Gussie Fink-Nietzsche
Sir: Jeeves, as noted, found Nietzsche 'fun- damentally unsound'. Schopenhauer, Bertie thought 'a grouch'. In Ring for Jeeves
there is the following accusation: "the
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whole trouble with women, Jeeves," he said and the philosopher Schopenhauer would have slapped him on the back and told him he knew just how he felt, "is practically all of them are dotty. . ." ' When Florence Craye discovered Bertie ordering Spinoza ('When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza's latest') she almost mar- ried him there and then.
Elsewhere in the canon, Spengler gets a bad press but Jeeves approves of Marcus Aurelius, on one occasion wishing 'that it were possible to bring the roses back into his cheeks by telling him one or two good things which had come into his mind from the Collected Works of Marcus Aurelius'.
In the last resort, however, it was the psy- chology of the individual which Jeeves found a more useful study than philosophy and who can say he was wrong?
David Roberts
133 Albert Street, London NW1
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