Fine Weather, Jeeves, page 1
About the Author
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) is widely regarded as the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century. Wodehouse wrote more than 70 novels and 200 short stories, creating numerous much-loved characters – the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and his beloved Empress of Blandings, Mr Mulliner, Ukridge, and Psmith. His humorous articles were published in more than 80 magazines, including Punch, over six decades. He was also a highly successful music lyricist, once with over five musicals running on Broadway simultaneously. P. G. Wodehouse was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for ‘an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’.
Also by P. G. Wodehouse
Jeeves and Wooster
The Inimitable Jeeves
Carry On, Jeeves
Very Good, Jeeves
Thank You, Jeeves
Right Ho, Jeeves
The Code of the Woosters
Joy in the Morning
The Mating Season
Ring for Jeeves
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
Jeeves in the Offing
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
Much Obliged, Jeeves
Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
Blandings Castle
Something Fresh
Leave it to Psmith
Summer Lightning
Full Moon
Pigs Have Wings
A Pelican at Blandings
Sunset at Blandings
Uncle Fred
Uncle Fred in the Springtime
Uncle Dynamite
Cocktail Time
Service with a Smile
Monty Bodkin
The Luck of the Bodkins
Standalone novels
The Pothunters
Piccadilly Jim
A Damsel in Distress
The Adventures of Sally
The Small Bachelor
Money for Nothing
Big Money
Hot Water
Laughing Gas
Summer Moonshine
The Girl in Blue
P. G. Wodehouse
* * *
FINE WEATHER, JEEVES
Summer Stories from the World of Wodehouse
Contents
Introduction by Andrew Hunter Murray
June
‘The Amazing Hat Mystery’
(from Young Men in Spats)
‘First Aid for Dora’
(from Ukridge)
‘The Romance of a Bulb-Squeezer’
(from Meet Mr Mulliner)
‘The Heart of a Goof’
(from The Heart of a Goof)
‘Best Seller’
(from Mulliner Nights)
‘Gala Night’
(from Mulliner Nights)
July
‘Trouble Down at Tudsleigh’
(from Young Men in Spats)
‘Fixing it for Freddie’
(from Carry On, Jeeves)
‘Comrade Bingo’
(from The Inimitable Jeeves)
‘Bingo has a Bad Goodwood’
(from The Inimitable Jeeves)
August
‘The Great Sermon Handicap’
(from The Inimitable Jeeves)
‘Noblesse Oblige’
(from Young Men in Spats)
‘The Love that Purifies’
(from Very Good, Jeeves)
Introduction
As I write this it is late March, and England has been on the receiving end of a nigh-Biblical deluge. Across the country, weather forecasters have left the thunderclouds on their maps for weeks without fear of refutation. Any unpaved ground resembles Agincourt at half-time. Biblical patriarchs have been seen ushering zoo animals into large MDF structures and muttering things like ‘I told you so.’ If rain, to misquote Madeline Bassett, is fairy tears, then something has gone seriously awry in fairyland.
And yet despite the clouds overhead, my spirits are undimmed, because I have just finished reading the collection of stories you hold in your hand, and have been transported to the Wodiverse, where it is generally summer, and where no matter what trials assail our heroes, the endings of their stories usually offer them at least a ray of sunshine.
This collection, ranging from the going at Goodwood to the turrets of Tudsleigh Court, shows Wodehouse to great advantage, in a field where he spent most of his career – that of shorter fiction, then a key strut of the literary world and the way many writers made their start. Lots of old favourites – Ukridge, Jeeves and Wooster, Bingo Little, Mr Mulliner, Anatole – make welcome appearances in this collection. There are implausible wagers of chefs, there are romances that hinge on the swing of a mashie or the brim of a gentleman’s hat. There are two separate kidnaps. All the usual stuff, as Wodehouse himself might airily dismiss it.
But there are also plenty of surprises in store, fictional realms where the casual reader might not think Wodehouse had a toehold. For example, ‘The Romance of a Bulb-Squeezer’, which presents a hero whose entire miserable job is to photograph beautiful women, and which introduces as its antagonist the indescribably hideous mayor of Tooting East. Or ‘First Aid for Dora’, which ushers the reader into one of the most dangerous territories in Wodehouse’s entire oeuvre – the parlour of a bestselling lady novelist, living just off Wimbledon Common.
He wouldn’t like it – he was aware before the joke was first made about the risks of dissecting frogs – but I have a theory about Wodehouse’s work, which is that it essentially follows the lines of Shakespearean comedy. There is youth, there is almost always love, the stakes are small but real, and very often the action transplants our heroes from the safe environment of the city to the countryside, where all sorts of weird inversions and chaos can occur. I think this is why so many Jeeves and Wooster stories begin with him being summoned by one aunt or another – because it is outside the safe haven of the Drones Club and the metrop that true Wodehousian mayhem can be unleashed.
As you might expect, the individual jokes throughout this collection are extraordinarily good. A young woman unhappy in love ‘flung herself on the sofa and was now chewing the cushion in an ecstasy of grief. She gulped like a bull-pup swallowing a chunk of steak.’ When the hopeless golfer Ferdinand Dibble exiles himself to a seaside resort where the standard of play lies even below his own weak standards, he finds that after a week, ‘he had gone through the entire menagerie like a bullet through a cream puff … Ferdinand Dibble was faced on the eighth morning of his visit by the startling fact that he had no more worlds to conquer.’ Wodehouse can make the seam between a sub-par golfer and Alexander the Great so invisibly small that any right-thinking reader will be startled into a smile.
This breadth of allusion is another feature of the Wodiverse, and yet not an essential one. Wodehouse’s work is not a crossword puzzle to be solved. The allusions he makes don’t have to be teased out or described at length in laborious endnotes. If you get the reference, all to the good; if not, like an omnibus, there’ll be another one along very soon, which you can pick up if you like. I don’t doubt I have missed dozens. But the comedy frequently sits in the enormous gaps between the allusion made and what is actually being described. ‘Percy continued to stare before him like a man who has drained the wine cup of life to its lees, only to discover a dead mouse at the bottom.’ This is a glancing reference to Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ which – and this is crucial, particularly given how dated Tennyson’s stuff has been looking lately – in no way affects the quality of the joke.
‘Like Hamlet on a less impressive occasion,’ another narrator writes, ‘I wanted to slay this man when he was full of bread, with all his crimes, broad-blown, as flush as May, at drinking, swearing, or about some act that had no relish of salvation in it.’ Bear in mind that this is about Ukridge, who has borrowed the narrator’s dress-clothes without permission, meaning he’s had to borrow some from his landlord. The genius lies in even drawing the comparison with the Moody Dane.
Another pet theory of mine – call this one the Code of the Wodehouses – is that so much of the charm of P. G.’s work is to make each separate element of the work look easy. This applies not only to his plots, which he frequently puzzled over for weeks or months until they were watertight, and over which he agonised in letters to his friends, but to every sentence. I don’t know if Wodehouse was familiar with the Italian Renaissance idea of sprezzatura – to work so terribly hard that you make difficult things seem easy, and never let on just how much effort they’ve cost you – but even if he did know the word, he wouldn’t have been caught dead admitting it. The reader doesn’t have to do any work, and in fact the stories are good because they don’t let on that they cost hundreds of hours of sweat. Any chump can strain for effect and then invite the world to witness them straining. But to slog and then conceal the slog is harder.
As he aged, Wodehouse was dismissed as having remained in a world that would be almost completely alien to anyone without their own Duchy, and was scorned by some critics as a soul marooned in a world that no longer existed. The real genius of his work is that, as Evelyn Waugh once famously observed, it never did exist. It’s not as if Wodehouse kept writing stories about Blandings Castle long after the place was sold off to the National Trust. The whole thing is a fever dream. The greatest strength of the work is that it transports the reader to an entirely different realm, one where essentially trivial people are grappling, in essentially trivial ways, with the real problems of life and young love.
Far from being a shipwrecked Edwardian, Wodehouse was deeply in tune with the fiction of the time – it is remarkable to read his letters describing lunch with George Orwell just after the war, reading Evelyn Waugh and marvelling at the satire of Put Out More Flags, and giving his views of the latest fiction – but any criticism that alleges he should somehow have turned his pen to gritty social realism ignores not only the breadth of what fiction can do but how comic writing works. Readers still pick up these stories precisely because of the delightful inversion of what matters. To the heroes in this collection of stories, some parts of modern life matter intensely (a golf handicap, the snug fit of a Bodmin’s hat). Other things that get a lot of people worked up don’t matter at all (the revolution of the proletariat).
This element of his writing, his steadfast refusal to grapple with the Great Issues of the Twentieth Century, is in fact essential to the comedy. Throughout the great pantheon, from The Diary of a Nobody via Adrian Mole to Bridget Jones, the inability to see things in their proper proportion is a vital ingredient of what makes comic characters actually comic. The outlook is essentially an anti-extremist one and, in uncertain times, it is a genuine pleasure to take refuge among a cast of characters who simply cannot imagine anything ghastlier than eating sardines for tea.
The dialect matches this cream-puff Weltanschauung. When Bertie Wooster is forced against his will to host a tea party for a group of communists (due to a complicated plot I won’t spoil for you now), the following discussion takes place between Bertie and Comrade Rowbotham, who fixes him with a glittering eye and asks:
‘Are you of the movement?’
‘Well – er—’
‘Do you yearn for the Revolution?’
‘Well, I don’t know that I exactly yearn.’
Time and again, from Rowbotham to Spode, Wodehouse and his cast remain deeply sceptical of anyone who can capitalise letters in everyday dialogue to describe their obsessions. These stories were refuges for millions of readers from the horrors of the twentieth century; they remain delightful oases of good humour and escapes from the dull or frightening realities of life even now, well into the twenty-first. This world has an innocence about it, and it allows us, however briefly, to recapture our own.
That’s enough theory, and probably far more than Wodehouse would ever have admitted to, even in the direst extremity. So I will simply conclude by saying that I enjoyed these stories immensely, and I hope you do too. Nothing remains but to pour yourself a glass of something strong (maybe go easy on the Buck-U-Uppo), collapse back onto the nearest cushioned surface, and take comfort in these thirteen delicious slices of Plum Pie.
Andrew Hunter Murray, 2024
June
The Amazing Hat Mystery
A bean was in a nursing home with a broken leg as the result of trying to drive his sports-model Poppenheim through the Marble Arch instead of round it, and a kindly Crumpet had looked in to give him the gossip of the town. He found him playing halma with the nurse, and he sat down on the bed and took a grape, and the Bean asked what was going on in the great world.
‘Well,’ said the Crumpet, taking another grape, ‘the finest minds in the Drones are still wrestling with the great Hat mystery.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You don’t mean you haven’t heard about it?’
‘Not a word.’
The Crumpet was astounded. He swallowed two grapes at once in his surprise.
‘Why, London’s seething with it. The general consensus of opinion is that it has something to do with the Fourth Dimension. You know how things go. I mean to say, something rummy occurs and you consult some big-brained bird and he wags his head and says “Ah! The Fourth Dimension!” Extraordinary nobody’s told you about the great Hat mystery.’
‘You’re the first visitor I’ve had. What is it, anyway? What hat?’
‘Well, there were two hats. Reading from left to right, Percy Wimbolt’s and Nelson Cork’s.’
The Bean nodded intelligently.
‘I see what you mean. Percy had one, and Nelson had the other.’
‘Exactly. Two hats in all. Top hats.’
‘What was mysterious about them?’
‘Why, Elizabeth Bottsworth and Diana Punter said they didn’t fit.’
‘Well, hats don’t sometimes.’
‘But these came from Bodmin’s.’
The Bean shot up in bed. ‘What?’
‘You mustn’t excite the patient,’ said the nurse, who up to this point had taken no part in the conversation.
‘But, dash it, nurse,’ cried the Bean, ‘you can’t have caught what he said. If we are to give credence to his story, Percy Wimbolt and Nelson Cork bought a couple of hats at Bodmin’s – at Bodmin’s, I’ll trouble you – and they didn’t fit. It isn’t possible.’
He spoke with strong emotion, and the Crumpet nodded understandingly. People can say what they please about the modern young man believing in nothing nowadays, but there is one thing every right-minded young man believes in, and that is the infallibility of Bodmin’s hats. It is one of the eternal verities. Once admit that it is possible for a Bodmin hat not to fit, and you leave the door open for Doubt, Schism, and Chaos generally.
‘That’s exactly how Percy and Nelson felt, and it was for that reason that they were compelled to take the strong line they did with E. Bottsworth and D. Punter.’
‘They took a strong line, did they?’
‘A very strong line.’
‘Won’t you tell us the whole story from the beginning?’ said the nurse.
‘Right ho,’ said the Crumpet, taking a grape. ‘It’ll make your head swim.’
‘So mysterious?’
‘So absolutely dashed uncanny from start to finish.’
You must know, to begin with, my dear old nurse (said the Crumpet), that these two blokes, Percy Wimbolt and Nelson Cork, are fellows who have to exercise the most watchful care about their lids, because they are so situated that in their case there can be none of that business of just charging into any old hattery and grabbing the first thing in sight. Percy is one of those large, stout, outsize chaps with a head like a watermelon, while Nelson is built more on the lines of a minor jockey and has a head like a peanut.
You will readily appreciate, therefore, that it requires an artist hand to fit them properly and that is why they have always gone to Bodmin. I have heard Percy say that his trust in Bodmin is like the unspotted faith of a young curate in his bishop and I have no doubt that Nelson would have said the same, if he had thought of it.
It was at Bodmin’s door that they ran into each other on the morning when my story begins.
‘Hullo,’ said Percy. ‘You come to buy a hat?’
‘Yes,’ said Nelson. ‘You come to buy a hat?’
‘Yes.’ Percy glanced cautiously about him, saw that he was alone (except for Nelson, of course) and unobserved, and drew closer and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a reason!’
‘That’s rummy,’ said Nelson. He, also, spoke in a hushed tone. ‘I have a special reason, too.’
Percy looked warily about, and lowered his voice another notch.
‘Nelson,’ he said, ‘you know Elizabeth Bottsworth?’
‘Intimately,’ said Nelson.
‘Rather a sound young potato, what?’
‘Very much so.’
‘Pretty.’
‘I’ve often noticed it.’
‘Me, too. She is so small, so sweet, so dainty, so lively, so viv— what’s-the-word? – that a fellow wouldn’t be far out in calling her an angel in human shape.’
‘Aren’t all angels in human shape?’
‘Are they?’ said Percy, who was a bit foggy on angels. ‘Well, be that as it may,’ he went on, his cheeks suffused to a certain extent, ‘I love that girl, Nelson, and she’s coming with me to the first day of Ascot, and I’m relying on this new hat of mine to do just that extra bit that’s needed in the way of making her reciprocate my passion. Having only met her so far at country houses, I’ve never yet flashed upon her in a topper.’
