Plenty of Room for Stupidity: On P. G. Wodehouse

Most often, this sort of bonding springs from romantic love, and in the English novel I suppose the most beloved pairings are Elizabeth and Darcy, in “Pride and Prejudice,” and Catherine and Heathcliff, in “Wuthering Heights.” (The marriage of Jane and Rochester, in “Jane Eyre,” seems less a triumph of romantic love than one of Gothic, erotic-psychological jousting.) But in many ways the most memorable English couples are non-romantic: Holmes and Watson, Peter and Wendy, Scrooge and Cratchit on a peculiar, particular Christmas morning that is in fact every Christmas morning. Add to these Bertie and Jeeves. I ran my recent Wodehouse marathon by way of the handsome, affordable hardcover editions published in recent years by Overlook Press, whose dust-jacket copy refers to Bertie and Jeeves as “twentieth-century fiction’s most famous comic characters.” Hard to quibble with that.

In time, Jeeves became more quietly imposing, Bertie more reverent toward him. (The Bertie of “Right Ho, Jeeves,” who could declare that Jeeves “has lost his form” and “wants his plugs decarbonized,” gradually disappeared.) Their relationship became subtler. In the earliest stories, Bertie often rewards Jeeves by giving him cash, sometimes in a specified amount, but as ministration and recompense enter a psychological realm, this sort of crass transaction vanishes.

Bertie and Jeeves belong to the genre, far more English than American, of the farcical comic novel. In such books, when characters fail to conform to our expectations, we don’t think of them as showing some other, hitherto unsuspected side of themselves. Rather, we feel that the author is mistaken. This is the domain of the caricaturist, whose sure and slashing strokes have a purity of outline that feels inevitable. It’s as though the literary archetypes were always there, waiting for Wodehouse to perceive and portray them. So, for instance, when, in an early story, Bertie relates how Jeeves—that totem of imperturbability—came undone at a glimpse of Bertie’s pal Bingo disguised behind a false beard (“I saw the man’s jaw drop, and he clutched at the table for support”), we tut-tut. “Know your characters,” we long to tell Wodehouse. (The true Jeeves would emerge in time: “I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.”) Likewise, when we read of Jeeves being temporarily affianced, we conclude that Wodehouse doesn’t yet understand his most famous creation. A Jeeves who would propose marriage to a woman, for any reason—her riches, her beauty, her pedigree, her cooking—is an ersatz Jeeves.

The Bertie and Jeeves partnership gets better as it goes along, in part because Wodehouse learned to trust that his reader was in on the joke. Just as he gradually realized that we didn’t need to see money exchanged to understand that Jeeves finds ample rewards in caring for Bertie, Wodehouse discovered that Bertie needn’t be an absolute numbskull to make Jeeves’s braininess funny. In the last of the Jeeves novels, Bertie actually quotes poetry to Jeeves, and, though the poet in question is Ogden Nash (Jeeves responds with Herrick), the quotation itself is aptly chosen. This is a funnier Bertie than the one who isn’t sure what “plausible” or “etched” means, and who doesn’t seem to know who wrote “Macbeth.” Wodehouse came to see that Bertie could show a modicum of dash and savvy and still be a complete idiot. Even if, with a flâneur’s absorbency, Bertie has picked up a few stylish French bon mots, like preux chevalier and espièglerie, there is still plenty of room for stupidity.

Jeeves was born to minister to Bertie. Or, as Bertie puts it, in what for him is a moment of profound reflection, “I’d always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves, and haven’t got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on.” The parallels with J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are striking. (One of the greatest ironies of “Peter Pan” is that the boy who shuddered at puberty and romantic love engendered so many literary descendants.)