Lecture Notes • Wodehouse • “The Custody of the Pumpkin”
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Lecture Notes • Wodehouse • “The Custody of the Pumpkin” Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse: good-humored satirist of English country houses (rural mansions) and their denizens (inhabitants) ••• Born in 1881, he lived to age 93, receiving a knighthood (i.e. becoming Sir P.G. Wodehouse) in the year of his death ••• A self-declared practitioner of “light writing,” Wodehouse will always be most famous for 35 short stories and 11 novels (published over a span of 59 years) about Jeeves—a “gentleman’s personal gentleman” or valet—who serves and manipulates the clueless and foppish (i.e. dandy-like) Bertie Wooster, a minor aristocrat, a member of the Drones Club in London, and an instance of the “idle rich” bachelor ••• Jeeves’s knowledge, competence, and fix-it abilities inspired the name of the internet search engine Ask Jeeves ••• In Britain during the early 1990s, a popular television series Jeeves and Wooster, based on the Wodehouse tales, starred Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Wooster ••• On US television, Laurie is best known for paying Dr. Gregory House in the medical drama House and Senator Tom James in the political comedy Veep ••• Wodehouse’s other great literary series (1917 to 1975) is the nine short stories and 11 novels centered on Clarence Threepwood, the Ninth Earl of Emsworth, and his ancestral seat, Blandings Castle in Shropshire, an English county bordering the country of Wales ••• In the British nobility or peerage, earl is the third- most senior rank, after Duke at the top and Marquess next; an Earl’s wife is a Countess, but Lord Emsworth is a widower ••• We are reading the 1935 version of the Blandings Castle short story entitled “The Custody of the Pumpkin,” which adds some content to the original tale, published in American and English magazines in late 1924 ••• The English-Welsh border region is known as The Marches ••• Wodehouse’s contemporary and supporter, the novelist Evelyn Waugh (author of Brideshead Revisited, among other famous titles) opined, “The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden [i.e. the biblical Eden] from which we are all exiled” ••• Yet even the quasi-Eden that is Blandings Castle manifests anxiety over modernizing forces, which the third-person, unidentified narrator of “The Custody of the Pumpkin” calls the “age of rush and hurry” (p. 35) ••• A major reason for loss of prelapsarian (i.e. “before the Fall”) innocence: Huge death toll from machine-gun and poison-gas horror of World War I—also known as the Great War—of 1914-1918, which shattered belief and trust that the English had had in the authority of establishment institutions like the monarchy, government, military, empire, and church ••• Entire generation of young men lost ••• As British regiments were generally formed on a county or regional basis, a single battle could wipe out most of the men from a given community ••• One of the Shropshire regiments was the multi-battalion KSLI (King’s Shropshire Light Infantry), which attained 60 or so battle honors during Great War, including for the Battle of the Somme, on whose first day, 1 July 1916, the British suffered 57,470 casualties (19,240 of them deaths): the worst single disaster in the British army’s centuries-long history ••• As the “spare,” not the heir, of a noble family, we might expect Freddie Threepwood (known as the Honorable or Hon. Freddie) to follow social convention for the aristocratic second sons and pursue a military career (cf. Prince Harry), but apparently he has chosen to 1 be jobless and “just [moon] about the place [Blandings]” (p. 13), a signal perhaps of loss of faith in British civilization and its military- imperial project ••• The association between soldiers and their county of origin dates from one of the so-called Cardwell Reforms of the British army ••• That particular initiative is often referred to the localization scheme of 1871, and it divided Britain into Regimental Districts based largely on county boundaries ••• County pride is clearly manifest in Lord Emsworth’s desire that his pumpkin win “first prize … at the Shrewsbury Show” (p. 18): that is, the agricultural competition for the county of Shropshire, held in the chief county town, Shrewsbury (where Charles Darwin was born and grew up) ••• In this connection, Lord Emsworth thinks of his family’s “scroll of honor” (p. 18), but to Wodehouse’s readers that three-word phrase would have evoked military honor lists that commemorated locals who enlisted for Great War service and then were killed in the trenches ••• A picture of such a list sits in the top-right- hand-corner of this page (St. Chad’s Church, Shrewsbury, Shropshire: “This Tablet … Is Erected in Grateful Recognition of Those [from the parish] Who Fell in the Great War 1914-1918”) ••• Scottish gardener Angus McAllister introduces an astringent “Celtic” element into Lord Emsworth’s English or “Saxon” regime; Scotland is regarded as a “Celtic” country, and Shropshire abuts another “Celtic” nation: Wales ••• In Anthony Trollope’s “The Telegraph Girl,” Sophy Wilson’s music-hall-going and, thus, problematic early love interest Alec Murray has Scottish-sounding first and last names; three medieval Scottish kings bore the name Alexander ••• Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century race theory differentiated between two peoples or ethnicities within the United Kingdom, the nation created in 1800 by the Act of Union, whose repeal or dissolution became the focus of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association and its Monster Meetings ••• According to this scheme, the English were seen as Saxon, descendants of such Early Medieval Germanic invader tribes as the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes ••• Qualities and traits associated with the Saxon character included rationality, dispassion, order, good planning, enterprise, steadfastness, leadership ••• On the surface, Lord Emsworth seems rational, not least because he purchases one of the great symbols of Enlightenment inquiry, a telescope; however, his failure to use that scientific instrument properly works against any conclusion that, in practice and essence, he is logical (the Emsworth is his noble title suggests as much: What is he worthwhileness? Emmm…) ••• As the map that features in your Write Now exercise underscores, the Irish, Scottish, and Manx—and also the Welsh and Cornish (i.e. people from the county of Cornwall in extreme southwestern England)—were seen as Celtic, although we now know that these populations are probably not ethnic Celts ••• Qualities and traits associated with the “Celtic” character included sentiment, passion, disarray, lack of planning, dreaminess, inconsistency, obsequiousness ••• Social theorist Matthew Arnold (an Englishman) could be negative when assessing Celtic nature; however, he also saw much value in the passion, artistic creativity, and openness to sentiment displayed by the Celts ••• Arnold’s influential 1867 lectures known as “Celtic Literature” state, “[S]entimental—if the Celtic nature is to be characterized by a single term—is the best term to take. An organization [i.e. nature] quick to feel impressions...very strongly; a lively personality...keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow .... If the downs of life too much outnumber the ups, this temperament ... may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay .... [T]he impressionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up, to be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly. Sentimental, always ready to react against the despotism of fact: that is the description a great friend of the Celt gives of him; and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want [i.e. lack] of success. Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal 2 conditions...of high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had. Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded perfectly .... If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in spiritual work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of business and politics!” ••• As successful businessman. Scottish-American figure Donaldson is Wodehouse’s way of putting the lie to Arnold’s claim about Celtic failure ever to “[succeed] perfectly,” not least in “the world of business” ••• Liberated from the racial prejudices and associated class- straitjacketing characteristic of contemporary British society (consider Lord Emsworth’s inclination to “[pull] the feudal stuff” on McAllister [p. 17]), the Donaldson family has enjoyed socio-economic mobility Stateside ••• At the time of “The Custody of the Pumpkin,” the multiethnic United States has become richer than Britain, whose Empire began to fade after—and, in part, because of—the Great War ••• Wodehouse’s admiration for American openness and entrepreneurialism derived in part from positive professional experiences he enjoyed on Broadway and in Hollywood; the self-made American is reflected in Donaldson’s having subscribed to “personality courses” that train one to “look the boss in the eye and make him wilt” (p. 31) ••• Lord Emsworth is surprised to learn that the “authoritative” (p. 29) Scottish- American (or Celtic-American) Donaldson is rich, but that epiphany warms him up to the fact that Freddie has become “spliced” (p. 25)—that is, married— to Donaldson’s daughter, the saxophone-playing Aggie ••• Lord Emsworth’s encounter with tulips in Kensington Gardens (a kind of countryside space in central London) perhaps evokes the worlds first major economic crash or bubble: the tulipomania of the 1630s ••• The version of “Custody” we are reading reflects the Great Depression, caused by Stock Market crashes in London and then New York in 1929 ••• The American catastrophe in particular resulted from the bursting of a speculative economic bubble in stocks, shares, and commodities ••• Donaldson avers that “[w]e [American businesses] have been through a tough time ….