Sunset at Blandings (25 page)

[1]
Wodehouse, generally through the voice of Galahad, often calls
Blandings Castle a Bastille, sometimes Devil’s Island.

[2]
Would a Scotland Yard detective call the Chancellor of the
Exchequer ‘Sir James’ ? No, he’d have said ‘Sir’, and Wodehouse would have
known this, by heart and ear, if he had lived more in England. When he wrote
this, he had been nearly forty years away from England. (His own accent showed
no trace of American.) In the typescript of
Sunset
he is writing ‘somber’,
‘behavior’, ‘demeanor’ etc. But he wouldn’t have spelt them that way in a
letter to England. The typescripts of his books went first to his American
agent for duplication and sending out to publishers. His English publishers
would make the alterations of spelling for the English market. In my early copy
of the English edition of
Leave it to Psmith
(1923) I find ‘arbor’ and ‘arbour’
in different chapters.

[3]
The fact that Lady Diana’s first husband was (a) handsome and
(b) named Rollo makes one sure that she was lucky that he was eaten by a lion.
In Wodehouse, as a general rule, all male Christian names ending in ‘o’, such
as Cosmo, Orlo, Orlando, Rollo (not Pongo, Boko, Bimbo or Bingo — they were
nicknames), stamped a man as being a wet or a sponger or a fool. It is strange,
though, that when
The Clicking of Cuthbert
(1922) was published as
Golf
without Tears
in New York in 1924, in the story ‘The Long Hole’, Ralph
Bingham had been changed to Rollo Bingham. Hugo (as in Hugo Carmody) is the
only acceptable male Christian name with an ‘o’ at the end.

[4]
Wodehouse’s
best girls (e.g. Stiffy Byng, Nobby Hopwood and Bobbie Wickham) certainly
dominate their loved ones (The Rev. ‘Stinker’ Pinker, Boko Fittleworth and ‘Kipper’
Herring) . It looks as though this last novel might almost have amounted to a
reverse message to all mankind:

‘Dominate
her.
She’ll love it, and you.’ Two of the major characters in the Wodehouse novels
have been Lord Ickenham and Lord Uffenham, frequent advisers, generally
unasked, of timid young men. Their advice is the same: ‘Go to the girl you have
been nervously and distantly adoring, grab her like a sack of coals, waggle her
about a bit, shower kisses on her upturned face and murmur passionate words
(e.g. “My mate!”) into her ear. This seldom fails.’ It got Cyril McMurdo, the
ardent policeman, a slap on the face first time from old Nannie Bruce in
Cocktail
Time,
but it brought good results in the end. In this novel,
Sunset at
Blandings,
Florence is surely going to be reconciled to her ‘weak’ husband,
but, equally surely, only when she has seen him rise and dominate someone —
herself, one hopes. Lord Emsworth achieves good results when he rises and
dominates Florence and her hanger-on, Brenda. They are so surprised and annoyed
that they leave the castle.

[5]
The
Pelican Club, in Denman Street, Soho, was short-lived (1887—1892) but fondly
remembered: by Galahad, who had been a prominent member, in Wodehouse’s books,
by Arthur Binstcad in
A Pink
‘
Un and a Pelican
and
Pitcher in
Paradise,
and by J. B. Booth in
Old Pink
‘
Un Days.
For a
scholarly and suggestive analysis of the cousinship between the Pelican and the
Drones, see a paper ‘The Real Drones Club’, by Lt.-Col. Norman Murphy in the
August 1975 issue of
Blackwood’s Magazine.

The
Gardenia Club (see p. 22), in Leicester Square, was one of many started when the
Licensing Acts of the 1870s made restaurants close at 12.30 a.m. The Gardenia
was a dancing club and, unusually, had women as well as men as members. It was
less exclusive, in that way and generally, than the Pelican. It was opened,
probably in 1882, by the Bohee brothers, black musicians who had come over from
America with Haverley’s Minstrels. They sold the club to William Dudley Ward,
father of the Member of Parliament for Southampton (1906-1922). Dudley Ward
persuaded La Goulue (see Toulouse Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge drawings) to appear at
the club. He sold the club to an Australian, ‘Shut-Eye’ Smith, who was its
owner when the police closed it down, probably for infringements of the
drinking rules, probably in 1889. I am indebted for this information again to
Col. Murphy.

[6]
Jno Robinson has been the owner-driver of the Market Blandings
station taxi (see picture, page 187) since
Heavy Weather
(1933).

[7]
This paragraph, almost word for word, is repeated from Chapter
2 of
Galahad at Blandings.
The end of the last sentence, about Galahad’s
policemen friends, is new.

[8]
When Beach, in his pantry, was being suborned by Ronnie Fish
to help him steal Lord Emsworth’s pig, Empress of Blandings, he put a green
baize cover over his bullfinch’s cage lest it should be shocked by what it
heard
(Summer Lightning)
.

[9]
Clearly this means that the action of
Sunset at Blandings
(1977)
follows that of
A Pelican at Blandings
(1969) by a week.
Heavy
Weather
(1939) followed
Summer Lightning
(1929) by a fortnight.

[10]
Beach has been butler at the castle since
Something Fresh
(1915),
when he had an under-butler, Meredew. But now (1977), and in several post World
War II books, he calls it eighteen years, and for all we know he would have
called it eighteen years at the time of
Something Fresh.
Wodehouse has
never treated time with anything other than irreverence. It shows that time
does not quite stand still for Gally when he says that he is fed up with
London. We have always seen Galahad as a deep-dyed Londoner, seldom far from
the bars and barmaids, theatres and clubs of the West End: essentially a
visitor to, rather than a resident at, Blandings. In
Full Moon
(1947), Gally
said that he had never been able to understand his brother’s objections to
London, a city which he himself had always found an earthly Paradise. Now we
know that, though he still has rooms in London, he regards his family home, in
spite of sisters on the premises and Sir Gregory Parsloe across the fields, as
his home and ‘as near resembling an enchanted fairyland as dammit’.

[11]
Lady Diana, with Lady Florence still to come. This gives Lord
Emsworth and Galahad ten sisters at last count. Wodehouse had a pleasant
devil-may-care attitude to the Threepwood sisters. On page 50 Gally can count
up only five sisters, and those include the newcomer Diana. Wodehouse would
have checked and corrected this number before publication. Nine times out of
ten (literally) Wodehouse’s purpose in dragging in sisters is to provide ‘heavies’,
people to boss Lord Emsworth, disapprove of Gaily, say ‘No’ to lovers of
daughters and nieces. Lady Florence and Lady Diana have never been mentioned
before. And for the first time the benevolent old author has given us a
Threepwood sister whom we can like. But she speaks no word and never comes onto
stage. The roster of sisters now and, alas, for ever, is: Lady Ann Warblington
[Something
Fresh];
Lady Charlotte (what was her married name?) [‘The Crime Wave at
Blandings’]; Lady Constance (first Keeble, now Schoonmaker. Both her husbands
have been American millionaires, both nicer than she deserved)
[Leave it to
Psmith, Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Blandings Castle,
‘The Crime Wave
at Blandings’,
Pigs Have Wings, Service with a Smile, Galahad at Blandings,
‘Sticky
Wicket at Blandings’,
Plum Pie, A Pelican at Blandings];
Georgiana,
Marchioness of Alcester
[Blandings Castle];
Lady Hermione Wedge (who
looked like a cook and whose daughter Veronica was the dumbest blonde of all)
[Full
Moon, Pigs Have Wings,
‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Garland
[Full
Moon, Pigs Have Wings,
‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Julia Fish
[Heavy
Weather, Summer Lightning];
Lady Jane (what was
her
married name?
Geoffrey Jaggard in
Blandings the Blest
deduces ‘Allsop’ via
Galahad
at Blandings.
Perhaps. Her charming daughter Angela was the one whose
fiancé, James Belford, produced for the distracted Lord Emsworth the
wonder-working hog-call that got the Empress back to eating properly [‘Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’,
Blandings Castle];
and now Lady Florence (Wodehouse in his notes seems
undecided whether it should be Moresby, Ormsby or Appleby) and Lady Diana
Phipps, soon to be Lady Diana Piper, wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She
was the only sister Galahad approved of. He disliked all the others and they
disliked him. He had said to Lord Emsworth in
Galahad at Blandings,
‘I’ve
always said it was a mistake to have sisters. We should have set our faces
against them from the outset’.

[12]
Wodehouse had scored out a last sentence to this first
paragraph of the chapter. It read, ‘And this had always struck him as odd, for
his sister Florence, her mother, had even in childhood been constructed of
aristocratic ice’ . Wodehouse took it out, probably, because Florence wasn’t
Vicky’s mother, but step-mother. But ‘constructed of aristocratic ice’ is too
good to lose.

[13]
Dolly Henderson married Jack Cotterleigh of the Irish Guards,
and their delightful daughter (Sue Brown was her stage name) married Ronnie
Fish, son of Galahad’s sister Julia
(Summer Lightning
and
Heavy
Weather).

[14]
It is only in the last three Blandings books that the eighth
earl of Emsworth, father of the current ninth, of Galahad and of ten daughters,
gets more than a mention, and he is shaping up to being retrospectively, rather
a nasty character: here, ‘a bully and a tyrant’. It is odd that the benign
Wodehouse dragged the eighth earl from his grave to make an ogre of him. If you
try to work out when the ninth earl succeeded to the title, you must take into
account that Vicky says she just remembers the eighth and he terrified her.

[15]
See
Full Moon
and
Galahad at Blandings.

[16]
Lord Emsworth is still trying to get his beloved Empress
painted for the Portrait Gallery at the castle. This quest was a strong strand
in the plot of
Full Moon,
and there, too, the portrait painter came in
under the assumed name of Messmore Breamworthy. Galahad, in that story, also
told Lord Emsworth that his name was Landseer.

[17]
Eastbourne on the east coast? No, south, and 62 miles further
west along the south coast is the town of Emsworth, on the Sussex/Hampshire border.

[18]
At
this stage in the novel Dame Daphne Winkworth does not come nearer than being a
voice over the telephone (page
100).
But that enables her to puncture
Jeff’s alias at Blandings. She has just sacked him as drawing master in her school
even as, in
Galahad at Blandings,
she has sacked little Wilfred Alsop,
the piano teacher. Dame Daphne, who has appeared in two previous novels, is one
of the few links (Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor, is another) between
the worlds of Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth. She was prominent in
The
Mating Season:
widow of an historian, godmother of Madeline Bassett, mother
of Gertrude, whom Catsmeat Potter Pirbright loves and courts. Her mother wishes
Gertrude would be loved and courted by rich Squire Haddock, but Squire Haddock
loves and courts Catsmeat’s sister, Hollywood star Corky Pirbright (‘Cora Starr’).

Dame Daphne is described by Bertie Wooster as ‘a
rugged light-heavyweight with a touch of Wallace Beery in her make-up’. When
Bertie and Esmond Haddock drink a large decanter of port together after the
ladies have left the dinner table, and are ‘discovered’ by Dame Daphne waving
the empties and singing a hunting song, she emits a memorably described
four-letter word:

‘Well!’

There are, of course, many ways of saying ‘Well!’ The
speaker who had the floor at the moment— Dame Daphne Winkworth—said it rather
in the manner of the prudish Queen of a monarch of Babylon who has happened to
wander into the banqueting hall just as the Babylonian orgy is beginning to go
nicely.

Curiously, in
The Mating Season,
‘she
used to be headmistress of a big girls’ school’. But in her next two
scriptural appearances she
is
a headmistress. In
Galahad at
Blandings,
she has a small and unpleasant son, Huxley. She seems to have
been thought to have been an early flame of Lord Emsworth’s (not that Lord
Emsworth can remember anything of the sort) . It is now his sister Constance’s
idea, and briefly Dame Daphne’s, that she ought to become Lord Emsworth’s
second Countess. (He has been a widower for twenty years.) Lord Emsworth is
strongly against the whole thing, not least the idea of being Huxley’s
step-father. Huxley teases the Empress and tries to let her out of her sty for
gallops in the meadow. He gets his deserts when the Empress bites him in the
leg. His mother overhears Lord Emsworth telephoning the vet to make sure that
the Empress can take no harm from this biting of the beastly boy. Any prospect
of romance between Dame Daphne and Lord Emsworth after that is dead.