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BY RONALD BRYDEN TT is golden afternoon in Market Snodsbury. The 'chimneys of Brinkley Court, rural seat of Mr. and Mrs. Portarlington Travers and their peerless
French chef Anatole, doze in a water-colour landscape. Across the lawn, a butler shimmers with tea. Up the drive, the young people assemble for the weekend, in flannels, two-seaters and assumed identities. It is a vista, as the narrator will inevitably say, in which every prospect pleases. Only one thing is wrong. You must not look too closely at the heroine's Bermuda- shorted legs or flaming hair. Despite the madcap vivacity of her manner, she is a carefully hennaed, tenacious fifty-year-old. You must not draw too near the lissome bachelor, shinning down drainpipes at her behest in search of missing silver cow-creamers. Beneath the youth- ful tailoring, he is a garrulous, arthritic septua- genarian. The lovers pursuing each other through the shrubbery are goatish pantaloons, flirtatious crones. The corridors ring with geriatric high- jinks.
For it is thirty years since Jeeves, with deference, first warned Bertie Wooster that young ladies of such Titian colouring and tireless espieglerie as Roberta Wickham do not make the best life- time companions. The consequences of ignoring that advice, which included Bertie's discovery at midnight attempting to puncture Sir Roderick Glossop's hot-water bottle with a darning- needle while the distinguished alienist slept, were set forth in Very Good, Jeeves, in 1930. And if the Roberta who now reappears in P. G. Wode- house's eightieth-odd novel* is still too much for her old admirer, it is scarcely surprising. Bertie was already well established as the least marriageable bachelor-about-Mayfair when Jeeves first presented his impeccable references some time in the year 1916. As for the ages of the others—Sir Roderick, Aunt Dahlia, the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, at whose preparatory school Bertie and his friend 'Kipper' Herring first tasted the bitter cup of education—their manners and their idiom betray that none of them can have matured later than the Liberal victory of '06.
Of course, it is not really dye and wrinkles which signal the flight of the years over Brinkley Court. Bertie, 'Kipper,' Aunt Dahlia and the rest safely inhabit that timeless Shangri-La where all Wode- house characters sport in perpetual sunshine and arrested development: where Bingo Little still trousers the housekeeping allowance for a flutter at Goodwood, Lord Emsworth communes in wordless content with that majestic sow, the Empress of Blandings, and a reminiscent Mr. Mulliner casts a twilit hush of expectation on the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest. 'I go off the rails,' Wodehouse wrote in the Thirties, 'unless I stay all the time in a sort of artificial world of my creation. A real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb.' So his ageless, india-rubber, grotesques dwell in a universe constructed for them, closed under glass like Lord Emsworth's champion marrows
* JEEVES IN THE OFFIN,G. By P. G. Wodehouse. (Herbert Jenkins, 13s. 6d.)
to keep out the autumnal breath of reality. Everything possible has been done to seal the vacuum : to make it sound-proof against the faintest tick of chronology, germ-proof against the minutest bacteria of change which might set
up the- slow chemistry of decay.
On the surface, the triumph over time appears complete. Any day now, somebody will discover that Wodehouse is in the highest contemporary fashion. In the age of Moore and Mondrian, Webern and Stravinsky, he is the most abstract writer using the novel form. For years he has been standing on the point to which Ionesco, Pinter and N. F. Simpson tend. Somehow he seems to have anticipated the taste which has created the more advanced, the farther-out kinds of modern poetry, ballet and jazz: a taste for arbitrary, self-enclosed patterns, strenuous, tight, cool and intricate. The best of his farces have the agile, metallic precision of an Empson riddle, a Balanchine divertissement; giving pleasure by their intellectual complexity rather than any re- semblance to experience. They are pure plotting, and their resolution provides the same pure satis- faction as the working-out of a jigsaw or fugue.
Did he foresee that a society moving deeper into mass production and mass education would demand new, paradoxical kinds of relaxation? It is one of the curious contradictions of our time that much of our leisure seems to have become the pursuit of artificial forms of tension. It is as if we had to wring from our spare time demands on the faculties which our work taxes inadequately: to find problems for surplus in- telligence, to strain nerves slackened by the day's routine. If it is true that modern life moves faster, more exhaustingly and dangerously, how do you explain the suicide-cyclists, the jazz-club ravers, the flick-knife gangs? If civilisation has really grown more complex and intellectually demand- ing, what do people seek from crossword puzzles, bridge and Dorothy Sayers? Escape, certainly, into order and unreality; but surely, too, into a mental strenuousness life will not require, a use for knowledge, quickness, ratiocination. The admitted difficulty of much modern art and literature has little to do with esoteric obscurity —has there been a genuine esoteric since Yeats? It has its parallels in every branch of popular entertainment, in increased complexity, ath- leticism and wit. On the frontier between the two fields stand Wodehouse's novels, half- classics, half-acrostics, but wholly in the latest vogue.
On the whole, theirs looks like an accidental modernity. It is doubtful whether Wodehouse has ever striven for purity of anything but enter- tainment value. Besides, there is an evolution discernible in his work where time and nature have been the selective agents. Perhaps because the plot of Jeeves in the Offing is looser than usual, there is time to notice the process of accumulation by which his medium has been formed. It is a whole geology of slang and humour. At one moment Bertie calls people old beans, at the next talks jazzily of flipping his lid. In between occur 1912-ish jokes about Chekhov and l930-ish jokes about psy- chiatry. Every decade has added its layer to the soil, and while the recent accretions wash awaY quickly, leaving little permanent trace, they have served to press down and harden to mineral toughness the primary strata from which the basic, springy mechanisms of his comedies are wrought.
They correspond with the first two decades of his career, and the two comic traditions-- English and American—in which he moved ill those periods. From 1902 to 1909, Wodehouse worked as a journalist on the old Globe, for the later years as heir to Beach Thomas's column. The Ukridge stories are an affectionate Inemoir of that time and the group of old Dulwich friends with whom he forgathered: visiting back and forth in bachelor digs (Ukridge was given the Arundel Street address of the adventure.- novelist William Townend), dining out cheap1Y at 'Barolini's' in Soho, borrowing shirts and fivers from each other, dropping in for matinees at the Criterion or Gaiety. The deepest level of every Wodehouse novel is a memory of Ed- wardian farce—the convention of Charley' Aunt, The Private Secretary and Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, with breezy young prodigals dodg' ing uncles and creditors with the aid of sly manservants in order to pursue arch flappers in the country—filtered through the mannerisms of Edwardian belles-/cures: Jerome K. Jerome. 'Saki,' E. V. Lucas, A. A. Milne. A long line of Honourable Freddies leads to Bertie. A tradi- tion as old as Terence blossoms in Jeeves.
In 1909, Wodehouse migrated to New York, to produce with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern a legendary string of musical comedies, cul- minating in Sally with Marilyn Miller. Some' thing of the buoyancy of that time glows through I the Indiscretions of Archie, with its picture of a brownstone Manhattan whose tallest building ! is the Flat-Iron, populated by Irish policemen. Jewish delicatessen-owners and song-writers in shirt-sleeves and hard plug hats who can sweell the nation overnight with hymns to motherhood. From that period come several of his recurring types—the gamine heroines, the repulsive child- ren, the cheeky bellboys and broody millionaires —but, more importantly, the gleaming stage' craft of the old-fashioned American musical comedy. To this day, any Wodehouse plot can be broken down to its components of acts. chorus numbers, duets and solos. Its exposition is slotted into racy dialogue, the entrances are prepared, the reversals work like revolving doors on ball-bearings. Wodehouse himself has de' scribed his novels as musical comedies without the music. He learned how to construct then' in the New York of Ziegfeld, the Shuberts and George M. Cohan. It gave him the sprung-steel technique which has survived both them and the theatre for which it was created. So perfect is the mechanisol now that it seems able to go on functioning Of ever, the bedroom doors opening and shutting: the roadsters dashing up the drive, the butler. ' head swivelling in a double-take. Robbed of .11' context, it has become pure design: a tinklingt abstract mobile which suddenly appears lus the thing for a contemporary drawing-room, go with the Rioupelles and Barbara Hepworth'5 (In an odd way, he makes a match for Iv1.15; Compton-Burnett---a comic mask to hang besk her iEschylean one.) But if you reread Ukridgci Psmith and Indiscretions of Archie, today's meta seems a little dull. The dolls' faces look haggard the mechanical pirouettes seem creaky an, skeletal. Something has gone with the music an' the air.
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