging its flashlight like a club, but, overall, its staff developed a reputation both for honesty anti.for adherence to the moderate mandate of its original legislation...
...Only four months before his sixtieth birthday, when he would have been released from internment in any event, he was freed, partly as a result of pressure from American public opinion (America still being neutral), and brought to Berlim From there, he broadcast over German radio to America five humorous scripts on his experience as an internee...
...By an odd coincidence, I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me...
...at Tuppy, whereupon the scales fall from his eyes...
...Of course, these surprises arrive dressed and bedecked in Wodehouse's fantastic metaphors, similes, and comic effects...
...He has clearly decided to dance on his grave and, by an odd coincidence, he has brought a pair of hobnailed boots along with him...
...The beauty of such an attack is that it hints plainly at a certain blackness in Mayer's character without giving him any opportunity to complain...
...As Private Eye's fictional "Dennis ThatCher" put it: "Four wives quite a sound idea if you've got- the sort of constitution that can stand it...
...The final proof of OrweU's point comes in Mr...
...Or did he want to depict a comic thug and simply latched onto the fascists as a convenient, topical, and faintly absurd metaphor...
...or Bertie's contrasting aunts, Aunt Agatha, who eats broken glass for breakfast and wears barbed wire next to the skin, and the good and deserving Aunt Dahlia Who, among other virtues, employs the peerless chef, Anatole...
...Jimmy Carter's "worst regulatory appointment" decries a loss of mission...
...This brilliant juggling with language is, of course, wonderfully comic in its own right...
...Of the very few writers who came to his rescue, George Orwell presented the most cogent and celebrated defense...
...And he writes entertainingly...
...And apart from a readiness for violence, traditional in this sort of character, is there anything noticeably fascist about Spode...
...He resolves to break off the relationship...
...His evidence for this startling assertion is Wodehouse's portrait of Roderick Spode, founder of the Saviours of Britain, a fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts...
...But these things, you say, would be quite out of place in a light confection like The Code of The Woosters...
...Benny Green is similarly wellplaced to shadow Wodehouse through life 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 and literature.* For some years, he wrote a commendably old-fashioned literary causerie for the London Spectator...
...Many wanted one modeled after state commissions administering "blue sky" laws, so called from a Populist complaint that fast-talking stock salesmen could persuade innocent investors into buying shares of the "blue sky" itself...
...Green's phrase, like Bertie Wooster bereft of Jeeves...
...But is it not merely a joke, a tolerant and even affectionate joke, more14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 over, such as many an M.P...
...For more than thirty years, the SEC generally stayed within this philosophy, insisting that its main job was to see that the financial markets had enough information to function efficiently...
...There are no post-1918 tendencies at all...
...Philip Toynbee once summed it up in the London Observer as a warm summer afternoon, a comfortable deckchair, a bottle of Moselle, and a new, unread novel featuring Jeeves and Bertie Wooster...
...His interests, there displayed, encompassed Edwardian fiction, the Broadway musical, vintage Hollywood movies, and cricket, which Wodehouse himself either influenced or fed upon...
...This sort of assault might well arouse some sympathy for its victim...
...No, they don't...
...Bertie duly delivers a rendition of "Sonny Boy" and is a bit miffed at his unenthusiastic reception, until Jeeves informs him that he was the third performer to offer "Sonny Boy" that night...
...After we have sat through all the bloody Brecht...
...rescue the young master from whatever soup his decency and incompetence have landed him in, and to secure as reward Bertie's surrender on some point o f sartorial principle such as whether to wear a white mess jacket to a formal dinner or an Alpine hat anywhere...
...T h i s raises a curious question...
...Louis B. Mayer, for instance, is dispatched as follows: "How well I remember the day when I was wandering through the jungle on the MetroGoldwyn lot and Louis B. Mayer suddenly sprang out at me from the undergrowth...
...Crime is quite common there, sin utterly unknown...
...The Master's touch is altogether lighter and more devastating...
...But how they get through it without alcohol beats me...
...He still has in store the incomparable, the inexpressible pleasure of making the acquaintance of the two most celebrated inhabitants of the glorious comic universe created by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse in almost a hundred novels and innumerable short stories...
...Green's full and scrupulously fair account of Wodehouse's German experience...
...This is strange because, superficially at least, Wodehonse's life was crowded with incident-public school, two year's penance in a London bank, his debut in magazine writing and editing, several stints as a Broadway lyric-writer with such partners as Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, a brief immersion in the dottiness of Hollywood as an overpaid and under-used screenwriter, wartime internment in Germany under the Nazis (an incident to whieh we must, alas, return) and, finally, his last years as a productive novelist right up to his death at the age of-93...
...A f t e r the stock market crash of 1929, congressional investigations unearthed financial scandals as sleazy and headlinegrabbing as Watergate...
...His wit, however, is sourer and more earth-bound than that of the mature Wodehouse, closer to satire than to gentle Wodehousian fantasy...
...But the question is: Did Wodehouse set out to damn the fascists by caricaturing them (barely) as goriUas...
...Exactlynand so woul d a virulent attack on totalitarianism...
...the list is endless...
...Now, as it happens, Mr...
...Wodehouse was denounced as a traitor by the Daily Mirror journalist, William Connor, apparently at the prompting of the-Minister for Information, Alfred Duff Cooper, and a general witch hunt ensued...
...All in all, a lively book that is well worth the trifling expense involved in buying or, as the fashion now is, in photocopying it...
...It will be a genuine pleasure...
...Its third chairFred D. Baldwin is a private consultant on energy conservation and social policy, and is working on a book on corporate governance...
...And scattered through the book are gems of incidental entertainment dredged up by Mr...
...The Rutledge Press, $12.95...
...My second quarrel with Mr...
...Simon and Schuster, $20.75...
...But as the critic Wilfrid Sheed argues: "The movies of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen are recent reminders of how even the best jokes sprawl when the string breaks...
...or that Louis B. Mayer once responded to Robert Taylor's request for a salary raise with a straight left to the jaw, stretching out the handsome star on the executive carpet...
...For instance, in the late Much Obliged, Jeeves, Bertie is told that Spode, now Lord Sidcnp, is renouncing his title in order to stand for election to the House of Commons...
...He had somehow managed to escape from the office where they kept him, and I could see from his glaring eyes and slavering jaws that he had already tasted blood...
...His resourceful valet, Jeeves, a below-stairs Machiavelli, is fortunately on hand to John 0 "Sullivan is editor of Policy Review...
...Green a severe attack of the heavy ironies...
...Other people's visions of paradise are notoriously unalluring...
...or Oofy Prosser, Pongo Twistleton, Bingo Little, and the other young men in spats who frequent the Drones Club and shy bread rolls at one another to brighten up lunch...
...I see," I said, rather impressed by this proof that the House of Commons drew the line somewhere...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 15...
...It is this which is the point of contention...
...The Moselle is nicely chilled, the afternoon balmy, and the deck chair guaranteed not to collapse on impact...
...Their creator, however, seems to have been less entertaining...
...Unlike many who go out through the much-maligned "revolving door" between *Roberta S. Karmel, Regulation by Prosecution: The Securities & Exchange Commission versus Corporate America...
...might include in an after-dinner speech to amuse his constituents...
...If the novel is neither new nor unread, that reminds u s we have something to look forward to when we reach the real paradise...
...Green interprets this as a symptom of Wodehouse's disillusionment...
...Other Wodehouse addicts will choose their favorites from the vast menagerie of comic characters: There is, for instance, Lord Emsworth, the absent-minded seigneur of Blandings Castle, whose overriding aim in life is that his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, should come in first at the annual Market Blandings fair...
...We must pray that Mr...
...G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography, by Benny Green...
...But paradise beckons as I write...
...Footer bags, you mean...
...Sunlight," he wrote, "'is said to be the best of disinfectants...
...Karmel, a young g r a d u a t e g f New York University Law School, had joine d the agency as a staff attorney in its New York Regional Office...
...Everything about Cooper is held up to scorn...
...The responsibility is irksome, but here goes...
...He is surprised: "Don't they allow Lords in...
...He could do so, of course, but only at the cost of looking humorless as well as savage...
...In creating the Securities and Exchange Commission, they instead took a leaf from a book by Louis D. Brandeis, who had won a reputation as what would today be called a "public interest lawyer" fighting corporate interests in the courts...
...To make assurance doubly sure, however, Jeeves tells the lady, when she turns up for her solo in the second Act, that Mr" Glossop h a s requested that she sing a particular favorite of his . . . . Exactly so...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 13 Now, there is no doubt that Spode is meant to impress us as (a) a brutal and thuggish type, and (b) a potential dictator of the fascist type...
...Green also devotes some pages to an extended denunciation o f Cooper, his works and pomps...
...After all, once stripped of his fascist trappings, Spode is a familiar figure in comic ~ f i c t i o n - - t h e lumbering and eventually outwitted bully, almost a natural force like an avalanche, hardly an embodiment of moral evil...
...or Lord Ickenham, Pongo's eccentric uncle, whose wife allows him up to London only once a year and who thus has a whole y e a r ' s stored-up loopiness to unleash on the unsuspecting suburbs...
...Green has persuaded me that even so gentle a soul occasionally got his revenge on old enemies through his fiction...
...Disillusionment would, after all, be out of place in Eden, which is where Wadehouse's novels take place...
...And so do I. In some of the novels and short stories, the farcical surprises of the plot are fifty percent of the joke...
...In 1964, a senior member of the SEC staff, who had been elevated to the Commission by President John F. Kennedy, became its chairman...
...What emerges from his examination of the offical documents (which are available because of the campaign to clear Wodehouse's good name by the Conservative M.P., Iain Sproat, now a Minister in Mrs...
...Hoping to pick up where Douglas left off, he and his:colleagues began to expand:the agency's authority...
...It is very doubtful if he would have bothered to read one...
...The Moslem heaven of houris and sherbet, for instance, provokes a complaint that can be leveled against Islam in general...
...Brandeis, a successful investor himself, argued that investors in stocks and bonds did not need a federal bureaucracy to protect them from financial risk, but they did need protection against being lied to...
...Tuppy turns up two performances later and, at Jeeves's suggestion, sings "Sonny Boy...
...At one point, "Wodehouse asked his jailers for permission to come home to England in Order to explain himself...
...And there is no appeal against this sentence...
Vol. 15 • November 1982 • No. 11
