[The question of tone] is troubling for anyone writing about Wodehouse. High seriousness about him brings to mind poor Professor Scully. This professor's attempt, in 1902, to describe a smile scientifically was quoted by Richard Usborne in his fine book Wodehouse at Work. Scully doggedly dissected "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth, the curving of the naso-labial furrows …"

Wodehouse is peculiarly resistant to what we might term the naso-labial approach, which is possibly why critics have always had such a hard time with him. It is, of course, the work of a moment to knock together something about the master-servant relationship as displayed by Wooster and Jeeves, and the relevance of same to British social history. Such an approach is not actively harmful, but it suffers from naso-labialism—leaving the mystery of Wodehouse's genius intact.

Wodehouse wrote The Code of the Woosters just before the Second World War. He was living in Le Touquet and, at the age of sixty, was at the height of his powers. In the same period he wrote Uncle Fred in the Springtime and shortly thereafter … Joy in the Morning, regarded by many as preeminent in the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. (p. v)

The first thing [new arrivals in Wodehouse country] will want to discuss are the characters of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. The duo is as momentous in literary history as the other great tandems—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Of the two, Wooster is by far the more interesting. He is a character. Jeeves, to the end of his days, remains a type—the deus ex machina who saves the day when all seems lost, the great artificer who ties up the loose ends and who rescues Bertie from the consequences of his repeated follies. People have written about Jeeves the valet as a mother-surrogate for Bertie and, though a touch naso-labial, the imputation has some accuracy. Bertie never mentions his mother (or indeed his father) and reserves all his passions for his aunts: the terrible Aunt Agatha [and the jovial Aunt Dahlia]…. Bertie has no sex life and so indubitably Jeeves, in the mother role, is his closest confidant. But a mere foil to the Wooster magic is what he remains, a counterpoint for linguistic jokes.

"Very well, then," says Bertie to Jeeves, "you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?" "Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir." Wodehouse never tired of variations of this low/high joke about language where Jeeves' somewhat sanctimonious precision of speech is followed by the loose idiomatic torrent of Wooster's blather.

There's another fine example of Jeeves' reserve played off against Bertie's copious flow in the great scene in The Code of the Woosters in which both characters are trapped in Stiffy Byng's bedroom by the dog Bartholomew. It's unusual to find Jeeves in an undignified posture, but this is exactly the state the dog Bartholomew has reduced him to, perched on top of the cupboard. Bertie is crouched on the chest of drawers [outlining a risky escape plan to an unsympathetic Jeeves.] (pp. vi-vii)

The joke is in the folly of his rescue plan, and beyond that in the understated but clear designation of the relationship. Wooster is the master, Jeeves the servant. But Jeeves will not take orders inimical to his safety and Bertie would not dream of clinching a proposal with a command. The relationship is always nuanced, so much so that when Bertie, in another story, hears Jeeves describe him to a substitute valet as "mentally negligible" we feel an equivalent stab of distress at such plain speaking. Bertie knows he is mentally negligible and is ready to leave all serious thinking to Jeeves. But Jeeves' savage frankness on the subject of Bertie's mental equipment is altogether too blunt—a breach of etiquette.

But there is a mystery to Jeeves—the evident incongruity of this adroit and learned schemer working for an ass like Bertie. It's as though one suddenly found Bosola or another of those Jacobean adventurers dressed up as a butler and handing round cucumber sandwiches. Jeeves is a little like Iago, in benign retirement from villainy, redeeming himself with good-natured and stoic penance.

At all events he found the right master. Wooster is the greatest of all the Wodehouse characters—and the one in which Wodehouse achieved his most complex technical triumphs. Bertie, after all, is not only the narrator but also the central character. The reader laughs at Wooster as he thrashes around in the toils of circumstance, but he also laughs with Wooster because it is Wooster who is reporting on the aforementioned toils and how exactly he got enmeshed in them.

Above all it is Bertie who weaves the idiom of the stories; everything is cast in that unique language, a stew of half-remembered quotations, slang, repetitions, formulaic expressions. It is Bertie who dreams up the great similes and bleats out the dense word play. (pp. vii-viii)

Character … language … but also action. It's all very well to talk about Wodehouse's unfailing invention, but mere invocation of it is insufficient. Wodehouse was, after all, dealing with the most perilous of forms—farce. The slightest lapse in vigilance and not even Bertie's linguistic virtuosity could keep the reader's eyes on the page. (p. ix)

[As Wodehouse once] remarked, "In a Jeeves story every line has to have entertainment value," and the final, seemingly effortless concoction was produced with the toil and concentration that such a remark indicates. The Code of the Woosters is an excellent example of the structural complexity Wodehouse strove for.

Across the main plot line of Aunt Dahlia's lust for the cow-creamer come dashing the subplots: Gussie's problems with Madeleine Bassett; Stiffy Byng's hopes for marriage with Stinker the curate. There are the mechanisms that connect these threads in the narrative: the missing notebook, the cow-creamer itself, the monstrous Sir Watkyn's designs on Anatole, Aunt Dahlia's sublime chef. Study the conclusions of each chapter. Almost always the final line switches the plot, plunging the reader forward into some new portion of the labyrinth. Wodehouse never let his readers relax for a moment. Like Homer, he knew that relaxation meant inattention, sleep, or disconsolate grumblings that bards are not what they used to be in the old days.

Each Wooster-Jeeves novel has certain specific felicities. In The Code of the Woosters a prime point of attraction is indubitably the character of Sir Roderick Spode and his eventual neutralization through the agency of Jeeves. Spode was evidently modeled on Sir Oswald Mosley, 1930s leader of the British Union of Fascists. (pp. ix-x)

[The tongue-lashing Spode receives] may not be the fiercest piece of anti-Fascist prose ever composed, but for Wooster it was saeva indignatio at its most potent. We should remember Bertie's limitations and respect him all the more for his stand.

Other traditional characters in the Wooster-Jeeves saga are well displayed: Gussie Fink-Nottle, the lover of newts and seeker of the hand of Madeline Bassett:

"I broke the tank. The tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my newts in. I broke the glass tank in my bedroom, and the bath was the only place to lodge the newts. The basin wasn't large enough. Newts need elbow room. So I put them in the bath. Because I had broken the tank. The glass tank in my bedroom. The glass tank I keep my—"

This is Gussie, reporting the newt mishap to Bertie. It's a high moment for the Wodehouse style; an epiphany, if you must, to be compared with King Lear's reflections on his own considerable reverses of fortune.

And there is Madeline Bassett, prime example of the soupy girl with whom Bertie was always trying to avoid a marriage enforced by circumstance. (p. xi)

[If the scene in which she likens the totally uncomprehending Bertie to Rudel] won't cause curvature of your naso-labials, nothing will. Wodehouse is not for you.

Wodehouse's status? It's been vouched for by every major English writer of the twentieth century with a spark of insight or talent. He stands as father of the style of Evelyn Waugh, too acute ever to get lost in the prejudices that marred the latter's delicacy of touch towards the end of his career. Wodehouse took a language forged out of second-rate fiction and narrative techniques from stage farce and created a world as timeless and as true as that of Homer or of Shakespeare. And despite his own self-deprecation, Wodehouse had his ambitions. Joy in the Morning, to be read immediately after The Code of the Woosters, deliberately invites comparison with Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Wodehouse popped in enough allusions and quotations to bend the reader toward such parallel. And he survives it. The Wooster-Jeeves cycle is the central achievement of English fiction in the twentieth century; an achievement impossible to imitate, because—as E. M. Forster remarked of the poet Cavafy—the cycle stands at a slight angle to the universe, unreachable by almost anything but laughter itself. (p. xii)