The Divine Comedy of PG Wodehouse

Plum Time in Nevereverland: The Divine Comedy of P. G. Wodehouse WILLIAM VESTERMAN "It reminded me of one of those lines in the poem— 'See how the little how-does-it-go-tum tumty tiddly push.' Perhaps you remember the passage?" "'Alas, regardless of their fate, the little victims play,' sir." "Quite. Sad, Jeeves." "Yes, sir." —Joy in the Moming VIEWED AS AN ultimately ineducable man, Bertie Wooster under- mines the biographical foundations of the novel as a literary form. In any given "installment of the Bertram Wooster story," he will always be seen to forget as a character the same lovely tag lines of litera- ture that as a narrator he remembers so well to have forgotten. Of course, Jeeves never forgets anything and can always supply any demand for the proper lines or their proper authors. And at first each of his lessons seems taken to heart, because in Bertie's narratives both the initial ignorance and the supplied knowledge have been clearly remembered down to the last nonsense syllable. But as soon as Bertie stops writing and enters his world again, oblivion resumes its sway. Old favorites fade over and over. In volume after volume, for example, Jeeves has to remind him what the troops of Midian are said to do in Hymns Ancient and Modem (they "prowl and prowl around"). And although Bertie has been through Eton and Oxford he never can get straight Jeeves's rem acu tetigisti ("you have touched the matter with a needle," i.e., "exactly so"). Yet every time Bertie comes to narrate his latest aphasias, he is once more blessed with total recall. Literary lapses are fully consistent with larger problems of 92 WILLIAM VESTERMAN • 93 learning. Bertie can no more help getting engaged to the same women over and over again—though previous narratives clearly prove he should know he shouldn't—than he can help enacting the eternal return to Totleigh Towers or Steeple Bumpleigh—though previous reincarnations as a narrator prove he knows he will get in the soup promptly on arrival. In spite of his helplessness and infinite regression, however, Bertie's autobiography is far from being Kaf- kaesque. The world he lives in is not hellish, but (as Evelyn Waugh said) paradisal. Though amnesia and passivity seem to rule his life, all his verbal fumbling and personal diffidence are redeemed as soon as Bertie begins to write. In a strikingly original style with shining new similes leaping out of a tumbling torrent of slangy cliche, biblical reference, and literary allusion, his spirited narration proceeds as if he were blessed by divine inspiration like some Mayfair Caedmon. At least without an equally radical explanation, his state of literary grace as a narrator seems incomprehensible. How—under centuries-old novelistic conventions of temporal verisimilitude—could he ever other- wise be understood to have written the books in which he appears? It is as if Leopold Bloom were to wake up on 17 June 1904 and sit down to write Ulysses. This serial literary apotheosis in a serial novel makes part of the comic art of P. G. Wodehouse, and the comedy would not be nearly so amusing without its play on novelistic conventions. This point becomes very clear in any comparison of the Wooster narratives with their transmogrifications into plays. Absent the dynamics of inter- action between Bertie as narrator and Bertie as character, every- thing tends to fall flat. Trapped without its temporal perspective in the block universe of a mere living present, the transcribed dialogue dies, Bertie seems only inept, and Jeeves himself only stuffy or arch and self-regarding, not respectful, all-knowing, and all-forgiving. In their deft deployment of literary conventions as well as their intricate plotting, the novels belie Wodehouse's own typically modest charac- terization of them—^"musical comedies without music." One fundamental convention of narration in the first person is 94 • RARITAN that the narrator has learned something about his or her earlier life, if only what parts of the plenum of experience may be justifiably left out of its verbal record. Naturally, a narrator's ambition is to achieve some greater composition—to understand and express the life left in. And if life exists in time, the language of narrative in expressing some meaning for a life also expresses a sense of time. Paul Ricoeur says that throngh "emplotment" the art of narration creates a knowledge of time by creating a world of events in which " 'one because of that' prevails over 'one after that'" By making a meaningful temporal order of occurrences, narrative redeems them from mere sequence. Ricoeur claims that by achieving a verbally expressed composition out of the welter of events in history (or out of the welter of imagi- nary events possible to fiction), the art of narration "figures and reconfigures" the mystery of time, humanizing it for our understand- ing. By means of these figurative powers of narrative, time becomes comprehensible. But if time implies change and Bertie's autobiography ultimately expresses an absence of change, how can we understand his life or his time or the narrative art of P. G. Wodehouse? Besides trying to recall quotations, Bertie's life consists largely of his getting "into the mulligatawny" and of Jeeves's getting him out. That's what Jeeves seems placed on earth to do. What is more, Jeeves knows his place and never resents it. What do you think of that? Jeeves exists to serve not only Bertie—who he fully understands is "mentally negligible"—bnt also any of Bertie's odd friends and relations who might require his help—^"They all come to you, don't they, Jeeves, from the lowest to the highest?" Happily for them, Jeeves's service is so effective that (for example) no need for money ever lasts for more than a few days. While some people like Bertie himself "have the stuff in heaping handfuls," others temporarily experience a desperate need for "a bit of the ready" and rely on Jeeves's schemes to redistribute the wealth, though the money of the young master is never required for the plan. And while all Jeeves's plans are crowned with success (as Bertie might say), a new edition of Spinoza is about the most this gentleman's personal gentleman ever gets from anyone for his pains. Jeeves is always pleased with his reward, however, fully WILLIAM VESTERMAN • 95 satisfied to have been of service. What do you think of that? In fact, not only are envy and ingratitude unknown, but Bertie lives forever in his mid-twenties in a world devoid of other common causes of human suffering. Violence, relations between the sexes, ar- son, blackmail, and drunkenness—to take only a few examples—are always just as harmless and amusing as money troubles. The weath- er is almost always perfect. Mumps (never accompanied by testicular complications) is the worst disease really encountered, hangovers the worst discomfort—^"I felt like a sandbagged leper." You can lack a boy scout in the rump and the result is not permanent damage to nerve or bone, not a criminal charge or a civil lawsuit, but the gratitude of the boy's father, which leads to the success of young lovers. Granted, in the public sphere the plague of Gommunism sometimes infects people like G. D'Arcy ("Stilton") Gheesewright, causing him to shun momentarily the eager support of a rich uncle and to believe he is joining the working-class struggle by becoming a rural constable. People of the "rougher sort" sometimes throw eggs and old vegetables at political speakers. There is a protest march. But that's about it on the left. It is also true that fascism does appear in Wooster's England through an organization formed by Bertie's ene- my, Spode, later Lord Sidcup. Yet his Black Shorts do little more than chant "Heil, Spode!" while wearing rugby pants off the field of play. Like ghosts defined pragmatically by William James, they might as well not exist. As for capitalism, everyone in his world (including Ber- tie) knows that he and most of the young and idle rich at the Drones Glub are complete social parasites, but no one cares. No one cares! What do you think of that? What everyone does care abont is the fast-paced pursuit of still more happiness in unambiguous and fully satisfying forms. And thanks to the fish-fed brain beneath his size-nine hat, Jeeves has the power to supply every demand in Bertie's world and to overcome every threat to its normal steady state of pure pleasure. But where does he get the heart to do so? How does "one after that" become "one because of that" for him? How are we to understand the motives of a superman in the selfless service of a booby? 96 • RARITAN It might be argued that the lack of an answer is precisely the basic joke of the series and a sacred mystery, like the never-revealed name of what the Newsomes manufacture in Henry James's The Am- bassadors or what Gaptain Vere says to Billy Budd behind the closed doors. But surely criticism should not give up without a fight. Jeeves always counts on the discovery of clear and distinct motives to form his plots. Why should we not try to take him on his ovm terms? At this point, an unamused critic interested in social justice might say that the only relevant motives here are those of the genre, and that "the clever slave" is a type going back at least to Roman comedy, one designed to affirm the justice of the estabhshed social order by dramatizing its putative universal acceptance.

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