SOURCE: “Comedy Among the Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism of Comic Form,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 114-38.

[In the following essay, Mooneyham investigates Wodehouse's place in modern comedic literature.]

The roof of the Sheridan Apartment House, near Washington Square, New York. Let us examine it. There will be stirring happenings on this roof in due season, and it is as well to know the ground. The Sheridan stands in the heart of New York's Bohemian and artist quarter. If you threw a brick from any of its windows, you would be certain to brain some rising young … Vorticist sculptor or a writer of revolutionary vers libre. And a very good thing too.

(7)

Thus begins P. G. Wodehouse's 1927 novel, The Small Bachelor. “It is as well to know the ground,” indeed, because this particular roof will provide a stage for innumerable farcical events as the plot of the novel unfolds: impostures, concealments behind water towers, hasty retreats down fire escapes, the throwing of pepper into the face of an officious policeman, and more. Such farce, however, requires more than these comic free-for-alls; farce also requires comic belief. Readers must allow Wodehouse's characters to cavort as they do, and it is not accidental that Wodehouse prepares for this by heaving a hypothetical brick at those figures who represent an incapacity to believe in comic narratives: modernists. We are told by the comic spirit as it is embodied by the narrator that Vorticist sculptors and writers of revolutionary free verse should be beaned by bricks early and often. For Wodehouse knows that no force poses a greater threat to a welcoming reception of his comedies than the modernist sensibility of the twentieth century.

Can anything be more anomalous than the position of Wodehouse in twentieth century fiction? What beyond quirkiness, after all, can explain Alexander Cockburn's claim that Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves saga stands as the “central achievement in the twentieth century” (xii)? Equally extreme praise has come from Hilaire Belloc, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and W. H. Auden, among others.¹ Hugh Kenner, lamenting the betrayal of high modernism by the dons of Oxford (no don, it seems, would really read Joyce, Lawrence, or Pound on his own time), finds particularly galling the fact that “in 1939 Oxford conferred on Psmith's creator the honorary doctorate it'd not dream of offering Leopold Bloom's” (34). Donnish enthusiasm in the long run has meant little, however, for the formation of the canon in twentieth century literature excluded and continues to exclude Wodehouse.² Even one of the most perceptive of Wodehouse's critics, Stephen Medcalf, has held that Wodehouse seems to possess “neither the conscious irony nor the undercurrent of Angst which make [sic] Evelyn Waugh a candidate for high seriousness” (190). Under such circumstances there is occasion to ponder why the brilliant comic plots that garnered the support of Waugh, Orwell, and Auden should fail to be considered worthy of serious scholarly interest.

Wodehouse's exclusion is curious given the ancient lineage of comedy. Comic structures—which characteristically include happy endings and a newly remade society marked by a sense of tolerance and accommodation—have been a central mode of the Western imaginative experience since the classical Greek theater. As Northrop Frye defines them, comedies embody a basic structural pattern which moves from unhappiness to happiness, through the eventual removal of obstacles erected by an intolerant and unjust society. The restrictions to be overcome may take the shape of overbearing parental figures, oppressive social institutions or, in more serious comedies, flaws and self-imposed bondages within the protagonist's own character. But eventually in a comedy all such bonds are cut, and a liberating and festive resolution follows, often signaled by the erotic consummation of a wedding or the social consummation of a feast, or both (Frye 163-86).

It must be conceded that these sorts of traditional comic plots, which Wodehouse unrepentantly fashioned, have become unfashionable in the twentieth century. Comic narratives, unfortunately, rarely find acceptance with modern audiences except when they occur in popular culture (the Hollywood film, the sitcom, the drugstore bodice-ripper, the mystery or detective novel). These genres of popular culture are immune to the requirements of literary modernism and postmodernism, requirements which insist that in serious literature human existence must be presented as alienated, fragmented, powerless, and absurd. In comedy, crisis—Tom Jones on the scaffold, Shylock's bared blade in the courtroom—must be temporary and illusory; moments later, Tom will be reprieved and Shylock's blade sheathed. Such a moment Northrop Frye describes as a waking from nightmare (179). This pattern of peril and release—what we might term a structure of reprieve—commonly relies on our sense that the apparent bondage or crisis has been entirely illusory all along (see Kaul 33-35). By the account of literary modernism, however, such crises are real rather than illusory. Ours is a culture which has, in Johan Huizinga's phrase, completed “a fatal shift towards over-seriousness” (198, qtd. in Herbert 402). Over-seriousness incapacitates us from viewing comic endings as even remotely mimetic of experience. “To stress … the artificial, anti-realist factor in comedy,” Christopher Herbert argues, “is to draw attention precisely to those elements that have tended to alienate modern sensibilities from traditional comic literature”:

For a culture impregnated with the tragic sense of life, in which as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg say, “tragic” and “realistic” are normally applied as terms of praise (8), comedy seems bound to be mistaken for a vehicle for naive optimism and for facile evasion of real experience.

(406)

What then are the consequences of this bias in our day of ironic or tragic realism in terms of our construction of what constitutes true “literature”? What in particular are the consequences for the reception of comedies like Wodehouse's? Wodehouse's literary achievement has to be understood in terms of its place in literary history, particularly by its relationship to literary modernism, the dominant ideology of the period in which Wodehouse worked out his idiosyncratic practice of comedy. By the twenties, as modernism became the dominant mode of serious literary expression, Wodehouse had completed the refinement of this comic art, expunging from it the elements of sentiment, those manly schoolboy prefects or brave and chipper ingénues of his earliest fiction whose adventures were almost as melodramatic as they were comic (Quinton 84). Even as Wodehouse's novels were selling briskly in both England and America, the publishing houses began to be influenced by modernism's control of literary practice. As Norman Cantor explains: “There was a market for this kind of difficult and provocative literature, and the more established publishing houses began to show themselves receptive to it” (45). Wodehouse's awareness of such market requirements surfaces frequently, as in this passage from The Return of Jeeves, in which a former poet muses on the publishing biases of high modernism:

Although in her vers libre days in Greenwich Village she had gone in almost exclusively for starkness and squalor, even then she had been at heart a sentimentalist. Left to herself, she would have turned out stuff full of moons, Junes, loves, doves, blisses and kisses. It was simply that the editors of the poetry magazines seemed to prefer rat-ridden tenements, the smell of cooking cabbages, and despair, and a girl had to eat.

(68)

Despite the requirements of poetry magazines, however, modernism's ascendancy was not complete until the study of modernism became institutionalized in the universities in the 1940s, when, as Gerald Graff has noted, “New Critical” practice achieved its dominance (146ff.). In the earlier period of roughly 1910-1930, when Wodehouse was honing his art into the purest of comic practice, universities were resisting the incursion of contemporary literature and modernist poetics. We will see that the grounds of Wodehouse's suspicion of modernism parallel to some degree those of the academic old guard of this time. Graff speaks of the hostility to contemporary literature in this period as issuing from two concerns: the fear that much of contemporary literature was lowbrow, “journeyman literature,” and the belief that contemporary literature was injurious to the moral fiber: “Though ‘contemporary literature’ was coming to mean two different kinds of things depending on whether ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’ taste was at issue, most professors distrusted both kinds—popular … literature for its superficiality, the most serious literature for its immorality, materialism, and pessimism” (125). Only later did English departments embrace modernism and its literature; after 1940, as Cantor comments, “The modern novel and poetry became the particular province or subject in whose interpretation English departments specialized. [Modernist literature] found [its] authentication in these institutions' work, and acquired a legitimacy which would otherwise have been difficult to obtain” (49). This institutionalization of modernism in English and American universities meant, among other things, that to be an educated person was to be conversant with the novelistic achievements of Proust, Woolf, and Joyce, not (need it even be said?) Wodehouse.

Wodehouse remained beyond the pale because he practiced a discredited genre, and because he wrote to be popular. Modernism's bias against mass culture is entrenched and characteristic, as Andreas Huyssen points out: “Only by fortifying its boundaries … and by avoiding any contamination with mass culture … can the [modernist] art work maintain its adversary stance: adversary to the bourgeois culture of everyday life as well as adversary to mass culture and entertainment which are seen as the primary forms of bourgeois cultural articulation” (197). “Bourgeois cultural articulation,” of course, can fight back, as Wodehouse did. Wodehouse would at least have been consoled by the reflection that modernism has never been the only game in town; his work has always sold better than Faulkner's or Joyce's, if we exclude those sales to undergraduates who buy to fulfill the requirements of syllabi.

The ascendancy of modernism hampered both the production of comedies and scholarly interest in comic theory. Modernism's hostility to comic structure flows in part from modernism's essential questioning of genre in general, but also from a philosophical aversion to the culminating happiness and formal closure that comedies promise. Serious literature since the turn of the century has barred comedy as a workable genre. The twentieth century has been governed more and more by the ironic and/or tragic modes which question or deny to plots the possibility of stable, desirable ends. To close a narrative unironically with a marriage or a feast is to participate in anachronism. Comedy has become tolerable only in the hybrid modes of absurdist or black comedy, tragicomedy, and the like. In the drama, comedy has moved from the humanitarian ethos of wit last represented by George Bernard Shaw to the alienations and grotesqueries of Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter. As Harry Levin comments, now “absurdity is treated seriously, as indeed it must be when it breaks in on us from all directions and unsettles the presuppositions of daily living” (191).

In the novel, when high modernists such as Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Faulkner employ comic structure, they do so ironically, as a way to call attention to the fatigued and delegitimized status of comedy itself. The vestigial force of comedy runs through such works as Ulysses and As I Lay Dying, but the pure strain of comedy cannot be found among the works of high modernism. Near the end of Ford's The Good Soldier, for instance, the impossibly short-sighted boor of a narrator reflects on the conventional quality of the story he has told:

Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it, I see that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The villains—for obviously Edward and the girl were villains—have been punished by suicide and madness. The heroine—the perfectly normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful heroine—has become the happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful husband. … A happy ending, that is what it works out at. … In order to set [this heroine] up in a modern mansion, replete with every convenience and dominated by a quite respectable and eminently economical master of the house, it was necessary that Edward and Nancy Rufford should become, for me at least, no more than tragic shades.

I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness, upon cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus or wherever it was.

(252)

Our narrator's uneasy use of erudition—“in Tartarus or wherever it was”—may recall some of the laughable illiteracies of Bertie Wooster, but Ford's intention is not simply a comic one. Rather, Ford underscores the impossibility of feeling secure generically about the narrative end; both tragic and comic ends are invoked but we as readers can feel convinced by neither. Such pervasive irony even in the seeming endorsement of comic structures undermines the very idea of comedy.

Wodehouse's literary achievement runs exactly counter to this prevailing fashion of generic questioning. Of his work he once wrote, “I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.” Wodehouse's peculiar linking of pessimistic realistic fiction with apathy—“not caring a damn”—displays an antagonism to the modern literary achievement. Wodehouse seems even to defy modernism, especially in his implied claim that a truer depth of feeling wells up in the artifice of comedies than in the open and ironic forms the novel has employed since the turn of the century. It will be granted that modernist literature encompasses many different sorts of narrative practice, and any given modernist work must be read in the light of the particular contextual requirements of the author's history and culture and of the work's production. Nonetheless, one may still identify certain broadly shared characteristics of modernism against which Wodehouse sets himself firmly at odds.

First, Wodehouse places little value on the modernist dictum articulated by Ezra Pound, “Make it new.” Wodehouse was in fact so little troubled by the problem of originality that he felt only mildly disturbed to learn that Summer Lightning had already been used as a title by no less than five other authors; in the book's preface he writes: “I can only express the modest hope that this story will be considered worthy of inclusion in the list of the Hundred Best Books Called Summer Lightning” (183-84). The same characters reappear in story after story; there are no fewer than forty-two stories or novels which feature either Bertie or Jeeves and some sixteen fictions about that pig idyll, Blandings Castle. Nor was Wodehouse discomposed by the charge that his characters resurfaced virtually unaltered from story to story. Again, from the preface to Summer Lightning:

A certain critic … made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

(183)

More important than this casual dismissal of originality as presiding aesthetic value is his rejection of the modernist retreat from plot, the emphasis on the disorganized, particular, and fragmented flow of experience. Where a modernist expects to discompose and baffle the realist expectations of his readers,³ Wodehouse always apologizes with a courtly spirit if the demands of exposition have left a given part of the narration unattended to; he evidently prefers that the paying customer never be confused or forestalled from learning something of interest. Changes of scene are commonly accompanied by explicit statements of narrative control such as the following from Summer Lightning:

It is a defect unfortunately inseparable from any such document as this faithful record of events … that the chronicler, in order to give a square deal to each of the individuals whose fortunes he has chosen to narrate, is compelled to flit abruptly from one to the other in the manner popularized by the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag. The activities of the Efficient Baxter seeming to him to demand immediate attention, he was reluctantly compelled some little while back to leave Hugo in the very act of reeling beneath a crushing blow. The moment has now come to return to him.

(361)

Wodehouse's attention to the reader's need for intelligibility extends to a dismissal of modernism's proclivity for doing without the rigors of causal consequence prominent in realist presentations of events (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet's willingness to have a given character murdered in one chapter and alive in the next). Wodehouse expected each of his narrative structures to be a unity, a seamless artifact of cause and effect. He was maniacal about plot, often writing preliminary synopses for his novels that ran over sixty thousand words to guarantee clockwork plot maneuvers; accordingly, he seemed to believe that the highest aesthetic criterion would judge whether the arrow of action in a narrative flew true (see Galligan (612-64). A common theme in his letters is his amazement that other writers can make do with less planning or plot development. After reading Trollope's Autobiography he muses: “I still don't understand his methods of work. Did he sit down each morning and write exactly fifteen hundred words without knowing … how the story was going to develop? I can't believe that an intricate story like Popenjoy could have been written without very minute planning” (Yours, Plum: The Letters of P. G. Wodehouse 189 [hereafter abbreviated as Yours]). Even more disturbing to Wodehouse was the work of John O'Hara: “What curious stuff the modern American short story is. The reader has to do all the work. The writer just shoves down something that seems to have no meaning whatever, and it is up to you to puzzle out what is between the lines” (Yours 193). Wodehouse's obsessive interest in reader-friendly plot, as it were, connotes his deeper need to create an intelligible and orderly fictional world, a world in which the modernists' favorite game, the play of indeterminancy, is ruled out of court.

Intelligibility and orderliness make for conventionality of plot; action in Wodehouse runs by plot devices that Menander, Plautus, and Shakespeare would recall with fondness. Traditional elements such as feasting predominate, to the extent that many a plot revolves around determining who will be the employer of Anatole the master chef.⁴ The comic convention of the world turned upside down is a Wodehousian staple, a world peopled by lords in stocks (or locked garages) and beggars on horseback (or private investigators drinking the best port). The traditional nature of Wodehouse's comedies is confirmed by his use of the topos of the green world, that realm for the central lunatic activity of comic plots identified by C. L. Barber. The green world in Shakespeare lies in the wild, away from the pressure of authority and law, like the Forest of Arden in As You Like It or Titania's moonlit wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Wodehouse's green world is drawn largely from Shakespeare's (he read Shakespeare every day of his adult life), but in Wodehouse the green world is usually the country estate, complete with bijou residences for pigs, gamekeeper's cottages, swan-infested lakes, and gardens in which to conspire, woo, and bung into hoes and ladders. Such green-world excesses can be found in Something Fresh when the hero muses on the dreamlike quality of the farcical revels: “His life had changed from an orderly succession of days to a strange carnival of the unexpected. … Life had taken on the quality of a dream in which anything might happen. … It was strange that [Joan] should be here in the pitch-dark Hall in the middle of the night, but—after all—no stranger than that he should be. In this dream-world … it had to be taken for granted” (113).

This reliance on the Shakespearian model underscores the completeness with which Wodehouse accepts his chosen conventionality. We do not read Wodehouse to find innovations about how to close a narrative; rather, as Robert Hall points out, in reading Wodehouse, “the pleasure lies in admiring the ingenuity and verbal pyrotechnics by which the plots reach their predetermined ends” (Comic 47). Those predetermined ends will always include reunited couples; typical is the end of Uncle Dynamite, where Uncle Fred surveys the four pairs of happy lovers and comments that “it reminds one of the final spasm of a musical comedy” (302). The comic close also requires a general amnesty for those characters who have blocked young happiness. At the end of The Code of the Woosters Bertie is in a position to dictate terms to the heavy of the piece, Sir Watkyn, but after the older gentleman has indicated his willingness to let the happy ending roll into place, Bertie is all magnanimity: “Jeeves, a snooterful for Sir Watkyn,” he bids, and then, to the reader, “Probably quite a nice chap if you knew him” (220). Anthony Quinton sums up the conventional quality of Wodehouse's plots:

In all the stories about young men … the ancient struggle of the young against the old … constitutes the main structure of the action. Impersonation and concealed identities, chases, aberrant behaviour brought on by drink or falling objects, elaborate conspiracies fill the spaces between the chief structural members. Everything formal in Wodehouse's work is traditional.

(83)

In Wodehouse's work we always know where we are in terms of the plot; his characters are firmly placed along the axes of time and space. Wodehouse's plots are in this sense historicist; that is, they assume the steady pace of time and the accrual of event moving forward to a presumed most recent past. Time is never disjointed in Wodehousian narrative, the ordinary span of action being three or four days of frenzied comic doings. Wodehouse's respect for the Aristotelian unities also means that we are always firmly set in the landscape. A typical setting of scene moves from panorama to a focused perspective (from, say, the bird's-eye view of Blandings grounds to the focus on Beach in his butler's pantry); the social whole is invoked to insure our surefootedness in the coming comic melée. Even the most minor of scenarios is set with a comically ruthless attention to spatial relationships. One chap can't meet another chap without the imposition of navigational details: “We came together, he approaching from the nor‘-nor’-east and self approaching from the sou‘-sou’-west” (Mating 147). Consider also the racecourse-like announcement of dog chases cat from the same novel:

The pursuit rolled away over brake and over thorn, with Madeline Bassett's school friend bringing up the rear. Position at the turn:

1. Cat

2. Dog

3. Madeline Basett's school friend.

The leaders were well up in a bunch. Several lengths separated 2 and 3.

(125)

In Wodehouse we know where and when we are, even in the homeliest of details. Such strategies are both comic and relentlessly realist, because the humor lies partly in our knowing more than we need to know about our placement in space and time, an ethos directly opposed to the relativistic uncertainties about space and time spawned by Einstein and relished by literary modernists.

Plot's tyranny in Wodehouse means the complete absence in his works of that subordination of plot to subjective experience which is a keynote of the modernist novel. Point of view is stable; we are not in the semi-transparent envelope of subjectivity championed by Virginia Woolf. If we move from one character's mind to another's in Wodehouse, we do so under the explicit guidance of the narrator; and the most common presentation of such inner views involves erlebte Rede, a mode of point of view which allows the individual's consciousness to be represented but which also allows the narrator firm control over how, when, and what of that character's mental workings will be read. For instance, in Heavy Weather Monty Bodkin must explain away a tattoo which bears the name of his friend's fiancée: “He was blaming himself. Rummy, he reflected ruefully, how when you saw a thing day by day for a couple of years it ceased to make an impression on what he rather fancied was called the retina” (508). This is the language of inner view—“Rummy … how when you saw a thing”—shaped by the narrator's superior perspective—“what he rather fancied was called the retina.” Delving into layers of consciousness is a rare event in the Wodehouse world, despite Jeeves's reliance on knowing “the psychology of the individual” in his plots to insure Bertie's happiness (Sharma 214). Wodehouse, after all, believes in a comprehensible world, one in which narrative authority is needful and in which subjective experience without social authorization is meaningless.

Such a world is essentially realist. Peter Demetz has argued that the hallmark of the realist imagination is its creation of an “epic world by means of a comprehensive, encircling and inclusive narrative” (336; trans. Fokkema 13). Wodehouse's realism is of this sort, and he perhaps insures its safety by not mining too deeply into individual psychology. After all, the modernist rebuke to realism came about, paradoxically, because the search for mimetic adequacy that realism engenders led twentieth century authors to move into the realm of the subconscious and its ephemeral workings in the individual. Such a movement beyond the realm of objective reality is ultimately hostile to a realist point of view because focusing on impressions which have no permanent or verifiable status leads to a dismembered world which does not admit of stable interpretation (see Scholes and Kellogg 191-204). Wodehouse's realism is made possible by a certainty that the world he wishes to describe is complete and that the laws governing human existence in that world are knowable and intelligible. The corollary to this position is that human motivation is always a very simple proposition in Wodehouse; plots run on the assurance that, for instance, estranged lovers will be united if the male partner sustains an injury in the presence of the female partner, a spectacle which will lead the female partner to forget her previous disapprobation of the loved one in a surge of feminine solicitousness. That the female partner might ever react to the wounding of her man differently falls beyond the strictly uniform universe of human motivation that Wodehouse engineers.

This static world of motivation and action requires a purely traditional employment of characterization, which in Wodehouse follows the four central types of comedy that Frye has identified—the buffoon, the boor, the eiron, and the alazon. Jeeves operates as eiron, a figure who has an ironic perspective on events and manipulates them for his own advantage and for that of those he serves. Jeeves represents, in fact, a particular sort of eiron, the servus dolosus or tricky slave found in Roman New Comedy and later in Sancho Panza or Sam Weller. Bertie plays a deluded alazon to Jeeves's eiron. As alazon, Bertie is as commonly mistaken about his competencies and the consequences of his actions as are Don Quixote and Pickwick. Everywhere are the buffoons and boors, the playboys and killjoys, respectively, who are central to comedy's mission. Those who run riot—particularly Lord Ickenham (Uncle Fred), Galahad Threepwood, and Psmith—do so with complete abandon. Uncle Fred, like Gally and Psmith, operates, in Richard Usborne's phase, as a “whirling dynamo of misrule” (154). In Uncle Fred in the Springtime a drone identifies the very traits in Uncle Fred which make him a reincarnation of Falstaff leading the hapless Hal into revelry: “[Uncle Fred] has a nasty way of lugging [his nephew] Pongo out into the open and there, right in the public eye, proceeding to step high, wide and plentiful. I don't know if you happen to know what the word ‘excesses’ means, but those are what Pongo's Uncle Fred, when in London, invariably commits” (37). Bertie Wooster figures as another type of playboy, the passive sybarite, committed to the simple pleasures of darts, golf, the refreshing morning bath, Pat-and-Mike routines, and pinching policemen's helmets.

Against this “vapid and frivolous wastrel” (Aunt Agatha's term) is arrayed a platoon of aunts (in The Morning Season no less than six, a “surging sea of aunts,” who naturally characterize Bertie's activities as “vulgar foolery” [46].⁵ If an aunt is lacking to block the happy ending, Wodehouse has an enduring substitute in the senex figure, usually a tyrannical captain of industry or bad-tempered justice of the peace. Or the killjoy may operate out of general principle, like the Efficient Baxter, who harbors suspicions of all others indiscriminately and who moves to squelch pleasure as completely as did his predecessor Malvolio. Because we must feel secure to enjoy the chaos of comedy, the bad characters are always drawn from stock, whenceforth issues a guarantee of their eventual comeuppance.

This guarantee of poetic justice (pleasure lovers win, killjoys lose) issues from the uniform morality of this world. This consistent moral vision in turn bars any naturalistic invokings of sex or violence such as characterize the works of Lawrence or Joyce. Wodehouse found such explicit content in modern literature embarrassing. After reading Faulkner's Sanctuary, he exclaimed “These Southerners!” and though he appreciated the artistry of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, he was appalled by the novel's obscene language (Voorhees “Jolly” 217). Wodehouse's own fictions are chaste in the extreme. In The Code of the Woosters Bertie is embarrassed even by what he believes are Madeline's references to the medieval practice of loving a married woman from afar: “[Madeline:] ‘The Seigneur Geoffrey Rudel, Prince of Blaye-en-Saintonge … fell in love with the wife of the Lord of Tripoli.’ I stirred uneasily. I hoped she was going to keep it clean” (44). There is no sex or obscenity, adultery or guilty love, in Wodehouse at all. Wodehouse knew his limitations; in a letter written in 1960 he called attention to the very sort of subject which could be fatal to his fiction: “I've just finished my new novel. Fairly good, I think, but what does it prove? I sometimes wish I wrote that powerful stuff the reviewers like so much, all about incest and homosexualism” (Yours 161). His narrative sexual exchanges are of a different order altogether. The tempestuous romantic climaxes which come close to the end of each plot are among the most conventional of Wodehouse's effects; successful wooing, as any Wodehouse aficionado knows, consists of grasping the female in one's arms, waggling her about a bit, raining kisses on her upturned face, and saying “My mate!” Though this formula's insufficiency as an all-purpose courting procedure outside of a Wodehouse fiction is perhaps self-evident, it never fails to succeed in one.

Nor does blood flow, at least not to much account. The explicit violence which modernism requires to represent the ordinary sordidness and horror of modern experience Wodehouse found intensely uncongenial. His favorite readings beyond Shakespeare were British mysteries, particularly those by Agatha Christie and Patricia Wentworth, in whose books violence occurs only genteelly.⁶ It is not, however, that Wodehouse's work excludes violence; in fact, violence is both a dominant force in the figurative language as well as an important part of every plot. Hall has pointed out that Wodehouse's fiction contains an enormous violence of both action and imagery (Comic 108-09). Almost every novel has a reference to Jael, the wife of Heber, and her athletic propensity to drive spikes through the brain (Jael is most often alluded to to make vivid the aches of a hangover), and Jezebel's fate—stomped by horses and eaten by dogs—is equally ubiquitous for comic effect. Characters commonly say horribly crushing things to each other and indulge in darkly sadistic fantasies (Hall 108). Lord Worplesdon, locked in a garage by Boko, thinks of skinning him alive, “lingeringly and with a blunt knife” (Joy 255). Of the young Edwin, Bertie muses, “There's a boy who makes you feel that what this country wants is something like King Herod’” (Joy 84).

But such violence poses no real threat, because we know we are in Arcadia. In fact, as Robert Kiernan notes, it is exactly because their world carries no real risk that Wodehouse's characters can speak and think in such murderous terms (108). Colin MacInnes has pointed out the prelapsarian invulnerability of life in Wodehouse's world: “His world … is that of mankind before the Fall. There are multitudinous serpents in this Eden, but, like the English grass snake, without venom. There are accidents innumerable (watch out, in his stories, for any swan-decked lake, or stately stairway, or drainpipe descending from a mullioned window). But no one gets more than a chill or a sprained ankle, and nobody ever dies” (32). The most common weapons in Wodehouse's world, as Voorhees noted, are the weapons of slapstick, the eggs and vases which “make the most commotion and do the least harm.” The projectile of choice in moments of high emotion is the not particularly murderous statuette of the Infant Samuel in prayer. How can we worry when we begin a novel with a spectacle such as Bertie in his bath playing with his rubber duckie? No one is hurt, at least never seriously or permanently, though Jeeves might cosh a policeman or the Earl of Emsworth might shoot his male secretary in the buttocks with an air gun. This comic world in which ordinary dangers pose no risk carries so much authority in Wodehouse that what we most fear are events that in ordinary experience would seem negligible dangers. As Voorhees puts it, in Wodehouse the reversal of values is so complete that “baby contests are the most fearful of events and dangerous and criminal activities become domesticated” (134-35). It is perhaps in this capacity, as determined domesticator of all contemporary trauma, that Wodehouse most saliently demonstrates his rejection of modernist values.

There are only two arenas in which one might claim the title of modernist for Wodehouse: his use of language and his employment of narrative self-consciousness. Wodehouse's ease with language, his extraordinary linguistic inventiveness, shares that modernist inwardness and freedom we relish in Joyce, so much so that one critic has claimed that Wodehouse's “lordship of language” displays “more true Shakespearian buoyancy … than Joyce” (Bayley 285). Wodehouse, like Joyce, writes “right out of the act and moment of linguistic creation” (Medcalf 192). This joyousness of linguistic discovery, however, unlike Joyce's, is not revolutionary. It is instead accompanied by a complete acceptance of the multitudinous tags and idioms that the culture has provided, not the rejection of tradition's storehouse that Joyce represents (Joyce once wrote in a letter, “It is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent” [Eagleton 1]). Because Wodehouse's art “centers on his ability to bring a cliché just enough to life to kill it” (Medcalf 190), it is vital that those original clichés crowd in. When, for example, Bertie offers for Jeeves's inspection the words “The imagination boggles,” we cannot go more than a line further without this improvisation: “I suspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled” (Right 202). Medcalf is right to insist that such verbal play demonstrates that “Wodehouse delights in his original quotations and clichés and does not discredit them” (192). His sort of discovery is not antagonistic toward English literary traditions, since these very traditions supply the language that Wodehouse refurbishes for comic effect. His is a recombinatory genius, in which the modernist love of linguistic innovation is yoked to a love of language's traditions.

If then Wodehouse's use of language does not follow the modernist path completely, one might argue that perhaps it is Wodehouse's self-consciousness as an artist which allies him with modernism. After all, Wodehouse's attention to the demands of the paying customer and his or her interpretation of events, expectations, and frustrations may parallel modernist self-consciousness, the sort of thing André Gide does when he provides a blank space on the last page of his Paludes for writing down “les phrases les plus remarquables de Paludes” (149). I would argue, however, that Wodehouse's self-reflexivity has more links to the nineteenth century practice of the intrusive author than to modernism. Such effects are very largely nothing more than a comic expansion on the intrusive narrator, extending the possibilities inherent in such moments as Trollope's assurance to the reader in Barchester Towers that Evelyn will not marry Mr. Sloope or Thackeray's reference to the puppet box of his characters at the close of Vanity Fair.

Wodehouse's self-consciousness, moreover, has a peculiar and anti-modernist cast; it focuses on the customer's right to a coherent presentation and implicitly criticizes narratives which lack order. All Wodehousian apologies for disorganization are, of course, organizing tools themselves. For instance, Bertie's exposition about Gussie Fink-Nottle constitutes a brilliant précis of previous action: “I wonder, by the way, if you recall this Augustus, on whose activities I have had occasion to touch once or twice before now? Throw the mind back. Goofy to the gills, face like a fish, horn-rimmed spectacles, drank orange juice, collected newts, engaged to England's premier pill, a girl called Madeline Bassett. … Ah, you've got him? Fine.” (Mating 10). That Wodehouse commonly refers to his readers as “customers” also indicts the modernist disdain for market realities, a point of view which places Wodehouse as the purveyor of goods. “Poets,” after all, as Wodehouse argues in Uncle Fred in the Springtime, despite their pretensions, “as a class are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns” (138).

Wodehouse's antagonism to modernism, however, extends far beyond his general refusal to employ modernist conventions for himself. His is not a purely negative or passive position. Rather, Wodehouse perpetually wages a literary class war against the literati, the modernist elite. At one level, this hostility against modernist sensibility manifests itself in the presiding anti-intellectualism of his fiction. The common or garden variety of this anti-intellectualism punctures literary pretentiousness through the pervasive yet loving skewering of the English classics. Typical of Wodehouse's technique is this fracturing of Hamlet in Bertie Wooster Sees It Through:

It is pretty generally recognized in the circles in which he moves that Bertie Wooster is not a man who lightly throws in the towel and admits defeat. Beneath the thingummies of what-d'you-call-it his head, wind and weather permitting, is as a rule bloody but unbowed, and if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune want to crush his proud spirit, they have to pull their socks up and make a special effort.

(268)

But Wodehouse's inability to take “Literature” with due seriousness and his ridicule of literary beauties sharpen into unsparing abuse when the literature in question is that of recent origin. Almost every fiction features a representative of self-conscious high culture as the enemy of the hero. In Wodehouse, as Edward Galligan points out, “with one exception [Jeeves], the intellectually competent people are monstrous” (“P. G. Wodehouse” 616), a statement which rings with particular force for the gallery of poets, editors of the better critical reviews, and novelists in the fiction who represent the modernist elite.

Wodehouse's mockery of aesthetes and high-caste litterateurs began with the character of Psmith, who punctuates artistic pretensions with what Wilfrid Sheed terms “brutal philistinism” (xiv). In Leave It to Psmith, a novel which also indulges the author's fantasy that modernists be hit by bricks (“In these modern days … poets are so plentiful that it is almost impossible to fling a brick in any public place without damaging some stern young singer” [78]), Psmith impersonates the modern poet Ralston McTodd. The ersatz McTodd must explain to the Blandings Castle inmates the meaning of an obscure line, presumably of his authorship—“across the pale parabola of Joy.” Psmith admits, “Perhaps I did put a bit of topspin on that one” (95). When Psmith is tapped to give a reading of what he terms a “scuttleful of modern poetry” (175), the entire household is shocked to learn that Psmith “concealed anything up his sleeve as lethal as Songs of Squalor”: “The stout hearts argued that while this latest blister was probably going to be bad, he could hardly be worse than the chappie who had lectured on Theosophy last November, and must almost of necessity be better than the bird who during the Shiffley race-week had attempted in a two-hour discourse to convert them to vegetarianism” (168). Earlier, Psmith makes a case for the solitude required for poetic inspiration:

I need the stimulus of the great open spaces. When I am surrounded by my fellows, inspiration slackens and dies. You know how it is when there are people about. Just as you are starting in to write a nifty, someone comes and sits down on the desk. … Every time you get going nicely, in barges some alien influence and the Muse goes blooey.

(149)

The “Muse goes blooey,” we presume, much as it did when Coleridge was interrupted by that gentleman from Porlock; with Wodehouse, it is hard to take poetic practice with due seriousness. Poets are themselves to be shunned. Leave It to Psmith features one genuine poet to offset Psmith's fake one, a Miss Alison Peavey, about whom we are told, “It is a sad but indisputable fact that in this imperfect world Genius is too often condemned to walk alone—if the earthier members of the community see it coming and have time to duck” (152).

The literary class war waged by Wodehouse becomes useful as a plot device in many of the Bertie and Jeeves narratives. A significant proportion of Bertie's difficulties arises from the intrusive attempts of aunts and girlfriends to make him read improving literature—and what does Wodehouse pillory as “improving” literature? Depending on the narrative, Bertie may be trying to avoid reading T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, or Henri Bergson! As Voorhees has noted, Bertie's reluctance in this matter echoes Huck Finn's attempts to avoid the devotional literature foisted upon him by the Widow Douglas (“Jolly” 219). Wodehouse's substitution of modernist literature for the nineteenth century literature of piety demonstrates his awareness of modernism's status as reigning orthodoxy in the twentieth century.

Wodehouse's antagonism to modernism never declined; until his last years, as Voorhees points out, Wodehouse equated an “intellectual view of the world … with tragedy, pessimism and negation” (“Jolly” 217). When Mr. Mulliner, for instance, explains that one of his multitudinous relatives has suffered a reversal of fate, Wodehouse has him speak slightingly of the standard literary practice of the day: “It was as if he had suddenly stepped into one of those psychological modern novels where the hero's soul gets all tied up in knots as early as page 21 and never straightens itself out again.” Wodehouse's verdict on modernism relies on his sense of a moral degeneration in the twentieth century, a sense which underlies such statements as Bertie's reflection in The Code of the Woosters that being subjected to two separate sorts of blackmail is “pretty good going even for this lax post-War world” (79). The modernist spirit, according to Wodehouse, requires a sense of hopelessness. He claims in Something Fresh that “worry is the specialty of the twentieth century” (138), and in Uncle Fred in the Springtime we see a dejected Pongo Twistleton made an example of twentieth century angst by the loony doctor Sir Roderick Glossop: “Sir Roderick carried away with him an impression of a sombre and introspective young man. He mentioned him later to the Mothers of West Kensington as an example of the tendency of post-war youth toward a brooding melancholia” (87).

Wodehouse's aversion to elitist notions of despair surfaces in his attacks on nineteenth century philosophers. The arty women who try to mold Bertie find in Nietzsche, Martineau, and Schopenhauer adequate replacement for the high modernists they promote otherwise. Wodehouse himself clearly conflates the pessimism of Schopenhaeur and Nietzsche with the much later literary expressions of pessimism in an author like Eliot. For Wodehouse these are interchangeable satiric targets, primarily because he knew very little about either set of writers, having never taken them seriously or read widely in them. His caricaturing of philosophic gloom is evident in his attack on Schopenhauer in Summer Lightning (317ff). A lovelorn Millicent expounds to a lovelorn Sue about Schopenhauer's wisdom:

‘Schopenhauer says that all the suffering in the world can't be mere chance. Must be meant. He says life's a mixture of suffering and boredom. You've got to have one or the other. His stuff's full of snappy cracks like that. You'd enjoy it … Schopenhauer says suicide's absolutely O.K. He says Hindoos do it instead of going to church. They bung themselves into the Ganges and get eaten by crocodiles and call it a well-spent day. Schopenhauer says we are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses first one and then another for his prey. Sure you won't go for a walk?’

(317)

Despite this pithy and relatively accurate rendering of Schopenhauer, one must entertain serious doubts as to whether Wodehouse ever read any of Schopenhauer's philosophy for himself. The consummate negativist Nietzsche also comes in for abuse. Jeeves, that redoubtable superman, does Bertie the signal service of saving him from the originator of der Ubermensch: “I have had it from her ladyship's own maid … that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound” (“Carry On” 33). In fact, Jeeves as superman stands as an implicit reproach to the superman theories of Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Shaw because Jeeves, that “constitutional superman” (“Carry On” 31), rules only through service (Spath). Jeeves's (and Wodehouse's) approval is granted only to pre-Romantic philosophic minds, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius.

An analysis of Wodehouse's position in twentieth century literary history and his antagonism to modernism would be incomplete without an examination of his political and economic world view. At some level Wodehouse attacks the same raw world of bourgeois capitalistic exchange which the modernists generally pillory. But his critique of capitalism is uneven. For the most part he casts a benevolent eye upon the class system and commonly extends his sympathy toward the impoverished peers of the twentieth century. Note the Horatio Alger model that Wodehouse uses to explain the means by which one ascends into the aristocracy in this speech from The Return of Jeeves about a young man's predicament: “Bill starts at the bottom of the ladder as a mere heir to an Earldom, and by pluck and perseverance works his way up till he becomes the Earl himself. And no sooner has he settled the coronet on his head and said to himself, ‘Now to whoop it up!’ than they pull a social revolution out of their hats like a rabbit and snitch practically every penny he's got” (6). Wodehouse had little sympathy for those who advocated the social revolution which brought Bill to his present difficulties. Many stories feature characters with Bolshevik leanings, like Brinkley, Bertie's substitute valet in Thank You, Jeeves, whose revolutionary sympathies make them objects of sustained ridicule. Wilfrid Sheed has argued that even Marxists love Wodehouse, despite his acceptance of the class system, because in his works “the horrors of class society are somehow magically transformed painlessly” (220). The painlessness issues from Wodehouse's refusal to dwell on class envy and class conflict except as vehicles for comedy.

Much as Wodehouse accepts the class system, so too he consistently takes capitalism as a necessary precondition for his plots, at least to the degree that the need for economic subsistence and the need to have a job or some of the ready commonly serve as motives for action. But the fact that economic motives dominate the plots does not mean that such motives are taken in the end with particular seriousness. In his utopia no one really works except the killjoys (who like to); everyone else, even those presumably employed at one occupation or another, plays. The servants are remarkably underemployed, as are the village folk. Blandings Castle, rather than a world in which the labors of the many support the ease of the few, is instead a world in which ease is supported for all magically. Those who do worry about the terms of their employment or about getting jobs “get them, all right, not by the laws of economics but by the laws of farce” (Voorhees P. G. Wodehouse 132). Jobs disappear and reappear with the ease of miracle, as the fluid dispensation of the post of Lord Emsworth's secretary makes evident. Neither are commodities allowed undue power, except, again, as necessary ingredients of the farcical exchange. Valuable items, such as pigs or silver cow creamers, are valuable more because someone has placed an irrational value on them than because they have intrinsic value or produce wealth for their owners. And these objects of value are almost infinitely transferable; it's axiomatic in Wodehouse that if an object has been purloined once from its rightful owner it will be purloined again, perhaps as often as half a dozen times.

It would be hard to call this position a uniform critique of capitalism or even an endorsement of feudalism. What is endorsed is the ahistorical world of an arcadia. Wodehouse never, to his credit, posited a world of painless exchange as one achievable in real life. He acknowledged that his world had “gone with the wind and is with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it” (Cannadine 12). David Cannadine points out what Wodehouse probably also knew, that the models for Bertie and his friends (Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bingo Little, et al.) were slaughtered in World War I (10). Wodehouse instead leaps out of history altogether. His chronology was perpetually out of whack, as the plainly pre-1939 scene of Wodehouse's characters is commonly jarred by anachronistic reference to post-1945 culture, including tape-recorders, atom bombs, population explosions, and overnight transatlantic airplane service (Hall “Timelessness” 23). The point is that if it is never any particular time, it can be all times, a perpetual present. The value of such a world is precisely the value of our desire for that leap out of history. As Stephen Medcalf points out, the innocence of the Wodehouse world reproaches the world outside, even though the pressure of the outside world can always be seen dimly in it (200-01). Our pleasure in that world is that we take in a world of pure play that reproaches a world of capitalistic concern, for here commodities are infinitely malleable and there is milk and honey enough for all, even for the stymied antagonists.

Wodehouse reproaches a world that does not believe in arcadia, that has given up on the possibility of a vision of human destiny as intelligible and happy. Wodehouse tries to show that modernism's metaphysics are out of joint and attempts to argue for comedy's enduring message of human value, that things will end happily despite trouble. This claim to a higher moral status for the comic may not be without merit. In one sense the ends of comedies make a providential argument de facto. As Herbert tells us, “It is not just that comedies have happy endings … but that the whole design of comedy lets us know that no other kind of ending is conceivable” (404-05). Comedy invariably makes a claim about human evil parallel to that of the medieval Christian portrayal of the Vice figure, whose crimes are laughable precisely because he operates in a world that makes evil ultimately absurd and unimportant. Here is the felix culpa, the doctrine that all evil works to good on the cosmic scale. In Joy in the Morning (the very title with its roots in the Psalms accords with a providential reading of human suffering), Wodehouse supplies us with farce's felix culpa. Edwin the Boy Scout, a deeply repellent little boy, has just dealt the senex figure, Lord Worplesdon, a crushing blow with a hockey stick. Bertie sees in the attack evidence of divine order, feeling in himself, he says, “that sort of awe … one gets sometimes, when one has a close-up of the workings of Providence and realizes that nothing is put into this world without a purpose, not even Edwin, and that the meanest creatures have their uses” (145). Similarly, in Summer Lightning, when the skulduggery of a decamping pigman fails to stay the Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth's prize pig, from eating her full, the narrator comments, “The right triumphs in the world far more often than we realize” (190).

But this claim to moral value is complicated by our century's insistence that this sort of moral value is senseless. Wodehouse is ignored, not because he is not peerless in his literary accomplishment, but because his metaphysics bear little relationship to the age's. As Anthony Quinton notes, “The objection is that … Wodehouse's world is not truly or metaphysically real; it ought not to exist and is not worth thinking about” (84). What we inevitably ask is, if the moral claims of a given text are historically limited, are the moral claims of Wodehouse's world themselves anachronistic or escapist? And escapist for whom? And if moral claims can be rendered obsolete when a culture's expectations shift, can genre, which depends on particular moral views of human experience, also be rendered obsolete? Many poststructuralists and Marxists are ready to assert that genre is dead, replaced by Literature as an all-consuming and ironizing category. For instance, Fredric Jameson suggests that “A final position is possible, one which, while admitting the social nature of the generic situations, declares that the old-fashioned genres have ceased in our time to exist, and that we no longer consume a tragedy, a comedy, a satire, but rather Literature in general in the form of each work” (158-59). If genres can really die (rather than lie dormant only to re-arise), the defense of Wodehouse which points out that realism is an artificial artistic standard is a limited one. (Among the best of such a defense I might cite Quinton's stinging questions: “Is its lack of Zoalesque naturalism seen as a weakness of The Rape of the Lock? Are pastoral poems taken to task for their inadequacies in the light of the oviculture of their time?” [84]). If genre dies, Wodehouse can be legitimately termed anachronistic. But if comedy remains a salient response to human experience, even if it suffers from lack of academic and intellectual approval, perhaps Wodehouse's literary achievement is a genuine one and our inability to so see him in our time is a form of inevitable historical myopia.

Notes

1. Belloc, for instance, called Wodehouse “the best writer of English now alive” and “the head of my profession” (5, 8). Such an extreme judgment has its own political and moral agenda. Anti-modernists and Christians, Belloc, Waugh and Auden, as Anthony Quinton observes, “are by no means pure aesthetics but the devoted and combative adherents of a moralistic faith; [in consequence] their exaggerated praise of Wodehouse is really not concerned with him so much as with the condemnation and discomfiture of less verbally fluent but more morally earnest authors whose moral bias is opposed to their own” (76). Perhaps similar motives impelled Arnold Bennett, the Edwardian novelist repelled by modernist experiments, who told Frank Swinnerton that Wodehouse was “awfully able. Far abler than any of these highbrows” (Swinnerton 370). Some such aesthetic unfairness surfaced as well when C. S. Lewis disparaged the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (written when T. S. Eliot was a champion of modern nihilism): “For twenty years I've stared my level best / To see if evening—any evening—would suggest / A patient etherized upon a table; / In vain. I simply wasn't able” (1).

2. Quinton surveys the standard general guides to English literature and concludes that they have “nothing or next to nothing to say about Wodehouse.” Silence prevails in Albert Baugh's The Literary History of England. David Daiches's Critical History of English Literature, F. W. Bateson's Guide to English Literature, and Martin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature. Brief and patronizing notice is taken of Wodehouse by the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, G. S. Frazer's The Modern Writer and His World, and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Only W. W. Robson's Modern English Literature gives Wodehouse credit as a substantive writer (Quinton 73-74).

3. Fredric Jameson rightly argues that the reading of modernist texts is always a double-layered event: “You will find it axiomatic that the reading of such a work is always a two-stage affair, first, substitution of a realistic hypothesis—in narrative form—then an interpretation of that secondary and invented or projected core narrative according to the procedures we reserved for the older realistic novel in general” (177). Modernist texts are thus decoded into the narrative logic of older forms, forms, I would claim, much older than the model of the realist novel and closer to the codes structuralists like Frye have analyzed.

4. See Barbara C. Bowen on the range of Rabelaisian characteristics in Wodehouse, among them the feast, the world-upside-down topos, the fixed class structure, the zany inventiveness that adorns the traditional plots, the relentless parody of literary conventions, and the parody of epic conventions (“Where Gymnaste has a sword named Baise mon cul, Uncle Fred has his great sponge Joyeuse” [64]). For Wodehouse's reliance on classical models of comedy from Greek and Roman New Comedy, see both Malcolm T. Wallace and George McCracken.

5. That aunts represent the constraints of the superego rather than mothers keeps us from being overly disturbed by Oedipal anxieties. Wodehouse intuitively grasped that it was necessary that his blocking characters be at a remove from the central anxieties of the family romance. A newspaper interview records him explaining, “The main thing is that if you want to draw an unpleasant character, you can't very well make her a mother and she's got to be some sort of relative, so make her an aunt” (Robinson 496).

6. If Wodehouse couldn't be satisfied with British mysteries, he turned to even more secure texts, his own: “I simply can't cope with the American novel. The most ghastly things are published and sell a million copies, but good old Wodehouse will have none of them and sticks to English mystery stories. It absolutely beats me how people can read the stuff that is published now. … I am reduced to English mystery stories and my own stuff. I was reading Blandings Castle again yesterday and was lost in admiration for the brilliance of the author” (Yours 193-94).

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———. Jeeves and the Tie That Binds. New York: Simon, 1971.

———. Joy in the Morning. New York: Doubleday, 1946.

———. Leave It to Psmith. Intro. Wilfred Sheed. New York: Vintage, 1975.

———. Life at Blandings. New York: Penguin, 1981.

———. Life with Jeeves. New York: Penguin, 1981.

———. The Mating Season. New York: Harper, 1949.

———. The Return of Jeeves. In P. G. Wodehouse: Five Complete Novels. New York: Avenel, 1983. 1-142.

———. Right Ho, Jeeves. London: Jerkins, 1935.

———. The Small Bachelor. New York: Penguin, 1987.

———. Something Fresh. In Life at Blandings. 7-179.

———. Summer Lightning. In Life at Blandings. 181-388.

———. Thank You, Jeeves. Boston: Little, 1934.

———. Uncle Dynamite. New York: Didier, 1948.

———. Uncle Fred in the Springtime. New York: Penguin, 1939.

———. Yours, Plum: The Letters of P. G. Wodehouse. Ed. Frances Donaldson. New York: Heineman, 1990.