The 23 episodes of “Jeeves and Wooster”, a British TV series starring Stephen Fry as Jeeves and a young Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster that ran from 1990 to 1993, are now available via YouTube. If you don’t know who Jeeves and Bertie are, you probably won’t enjoy the series. If you do know, you’re almost sure to have quibbles.
Jeeves, indispensable personal manservant, and his employer, mentally negligible man about town Bertie Wooster, were the supreme creations of P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced “Woodhouse”), the most gifted (to my mind) author of light fiction who ever lived. George Orwell, who wrote an intelligent though ultimately too generous discussion of Wodehouse, explained to ignorant Americans that Bertie was a pre-World War I Edwardian “knut”, a languid, yet somehow charming fellow whose general incompetence somehow makes it appropriate that he should have more money than he can spend.
The fact that a lot of Bertie Woosters got slaughtered in the trenches of World War I somehow did not decrease the market for Wodehouse’s fiction. Wodehouse, who always looked rather determinedly on the bright side of life, at least in public, shrewdly guessed that a lot of people would prefer to pretend that the Great War never happened, and so made the world of the knut even more extravagantly self-indulgent and unreal than it had been in the balmy days when King Edward was still alive,1 creating a world of young men in spats, white flannels and cucumber sandwiches, smart flats and country homes, heiresses and French maids, all of them pure as the driven snow—for Wodehouse’s world is as innocent as the real one is wicked.
What makes Wodehouse worth reading is the wonderful dexterity of both his language and his plots—“musical comedy without the music,” he liked to call it, although few musicals could match the twists and turns of his absurdist plots where everything is first turned upside down—very often due to Bertie’s blundering—and then flipped rightside up again thanks to Jeeves’ brilliance.2 Wodehouse drew heavily on the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan for both his plots and language, translating them onto the written page. He had a wonderful ability to mix the clichés of formal and colloquial English—ponderous “Establishment English” and English “public school”3 slang, in particular—turning them inside out or leaving them rightside in while placing them in incongruous surroundings, shifting constantly from outrageous overstatement to similarly outrageous understatement within a single sentence.4
When I first saw the Jeeves and Wooster episodes I was disappointed that every line of Wodehouse’s superb verbal stunting wasn’t faithfully replicated on the screen—absurd, no doubt, but, as Bertie would say, there it is. After almost thirty years to collect my thoughts, I find that, so far, my original judgment was a bit harsh. Stephen Fry makes an excellent Jeeves, though there’s often an ironic tone to his supposedly respectful responses to Bertie’s inanities—as though Fry feels the need to let us know that Jeeves knows how stupid Bertie is—which strikes me as lazy and self-indulgent. The real Jeeves, one feels, would be above the need to signal his superiority.
Laurie’s Bertie Wooster is more of a mixed bag. In the first scenes of the first episode, Laurie engages in some horrible mugging, intended to let us know that Bertie’s suffering from a hangover, but if the plot didn’t make that clear, we’d never have guessed. Eventually. Laurie improves, and physically he makes an excellent Wooster, his tall, spindly, eccentric frame making even the most elegant outfit look somewhat ridiculous, and thus serving to ridicule rather than distinguish its wearer.
The trappings of twenties and thirties elegance are very well done, but the Brits, of course, never tire of this. British studios must have roundhouses of puffing locomotives, garages bursting with antique sports cars, taxis, and limos, not to mention immaculately maintained country homes and smart flats. The theme music, a sort of palm court jazz, if that isn’t too rude a term, is quite catchy as well.
The attempts to “open up” Wodehouse’s world are another matter, and an area where devotees are likely to quibble. The series takes us inside Bertie’s “Drones Club,” but the members are depicted as emotionally stunted six-year-olds, while I always envisioned them as emotionally stunted thirteen-year-olds. I ended up bailing on the series back in the nineties for its lack of “respect” for Wodehouse, but if I persevere through the whole thing this time around I may be more forgiving.
Afterwords
In the “real” twenties, knuts were better known as upper-class twits or “Bright Young Things.” The current British series The Windsors does a better job taking down the modern-day upper-class twit, because The Windsors deals with shagging and snorting as well as cigarettes and liquor, which are the only sins permitted in Jeeves and Wooster, though The Windsors still keeps it light. For a grimmer touch, you can find a TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, in which all the Bright Young Things are damned to Hell—or at least would be if Evelyn had his way. Variations on these themes can also be found on the once legendary Upstairs Downstairs series, which you can get on Amazon, if not elsewhere, as well as the execrable Downton Abbey—execrable if not indeed damnable—which I ridiculed both here and here.
Back in his heyday, between the two big wars, Wodehouse was the beloved pet of virtually every English writer, from Orwell on the left to T. S. Eliot (officially an American, of course,5) on the right, first because he was so funny and second because he offered no competition to them, writing of a world that they all knew never existed.6 The Wodehouse cult endured a great crisis in the early days of World War II when Wodehouse and his wife, enjoying an extended vacation in France, managed to get themselves captured by the German army. They were interned as enemy civilians, and Wodehouse agreed to make a few radio broadcasts for the Germans, in which he explained that his hosts, once you got to know them, proved to be rather jolly chaps in the whole. This naturally enraged the British population, who regarded Wodehouse as nothing less than a traitor.
The intelligentsia can always love an outcast—some more than others, of course—and Wodehouse admirers like Orwell rallied round in an excessive manner, rushing to “explain” that Wodehouse was a political naïf who knew not what he did. I think one can wonder about that. Wodehouse was quite a wealthy man—rarely the mark of a naïf in the first place—and many wealthy people on the eve of World War II feared that a “long war” would inevitably lead to crushing taxation and endless governmental regulation of every aspect of society no matter who “won”. Better to have the whole thing settled and done with, so that, hopefully, we could somehow find our way back to “normality”. Far more illustrious men than Wodehouse—Picasso, Matisse, and Andrè Gide, for example—were willing to make their peace with the Nazis. One must learn to accept that which one cannot change, after all.
1. Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 until 1911, was the figurehead monarch of a society that was moving rapidly towards civil war (over the question of “Home Rule” for Ireland) when an even greater external crisis intervened. Great Britain, as it then was generally called, was spared a civil war at the expense of about 600,000 dead and an equal number of wounded. On the one hand, there was almost nothing that Edward could do to prevent the smashup. On the other, there was almost nothing he did do to prevent the smashup.
2. Eighteenth century literature featured many plots where, as Orwell (again) put it, the elements fit together like the teeth of a zipper, but the real classic that prefigures Wodehouse is Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, far better known in the U.S. via Mozart’s opera. Wodehouse no doubt got the idea from Gilbert and Sullivan rather than the “original”.
3. English “public schools” are what we would call private schools. Wodehouse was immensely happy at his school—confusingly known as “Dulwich College”. It isn’t hard to guess from his work that he found the idea of an all-male society revolving largely around sports and adolescent hijinks immensely appealing.
4. Wodehouse came from a seriously “colonial” family, and according to Wikipedia was raised for the first two years of his life by a Chinese nurse. I’ve read (somewhere) that the historian Edward Gibbon was cared for in his first years by a French nurse, and William F. Buckley was initially raised by a Spanish one. Not being exposed to your “native language” from birth can perhaps lead certain spirits to experience language as “naturally” artificial.
5. Wherever he went, Eliot liked thinking of himself as a “metic” (Greek for “resident alien”)—St. Augustine’s notion of the proper role of a Christian while here on earth. I once read an interesting biography of Eliot that collected the opening remarks of addresses he gave, largely in the U.S. and the U.K., in which he would politely but firmly explain to his audience that he was not one of them.
6. Not every writer adored Wodehouse. It’s typical of writers, regardless of background, to think of themselves as aristocrats and identify with the aristocracy, but some British writers, raised in the “Dissenting” tradition, hate everything about the whole country house fantasy. The fact that Wodehouse created a sort of “Disney version” made it no more palatable.
