Pod Insights The Book Club 18. The Code Of The Woosters: The Funniest Book Ever Written? About this episode How did P. G. Wodehouse become one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century? Why have Jeeves and Wooster become such an iconic pairing? And, did P. G. Wodehouse collaborate with the Nazis?
Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Code Of The Woosters, the world it was born of, and the novel itself.
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Transcript 12,778 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:38 Dominic Sandbrook? I was standing there, hoping for the best, when my meditations were broken in upon by an odd, gargling sort of noise, something like static and something like distant thunder. And to cut a long story short, this proved to proceed from the larynx of the dog Bartholomew. He was standing on the bed, stropping his front paws on the coverlet, and so easy was it to read the message in his eyes that we acted like two minds with but a single thought. At the exact moment when I soared like an eagle onto the chest of drawers, Jeeves was skimming like a swallow onto the top of the cupboard. Jeeves was the first to break a rather strained silence.
3:17 Speaker 04 The book does not appear to be here, sir. I have searched the top of the cupboard, sir, but I have not found the book.
3:25 Dominic Sandbrook? It may be that my reply earned a trifle on the side of absurdity. My narrow escape from those slavering jaws had left me a bit edgy. Blast the book, Jeeves! What about this dog?
3:36 Speaker 04 Yes, sir.
3:38 Dominic Sandbrook? What do you mean, "yes, sir"?
3:40 Speaker 04 I was endeavoring to convey that I appreciate the point which you have raised, sir. The animal's unexpected appearance unquestionably presents a problem. While he continues to maintain his existing attitude, it will not be easy for us to prosecute the search for Mr. Finknottles' notebook. Our freedom of action will necessarily be circumscribed.
4:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Then what's to be done?
4:02 Speaker 04 It is difficult to say, sir.
4:04 Dominic Sandbrook? You have no ideas?
4:06 Speaker 04 No, sir.
4:08 Dominic Sandbrook? I wish, I said, that instead of sitting there saying "yes, sir" or "no, sir", Jeeves, you would do something.
4:15 Speaker 04 But what can I do, sir?
4:17 Dominic Sandbrook? You can get action, Jeeves. That is what is required here. Sharp, decisive action. What ho, everybody. Welcome to the book club. So that was, of course, P. G. Wodehouse's book, The Code of the Woosters, which was published in 1938. It's the third of Wodehouse's 11 full-length novels about the adventures and predicaments and travails of Bertie Worcester, who is an apparently dim-witted, but very enthusiastic, jolly, well-meaning and fun-loving Englishman sometime in the early 20th century,
4:54 Dominic Sandbrook? and his inflatable and infallible and indeed omniscient gentleman's gentleman, his valet Jeeves. And as you can tell from that reading, these books are not just tremendously good fun. They are absolute masterclasses in how to write and how to create a distinctive style of your own. And we'll be talking about the style and indeed the man in a second. But Tabby, you love these books, don't you? Didn't you grow up reading Jeeves and Worcester?
5:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, I totally did. I adore them. They're those books where, because there are so many of them, you can just slip from book to book to book and you remain within this wonderful, kind of colourful, hilarious world of cocktails and gentlemen's clubs and country houses. And so you just laugh your head off as you do it. I incurred some very confused looks on the tube when I was reading this to him back from work. And they were a massive hit in my family, partly because they're so quotable. I'm a huge fan. But you are too, aren't you?
5:48 Dominic Sandbrook? I am indeed. So I remember vividly my friend Luke at school introducing me to them when we were about 13 or 14. And him saying, oh, if you've never read P. G. Wodehouse, they're so, so funny. My grandfather introduced me to P. G. Wodehouse. I mean, this is the classic way, you know? They're the kind of thing that you hand down through the generations. And then I can remember probably a summer when I was about 14, just being absolutely addicted, ripping through them, sitting outside in the sun, just laughing and laughing and just thinking like I would never... I would never have so much fun reading a book again. I mean, I can remember just crying and crying with laughter.
6:24 Speaker 04 When we were discussing this podcast and we were talking about, you know, the bits that we like best, we would endlessly keep
6:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
6:30 Speaker 04 kind of erupting into laughter.
6:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
6:33 Speaker 04 Just genius.
6:34 Dominic Sandbrook? So to give people a sense who haven't read P G Woodhouse of the, the sort of the vibe of it, as it were, they are set, aren't they, in this, I said the first half of the 20th century because it's, it's sort of vague, the setting, it's a kind of Edwardian Never Never Land, but as we'll see, The Code of the Woosters, which was published in 1938, is also very clearly in a version of 1930s Britain. And the reason it's vague is partly because P G Woodhouse himself saw the books as a fantasy. He said, "The principle of his stories was making the thing frankly a fairy story and ignoring real life altogether."
7:08 Speaker 04 There is one way in which the stories are almost kind of historic. I mean, P G Woodhouse said this himself in an interview that I saw where he said that, "In some ways, I think of them as historical books in that they look back to a time that no longer exists." He said specifically, you know, "When I was a young chap, everyone had valets, but these days, nobody does." But then, yes, as you say, it's also a world that never really existed because the 1930s in Britain, this is the interwar period, massive economic uncertainty, political instability, you have the rise of fascism, there's a building sense of possibly another war on the horizon. It's quite a dark time in many ways, but you get none of this in the world of Bertie Worcester. It's all kind of jollity and nightclubs and big country
7:52 Speaker 04 houses and tremendous japes and things like that.
7:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. The one, there's one element of the 1930s, a very important element that finds its way into The Code of the Woosters specifically in the character Roger Expode, which we will come to. But just to, again, for people who've not read it, I mean, what is going on in the book? Now, this is going to be very, very hard to explain.
8:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, the plot is not the point, really.
8:13 Dominic Sandbrook? No, Bertie himself describes it as "an embrolio that would test the worsete soul as it had seldom been tested before. I allude to the sinister affair of Gussie McNaughtle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Bing, the Reverend H.P. Stinker Pinker, the 18th century cow creamer, and the small brown leather-covered notebook." So to give people, and try to interpret that for people who don't speak PG Woodhouse, Bertie and his manservant Jeeves have been sent off to a country house called Totley Towers by his aunt to steal a cow creamer. And a cow creamer is basically a jug, this sort of silver jug. When he gets there, he finds that his great mate from school,
8:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Gussie McNaughtle, is there with his fiancee, Madeline Bassett, who's a terrible drip, and Bertie tries to avoid her at all costs because he's worried that she will marry him. Sir Watkins Bassett, who owns the house, he's a magistrate with whom Bertie has a history, and Bertie lives in terror of Sir Watkins. Sir Watkins is there with his great friend, Roderick Spode, who is a would-be fascist dictator. Also there on the scene are another friend of Bertie's called Stephanie, or indeed Stiffy Bing, and she is engaged to yet another friend of his, Harold Pinker, who he calls Stinker.
9:33 Speaker 04 Stinker Pinker.
9:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Who's now rebranded himself as a Church of England curate. And basically, all of these characters end up sort of enmeshed with each other in this incredibly complicated plot in which Bertie is being driven, I mean, as we saw him in the opening reading, hiding on the top of a chest of drawers from a dog while searching for a notebook. Bertie's being forced ever greater and more sort of Baroque escapades to try to extricate himself from this terrible situation.
10:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, really thanks to the machinations of two formidable women, in many ways.
10:06 Dominic Sandbrook? That's right, yeah, exactly.
10:07 Speaker 04 We'll dig into the story a bit more in due course, but let's get into PG Woodhouse himself, because I think that his books are much more famous than Woodhouse himself. So he's born in Guildford in Sorry, in eighteen eighty one, and his Christian names are Pelham Grenville. Unfortunate, I think, but everybody calls him Plum. His father Ernest was a magistrate in Hong Kong and his mother Eleanor was back to visit her family when he was born. He was born prematurely. So she took him back to Hong Kong with her as a baby. And then, when he was two, his parents brought him and his older brothers to England. And they basically handed him to a nanny who lived in Bath called Miss Roper.
10:47 Speaker 04 And he said that she was a stickler for order and cleanliness, but they essentially abandoned him. There's something quite sort of young Churchill about that. These parents wanting off and doing their thing and basically leaving their children in the care of
11:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, quite a few of the great writers of the early twentieth century had a similar story. So Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell. So basically Ernest and Eleanor went back to Hong Kong and P G Woodhouse, their son, did not see them for another three years. In fact, in Robert McCrum's brilliant biography of P G Woodhouse, he says, in total, Woodhouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and fifteen, which is by any standards a shattering emotional deprivation. So, parents in the, in his books are generally shown as pretty cold and chilly. They're not shown, there's not a great deal of maternal or paternal affection in the books.
11:44 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, you know, this experience, I think, lies at the heart of P G Woodhouse's fantasy world. Because basically, he's been cut off from his parents. It's the greatest severance that a small child can have. And as a result, he sort of retreats into himself and effectively creates an imaginative fantasy world that he never leaves for the rest of his life.
12:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, he essentially kind of suppresses or represses all serious emotion and takes solace in this fantasy. It makes him withdraw into this very detached state of mind where he just wants to talk about things that are nice or that are fun or. You know, so for instance, McCrum says, "The completeness of his fantasy world reflects the intense and lonely bleakness of the inner world created by his early life." And you can definitely see that in the world of Jeeves and Worcester. He'd always said that he wanted to be a writer, so he escapes into this. And he is lucky in that he's very sunny, he's very jolly in his temperament, and everybody who knows him comments on his very sweet, kind nature. And when I was looking up some interviews with him on YouTube before doing
12:51 Speaker 04 this, you can totally see that. He's so warm and smiley and chipper. And this definitely explains the kind of unique nature of this fantasy world that he constructs. It's always summer, nothing bad ever happens, you know, it's always jolity and light. As we've said, there are barely any references to the real world, quite a dark real world in terms of its, you know, politics and a war on the horizon. And he hardly ever mentions the war, though it will later on in his own life have quite a sort of sinister impact on him that we'll get on to. So it's an imaginary 1920s that doesn't really exist, where everything is also superficial. He has a genuine horror in the books of any kind of profound emotion. He makes light of everything. Everything is a joke, you know, particularly in the dealings with women.
13:36 Dominic Sandbrook? There is a weariness of women that runs right through the books. I mean, we mentioned that Bertie in The Code of the Woosters, the worst thing that can possibly happen, the kind of existential apocalyptic disaster that he is facing, is that he will have to marry Madeleine Basset.
13:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And the reason for this is that he has this lovely life of the sort of gentleman of leisure. He hangs around in the drones club, throwing bread rolls at other old Atonians and stuff.
14:02 Speaker 04 The eternal bachelor.
14:03 Dominic Sandbrook? He is menaced at every turn by aunts, by would-be suitors, by women who write for little magazines, by blue stockings of various kinds, who are always kind of terribly domineering and bullying. And he cannot stand up to them. As he says to Jeeves, well, in another book, "Show me a delicately nurtured female Jeeves and I will show you a ruthless Napoleon of crime." And he basically says, you know, women, they're terrible. And indeed, romance, although the books are quite romantic, Bertie himself...
14:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Regards romance with a very sceptical eye, doesn't he?
14:39 Speaker 04 Genuinely, I think my favourite passage in the whole book is this bit when he's kind of, he's talking about Madeleine Basset. Basically, if she doesn't marry Gussie Finknotle, she believes that Bertie has been pining for her all this time and so she will marry him. And Bertie just can't, there is no world in which Bertie can say, no, I won't marry you. It's just his fate.
14:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
15:00 Speaker 04 He says at one point, "I once stayed at the residence of a newly married pal of mine, and his bride had carved in large letters over the fireplace in the drawing room, the legend, 'Two lovers built this nest', and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it. Whether Madeleine Basset, on entering the marital state, would go to such an awful extreme, I could not say, but it seemed most probable."
15:23 Dominic Sandbrook? So, two things. First of all, Tabby is somebody with nuptials of their own fast approaching. Would you be tempted to do this? Would you put this above your fireplace?
15:32 Speaker 04 Absolutely not.
15:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you know who inspired this? So, P G Wodehouse apparently went to visit H. G. Wells. And this was written in H. G. Wells'. It seems so unlikely that the guy who wrote The War of the Worlds had this above his fireplace. Well, obviously, it's because of the rejection from his mother. It's not hard to see the psychological roots of this sort of dread of women and of emotion because he's been rejected and he's been damaged. And he was brought up partly by a succession of aunts. So, he had eight aunts living in England at the time that he was sent to school. And Woodhouse, in his Jeeves and Worcester stories, combines these aunts into two absolutely formidable figures. One is Aunt Agatha. Now, Aunt Agatha is just absolutely terrifying.
16:18 Dominic Sandbrook? She's not in the Code of the Woosters, although she is alluded to at one point. Bertie describes it as, "She eats broken butts and wears barbed wire next to the skin." And she's just absolute martinet and a matriarch. And then there's Aunt Dalia. She is much kinder and jollier. She's a huntswoman, isn't she?
16:37 Speaker 04 Oh, yes, she most definitely is.
16:39 Dominic Sandbrook? She has a sort of foghorn voice. And she, again, Bertie cannot possibly stand up to her. So when she says at the beginning of the book, I want you to steal an antique cow creamer from a magistrate who already despises you, which is an insane thing for Bertie to do, he cannot possibly resist her, not least because she has a brilliant cook, a French cook called Anatole.
17:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
17:02 Dominic Sandbrook? And Bertie doesn't want to be deprived of this bloke's cooking.
17:05 Speaker 04 The stakes are so low, and yet they become so high. But then I was thinking, you could also argue of the Jeeves and Wister books, that there is kind of a curiously proto-feminist angle in that Bertie is kind of putty in the hands of strong, intelligent women.
17:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:21 Speaker 04 Who are ruthless and much more formidable than he. He's just no match for them.
17:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, no one can say that P G Wodehouse's women aren't strong characters. They are stronger than lots of the men who are completely jealous of various kinds. Although, I suppose you would say the treatment of a character, well, get on to Madeleine Basset, who is the sort of love interest, as it were. But she is very much a particular kind of man's nightmarish fantasy of what a girlfriend would be like. Back to Wodehouse. Wodehouse went to various prep schools, then he went to Dulwich College. So Dulwich College was also the alma mater. Incredible that it produced two such different writers, P G Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. And Wodehouse, he didn't know Raymond Chandler, he was seven years older. He absolutely loved his time at school. He's one of those people for whom school is this kind of Arcadian fantasy. It's this, it's this time when, as he says, it was like
18:09 Dominic Sandbrook? heaven. He loved the camaraderie, he loved the bants with the other boys, he loved the sport.
18:14 Speaker 04 Very like you.
18:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Thanks, Tabby.
18:17 Speaker 04 You loved your school days.
18:18 Dominic Sandbrook? I did like my school days, and I did like all those things.
18:20 Speaker 04 You never left?
18:21 Dominic Sandbrook? I never left. In my heart, I never left. Exactly. I'm sure my wife will be delighted to hear me saying that. He was a big reader, so he read Chaucer and Spencer and Shakespeare because he studied them. You know, he devoured Dickens and Kipling and Conan Doyle. He loved the comic wordplay of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and you can see all of that reflected in the style of Jeeves and Wustis.
18:43 Speaker 04 I think you can't underestimate what a massive influence that was on Woodhouse, and also you shouldn't overlook it. I think it is quite overlooked, how well-read, how knowledgeable he was.
18:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, definitely. Well, actually, we'll come on to all the literary allusions in the book. I mean, there are as many literary allusions in The Code of the Wustis as there probably are in something like The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot.
19:01 Speaker 04 I just think P. G. Woodhouse sounds like such a great man. You know, he doesn't wear his intelligence heavily. He's fun, he's lighthearted, he's funny, he's amiable, he's nice.
19:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Does he remind you of anyone, Tabby?
19:12 Speaker 04 Myself.
19:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, come on. He had an open goal then, you missed it. So, you know, he expected to go to Oxford, didn't he? His older brother had been to Oxford, but his father basically says, no, we haven't got enough money, so you're going to have to go and get a job. And he goes off to work at H. S. B. C. And he didn't enjoy it at all, did he?
19:29 Speaker 04 No, I mean, unsurprisingly. So then he starts writing comic pieces in boys magazines, and is first published in 1900, and then also publishes a school story novel in 1902. And then, within the next seven years, he's so prolific. Within the next seven years, he's written about another eight novels and co-written two more. I mean, he's like Trollope or something. He writes at such an incredible speed.
19:53 Dominic Sandbrook? He's an absolute machine all through his life. And then, in the early 1900s, two other really important influences. One, he visits New York, and he absolutely loves New York. And he recognizes that the appetite for stories, basically, in these sort of little magazines, is enormous and greater even than in England. But also crucially, because the market is so big, the fees are bigger. And so he starts writing for American publications. And he also starts writing musical comedies for the stage, and he's brilliant at it. And so that sort of sets the pattern. For the next 60 years of work, he will write short stories and novels and musicals, but his eye is very firmly on that American audience. So he is thought of as the most English of writers.
20:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:35 Dominic Sandbrook? But that is actually a bit... Bit of a contrivance because as we'll see, what he's doing in the books is he's creating a kind of Anglo American fantasy of England with a lot of Hollywood slang and a lot of kind of the slang that he's picked up in nineteen twenties, kind of roaring twenties, jazz age, New York and whatnot. And he's combining that, as we'll see, with his public school background to create this unique style that is all his own.
21:00 Speaker 04 That's actually such a brilliant point. I'd never considered that this is very much the world as Americans hope that period of England might be. It's kind of Downton Abbey on steroids.
21:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
21:10 Speaker 04 It's the vision all Americans would have of the English upper classes, particularly during this period. But he doesn't fight in World War One. His eyesight is too poor and it makes him ineligible. So he spends the war in New York, writing for the theatre. And then in nineteen fourteen, he marries a widow called Ethel and theirs is a very happy marriage, which is a nice thought considering, you know, he had quite a lonely upbringing. She takes very good care of him and she has a daughter called Leonora who he adopts. And then there's a key year, which is nineteen fifteen, and this is when he writes his first Blandings novel. So this is kind of his other great, most famous series, similar over to Jeeves and Worcester.
21:49 Speaker 04 He writes his first Blandings novel, which is called Something Fresh, and then a short story, Extricating Young Gussie, which introduces two characters called Bertie Worcester and Jeeves.
21:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So now we come to our protagonist. So Bertie, so Bertie, he took several goes to get to Bertie, didn't he? Because he'd been playing with characters a little bit like Bertie.
22:08 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, this is something of an archetype at this time, anyway, in the nineteen hundreds, the kind of upper class Englishman stereotype. So McCrum says, the dim-witted upper class stereotype had been a popular English figure of fun since early Victorian times. For instance, it's a stock figure in musical comedies. And Woodhouse himself said in something that I found that he thought of Bertie a bit like this chap called Lord Nitty Mildmay, the steeple chaser. He's an aristocratic man, he's slope shouldered, he's gaunt and he's a great sportsman, which Bertie is not. But then in nineteen twelve, Woodhouse invents a character for Strand magazine called Reggie. Pepper and Reggie narrates his own adventures like Bertie does and describes himself as a chap
22:52 Speaker 04 who's supposed to be one of the biggest chumps in London. And Reggie, like Bertie, is also always getting engaged in appropriate girls. But then again, he's rougher and he's more selfish than Bertie is. He's not as good humoured, nor is he as reflective as Bertie is. And he doesn't have that very particular narrative voice. And crucially, there is no Jeeves in these stories.
23:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, so the narrative voice is really important because people often forget that. And people think of Bertie as an idiot, but the person who tells these stories cannot be an idiot. He's so well read and he's got such a mastery of the English language. I mean, this is the funny thing about Bertie, the ambiguity of him. But there are some, we'll talk about him in The Code of the Woosters a little bit more later. I mean, there are characteristics that are common to all the stories. Bertie is rich, obviously. There's no question of him ever having a job or ever working.
23:36 Speaker 04 The Worcester millions.
23:38 Dominic Sandbrook? The Worcester millions, he says, but he says that's sort of slightly self-deprecatingly, I think, doesn't he?
23:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:43 Dominic Sandbrook? He spends his time at the Drones Club with the boys, throwing stuff around, drinking. So sort of his school days discontinuing endlessly into the distance. He has this dread of women, he has this dread of getting married and he's constantly sort of battling with Jeeves.
23:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Because he will be, Bertie will return unexpectedly from holiday with an ill-advised jacket.
24:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Or an outlandish pair of shoes, which Jeeves will want to destroy. Or Jeeves will have some scheme of his own, as in The Code of the Woosters. Jeeves wants to go on around the world cruise. We'll come back to this because I love this passage. And Bertie doesn't want to go on the cruise and Jeeves is determined to force him to do it. Which brings us to Jeeves. So PG Woodhouse himself said of Jeeves, who is in many ways his great creation.
24:29 Speaker 04 I mean, he's entered culture, like everyone knows of Jeeves. They think of butlers and they think of Jeeves, much more so than Bertie.
24:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Because he's not actually a butler. He's a valet, he's a manservant, he's a gentleman's gentleman.
24:40 Speaker 04 But we no longer have that concept, so it's easier to think of him as a butler, yeah.
24:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Woodhouse said he invented Jeeves as a plot device. He needed to get Bertie out of situations, out of messes. But Bertie, because he was meant to be a dimwit, couldn't get out of them himself. So he thought, you know, it would be out of character for Bertie to think of the solution. He said, well, who will think of it? For a long time I was baffled. Then I suddenly thought, why not make Jeeves a man of brains and ingenuity? And have him do it. And after that, it was all very simple. So he gets his name from a cricketer who played for Warwickshire, a bowler called Percy Jeeves, who was actually killed on the Somme in July 1916. So he was a well-known figure. Jeeves is a very backward-looking figure. You can't really imagine him on the kind of western front or something like Percy Jeeves. There have been servants in P G Woodhouse before.
25:28 Dominic Sandbrook? So there's a character called Jevons, who is a butler, in a short story in the Strand Magazine in 1914. But Jeeves is obviously much more than just a manservant, isn't he? He is a, he's like a deity to Bertie.
25:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, he himself is a gentleman. That's one thing. He's a friend. He's a companion. He's a confidant. But he's also Bertie's guardian angel. And often in cases, he's Bertie's friend's guardian angel as well. He's omniscient. He's totally reliable. He's utterly invaluable. He's a genius. It's almost like, as you say, he has supernatural powers, you know, this massive brain of his. And he has a mastery of all literature and history, which is extraordinary. And I love the way that he's described as kind of shimmering into a room or gliding into it or oozing out of it.
26:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Jeeves never walks anywhere, does he really?
26:17 Speaker 04 No, never. That's too human, you know?
26:19 Dominic Sandbrook? As soon as he said it in his biography, I thought, yes, why didn't I see this before? We've mentioned a few times the Strand Magazine. The Strand Magazine published the Sherlock Holmes stories. And actually, in creating Jeeves and Worcester, P G Woodhouse is emulating another double act that we've done on this show, which is Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
26:38 Speaker 04 You're so right about that, actually.
26:40 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, you can imagine the same audience reads both sets of stories, because they're published in the same places, for one thing. So the story's being told by the dimmer person. So Dr. Watson or Bertie. They get into a terrible mess, they can't see a way out, their friend has vanished, often in the middle of the story, and then their final third, the friend, that's Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves, returns and uses their unbelievable, almost, as you say, supernatural brain power.
27:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:08 Dominic Sandbrook? To solve the case and save the day. You know, people often talk about the relationship, the camaraderie, actually, between officers and men in the First World War and how much that appealed to people. And there is an element of that, I think, about Bertie and Jeeves.
27:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, but also that thing of a servant and a master being used in comedy, like, I mean, goes right back to classical times, Robert McCrum makes that point. The other thing I was thinking, slightly less sophisticated point, is it's exactly the dynamic. Have you seen Blackadder III, The Prince Regent and Blackadder?
27:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yes.
27:39 Speaker 04 And obviously that's, Hugh Laurie plays Bertie Worcester in the Jeeves and Worcester adaptation, so definitely drew on that, I would have thought.
27:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yeah, completely. You can definitely see how Hugh Laurie's, I mean, but also the people who wrote Blackadder would undoubtedly be very.
27:52 Speaker 04 Been aware.
27:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and would have, I hadn't thought of that, but you're dead right.
27:56 Speaker 04 Totally, yeah.
27:57 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a similar kind of dynamic. So, anyway, Bertie and Jeeves, they appear in a series of short stories in the late 1910s and early 1920s, which end up being collected as the first Jeeves and Worcester books.
28:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, but meanwhile, Woodhouse is dividing his time between Britain and America. He's now a very, very successful Broadway lyricist, and he tells his school friend that writing musical comedy has taught me a lot. I think you can see that in his prose, actually. But he's also producing an endless stream of short stories and novels. So in the 1920s, McCrum says, "A decade of non-stop work in which Woodhouse would compose the lyrics for some 12 musicals, write or adapt four plays, and publish 20 books in London and New York."
28:38 Dominic Sandbrook? I think of myself as quite a stickanobite.
28:40 Speaker 04 You write very quickly.
28:41 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm not remotely in that league. That's absolutely extraordinary.
28:45 Speaker 04 You do write like a million-word books, whereas Pudgy Woodhouse's books are quite short.
28:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but also his, I mean, I'll say this, and I'm not ashamed to say it, his are much better than mine.
28:55 Speaker 04 But it's interesting, why do you think these books strike such an enormous chord in the 1920s?
29:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I think it's actually the the timing is really important. I think we've mentioned a few times the First World War. The world has descended into such horror and so many of the old certainties have crumbled. And actually, we've we talked about this when we did our episode about Virginia Woolf's book Mrs. Dalloway, which is an attempt to reckon with the trauma of the war. What P. G. Wodehouse is doing, and it and it sort of, it seems weird, doesn't it, to think that, you know, you could be reading one week Mrs. Dalloway and the next week P. G. Wodehouse, and they're just being published and they're both reflecting the times. But what P. G. Wodehouse is doing is he's offering you escapism. He is deliberately ignoring the horrors of the time and looking back to a kind of carefree confidence and certainty that has been lost. I think his books would have appealed overwhelmingly
29:46 Dominic Sandbrook? to middle-class readers. If you're a middle-class reader who is alarmed about the war, you know, you've, you know, you've, you've lost friends or something, you're worried about the Russian Revolution and the rise of Bolshevism and all of these kinds of things, reading P. G. Wodehouse is this warm, comforting bath. Nothing has changed since 1900 in this world. The anxieties of modernity have not kind of penetrated. And that's why I think, you know, P. G. Wodehouse really hits his stride and he becomes, I mean, he's a household name by this point. He goes off to Hollywood at the end of the 20s. He gets to deal with MGM. I mean, he's, he goes to Hollywood, you know, every few years, never really works out. And he always sort of comes back after a year and says, I don't know why they bothered paying me all that money because I didn't really do anything.
30:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think he needs to be busy. He's an industrious man, I suppose.
30:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he's industrious. He's ambitious. He likes America and he likes going out there. And then he comes back. The 1930s are a more uncomfortable decade for him, though. By this point, the writers that he has grown up with, that he loved as a boy, like Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, they're all dead or they're dying off. He had enjoyed, I think, the spirit of the the sort of Jazz Age side of things in the 20s, especially when he went to New York.
30:54 Speaker 04 You can see that in Jeeves and Wisteria.
30:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, you can completely. And there were stories, there were short stories, for example, where Bertie goes off to New York and has adventures there. And you can see, there's a sort of, there's a real sense of fun. That Wodehouse is somebody who likes America. He, he's amused by it. He likes his confidence and his breeziness. And, you know, there's this sort of American millionaires chomping cigars in his books and things. And it's, he finds all that really infectious, I think. But then in the 30s. I mean, you mentioned the economic issues of the day, I mean, it's the depression. There is Stalin and his terror in the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, obviously the rise of Nazism. Woodhouse is not a, I mean, he's a small C conservative writer, obviously, and small
31:40 Dominic Sandbrook? C conservative kind of person, but he's not especially political. So you might think that he would be an odd fit with that, the sort of temper of the times. But this is the point at which he writes probably his most beloved books. So the first full-length Jeeves and Worcester novels, Thank You Jeeves and Right Ho Jeeves, they're both published in 1934. A couple of years later, he's offered another gig in Hollywood, MGM again. He goes out there for a year, again, it doesn't work out, he comes back to England. And when he comes back to England from California, he has the idea for a third book, and this is today's book, The Code of the Woosters.
32:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And he was originally going to call it The Silver Cow. And he said to one of his friends, I think it's going to be one of my best. He wrote it over Christmas and kind of New Year, 1937, 38. His wife said he rewrote it so many times that she thought it would never be finished. But he did finish it.
32:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:33 Dominic Sandbrook? And we'll plunge into The Code of the Woosters and how it works after the break.
32:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, so just before we do get into that hilarious story, let's just quickly get to the break by talking about quite a famous, but quite a sort of odd and sad episode in Woodhouse's life. So these are the famous broadcasts. So he's living in a house in France after the Nazis invade in 1940. He tries to get out, but he's too late. He's captured by the Germans and he's interned as a civilian prisoner. And I think, you know, undoubtedly, he suffered some pretty difficult times during that period. And then a year later, thanks to pressure from the Americans, he, and because of his age, he's 59 at this point, he's released and taken to Berlin. And there, he agreed to record a series of what were definitely light-hearted radio
33:23 Speaker 04 broadcasts that were to be broadcast mainly to the US. And remember what we said about, you know, Woodhouse's jollity and his kind of escapism and his unwillingness to kind of face up to sad things? These broadcasts were intended to be funny and lighthearted reflections on his time being in turn. He was never going to say, oh, it was traumatic and it was hard. They weren't to be taken seriously. And they kind of had the same humorous tone and flippancy of Jeeves and Worcester. They're not at all political. They're certainly not pro-Nazi. And they, you know, they even make fun of the Germans, but it's very badly received in Britain, partly because it's been
34:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Disastrous.
34:00 Speaker 04 I mean, it's disastrous, partly because it's been broadcast from German radio. He's thought to be kind of collaborating, unintentionally maybe, but collaborating nevertheless. It's the flippancy of them, which I think I understand in fairness. When Britain is seemingly at this point, losing the war, when it's a period of incredible national suffering, it's thought to be too provoking, you know, too flippant, and he gets widespread criticism. So for instance, A. A. Milne, the writer of Winnie the Pooh, he comes out and publicly lambasts him.
34:32 Dominic Sandbrook? The BBC broadcast, one of the most opinionated things they've ever done on the radio, it was a massively controversial thing within the BBC, an attack by a columnist, I think for the Daily Mirror, basically saying, this bloke, P. G. Wodehouse, has made us laugh all these years, whatever, whatever. He's a traitor. You know, he, at a time when our cities are being bombed, when, you know, thousands upon thousands of British men and women have been killed, he is making, going to Berlin, and they put him up in a hotel, and he's making jokes broadcast on German radio.
35:01 Speaker 04 With the enemy, by the enemy.
35:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, what a monstrous thing to do. And Wodehouse's friends sent him messages, tried to, you know, to try to stop him. But it was too late. It recorded them all and they kept going out on American radio. And it was absolutely catastrophic for his reputation in Britain. I mean, the way you've presented it, Tabby, makes it very obvious, your own sympathies.
35:23 Speaker 04 I think it was foolish. I think it was incredibly foolish, and it was, um. And it was thoughtless. I don't think he was traitorous. I don't think he was a Nazi.
35:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course not. The flippancy that had served him so well and had brought him so much success and had inspired so much affection from so many readers was totally ill suited to the moment. In fact, I'm just gonna have to say it, Tabby, it was a bit inappropriate. And for that reason, public opinion turns against him in Britain. And it takes a long time for it to shift, actually, the taint of that.
35:54 Speaker 04 MI5 later investigated it and they concluded that he definitely wasn't treacherous, but he was politically naive and it was poor judgment. But because of all the negativity and his unpopularity in Britain, he moves to the US and he stays there permanently. And he himself admitted that it was a very foolish thing to do. He called himself a loon for doing it. He is eventually forgiven. And at the end of his life, he's knighted. But he basically carries the stain of this, certainly in Britain for the rest of his life.
36:24 Dominic Sandbrook? For the rest of his life, although not, I think subsequently, I think by the time that he died, which is what, 1970 or so, people recognised that they'd been too harsh on him.
36:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:33 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, it's not exactly forgotten because it's something that people bring up, as we have.
36:37 Speaker 04 But that's because it's an unexpected story. You would never expect a story like that from the man that wrote Jeeves and Worcester. I think that's why people remember it.
36:44 Dominic Sandbrook? So, all right, we need to talk about the Code of the Woosters. We'll find out after the break.
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38:22 Speaker 04 Welcome back to the book club, everybody. So now we're going to get straight into the code of the wisters. Do you, Dominic, want to explain what is an insanely complicated story?
38:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, so we'll start right at the beginning. Bertie wakes up and he's got a colossal hangover. And Jeeves comes in and Jeeves has this sort of, what does he call it? Jeeves' tissue restorer.
38:44 Speaker 04 It cures everything.
38:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
38:46 Speaker 04 What do you think is in it? I've always wondered.
38:48 Dominic Sandbrook? I think you can find a recipe for it online, actually.
38:50 Speaker 04 Really?
38:51 Dominic Sandbrook? I think Bertie describes it at one point. It's like it's derived from quite a popular hangover cure of the sort of 1910s or something. So I think it's kind of, you know, raw egg, Worcester sauce, all those kinds of things.
39:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, okay, I've lost my interest. Anyway, continue.
39:06 Dominic Sandbrook? So anyway, now there's a big issue for Bertie and Jeeves because they're having a disagreement about this round the world cruise. As Bertie puts it, "When two men of iron will live in close association with one another, there are bound to be occasional clashes."
39:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, and then we get to what is undoubtedly one of the great passages in all 20th century fiction. And I think to reenact this, Dominic, we should take on our roles from the opening reading.
39:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Go for it.
39:29 Speaker 04 So I'm Jeeves. "Travel is highly educational, sir."
39:33 Dominic Sandbrook? "I can't do with any more education. I was full up years ago." "No, Jeeves, I know what's the matter with you. That old Viking strain of yours has come out again. You yearn for the tang of the salt breezes. You see yourself walking the deck in a yachting cap. Possibly someone has been telling you about the dancing girls of Bali. I understand and I sympathize, but not for me. I refuse to be decanted into any blasted ocean-going liner and logged off round the world."
40:00 Speaker 04 Very good, sir.
40:01 Dominic Sandbrook? He spoke with a certain what is it in his voice. And I could see that if not actually disgruntled, he was very far from being gruntled.
40:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:10 Dominic Sandbrook? So that's the bit, that's the genius of Woodhouse, the very far from being gruntled thing.
40:13 Speaker 04 The wordplay.
40:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, Tabby, you can take up the more complicated part of the plot.
40:18 Speaker 04 Okay, so after this, Bertie goes to lunch with the nice aunt, Aunt Dalia. And she demands that he go to a shop and sneer at an antique cow creamer in order to bring down the price for Bertie's uncle Tom, who collects silver, because otherwise he's disbarred from her dinner table and the brilliance of Anatole. While there, he runs into a Sir Watkins Basset and his friend Spode. Sir Watkins, who he has been fined £5 for nicking a policeman's helmet. Great banter.
40:49 Speaker 04 So then Bertie receives a note from his friend Gussie Finknottle saying, oh, it's all off with Madeline. You must come quickly and fix it. It's in Bertie's interests to fix their engagement because otherwise he has to marry Madeline. So off he goes to Topley Towers, also on the urging of his aunt Dalia, because she says, you need to steal the cow creamer from Sir Watkins, who has bought it.
41:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. So there's two things combined, the cow creamer and the Madeline Basset issue.
41:13 Speaker 04 And then, once there, he discovers that in order to mend Madeline and Gussie's fences, he must steal back a notebook in which, in order to steel his nerves for his groom's speech at his forthcoming wedding, of which he's absolutely terrified. Gussie has been writing down all the terrible things that he can think of about his father-in-law-to-be and the terrifying Spode. But now he's lost possession of the notebook and it's fallen into the hands of the marvellous Stiffy Bing. She's Madeline's cousin, she's Sir Watkins' niece, and she is holding it as a bribe. She also wants Bertie to steal the cow creamer because then she wants her fiance, Harold Stinker-Pinker, to come in and save the day by returning the cow creamer to Sir Watkins.
41:57 Dominic Sandbrook? She wants her fiance to punch Bertie.
42:00 Speaker 04 As a marauder, a marauding thief, to punch him. And then he'll look good and therefore her uncle will let her marry Stinker. Never marry a man called Stinker. Anyway, so Madeline then breaks off the engagement with Gussie again, Spode makes some threats. Bertie is terrified once more that he will have to marry Madeleine. However, Jeeves then discovers a secret about Spode and says to Bertie, you must say the word "eulally" and Spode will be putty in your hands. Bertie does this and it proves very effective. Then there are all sorts of entanglements and dramas and adventures.
42:30 Dominic Sandbrook? More complications ensue.
42:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, man-eating dogs, policeman's helmets, you name it.
42:36 Dominic Sandbrook? We mentioned the Sherlock Holmes comparison earlier on and actually, Robert McCrum in his biography compares this to a Sherlock Holmes story in terms of the complexity and says, you know, P G Wodehouse loved Conan Doyle and this is the one story that sort of rivals the intricate machinations of the most convoluted Sherlock Holmes adventure. Bertie describes it as a case, doesn't he?
42:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:56 Dominic Sandbrook? He says at one point to Jeeves, "Man and boy, Jeeves, I've been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the muddled oyster."
43:03 Speaker 04 I love that expression.
43:05 Dominic Sandbrook? The wins the muddled oyster, I don't even really know what that means. But at one point, he explicitly mentions Sherlock Holmes, doesn't he?
43:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, he does. He actually does, which is kind of remarkable. He says, "I mean, imagine how some unfortunate master criminal would feel upon coming down to do a murder at the Old Grange if he found not only Sherlock Holmes was putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot as well." There's a satisfaction in the way that the Jeeves and Worcester books are kind of tied up, their plots are constructed, that reminds me of the same kind of satisfaction of reading a Sherlock Holmes book.
43:36 Dominic Sandbrook? A detective story, yeah.
43:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, how everything neatly kind of clicks together.
43:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. Although you read it and you marvel at the complexity of the plots and the way that it works like plot work. But the truth of it is that the plots are slightly irrelevant. In Alfred Hitchcock's films, he used to call them MacGuffin, which is basically the thing that the characters are searching for or something. But you don't really care what that is because the pleasure of it is just in the experience. And this is true of Code of the Woosters. It's the joy of it is in the characters and particularly in the way that Bertie describes them. So if we kick off with Aunt Dahlia, she is the nicer of the two aunts, isn't she?
44:12 Speaker 04 She's the nicer of the two aunts, but she's still, I mean, formidable. So she's such a particular type of upper-class Englishwoman. So for instance, Bertie says of her... She greeted me with one of those cheery view halloos, which, when she went in for hunting, used to make her so noticeable a figure with organisations for doing the British fox a bit of no good. And he always has funny ways of describing her to her face. So he'll say, oh, aged relative, or my fluttering old Aspen, or decrepit ancestor, or things like that. She laughs very loud. So, for instance, he says, she laughed a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health. But then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused.
44:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I love that.
44:54 Speaker 04 Because Aunt Ailie, that's kind of forcing him into all these terrible binds. He says at the end that she's just as bad as his other aunt. All aunts are bad.
45:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof, as he says.
45:05 Speaker 04 Exactly.
45:05 Dominic Sandbrook? So the house that he goes to, Tottley Towers, is the house of Sir Watkins Basset. Sir Watkins Basset is this magistrate. He's a sort of pillar of the establishment. He is disturbingly short, which I think Bertie finds unsettling. They have this history that Sir Watkins, as you said, fined him five pounds for stealing a policeman's helmet on boat race night. I mean, this bit makes me laugh so much when Bertie's describing. Sir Watkins appears, he's dressed in a very loud tweed suit, and Bertie says, "It is, of course, an axiom," as I've heard jeeves call it, "that the smaller the man, the louder the Czech suit. An old Basset's apparel was in keeping with his lack of inches. Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds. And oddly enough, the spectacle of them had the effect of steadying my nerves.
45:51 Dominic Sandbrook? They gave me the feeling that nothing mattered."
45:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Then there's Madeleine Basset, Sir Watkins' daughter.
45:57 Speaker 04 We've already alluded to her kind of romantic nature. She's soppy, droopy, and a bit of a drip. She's kind of sickeningly romantic. And as I said, she can't even conceive of a world in which Bertie isn't pining for her from afar. And let's remember that, you know, one of the great tensions in this book is Bertie's desperate efforts to go to any length to avoid having to marry her. And yet, the minute that she sees him at Tottley Towers, she says, "Oh, why did you come? Oh, I know what you're going to say. You felt that, cost what it might, you had to see me again just once. You had to take away with you one last memory." To which Bertie replies, "Terrific, I said, feeling I had to say something."
46:39 Speaker 04 So she classed herself as a romantic heroine. And then he says of her to his aunt, I call her a ghastly girl, because she was a ghastly girl. And then there's this one thing that he says about her, which somehow is so pertinent to life. I kind of know exactly what he means.
46:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Go on.
46:53 Speaker 04 I promise I've never done this myself, I promise.
46:56 Dominic Sandbrook? You definitely have.
46:56 Speaker 04 And he says, she was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over her husband's eyes and says, guess who?
47:05 Dominic Sandbrook? She definitely does. And she is well matched with his mate Gussie Finknottle, who Bertie says, a fish-faced pal of mine, who on reaching man's estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts.
47:18 Speaker 04 They call him a newt fancier, yeah.
47:20 Dominic Sandbrook? This is literally what he is. But he adores Madeline, doesn't he? He absolutely worships Madeline.
47:26 Speaker 04 She's very attractive and she's very feminine, I suppose.
47:29 Dominic Sandbrook? There is another girl on hand, though. So this is her cousin, Stiffy Bing. Now, Stiffy is, she's jolly, she's a laugh. But she is also pretty intimidating. So she is blackmailing Bertie into stealing the cow creamer and getting himself punched.
47:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, she's very robust. She always gets what she wants and she's always unruffled and unfazed. And I like the way that she speaks, because I think she's actually one of the only characters that matches Bertie's kind of clever contortions of speech and language, her abbreviations, the colloquialisms, the slang. And it makes her very flippant, which I find so entertaining. There's something in the way that she speaks that is very kind of of the bright young things of this time. So a lot of the characters in Nancy Mitford's funnier books speak very like this, for instance. There's nothing soppy about her at all. She has a compelling stare. She's indomitable but feminine. I'm just going to say it, the comparisons with self are uncanny. Because also, the other thing is, apart from all those wonderful characteristics that
48:29 Speaker 04 we share, she also fervently jumps to the defence of indefensible pets. And I do the same. I did that for my cat.
48:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Your cat? But you've got it.
48:38 Speaker 04 Could do no wrong.
48:39 Dominic Sandbrook? The cat's gone now, mate.
48:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, he knows of my brother.
48:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there was definitely a point, by the way, when you were talking about Stiffy Bing there, where it was pretty clear that you'd forgotten all about the book and were just praising yourself.
48:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, that was, that was an ode to moi.
48:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And then one of the great characters, I think, one of my favourite characters in all modern English, 20th century English fiction, and this is Roderick Spode. In Spode, we have the one moment when the 1930s intrudes on Woodhouse's fantasy, because he is very clearly modelled on Sir Oswald Mosley.
49:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:09 Dominic Sandbrook? The British Union of Fascists. In Spode's case, he leads an organisation called Not the Black Shirts, But the Black Shorts. The reason being that they ran out of shirts and they had to buy what Bertie calls "footerbags", as a mark of their paramilitary status.
49:26 Speaker 04 And then Bertie says, "By the way, when you say shorts, you mean shirts, of course." This is talking about the black shorts. "No, by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents were black shorts. 'Footerbags', you mean? Yes. 'How perfectly foul!' Yes. 'Bare knees?' 'Bare knees.' Golly."
49:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, so he has a tremendous line when he first sees Spode. "Because of a breathtaking cove, about seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster that made him look about six feet across. He caught the iron and rested it. It was as if nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment." So, anyway, Spode is the leader of the Savers of Britain, the black shorts. His ambition is to make himself a dictator. And Bertie, when he discovers this, because he's met Spode earlier, didn't know who he was, and now finds out. And Bertie, rather like you, congratulates himself at great length on his perspicacity. He says, "Well, I'm blowed. I was astounded at my keenness of perception.
50:28 Dominic Sandbrook? The moment I set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself, 'What ho! A dictator!' And a dictator he had proved to be. I couldn't have made a better shot if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he's a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living in Clapham." So again, the Sherlock Holmes reference.
50:49 Speaker 04 Jeeves discovers, though, as I said, this secret about Spode that kind of halts him in his tracks when he's about to attack Bertie.
50:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
50:58 Speaker 04 And he learns this from his own... You know, man servants' club, which is called the Junior Ganymede. And the secret is that Spode secretly delights in designing and making ladies underwear.
51:09 Dominic Sandbrook? You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothing.
51:13 Speaker 04 No, sir.
51:14 Dominic Sandbrook? One or the other, not both.
51:16 Speaker 04 Precisely, sir.
51:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Bertie is equipped with this knowledge that Spode runs a boutique called You Lily Sirs, where he designs women's undergarments. And he decides to confront Spode with this, doesn't he? And he unleashes on Spode this tremendous passage. You hear people shouting, "Hile Spode!" And you think, "It's the voice of the people. This is where you make your bloomer." What the voice of the people is saying is, "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags. Did you ever in your puffs, he's such a perfect perisher?"
51:49 Speaker 04 You can see there, though, I mean, and Woodhouse's style has kind of been seen ever since. And you can see why, as this, as a brilliant way of puncturing the pretensions of fascism. He just mocks it, he ridicules it.
52:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, completely. Spode is all about violence and posturing and showing off. I mean, Spode is a comic figure rather than a terrifying one, although Bertie does find him terrifying. But he is unfriendly, unsympathetic, kind of glowering with rage all the time. Bertie is the embodiment of decency and tolerance and goodness. And actually, the code of the Woosters, which gives the book its title. The code of the Woosters is never let a pal down. And there's something, I think, quite touchingly innocent and simple about this.
52:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
52:35 Dominic Sandbrook? It's the sort of understated spirit of British propaganda in the early years of the Second World War. Our simple virtues will win out over the maniacal posturing of the dictators. You know, that sort of spirit.
52:48 Speaker 04 We've made this comparison so many times, but there is something very Tolkien about that.
52:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, mine's worked in similar ways, Tabby, because I thought exactly, this is like the hobbits defeating Mordor kind of thing. That is, I think in both cases, actually, it's an idealized British self-image in the age of totalitarianism.
53:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:06 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, we will overcome this evil by the virtues of friendship.
53:10 Speaker 04 Decency, tolerance, yeah. But there we have very, I mean, as you said, so unusually for these books, the real world is entering the story.
53:20 Dominic Sandbrook? But in a way in which it's.
53:21 Speaker 04 It's cartoonised, really.
53:23 Dominic Sandbrook? The threat of fascism is tamed in the book and made ridiculous, and it makes it easy to deal with it. That Spode is basically undone by Bertie confronting him with the fact that he designs women's underwear.
53:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:35 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, if only with that simple, of course. I mean, it's one of the things that people love about the book, actually, is the contrast between Bertie and Jeeves on the one hand and Spode, because usually the books don't have villains.
53:44 Speaker 04 But then the appeal of these books, it's not actually just the plot or the characters, marvellous though they are, it's the style. And I think his is surely one of the most recognisable and effective styles in all modern English literature. Woodhouse's language just totally steals the show. He can backflip and somersault his language in such a way that it gives such a strong impression of comedy, but also the character's actions. You always know exactly what he means, even though everything is contorted and flipped around. There's such precision. It's like a dance. And so because of that, it's worth just stressing the brilliance of Woodhouse as just a pure writer of English. Forget the story, forget the characters. He's one of the great stylists. Like, there's something
54:28 Speaker 04 worth quoting in every paragraph. And like, my copy is proof of that. Every second page is dogged. Evelyn Waugh, who was considered far more hard-hitting, called him the master of their profession. I mean, high praise indeed, because I think Evelyn Waugh's writing is some of the greatest. But P G Woodhouse is just a genius.
54:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, lots of writers, lots of critics have said, it's his use of language, it's the unexpected image, it is the surprising wordplay, it's the sort of inversion, it's the incongruity. It's the way in which Woodhouse's style, on a sentence-by-sentence level, combines a sort of high art and mass culture. So the literary allusions and then the slang. And if you kind of go through it, I mean, we don't often do this on the show, but I think P G Woodhouse absolutely deserves it. If you look at the ingredients of any given paragraph or sentence, you have public school slang from his Dulwich days, you have the sort of. Sporting banter, you have the slang from the, you know, the speakeasies of New York in
55:25 Dominic Sandbrook? the 1920s, you have abbreviations, all kinds of informality, you have literary references, you have, I mean, the slang is a huge, huge element of this. He loves making up words and playing with words.
55:38 Speaker 04 He loves language itself. I think there are some writers that you can just tell that they're obsessed with language above anything.
55:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the musicality of it. You mentioned the point about musical comedy, the sound of it, actually. And so there's a really good example on the very first page. So it's the bit when Bertie awakes from his hangover. And actually, if you just think about how this works, he says, "Just before Jeeves came in, I'd been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head. Not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael, the wife of Heber, but red hot ones. He returned with the tissue restorer. I loosed it down the hatch and after undergoing the passing discomfort, unavoidable when you drink Jeeves's patent morning revivers, of having the top of the skull fly up to the ceiling and the eyes shoot out of their sockets and rebound from the opposite wall like racquetballs, I felt better. It would have been overstating it to say that even now Bertram was back in mid-season
56:27 Dominic Sandbrook? form, but I had at least slid into the convalescent class and was equal to a spot of conversation. Ha! I said, retrieving the eyeballs and replacing them in position. Well, Jeeves, what goes on in the great world?" And actually, if you go through that and you look at all the different ingredients, slang, he talks about some bounder, driving spikes through my head, as not used spikes, as used by Jael, the wife of Heber. So Jael, the wife of Heber is an Old Testament reference. Jeeves is drink the tissue restorer, he looses it down the hatch, there's the stuff with his eyes popping out like racquetballs, then there's the sporting stuff of like Bertram in mid-season form, a spot of conversation, we're back to the kind of upper class slang. He says, he talks about retrieving the eyeballs, and
57:10 Dominic Sandbrook? that's a very, very common P G Woodhurst thing. He'll say, "I raised the arm."
57:15 Speaker 04 Or self, he'll say, "The self rejoiced," or something like that.
57:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly, exactly.
57:20 Speaker 04 He never says things directly. He always finds a more interesting way to climb around the direct statement, but get his meaning across.
57:29 Dominic Sandbrook? And then again, you know, the sort of, his question to Jeeves, "Well, Jeeves, what goes on in the great world?" The joviality and the flippancy of it. But, but almost every ingredient of that paragraph, there is something going on with every little idiom, with every phrase. You know, it'd be so easy to write that in a much more mundane and banal way and to derive less pleasure from every ingredient.
57:48 Speaker 04 And yet he wrote so fast, performing acrobatics with every line. But the other overlooked thing as well, I think, about the writing is, um, Bertie is a narrator. He's a very self-conscious narrator, for instance. So he'll often speak directly to the reader throughout, as if he's kind of looking to entertain or keep his audience with him. But also, so for instance, in the early pages of the book, his first mention of Gussie Finknottle, he says, "A thing I never know when I'm starting out to tell a story about a chap I've told a story about before, is how much explanation to bung in at the outset. It's a problem you've got to look at from every angle, and so on, and so on, and so on." And he goes on. And it's this really, really big chunk of explanation, so long and it's so waffly. It takes him longer than if he'd just explained it.
58:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Who Bertie was, I love that. When he says, you know, um, uh, sorry, I know we're just degenerating, so reading lots of bits out. It says, "If I take it for granted that my public know all about Gussie Finknottle, just breeze ahead. Those publicans who weren't hanging on my lips the first time are apt to be fogged. But if he says, but if I give you eight volumes of the man's life and history, other bimbos who were so hanging will stifle yawns and mutter, old stuff, get on with it."
58:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:57 Dominic Sandbrook? So that sort of, again, yeah, you're right. He's a self-conscious narrator. And actually, this takes us to such an important point about Bertie as a narrator. Bertie is such a literary narrator. So I read an article by Charles Moore in The Spectator, Charles Moore, the biographer of Margaret Thatcher. He went through the Code of the Worcester's and he made a list of all the cultural allusions. And he basically found 85 of them in total. So one of them we've already mentioned, the very first page, "Jail the Wife of Heber." She kills a bloke in the, in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. Earlier on the first page, so literally just a paragraph or so into the book, when Jeeves comes in and wakes Bertie up, Jeeves says to Bertie, "There is a fog, sir. If you'll recollect,
59:40 Dominic Sandbrook? we are now in autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." Season of what? Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness. And this is a reference to Keats. And it goes on and on and on, like so many references, every page or so, 15 from the King James Bible, 14 from Shakespeare, three from Keats, three from Dickens, and so on and so forth. And it is a range of references, as Charles Moore said, that a P G Woodhouse's readers, people who had been to the kind of schools that he had been to, would have had these references drummed into them. And they would, like Bertie, vaguely recall them, not perhaps exactly know where they're from. And sometimes Bertie takes it for granted that you will recognise the more famous ones. So he says of your great favourite, Stiffy
1:00:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Bing, Kipling was right, D than the M. D than the M is the deadlier than the male. The female of the species is deadlier than the male.
1:00:34 Speaker 04 Which is a big assumption that people will get that.
1:00:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but I guess Woodhouse thinks his readers will get it. And I guess a lot of readers would have done. I mean, Kipling was such a huge favourite in the beginning of the 20th century. But the great thing is that Bertie, he sort of knows all this, but he doesn't know that he knows it. He doesn't know quite why he knows. He was sort of saying, Jeeves once said to me, I can't exactly remember what it is, but something from, was it Shakespeare or was it, was it Keats' Jeeves? And Jeeves will say, Tennyson, sir.
1:01:02 Speaker 04 Because Jeeves always knows. He's, he's a walking dictionary of quotes and knowledge. So for instance, when Jeeves asks Bertie if he plans to obey Aunt Dalia and steal the crow creamer, Bertie answers, that is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can't make up my mind. You remember that fellow you've mentioned to me once or twice? He let something wait on something. You know who I mean. The cat chap. And then Jeeves says, Macbeth, sir. A character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting, I dare not wait upon, I would, like the poor cat in the adage. So that's a reference to the scene in which Lady Macbeth is mocking Macbeth by describing him as the proverbial cat who wants to eat the fish but is afraid to get his feet wet.
1:01:47 Speaker 04 So Bertie is misremembering that entirely. And then later on. The image recurs because he later plucks up his courage to enter this drawing room where the silver cow creamer is kept. And he says, my frame of mind was more or less that of a cat in an adage. So again, he's totally misremembering it.
1:02:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly.
1:02:06 Speaker 04 Not the point of it, yeah.
1:02:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Mabeth comes in, the very last lines of the book, which I think are some of the great last lines ever written. So Bertie, the case is solved, as it were, and Bertie's going to sleep. And Bertie says, presently, the eyes closed, the muscles relaxed, the breathing became soft and regular, and sleep, which does something which has slipped my mind to the something's sleeve of care, poured over in a healing wave. As you can tell, we're big P G Woodhouse fans. I think people have written, obviously, much deeper books about the human condition. They've written books that are maybe more emotionally moving, books that have more to say, as it were. But I don't believe there's any writer in English, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, who've produced works that word for word,
1:02:52 Dominic Sandbrook? line for line, are better, more ingeniously, more cleverly, and more satisfyingly written. And I think the other thing is that you're a huge fan of fantasy, Tabby. Woodhouse has never thought of as a fantasy writer. You know, he didn't create creatures and worlds. But what he has done is he's created an alternative universe that speaks to an enduring yearning, I think, for lost innocence, for escapism, for nostalgia, for kind of lightness. I mean, what underlies all his plots is people are seeking love. The stories are always the stories of young love, one way or another. And there's a sort of, there is this, I mean, it's such a terrible cliche, everyone says it to P G Woodhouse, but there is this extraordinary
1:03:34 Dominic Sandbrook? sunniness to them that makes them, I think, utterly irresistible.
1:03:38 Speaker 04 Yeah. And also, I mean, they've brought pleasure to so many people. I think that matters. We've always said on this show that It's about, you know, enjoying books. And I think you can enjoy these books, you know, more than almost any in the world. That lightness, I think, is important. If part of the pleasure of reading is that allows you to escape to bright sunny climes. Well, then, I mean, Woodhouse is the master, isn't he?
1:04:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Although we've quoted loads.
1:04:03 Speaker 04 I mean, we've basically just quoted our way through this episode.
1:04:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Just read out the book.
1:04:06 Speaker 04 So now, should we give it marks out of 10? So what's our rating system today? We have so many options.
1:04:12 Dominic Sandbrook? You can choose, Tebby.
1:04:13 Speaker 04 So we're going to rate it out of Unexpected Intimate Apparel Designers.
1:04:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:04:17 Speaker 04 Or we're going to rate it out of Incriminating Notebooks. So what are you rating it out of 10?
1:04:23 Dominic Sandbrook? I think this is one of the great novels. It gives me so much pleasure. I'm going to give it 11 out of 10 because I think it's brilliant.
1:04:30 Speaker 04 Nice.
1:04:30 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't want to see anything beat it, except possibly The Lord of the Rings.
1:04:33 Speaker 04 Fair enough, yeah. I'm going to give it not as high, but still very respectable. I'm going to give it 10 out of 10.
1:04:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
1:04:39 Speaker 04 It's just pure joy. It's the perfect comic novel, but it's also unrivalled in like the perfection and the genius of its language. And I've always turned back to these books for comfort and they never fail me. So, yeah, 10 out of 10.
1:04:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Wonderful. Will it ever be beaten? Surely not.
1:04:57 Speaker 04 Well, maybe when we finally do Ironborn, the next romanticy big hitter on our radar.
1:05:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, come on. Surely we haven't done enough romanticy for a while. Okay, so let's have a look at what we've got coming up.
1:05:08 Speaker 04 What have we got coming up? Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Then we have Game of Thrones by George R R Martin. Then we have The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham. Then we have The Leopard by.
1:05:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Tomasi de Lampejuza.
1:05:26 Speaker 04 Then we have The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buckan. Then we have My Brilliant Friend by Eleanor Ferrante. And then we have Cersei by Madeline Miller.
1:05:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Fantastic. So loads to look forward to. All right, everybody, I'm off to steal a cow creamer. Bye bye.
1:05:41 Speaker 04 Bye.
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