Blandings

I’ve just finished reading all of P G Wodehouse’s Blandings books. That’s 11 books from Something Fresh (1915) to the posthumously-published and unfinished Sunset at Blandings (1977), plus Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best a handy volume that collects all the stray Blandings short stories from other volumes.

I read the Jeeves & Wooster books as a teenager and found them eye-wateringly funny. I probably read a bunch of them every six or seven years and they are as funny to me now as they ere then. They are certainly the funniest books I’ve ever read. But, for various reasons, I’ve never ventured beyond that series. I think the Jeeves & Wooster books are so perfect I worried that Blandings would fall short. Also, I’m aware that Wodehouse is enormously prolific (around 80 novels, another 20 collections of short stories, a good half dozen autobiographical works) and feared that if I ventured out too far, I would get sucked under by the tide.

But so many people had recommended the Blandings books that earlier this year I asked for them for my birthday. I took them slowly, wanting to savour them, so I guess I got through about two of them a month, just reading them as a treat every Saturday morning. I read them in order of publication (except the short story collection which contains stories written between 1924 and 1966 and which I read in one sitting between Leave it to Psmith [1923] and Summer Lightning [1929]). And last weekend I finished reading the notes at the end of Sunset at Blandings which give a fascinating insight into the work in progress.

And everything they say is true. They are brilliant, extraordinarily funny, exhilaratingly plotted, and endlessly charming. By the end of the series you will have come to love Gally and Beach and Lord Emsworth and the various Aunts and of course The Empress of Blandings. It is striking, too, how sustained Wodehouse’s talent is: the later books are really as good as the early books: perhaps there’s a peak in the run of books from Summer Lightning (1929) through Heavy Weather (1933), Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939) and Full Moon (1947) which are immaculate but a late novel like Galahad at Blandings (1965) easily stands up with the best of them.

What are these books? They are farces. The action of the farce is Blandings Castle, though the characters often converge on the Castle from other country seats, London, or New York. Reading them all in one sequence, you notice very clearly how, essentially, all the books are the same - or rather, Wodehouse uses the same elements in minutely different permutations to create distinct novels. There’s almost something of Philip Glass in the way he will take an imposter, an undercover investigator, a marriage forbidden, an engagement broken off, a threat to Lord Emsworth’s pig, something overheard in the pub, someone hiding in a bedroom, another person locked out of the castle, a dilemma for the butler, a night-time escapade, an accidental unmasking, the theft of a necklace (or book or painting), the arrival of a despised relative, a threat to the family honour, a horrid youth, and more and rearranges them in each book so that you both notice the repetition and marvel at the differences. These are not retreads of the same thing; each one is more delightful because you know the rules of game.

And the farces are beautifully carpentered, as all good farces must be, piling stratagem upon stratagem, misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, the artifice delightfully defusing any sense of genuine jeopardy, just producing a giddy laughter. And they are magnificently funny. The farce mechanism is a way of revealing his joyful characters..The central cast are superb and pretty much every guest star (The Efficient Baxter, The Duke of Dunstable, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, Sue Brown, Percy Frobisher Pilbeam, George Cyril Wellbeloved, and more). There is even Marvel-Universe-style crossover with characters and events from other non-Blandings novels making their way through these pages: Psmith, Pilbeam, The Drones, Monty Bodkin, Sir Roderick Glossop.

One of the things that is fascinating about reading these books in chronological sequence is watching how Wodehouse, perhaps through trial and error, finally creates the perfect structure of characters. Lord Emsworth’s younger brother Galahad ‘Gally” Threepwood, a rakish, generous-spirited, mischievous alumnus of the London fin de siècle is an inspired invention. He relieves Emsworth of any need to become morally involved in the lives of the residents, temporary or otherwise, at Blandings Castle. He only appears in 1929’s Summer Lightning, fourteen years into the saga, and while the preceding books are excellent, there is a certain lift that happens here as the structure of forces becomes truly robust. The long-serving and long-suffering butler Beach also changes subtly across the books; in ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’ (1936), collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937), he is described as ‘a man who invested all his actions with something of the impressiveness of a high priest conducting an intricate service at some romantic altar’ (p. 28). This sense of enormous dignity, which of course places him alongside Jeeves, tends to diminish somewhat as the stories go on, as we find out more about his personal life, his weight problems, his family, his preference for port, and he is drawn into the seamier sides of the Blandings intrigues. But this works too: that the man holding the whole operation together should be himself slightly ridiculous is all to the good of the books.

It is certainly true that the women are much more colourless than the men (apart perhaps from Lady Constance, who is one of an otherwise interchangeable series of tyrannical aunts in the Lady Bracknell mould). It is an entirely white, privileged cast. But then these are not books that pretend to be anchored in daily life; the artifice and artistry is about plotting, character and verbal wit. They are not especially snobby books, despite their often snobby characters. They are not particularly straight books, despite their uniformly heterosexual characters. They are not necessarily white books, despite their caucasian casts. The magic of these farces is they turn everything upside down, show the absurdities in everything, and leave us affectionate for the characters without any requirement to love their lives, situations, or aspirations.

The humour is surprisingly different from the Jeeves and Wooster books. The peculiar genius of those is the fallible narrator Bertram Wooster whose chipper naivety adds an extra layer of linguistic precision and delight. Here we are more in the world of the omniscient narrator - although one who occasionally stops to remark on the complexities of doing a really good narration - and we are looking in on the characters more directly. The language is still magnificent, with its familiar mixture of slang, quotation and absent-minded whimsy. There are some moments of indirect free style, but the writing is mostly very straight but endlessly witty and light. It is noticeable that the earlier books are much more grounded, spend more time in London, and have a sharper satirical eye. By the time Wodehouse has moved permanently to the US, the books are much more focused on Blandings, are more (not a bad word) artificial, and increasingly mix American slang in with the British. (This just occasionally jars as the reference to the wholly US notion of a ‘three-alarm fire;’ in Sunset. In Service With a Smile a character talks about wanting to ‘get to first base’ with a woman; he is an American character, though, perhaps because the meaning has shifted since 1961, but it introduces a rare moment of sexual desire into these otherwise innocent worlds.)

Enjoyably, the characters don’t age. Well they sort of don’t age. It is a characteristic of Galahad Threepwood, repeated in every book where we meet him, than he appears to be ageless; but, in fact, all the characters seem to be exactly as they are in the last book as when we first meet them. Yes, a couple of characters do marry. Perhaps Beach the Butler does put on a few pounds over the series. The Empress accumulates awards at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. But otherwise they stay preserved in aspic. Several of the characters seem old enough to ensure that the books can’t plausibly cover decades of history. It is hard to place exactly when they take place. In a couple of the earlyish novels, the Wall Street Crash appears to be a precipitating event. There’s a reference to Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen and to science fiction movies (‘horror from outer space’) in Galahad at Blandings that seems to place us in the fifties rather than the 20s/30s that seems to be the natural placing for the bools. But they are, in a way, like their near contemporaries, the Christie’s Poirot & Miss Marple books, or Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. The character remains the same and the changing world seems to press in only gently on them.

The Blandings books are superb and effervescent and joyful. Every moment reading these books was happy and careless and full of laughter. If you haven’t read them, treat yourself.

UPDATE: Audible have released The Blandings Collection, the second volume in their P G Wodehouse readings by Stephen Fry. These are pretty great value (especially if you have an Audible membership). Last year they released volume 1, which contained three unabridged Jeeves and Wooster novels and two unabridged J&W short story collections. This year it is three full-length Blandings novels (Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Uncle Fred ion the Springtime) and two Blandings short story collections (Blandings Castle and Lord Emsworth and Others, both of which also include some Mulliner stories, a Ukridge, a Bobbie Wickham and more, so an excellent way to dabble one’s feet in the wider Wodehouse universe). As you might expect, Stephen Fry is a blissful reader of these books, properly bringing out their humour, and choosing superb voices for the characters: his Rupert Baxter is magnificent in its steely dry-throated iciness; his Lord Emsworth’s quavering absentness is a delight; he manages to distinguish (perhaps better even than Wodehouse himself) the various dim young men from Freddie to Ronnie, and he has a tremendous actor and comedian’s way with Wodehouse’s great set pieces: two drunken exhibitions spring to mind - Gussie Fink-Nottle’s inebriate handling of the Market Snodsbury Grammar School prize-giving in Right Ho, Jeeves, one of the great comic scenes in literature, is so vividly done, you feel you’re listening to a full-cast dramatisation, while Percy Pilbeam’s tipsy interview with Lady Constance and Lady Julia in chapter 12 of Heavy Weather, another outrageously brilliant scene, is just exquisitely funny.