[In the following essay, originally written in 1961, Lejeune claims that The Ice in the Bedroom is “an exhibition of easy mastery, of familiar skill, as incomparable in its special way as Fred Astaire's dancing.”]

This year P. G. Wodehouse, whose world is ageless spring-time, celebrates his eightieth birthday; and his new book, The Ice in the Bedroom, gives us an opportunity to pay our respects. It is his best book for some while; an exhibition of easy mastery, of familiar skill, as incomparable in its special way as Fred Astaire's dancing. He has written scores of books just as good, of course; but the point is that no one else has.

The Ice in the Bedroom takes us back to the elysian London suburb of Valley Fields, where we find ensconced in adjoining houses Freddie Widgeon, whose allowance has been cut off by his uncle, Lord Blicester (a former winner, it will be recalled, of the Drones Club's Fat Uncles Contest), and a ferocious female novelist called Leila Yorke (author of For True Love Only, Heather o' the Hills, and Sweet Jennie Dean). Also present are Miss Yorke's pretty but green-eyed secretary, whom Freddie loves; Freddie's cousin George, who is an Old Etonian policeman; and Dolly Malloy, a blonde shoplifter who has carelessly stashed away some diamonds (pinched from Mrs. Oofy Prosser) on top of a cupboard in Miss Yorke's bedroom. The plotting is intricate but flawlessly put together; the dialogue runs as effortlessly as the purling brooks of Valley Fields; the turn of every comic phrase is felicitously exact. It is the mixture as before.

The vicissitudes of Mr. Wodehouse's reputation make a remarkable comedy in themselves. During the 1930s he won golden opinions from every sort of eminent literary man and received the accolade of an honorary doctorate from Oxford. In the 1940s his books were ignominiously thrown out of public libraries in Britain because, while interned in Europe, he was persuaded to deliver a humorous broadcast—entirely harmless, as anyone who has seen the text knows—over the German radio. After the war his new books were dismissed as mere anachronistic shadows with no relevance to the brave new welfare state. Gradually his reputation and his sales rose again, and he now enjoys that mellow affection with which the British public, unlike some of the younger critics, loves to reward ancient institutions and long service. And the cream of the jest is this: with a few ups and downs, Mr. Wodehouse's books have been exactly the same all along.

The world has changed, though, and fashions in literature have changed, and what riles the young angries of the Left is that Mr. Wodehouse has not changed. The world he writes about, the world of the Drones Club and Blandings Castle and Piccadilly Jim, was always a fairyland but it was never their fairyland. He writes about the upper classes without class-consciousness. He writes about love as though Freud had not been invented. He writes without ambiguity.

What a stylist he is. With what effortless economy he makes his effects. Bingo Little comes up to Oofy Prosser and says he's looking for someone to lend him five pounds. “Very hard to find, that type of man,” replies Oofy coldly. What more is there to say?

Or: “Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?”

“I could not say, sir.”

Or—Jeeves and Bertie again:

“In these days of unrest, Jeeves,” I said, “with wives yearning to fulfill themselves and husbands slipping round the corner to do what they shouldn't, and the home, generally speaking, in the melting pot, as it were, it is nice to find a thoroughly united couple.”

“Decidedly agreeable, sir.”

“I allude to the Bingos—Mr. and Mrs.”

“Exactly, sir.”

“What was it the poet said of couples like the Bingeese?”

“‘Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one,’ sir.”

“A dashed good description, Jeeves.”

“It has, I believe, given uniform satisfaction, sir.”

If Mr. Wodehouse had done nothing else but create Jeeves and Bertie, he would still have earned a place, along with Dickens and Mark Twain and Conan Doyle, in that small company of novelists who have created characters more real than life. Just as every self-respecting detective since Conan Doyle's day has tried to be like Sherlock Holmes, so every good gentleman's gentleman will always now have a little of Jeeves in him.

Mr. Wodehouse's literary opponents are quite right in a way. He and his creations have no place in the world of social consciousness and dustbin drama. Bertie Wooster would find little to say to Jimmy Porter or Lucky Jim. He would not enjoy the plays of Bertolt Brecht or Shelagh Delaney.

But Bertie is far from the vapid wastrel some people have taken him for. He is highly percipient in his own field. Some of Jeeves's quotations may be new to him, but, during his stretches at Malvern House, Eton, and Oxford, quite a lot of knowledge stuck. The names of Schopenhauer, Edgar Allan Poe, and Chekhov are on the tip of his tongue; so are the names of Tallulah Bankhead and Jack Dempsey. He understands about affairs of the heart. He even speaks French quite well.

More important, he is kind, generous, and loyal to a fault. “The code of the Woosters,” he once explained, “as is pretty generally known, renders it impossible for me to let a pal down. Mine not to reason why.” He is a chivalrous and, on the whole, eminently sensible Englishman. A world made up of Bertie Woosters would not be at all a bad world to live in. A world made by John Osborne for Jimmy Porter would be intolerable.

Cicero, in one of his later letters to Atticus, says, “Stomachor omnia—I get cross about everything. I think I must read that book I sent you, my De Senectute, more often.” I know how he felt. I think I will read my Wodehouse again. It will take me back to kindness and cleanness and good humor and England in the spring.