Jeeves et mon droit: The Subtexts of P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse’s politics have always been somewhat difficult to pin down. As he remarked in his notorious wartime broadcasts from Nazi Germany about the lovely time that he was having in his internment camp, for him the personal always trumped the political (and the two were, by implication, never connected). Any sort of dawning political consciousness on his part could be easily defeated by meeting “a decent sort of chap” from the “other” side, a remark which suggests an extraordinary level of naivety. It has been suggested that Wodehouse’s lonely childhood in an ancient aristocratic family led him to avoid intense emotional engagement with the world around him, and that this may explain his lack of political awareness. Wodehouse was not prone to ideology of any sort, his outlook shaped by an affective construct dominated by warmth and humour and repelled by anything extreme or unpleasant, which served to insulate him from the real horrors of the twentieth century. In fact, there could be no better exemplar of the well-known witticism that the English moral compass ranges from ‘very nice’ to ‘not very nice at all,’ categories which collapse into silence when confronted with the nadir of the mid-century. In any case the broadcasts showed, as Orwell implies in his famous postwar defence of Wodehouse, that he was completely out of his depth: Wodehouse was incapable of understanding the appalling implications of doing his usual humorous routine on German radio. By the same token, it is very likely that Wodehouse had no awareness of the bizarre religious motif hidden in his Jeeves and Wooster books. Like so much else with Wodehouse, it seems to have drifted in instinctively, with little conscious thought involved.
Orwell comments on the curious fact that the affectionate humour of Wodehouse’s works was interpreted outside England as devastating satire —which may suggest that in the troubled first half of the twentieth century, in polities more at risk of succumbing to extremism, benevolent puckishness was a luxury that could no longer be afforded. There was a perception abroad that Wodehouse was in fact anti-English, or alternatively, at the very least, anti-aristocratic. Orwell reports on a conversation with an Indian nationalist who had made this fundamental mistake (though it is important to note that the books’ continuing popularity in today’s India —where they appear to be required reading for the Civil Service entrance exam— is attributable to Indian readers getting the joke on an arcane and ancient social system). In Soviet Russia the books were popular because they were initially misinterpreted as factual commentaries on the decadent English aristocracy, though Stalin seems to have detected the sympathy inherent in the stories and duly banned them in 1929. Instead, however, Orwell rightly identifies the mood (it cannot be called a philosophy) that motivated Wodehouse as “a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness,” and “a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance.” One might take issue with that word ‘harmless,’ but Orwell’s fundamental diagnosis is right. However, Orwell misses the issue with the Wodehouse stories when he claims that their problematic aspect is that they “present the English upper classes as much nicer than they actually are.” The critique is correct, but superficial. The real problem with the stories lies, in fact, in the character of Jeeves: Orwell notes that the Jeeves-Bertie dynamic is amusing because it inverts the servant-master relationship, but this again leaves out the bigger picture.
As well as fundamentally apolitical (at least in the conscious sense), Wodehouse was also irreligious, determinedly agnostic throughout his life, but he would have had at least some vague exposure to Anglicanism in his childhood, and his subconscious was clearly affected. Jeeves is often described as materialising or flickering silently out of nowhere, an inscrutable creature of superhuman intelligence capable of foreseeing the outcomes of his extremely complicated deus ex machinations. (Jeeves also reliably defeats the matriarchal principle represented by Bertie’s aunts.) Wodehouse himself uses the word ‘godlike’ to describe Jeeves, though he himself seems unaware of the comparison’s implications for the social system that he gently spoofs. In any just world, Jeeves would be Prime Minister, so that his valeting for Bertie Wooster initially seems grotesque. However, the —possibly somewhat blasphemous— portrayal of Jeeves in the books is the key to understanding them. The fact that Bertie’s place at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy makes no sense to earthly reason is suddenly totally irrelevant. Jeeves’s obvious support of this inverse meritocracy is the important thing, hinting at a deeper mystical meaning that mere mortals can never grasp. The mind of God (or the mind of Jeeves, and in Wodehouse there is no meaningful difference) is obviously too brilliant to be labouring under a particularly bad case of Downton Abbey-style false consciousness —and suddenly, despite the trappings of the twentieth century, we are back in the world of a (Jeeves-ordained) mediaeval aristocracy. (In fact, if anyone is battling with false consciousness, it’s Bertie, who may even have Stockholm syndrome.)
Orwell suggests that Wodehouse’s outlook was dominated by sunny Edwardianism and never updated, despite the fact that “Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.” It is interesting to compare the Jeeves stories with the far more modern aristocrat-valet pairing in Dorothy Sayers’ stories, a portrayal of two characters —Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter— who have most certainly been affected by the First World War. These two brilliant men are actually best friends and on terms of equality, a bond cemented during their wartime experiences together, so that Bunter is the only person able to fully understand and deal with Wimsey’s bouts of neurasthenia. Bunter supports Wimsey in his long and exhausting struggle for the affections of the equally three-dimensional and modern Harriet Vane, but in a far subtler manner than Jeeves’s interventions in Bertie’s love life. Harriet, for her part, is well aware that Bunter’s acceptance (far more than that of Wimsey’s family) will be critical for the marriage to have any chance of success.
In contrast to Bunter and Wimsey’s battling on together through war and love, the Jeeves and Wooster dynamic begins to look rather anaemic, as caricatures usually do. More to the point, the equality in the former relationship —the fact that Wimsey is just as clever as Bunter— removes the unspoken religious subtext in Wodehouse that supports the class system. Bunter stays because of genuine affection and the interesting intellectual challenge of working with Wimsey on his detective cases, not because of some greater purpose that only his divine genius can perceive. While Bunter is still, officially at least, in a subservient position, Sayers never suggests that this is the correct way of things; prior to the Second World War career prospects for gifted working-class men were, in fact, highly restricted, so that it was not uncommon for a Bunter to end up in service. One senses, between Bunter and Wimsey, an occasional sense of embarrassment about this state of affairs, an uneasy recognition that this social order is not, in fact, God-given.
The peculiar unconscious religious subtext in Wodehouse’s stories serves to underscore Orwell’s point that —far from creating a world beyond class, as has sometimes been asserted— Wodehouse’s books subtly celebrate it. It is true that Wodehouse’s humour lovingly embraces all the nitwits who populate his stories, with the exception of the loathsome Fascist Spode, of whose violence and brutality he appears to have been genuinely terrified. (This raises the question why he failed to recognise that the Nazis who had invited him to broadcast were just Spodes with better manners; it may be that Wodehouse’s enduring emotional weakness from his childhood explains why he was never suspicious of people who were nice to him.) However, it is Jeeves’s buy-in to this world that really gives pause for thought. Orwell’s vigorous rejection of the postwar portrayal of Wodehouse as a Fascist sympathiser is certainly correct, but the Jeeves characterisation and its implications does suggest a subconscious affinity for hierarchies of power rather than competence, which seem to have been acceptable to Wodehouse (again, however, on a purely emotional level) when accompanied by an amiable veneer.
Despite the odd religious subtext of the Jeeves stories, Orwell’s judgment still stands that Wodehouse’s main failing was a sort of wilful innocence in the face of manifold horrors. The preservation of Bertie’s gormless world as a strange survival of a light-hearted Edwardian era which itself only ever really existed in retrospect, as a locus of longing following two exhausting world wars, was overall a significant public service. In an otherwise grim century, it was Wodehouse’s refusal to take off his blinkers which allowed him to find —and propagate— joy.--Isabel Taylor
