Sunset at Blandings (14 page)

Wodehouse’s
trained mind was a fat thesaurus of quotations, jargons and images: clichés in
their proper contexts but, misapplied and mismated by him, jewels. Uniquely
brilliant, yes; entirely original, yes, when he gave himself time to revise,
comb and brush to a fine gloss. I say ‘comb’ because in early stages his plots
could fall into familiar knots, and he sometimes repeated, from previous books
or in the same book, his own felicities of image or phrase.

I still
hold that, paragraph by paragraph, simile by simile, sentence by sentence and
phrase by phrase,
Joy in the Morning
(1947) is Wodehouse’s most
brilliant
book, and I am sure I know the simple reason why. It was the one he had
worked on longest. He did it in two stretches, one at Le Touquet when the war
had started, but before the Germans came and sent him to internment (up to that
moment he had got
Joy in the Morning
to just beyond the stage that this
novel,
Sunset at Blandings,
is in, with four chapters to go instead of,
as here, six) . The second stretch started eleven months later, when his wife
brought the manuscript to him in Germany, where they were reunited, all four
of them (Wodehouse, Ethel Wodehouse, Wonder the pekingese and the manuscript of
Joy in the Morning),
on his release from Tost Camp.
Joy in the
Morning
is a book that he was able to finish, revise, comb, polish and
re-polish in his enforced retirement, with no deadline from any publisher
looming. Practically every sentence in the book has a glow in it. It
represented three or four years of intermittent and always fresh work. His
average for a novel up till then had been a year, with interruptions.

In the
case of the sixteen chapters here, revision would (to alter slightly the
plastered Gussie Fink-Nottle’s phrasing in his speech to those Market
Snodsbury school kids in
Right Ho, Jeeves)
be taking out as well as a
putting in. Wodehouse knew he repeated himself in old age. He had to watch out
for it more carefully. Incidentally, one of the good stories in his own
autobiographical repertoire is of going, when young and gauche, to a
lunch-party at W. S. Gilbert’s table. Gilbert started on an involved anecdote
and all his guests waited for the punch-line. Young Wodehouse didn’t wait long
enough, laughed too early, murdered his host’s story and good humour, and
generally disgraced himself. But to one man at the table Wodehouse’s gaffe
brought delight—the butler who had had to listen to his master telling the same
story so often before. ‘Writhing with embarrassment, I caught the eye of the
butler, and I shall never forget the dog-like devotion in it’
(Bring on the
Girls).

To
those who are sporadic readers of Wodehouse, all the sixteen chapters here may
read fresh as well as good.

Those
who know the Wodehouse canon almost by heart will see that of the two hundred,
say, verbal felicities here, twenty or so would have been removed from the
final draft, discarded as not freshly minted: ‘den of the Secret Nine’, ‘saying
Bo to a goose’, ‘drained the bitter cup only to find a dead mouse at the bottom’,
‘Lord Emsworth drooping like a wet sock’, ‘baronets need watching’, ‘Sherlock
Holmes could have taken her correspondence course’, ‘had he not been seated he
would undoubtedly have drawn himself up to his full height’.

They
are few, and they were roses when he first showed them. He would have cast them
out as yesterday’s blooms had he been spared the time. And, in the natural
course of fleshing out the barebones script, he would have added many more, new
ones. In its unfinished state
Sunset at Blandings
has given us a chance,
more recent and more detailed than
Performing Flea
(1953) did, to see
the professional at work.

He
wouldn’t have much liked the idea of people looking over his shoulder at his
working notes, still less trying to write his missing last chapters. His notes,
he would have thought, wouldn’t have made much sense to anybody else anyway.
Often they made no sense at all to him. We are privileged here to be reading
what was strictly his business.

It is
clear that the idea of a Cabinet Minister and his guard had been bumping round
in Wodehouse’s mind for years. In December 1976 there came up for sale by
auction at Sotheby’s in Chancery Lane two items, described in the catalogue as
follows:

The
Property of a Lady

602 WODEHOUSE (Sir PELHAM
GRENVILLE) DRAFT OF HIS NOVEL ‘MUCH OBLIGED, JEEVES’, opening:

As I parked
myself at the breakfast table that morning, and started to dig into the
toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I took a quick
glance at the world and liked the look of it. Not a flaw in the setup, it
seemed to me.

“Jeeves,” I said, “I am happy today.”

“I am very glad to hear it, sir.” …

c. 170 pages of
typescript with extensive autograph revisions, c.
10
pages of autograph text, with over 50 pages of mostly autograph ‘scenario’
notes interspersed through the text, c. 250 pages in all, loose, 4to

ù
Much Obliged
Jeeves
was published in 1971. The present draft is dated
in one place 9 August 1970. INCLUDED IN THE LOT IS A VOLUME OF AUTOGRAPH
WORKING NOTES FOR THE NOVEL,
c. 50 pages, the recto of the tenth leaf marked
by Wodehouse: “This is where the notes for MUCH OBLIGED, JEEVES start”, in a ‘Criterion’
school note-book, upper cover inscribed “Jeeves Notes”, 4to.

603 WODEHOUSE (P.G.) DRAFT
OF HIS NOVEL ‘GUESTS AT THE CASTLE (A BLANDINGS CASTLE NOVEL)’, opening:

The summer day
was drawing to a close and dusk had fallen on Blandings Castle, shrouding from
view the ancient battlements, dulling the silver surface of the lake and
causing that supreme Berkshire sow Empress of Blandings to leave the open air
portion of her sty and withdraw into the covered shed which formed her sleeping
quarters. A dedicated believer in the maxim of early to bed and early to rise,
she always turned in at about this time. Only by getting its regular eight
hours can a pig keep up to the mark and preserve that schoolgirl complexion …

c. 250 pages of
typescript with extensive autograph revisions and an autograph title-sheet,
loose, 4to.

ù
INCLUDED WITH THE PRESENT DRAFT ARE c. 130 PAGES OF AUTOGRAPH
WORKING-NOTES variously headed “Cabinet Minister and Guard Novel” and “Blandings
Novel”, dated between December 1966 and May 1968,
loose, 4to.

As a
matter of record, Lot 602 was sold for £1,000, Lot 603 for £900. As a matter of
interest, when a similar bundle of typescript and autograph notes, for
Jeeves
in the Offing,
had come up in a sale for charity at Sotheby’s in 1959, it
had gone to a New York dealer for £100.

I was
particularly interested, this time, in Number 603.
Guests at the Castle
eventually
got changed to
A Pelican at Blandings,
as you may recognize from that
opening paragraph. Parts of the draft were cut, other parts re-located and
many of the revisions were re-revised before it all came to print in 1969. But
more particularly I wanted to see the working notes for that story that he had
headed
Cabinet Minister and Guard Novel.
Surely that could be, surely
that is, a foretaste of the novel we’ve got here in 1977?

No. It’s
not as easy as that. The first entry, hand-written in red ink, dated November
23rd 1967, reads:

Try this :— Hero loves ward in chancery.

Lord Chancellor won’t give consent.

Lord Chancellor infatuated with some girl.

Girl makes him go in for strenuous athletics

Elderly woman tells him he’s crazy wooing young girl

He won’t listen to her. He writes to her proposing.

Some scene where girl makes him do something which
exhausts him (e.g. riding)

He goes off girl. How to recover letter?

Hero recovers letter and gets consent to marry
heroine.

Lord
Chancellor marries elderly woman.

Where’s the guard in that?
He has been dismissed already. But characters flickering to and fro in pages
following begin to suggest to Wodehouse’s mind that the Blandings scenery would
do for the story, and many of the Blandings costumes. The notes drift away from
the Lord Chancellor, and Blandings through the mists rises into towers. It is
going to be a Blandings novel. Lord Emsworth is there, wishing he was alone.
But Lady Constance is there, and the Duke of Dunstable, and Uncle Fred.

And
here the Lord Chancellor comes back:

Then, after many
intervening pages:

The last
entry, under the dateline April 13th 1968, is:

For end
try this:

1.
     
Duke gives Lord E letter

2.
     
Next day UF goes to see Duke.± Lady C, says she
has had letter from Schoonmaker saying he can’t get to England, so she is
returning to America. She adds about Mother losing her memory [?money] —Lady C.
Duke tells UF about letter. UF is sympathetic, but has nothing to suggest.

X)

3.
     
Mother leaves [..?…] UF meets Lord E, who says
he has just found letter in his pocket. UF goes to Duke, says he told John abt
letter. John recovered it. How I don’t know. He has his secret methods. Duke
says give it to me. UF says about John losing Linda and won’t give up letter
till Duke has written consent to marriage.

This looks nearly right)

In
1967/8 Wodehouse was a mere eighty-six, rising eighty-seven. In March three
years later he is jotting down another suggestion for a novel:

Middle aged man in love with energetic girl

He has old Nanny who looks on him as a child.

She notes his wooing and disapproves of it. (Master Willie)

Make him Cabinet Minister with policeman guarding him (see
An
English Crime).

Every time he is
about to propose, he sees cops watching …

That novel died unborn.

Wodehouse
hadn’t thought of a title for this last Blandings novel that you have just
read. Or rather, he thought of fifteen and jotted them down in the sidelines of
various pages of notes: