"Very Good, Jeeves," P.G. Wodehouse - A Review

 A correction of yesterday’s TOTD: An alert reader noted a mistake in the population of the European Union. The numbers used were for all of Europe. The European Union has a population of 449 million, which is expected to decline to 420 million by 2100. My apologies for the error. A corrected copy is attached.

 

Markets continued their downward slide yesterday, amid fears of a global trade war and a possible recession, or worse. While that is cause for concern, it may be meaningful to recall that P.G. Wodehouse – an author who needs no introduction – did much of his work during the three decades between 1914 and 1945, a time when the world was mired in two world wars, a global depression, and a time that saw the rise of Communism, Fascism and Nazism.

 

He brought humor to a suffering world. Open anyone of his books, and the furrowed brow will be replaced by a joyous smile.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Book

Very Good, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

April 5, 2025

 

“…Mr. Wodehouse has created Jeeves. He has created others, but in his creation of

Jeeves he has done something which may respectfully be compared to the work of the 

Almighty in Michelangelo’s painting. He has formed a man filled with the breath of life.”

                                                                                                                     Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

                                                                                                                     English writer, politician, historian

                                                                                                                     Introduction Weekend Wodehouse, 1951

 

P.G. Wodehouse has been part of my life since childhood. While Wodehouse biographer Frances Donaldson has written that women, as a whole, do not care for the “masculine fantasy” he specialized in, it was my mother and grandmother who introduced me to him. Most of my collection did not make the trip from Old Lyme to Essex, but I still have sixty or so titles on my shelves. And I continue to belong to an informal group of Drones in New York where me meet – less frequently than we once did – but we still quote “The master,” tell bawdy tales and throw rolls at one another.

 

It is hard to explain why Wodehouse has accumulated so many fans over so many years. Most of his 96 titles are still in print. Many assume he wrote of the Edwardian age (1901-1910), but Wodehouse fan, publisher and editor Roger Kimball, wrote in The New Criterion, that the world Wodehouse created is one that “never existed.” Regardless, it is his playfulness that is the draw. While we laugh at Bertie Wooster having to be bailed out of self-inflicted predicaments by his valet Jeeves, the humor is never mean-spirited, even when Bertie’s Aunt Agatha calls him a “chump” and tells him: “Don’t gibber!” As much as anything, the love for his books stems from the fact he is a “master of the ludicrous” (Richard Usborne, author of Wodehouse at Work) and, as Evelyn Waugh wrote, the “exquisite felicity of his language.” 

 

In this collection there are eleven Jeeves and Bertie short stories. The book was originally published in 1930, a decade and a half after the two were introduced in 1915, when readers met them in “Extricating Young Gussie,” a short story published in The Saturday Evening Post.

 

Some examples of his bon mots in this volume:

 

                   “There’s no time when ties do not matter.” – “Jeeves and the Impending Doom”

 

                   “…he broke a vase in rather a constrained way.” – “Jeeves and the Song of Songs”

 

                   “Ha!, and I said it rather nastily.” – “The Love that Purifies”

                  “You know how it is in these remote rural districts. Life tends to get a bit slow. There’s nothing much to do in the long winter evenings but listen to the radio and brood on what a tick your neighbor is.” – “The Ordeal of Young Tuppy”

 

The British author of Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams, once wrote: “give me Shakespeare for tragedy, Shaw for wit and Wodehouse for lighthearted comedy.” To which I add, Amen!