"Galahad at Blandings," P.G. Wodehouse

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

“Galahad at Blandings,” P.G. Wodehouse

June 6, 2020

“Blandings Castle…Huge and grey and majestic, adorned with turrets

and battlements in great profusion, it unquestionably takes the eye.”

                                                                                                            P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

                                                                                                            Blandings Castle, 1965

There is no time that is not a good time to read Wodehouse. But now is the perfect time to slip from the unpleasant present into the pleasurable past of P.G. Wodehouse.

Wodehouse, who was born in 1881, published his first novel The Pot Hunters in 1902. His last, Sunset at Blandings, was published in 1977, two years after his death. In between, he wrote more than ninety novels, forty plays, a couple hundred short stories, and more than a dozen movie scripts, including “A Damsel in Distress” and “Anything Goes.” This novel is the twelfth of fourteen devoted to Blandings Castle.

Blandings is home to Clarence Threepwood, Lord Emsworth, “…his long, lean body, draped like a wet sock on a chair…” His prize possession is the Empress of Blandings, an enormous black, Berkshire sow who is a three-time silver medal winner for fatness at the local Shropshire Agricultural Show. This book, as the title suggests, features the Honorable Galahad Threepwood, younger brother of Clarence, “…a brisk, dapper little gentleman in his early fifties.”. He is a man “disapproved of by his numerous sisters but considered in the Servant’s Hall to shed lustre on Blandings Castle.” Leading the servants is butler Sebastian Beach, “…a man who made two chins grow where there had been only one before… his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht.”

It is when lives of young lovers go astray that is catnip to Galahad. In this instance there are three pairs: Tipton Plimsol, tall, none-to-bright heir to Tipton Stores, is engaged to Veronica Wedge, a beautiful, “tall half-witted girl,” daughter of Hermione Wedge, one of Galahad’s sisters. Sam Bagshott, lawyer, aspiring writer and son of the deceased Boko Bagshott, once a Pelican friend of Galahad’s, is engaged to Sandy Callendar, newly hired by Hermione to be secretary to Clarence. And Wilfred Allsop, diminutive nephew of Lord Emsworth, friend of Tipton Plimsol and struggling musician, is in love with Monica Simmons, a stout “stalwart figure in smock and trousers.” She is Lord Emsworth’s pig-keeper.

The story begins in “one of New York’s popular police stations,” with Tipton and Wilfred awakening with hangovers under the watchful eye of Officer Garroway. Having lost their wallets, they are forced to borrow twenty dollars bail money from Lord Emsworth who happens to be in New York attending the wedding of his sister Constance. Along the way, Lord Emsworth, Tipton and Wilfred return to Blandings, the Empress gets soused, Sam slugs Constable Evans in the eye, and Veronica, at the insistence of her mother who falsely believes Tipton has lost all his money, writes a letter to her fiancé breaking the engagement, a letter that must be intercepted.  

Sir Walter Scott’s “tangled web” has nothing on what Wodehouse weaves in this story. In Galahad he has a master unraveler, unimaginable to the more serious “Wizard of the North.” The web, untangled by Galahad, is a masterpiece of complexity; it keeps the reader wreathed in smiles, when not convulsed in laughter. It is not only these three couples who Gally wants to see happily joined, but he must also put a stop to his sister Hermione’s plot to have Clarence marry her friend Dame Daphne Winkworth, who is staying at the castle with her troublesome son Huxley.

The end of a Wodehouse story is never a surprise; they all end happily. The surprise is in how the Master leads the reader through convoluted confusion to blissful conclusion. As for Galahad, it “was always his policy, if he could manage it, to strew a little happiness as he went by.” The reader is the beneficiary of the joy that spills from Wodehouse’s pen.