‘Right Ho, Jeeves’

A completely unscientific but conclusive survey has convinced me that the names of the ineffable Bertie Wooster, whose education seems to have been based on Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” and his impeccable gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves, named after a famous Warwickshire cricketer (“a fastish opening bowler and a good-hearted attacking No. 7 or so at bat”), are no longer even close to being household words.

Thus I am forced to introduce them as leading characters in a series of novels and short stories written by P. G. Wodehouse, an Englishman who lived at various times in England, France and the United States, where he earned large sums of money in Hollywood, and later became a naturalized citizen.

Of his first assignment at MGM, he wrote: “So far I’ve had eight collaborators. The system is that A gets the original idea, B comes in to work with him on it, C makes the scenario, D does preliminary dialogue, and then they send for me to insert class and what not, then E and F, scenario writers, alter the plot and off we go again. I could have done all my part of it in a morning but they took it for granted that I should need six weeks.”

A similar statement having appeared at the time in this newspaper, it was to be some years before he was asked to return, but as a valued co-worker with the Gershwins and Cole Porter, he could not be ignored.

I might as well continue and confess to discovering that the performance of my annual spring rite of rereading at least one of Wodehouse’s novels is considered in some quarters as a sign of lingering adolescence. If so, all I can say is that adolescence can’t have been, as I had hitherto believed, all bad.

To round out the trinity, I also learned that though Wodehouse’s chief biographer, Frances (now Lady) Donaldson, clearly is a woman, Wodehouse is admired almost exclusively by males. And yet, listening to the entirety of “Right Ho, Jeeves” as I drove the freeways and surface streets of Los Angeles in the company of a friend who wishes to be referred to as “a woman of a certain age,” our manic laughter struck me as evenly divided.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse--Plum to his friends--was born on the 15th of October, 1881, in Guilford, Surrey, and died on the 14th of February, 1975, in a Long Island hospital. No one can say exactly how much he had written between those dates because he began publishing when very young and under a number of different names, but “he appears to have written ninety-six books, written or collaborated in the writing of sixteen plays, written the lyrics, or some of the lyrics, of twenty-eight musical plays, while collaborating in the book of eighteen of these . . . much humorous verse and the scenarios for half a dozen films.”

The senior Wodehouse was a civil servant stationed in Hong Kong, and for the first two years of his life, Plum, together with his parents and his two older brothers, lived there. Then came the day when the boys had to return to England in order to prepare to assume their proper stations in English society, and some Wodehouse specialists feel that this explains the frequent and not altogether favorable appearances of aunts in the later fictions. “As far as eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts,” remarks a character in “The Mating Season” (1949).

After stays at a variety of lower schools, Plum was able to join his older brother, Armine, at Dulwich College in the south of London; he remained in love with this hardly first-class school for the rest of his life. He began serious publishing at the time he left Dulwich at the age of 19 to take up a dull job in the London branch of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. For two years, he stuck it out, but with increasing success in writing boys’ stories, many of them serialized and later published as books, he finally cut free.

Jeeves was conceived when his creator began writing a series of stories for the Saturday Evening Post. It is embarrassing to record that Wodehouse first thought of him as Bertie Wooster’s valet, but Jeeves himself must have taken instant control at birth, for he has never been anything less--and what could be greater in this particular world?--than a gentleman’s gentleman.

To the puzzlement of his intimates, Wodehouse repeatedly complained over his difficulty in creating plots. His ultimate solution took the form of writing a lengthy synopsis of a novel before he started work on its full version. “In ‘Right Ho, Jeeves,’ I was conscious all the time that the plot was not too strong, so I developed every possible chance there was for bright dialogue.”

When the action is centered in Bertram Wooster’s inept efforts to effect a reconciliation between his fellow member of the Drones Club, Tubby, and Bertie’s cousin Angela--after a season at Cannes--as well as his attempts to care for another old friend, Gussie Fink-Nottle, a reclusive authority on newts smitten with love for dreamy-minded Madeline Bassett, plot hardly seems to come into it except for Jeeves.

This reading by Jonathan Cecil is brilliant. He interprets all the characters, including Bertie’s redoubtable Aunt Dahlia, convincingly. Which brings up the question of how the English sound out their proper names.

Wodehouse’s first “adult” novel, “Love Among the Chickens,” came out in 1906. Joseph Connolly insists that it contains “Plum’s pet character: Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. Now much has been made of pronunciation (sic) here, so we may as well get it straight. This is mainly for people who make the first syllable of Wodehouse sound like that blue stuff with which primitive peoples used to daub themselves unsparingly. ‘Ukridge is pronounced Youcridge. Featherstonehaugh is pronounced Fan-shaw, and Stanley, rather prosaically, is pronounced as in ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume.’ ”

As for Aunt Dahlia, you’ll have to get hold of Cecil’s “Right Ho, Jeeves” reading. The book itself appeared in 1934, its American title changed by Little, Brown to “Brinkley Manor.”

WHERE TO ORDER TAPES:

G. K. Hall Audio Publishers, 70 Lincoln St., Boston, MA 02111.