All Hail Jeeves!

 Back in 2016, I listened to the autobiography of Christopher Hitchens. Called Hitch-22 (a definite nod to Catch-22, by Joseph Heller) Hitchens discussed his life and the people, events and books (authors) who added to his own in a formative way. During the early part of his memoir, he mentions the school master who introduced him to the works of P.G. Wodehouse (aka Plum) and especially his affable yet adorably boneheaded character, Bertie Wooster. 

I decided to take this as a recommendation from one of my beloved modern writers (although Hitch died in 2012) and dig into the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves, his "gentleman's personal gentleman". 

I have never looked back. Along with Tolkien, Melville, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, King, Poe, Lovecraft, Doyle, Asimov and other regular re-reads, Wodehouse now makes the grade. Absolutely.

Jeeves, whose name appears in almost every title, is Bertie's masterful, brilliant, sagacious, rock-ribbed valet who prides himself on personal equanimity, knowledge of literature and poetry and of course exquisite practical taste as regards a young gentleman's evening wear. Jeeves is essentially omnipotent and Bertie swears by his advice and council, though quite often they butt heads on elements of Bertie's poor fashion sense or taste in musical instruments.

Bertram "Bertie" Wooster is a young gentleman of the aristocracy (his uncle is a lord) with plenty of income and absolutely nothing to do. He spends his time gathering with school chums at the Drones, his club, and getting into and out of adventures with said chums and a whole bevy of young females all of whom, for one reason or another, set their sites on Bertie for marriage. He is forever engaging and then disengaging with these women, though he's far from a letch and the stories are nothing if not wholesome. Bertie desires nothing at all so much as the freedom to conduct his affairs, such as they are, as a bachelor. Other people cause Bertie no end of trouble and though he has the heart of a hero and is as chivalrous (in a good way) as a knight errant, as Jeeves might say, Bertie is "mentally negligible". 

All the stories are told from Bertie's first-person perspective and they resonate brilliantly with rollicking early 20th century jargon. Lots of 'pip pips' and 'what whats' and 'what hos', but don't let that deflect you. Bertie's humor is not to be missed, especially in his description of events, when, sometimes quite passionately put out by his school fellows or a tiff with Jeeves or a soppy female, he completely loses the point for a moment.

Between them, Bertie and Jeeves race around a kind of time donut. Nothing ever really changes or progresses and Bertie either refers back to other stories in the compendium or hints ahead at others yet to come. It's always the same era (despite when Plum was actually writing them (between 1915 and the mid 70s) and there are always points in time that readers of the stories and books can remember and look to.

There are other characters as well. Scads of them, actually. Along with Jeeves and the young goof, Bertie, there are Bertie's two elder aunts, Dahlia (the good one) and Agatha (the one who kills rats with her teeth and chews glass bottles for lunch) who are forever involving Bertie in schemes, plots, plans and chicanery. Most of the romantic catastrophes in Bertie's life come at the behest of Aunt Agatha, who believes that—in order for Bertie to settle down—he needs a woman to keep him. Aunt Dahlia, on the other hand, usually wants "the young fathead" to bring Jeeves to help her with some caper involving her publication "M'Lady's Boudoir" and clever ways of getting Uncle Tom to come across with the cash he loathes to part with to publish another edition.

Bertie's list of compeers is nearly endless, as are the goonish dolts that torture him. He is forever helping his hapless chums, like Lord Marmaduke "Chuffy" Chuffnel, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Percy Gorange, Augustus "Gussie" Fink-Nottle (also called "Spink Bottle" by Aunt Dahlia) Richard P. "Bingo" Little, Reginald "Kipper" Herring and the Rev. Harold "Stinker" Pinker, among many others, out of and sometimes into romantic entanglements.

The goons are less thick, but no less entertaining. Reginald Glossop, a nerve specialist, is forever giving Bertie the pip, as is Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup and the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, from Bertie's boy's school, Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea. These meatheads are always messing with our hero and add to the fun.

Jeeves, along with dispensing advice about what the well-dressed man is wearing (incidentally the title of one of Bertie's contributions to his Aunt Dahlia's aforementioned periodical) helps Bertie and his friends get out of trouble. He also makes a one-of-a-kind hangover cure (one of Jeeves’ restoratives) which produces the sensation ‘that one’s eyes have started from their parent spheres’. Usually, too, there is some dudgeon between Bertie and Jeeves brought on by Bertie's desire to wear something wildly inappropriate, like a red cummerbund or "fruity" purple socks. Occasionally, being a "pleasant light baritone" according to Jeeves, Bertie also runs afoul of his personal dictator by playing annoying instruments. The hauteur is brief, especially when Bertie learns that he is helpless at solving problems that Jeeves excels at.

Far from just silly stories, though, Wodehouse is perhaps one of those rare masters of the English language that we might easily and without hyperbole compare with Shakespeare. Far less commonly assigned for school reading, Plum's stories are no less audacious or powerfully composed. Much the way we might make the serious assertion that Prince was a modern-day Mozart by compositional standards, the same comparison is on the ticket for Wodehouse.

Like Shakespeare, Wodehouse's works are essentially English. Even the landscapes he describes are deeply and humorously English. Deverill Hall, Market Snodsbury, Chuffnel Regis, Totleigh Towers and Twing Hall, to name but a few. The language, the setting, the characters are all built from the clay of Wodehouse's peerless ability to capture Englishness. Perhaps the great marvel of this master is that he wrote much of his life's work while living in exile in America.

There are 11 Jeeves novels and 35 short stories in the Jeeves series and though one can progress linearly through the books, as I mentioned before, it doesn't matter. They will be funny regardless.

However, to truly understand and appreciate the novels, it requires a sharp mind when it comes to Englishness. Though I am a dyed-in-the-wool anglophile, these stories do not trip lightly from the page. Like with reading Shakespeare (a practice which is pedagogically dubious at best) there is so much lost in translation with Wodehouse's works. They need to be performed.

Right away, I am an excellent candidate for this, because, as must be well-known by now, I do a lot of my reading via audio books. The reader of these particular stories, then, must be good enough to capture the nuance, the cadences, the brilliance of Bertie's wonderful words.

Hitch, that is, Christopher Hitchens, agreed and preferred for this task the vocal stylings of Martin Jarvis. I'll admit, Mr. Jarvis has a decent rendering. Simon Prebble, too, does a decent job as does Ian Richardson. However each of these fellows pales by comparison with the late great Jonathan Cecil. Cecil's Bertie is bright, chipper, goofy. His Jeeves has a deep basso-profundo. Each character, from Aunt Dahlia to her French cook, Anatole, "God's gift to the gastric juices" is perfect and perfectly hilarious.

None of this means anything, of course, if you don't actually give these books a chance. They are truly laugh-out-loud stories and are worthy of the time spent listening. Whether Bertie is taking odds on handicapped sermon lengths for a bet with his dastardly cousins, Claude and Eustace, or stealing an 18th Century cow creamer for "Sir Thomas Portarlington Travers (Uncle Tom)" or avoiding the marital noose with Stephanie Bing or Madeline Bassett, nothing can make your day quite as much as delving into the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves.

But Hitch and I disagree, at least in part on one aspect of this. He (Hitch) ascribed the genius of Wodehouse as ultimately American but with a backward glance at the country that spurned him. Hitch said that Plum was mocking Englishness rather than reveling in it. Perhaps. It is possible. Like Hitch, who also came to love America as his forever home, Wodehouse never got over England. Not the people or the politics, but certainly the language. To me, a "lesser fan" by the Hitchens standard I guess, no one captures Englishness like Wodehouse. And though I tremble to argue with the man who introduced me and countless others to Bertie and Jeeves, Englishness is the point of these books.

If you read or listen to a Jeeves story, please share your thoughts below!