‘Thank You, Jeeves’

Fans of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse will think I’m crazy, but I could never get into the man’s work. Once tried “Thank You, Jeeves” after a friend told me it was the funniest book he had ever read, but I soon handed it back. On the page, there was something so unreal about the world he created--”that loony Arcadia peopled with imbeciles in spats,” as someone described it.

When I mentioned this to Henry Trentman, the founder of Recorded Books in Prince Frederick, Md., he said, “I’ll have our reading of ‘Thank You, Jeeves’ on your desk in two days. You’ll fall in love with Wodehouse.”

Right he was.

Having British actor Alexander Spencer read the book to me made all the difference. A chronic insomniac, I lay in the dark listening to it on the Walkman; the chuckles woke up my wife.

I howled at this exchange when the well-born but somewhat dim Bertie Wooster is told by an acquaintance that his playing of the banjolele is disturbing the neighbors:

“How dare you play that thing in a respectable block of flats. Infernal din!” shouts Sir Roderick Glossop.

Wooster replies, “Did you say infernal din? Well let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself. . . .”

There is an abrupt pause here as Wooster’s Oxford education deserts him once again.

He turns from Glossop and shouts down the hall to his incomparable valet: “Jeeves, what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?”

Jeeves interrupts a mundane chore to call out, “Treasons, stratagems and spoils, sir.”

“Thank you, Jeeves.”

Then, as Glossop looks on incredulously, Wooster repeats, “Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.”

Spencer’s reading is brilliant. His Bertie Wooster is the epitome of upper-class-British-daft. For Jeeves, he deepens his voice each time to convey the manner of someone instinctively subservient, someone who must keep all irony out of his voice no matter how maddening the situation his master has gotten him into.

And there are maddening situations aplenty in “Thank You, Jeeves” as Bertie goes off to spend a weekend at a friend’s country estate, Chuffnell Regis. He briefly loses Jeeves’ services and has to hide out in a potting shed to escape a lady friend’s angry father.

“Wodehouse’s prose is so lean, so elegant,” said Spencer, who has also read several other Wooster-Jeeves adventures for Recorded Books. “He achieved this by moving the plot along with the dialogue. You don’t need a lot of wordy explanation.”

Of all the tape suppliers in the country I am familiar with, Recorded Books consistently does the best job of matching reader with subject. For Alan Moorehead’s “The White Nile,” the company used British actor Patrick Tull, whose bristling voice is perfect. Southern actress Sally Darling does “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Another 10.

And when you’re done with “Thank You, Jeeves,” you can’t imagine Wodehouse read by anyone but Spencer, a 43-year-old native of southwest England who now lives in New York State. His voice is cultured, slightly arch, but definitely not stuffy.

Spencer notes that though Wodehouse was reared in England, he moved to Greenwich Village in 1909 and wrote most of his nearly 100 books for an American audience.

He created Wooster and Jeeves in short stories written during World War I. “Thank You, Jeeves,” published in 1934, was the first novel built around the two characters.

In 1940, while staying at his house in Le Touquet, France, Wodehouse was captured by the Germans and taken to Berlin. A total innocent in the matters of politics and war, he agreed to make some radio broadcasts there for CBS in 1941, in which he ridiculed the whole idea of the war.

This enraged Britons, who were under siege at the time, and Wodehouse was so vilified that he never returned to England. When the Germans released him, he came back to America, bought a 10-acre estate on Long Island and continued to write until he died in 1975 at age 93.

He has since been forgiven by Britons, according to my procurer of rare texts, Craig Graham of Vagabond Books in Westwood.

“Without question,” said Graham, “Wodehouse’s work is now the most sought-after by collectors in England.”

Great. But I’ll stick with Alexander Spencer’s readings for Recorded Books. “Thank You, Jeeves” rents for $10.50 a month or you can purchase it for $29.95.

WHERE TO ORDER TAPES:

Recorded Books, 800-638-1304; 270 Skipjack Road, Prince Frederick, Md. 20678.