P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books have no need for literary criticism. They continue to be bought and read by the truckload, quite regardless of their place in any canon, for the sheer pleasure and mirth that they provide. No one needs to be scolded into reading Wodehouse, and no true admirer of Wodehouse would be so joyless as try to bully others into sharing that admiration.
Still it’s hopefully possible to ask, without spoiling the fun, why, of all Wodehouse’s literary creations, the Jeeves and Wooster chronicles are the most delightful.
We can see part of the answer if we read some of the few, unsatisfactory stories where Wodehouse decided to make the narrator not the idle “fathead” (as his aunts like to call him) young-man-about-town Bertie, but his seemingly omniscient and infinitely unflappable valet (or, to use the approved term, “gentleman’s personal gentleman”), Jeeves. Jeeves—as seen by Bertie—is an immortal comic creation, an angel in valet form. But when he takes the reins of the narrative, the stories fall flat. All-seeing, all-knowing angels make for fine dei ex machina, but their mystery evaporates if we are led inside their minds.
So we must see Jeeves through Bertie’s eyes to delight fully in his salvific extractions of Bertie from the soup. We must be made to sense the world with Bertie’s own gasping bewilderment, so that we can sense his problems as insolvable, and Jeeves’s interventions as miraculous.
Yet, in relying on this set-up, Wodehouse set himself an exquisitely difficult literary problem. Bertie is a bumbling fathead, but the narrative voice of a bumbling fathead, while it might make for one or two amusing short pieces, would swiftly grate. For the Jeeves and Wooster gag to be sustained over its hundreds of iterations, there needs to be a gap between Bertie the character and Bertie the narrator, and yet that gap needs to be made invisible. Bertie as storyteller must deploy a rich range of comic intelligence, yet there would be no stories to tell if Bertie the hero were not forever stumbling into tomfoolery.
For the Jeeves and Wooster gag to be sustained over its hundreds of iterations, there needs to be an invisible gap between Bertie the character and Bertie the narrator.
The requirement is somewhat similar to that which Dickens set himself in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, and Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird: to tell, in the first person, a child’s story, as the child lived and understood it, while also showing readers all the complexities that were of necessity beyond that child’s grasp. Still Dickens and Lee could bridge the gap by making their narrator not David or Pip or Scout at the moment of childhood experience, but the older man or woman, looking back on the child they once were.
Wodehouse allowed himself no such luxury: there is no future, older and wiser Bertie, to tell of the scrapes of his youthful self. On the contrary, the stories rely on Bertie being an unchanging quantity, who never learns enough not to get into another scrape, never ceases to need Jeeves to get him out of it. Wodehouse’s world—as his dark twin, Evelyn Waugh, acutely observed—is in essence Eden, and in Eden, there is no growing into a sober and wry maturity.
The stories rely on Bertie being an unchanging quantity, who never learns.
If we pause to reflect, we can see that Bertie as character never could be Bertie as narrator. But, unless Wodehouse is having an off day (as he did on occasion), this consideration does not obtrude on the reader. In the moment, the magic does not fail: suspension of disbelief here means precisely remaining blind to the gap between the two Berties.
For this to work, it must be more than a conjuring trick: it must attain some poetic truth, however far it is from realism. The secret lies in Bertie’s goodness. He is not really a fool: he is an innocent. Within the gentle perturbations of Wodehouse’s Eden, Bertie gets in trouble not because he is driven by the conceit or obstinacy of true fools, but because he cannot say no to a friend (or aunt) in trouble, however obvious the looming dangers for him. Such nobility would be both insufferable and implausible in a first-person narrator if he also struck a noble pose. But we believe in Bertie’s nobility because he never ceases to think of himself as a chump, and to accept the joke at his own expense. Jeeves’s rescues of Bertie often involve him subjecting his master to some dreadful embarrassment, but Bertie is without priggish self-regard, and so always grateful, never resentful. Jeeves has delivered what really matters: release from some dreadful marriage or scaly relative, happiness for whomever Bertie had set out to help, and a return to idle merriment for the young master. Accordingly we love Bertie and believe in his goodness. Then, because we know that innocence is not truly the same as foolishness, we accept without blinking the delicate comic eloquence with which the fathead tells his own stories.
Jeeves and Wooster are the direct heirs of Sancho and Don Quixote, then Sam Weller and Mr Pickwick. Quixote and Pickwick are innocents, just like Bertie, and Sancho and Sam are, like Jeeves, worldly-wise, resourceful protectors of those innocents. Quixote and Pickwick are innocents abroad in our own wicked world, so that their stories have a weight of sorrow that Wodehouse never approached. But, by the same token, neither Quixote nor Pickwick could have told their own stories without those books becoming far more painful than they are—it is only in the gentle light of Eden that the voice of the innocent can bring laughter without tears.
