WORK IN PROGRESS
YOU HAVE just read the last chronicle of Blandings: sixteen skeleton chapters of a Wodehouse novel that was to have gone to twenty-two.
These sixteen chapters, typed out on Wodehouse’s favourite old 1927 Royal and their pages numbered 1—90, were in the hospital with him when he died on February 14th 1975. In addition, one hundred and eighty-three pages of notes and drafts for this novel were found after his death, thirty-three of them in the hospital, one hundred and fifty of them from among the papers in his study at home. Practically all of these pages were in his own handwriting, but only eighteen of them were date-lined on top. Usually Wodehouse date-lined every page, not only of his self-communing notes in preparation of a novel’s scenario, but also of his drafts of dialogue and narrative.
Among the pages of notes he had with him in hospital were two, obviously consecutive, in typescript, of which the first is dated January 19th 1975. Although these two pages indicate that Chapter 16, which you have just read, was typed out after that date, the January 1 9th pages carry the last date that Wodehouse put on any page of the collection. And, if you want to know how the last six chapters might have brought the novel to a happy ending, this January 1 9th scenario (pages 150—155) is the key document.
You will see that, at this stage, Wodehouse
1. is proposing to give his hero, Jeff, a less reprobate father. The father will now be Beach the butler’s brother, and an actor rather than an absconding company director.
2. But it is not clear from the scenario why Beach is ‘agitated’ about this. Is it because he thinks that Lady Florence will oppose the Jeff/Vicky romance even more strongly if she discovers that Jeff, in addition to being penniless and an impostor, is also nephew to the castle’s butler?
3. has not decided what to do about Florence’s husband. After some doubts (page 161) he is clearly going to be her husband, and somehow their separation has to be changed to reconciliation and bright hopes of happiness together in the future;
4. has left Claude Duff in the air and unattached;
5. has not decided how Jeff is going to assure himself of an income sufficient to enable him honourably to marry the soon-to-be-rich Vicky. If other objections (see 1 above) are overcome, Florence might believe Gally’s enthusiastic assurances about Jeff’s future in Chapter 22, at least for long enough to loosen the purse-strings as trustee of Vicky’s inheritance. But Jeff, by the Wodehouse code, can’t marry and be an heiress’s kept man;
6. has not allowed for an ‘all-our-troubles-are-over’ love scene for Jeff and Vicky;
7. has not yet ‘planted’ Brenda’s bracelet (or necklace), the stealing of which is to bring down the curtain on Act 2, so to speak, and provide good alarums and excursions at the beginning of the final Act;
8. has scarcely touched on the necessary romance of Sergeant Murchison and Marilyn Poole. That chauffeur, of whom Murchison is jealous, is a dark horse. Will he be developed?
9. has left Brenda, Piper’s sister, at a loose end. It is not like the benign Wodehouse to leave even such an unrewarding character as Brenda unrewarded with an autumn romance of her own. After all, Constance, who has harassed, bullied and dominated Lord Emsworth from book to book, story to story, is allowed to marry two nice American millionaires successively. And the awful Roderick Spode, in the Bertie Wooster books, has his Madeline Bassett to dream about. Brenda, in this book, would surely be smiling when last seen. And her brother’s successful courtship of Diana will not be enough to keep that smile on her face for long. James and Diana are not likely to want her to come and live with them at Number 11 Downing Street;
10. has not settled whether the Empress’s portrait is going to please Lord Emsworth this time and, if so, whether he will hang it triumphantly in the family portrait gallery or have it, less triumphantly, in his study.
We are back in a favourite Blandings theme — the heroine brought to the castle to keep her away, and cool her off, from the penniless hero; the infiltration of the castle by the hero in some guise, organized by Galahad (or Lord Ickenham); the weaving of the web of deceit, false names, false purposes, ‘telling the tale’; the recognition scene (impostor unmasked, ‘never darken these doors again’, etc.); the theft of something valuable (Lord Emsworth’s pig, Gally’s Memoirs, Aunt Connie’s, or this time Brenda’s, necklace) which, being found and restored, makes the just rejoice, the unjust look silly and the right couples able to marry happily.
How to get the heroine’s loved one into the castle without the fierce hostess (any of Lord Emsworth’s sisters will do) knowing that he is the man the heroine is here to forget — this is the recurrent problem in the beginnings of Blandings novels and stories. It is no good letting Lord Emsworth into the conspiracy. He would sooner or later give it away, by mistake, to his sister. So he has to be fooled too. In this novel, Wodehouse is toying with, not to say muddling, two ideas, both of which he has used before: the infiltration of the castle by the hero as an artist to paint the Empress, as Bill Lister in Full Moon, or as a candidate for the job of Lord Emsworth’s secretary, as Jerry Vail in Pigs Have Wings.
But for some reason Gaily tells Claude Duff that Jeff is at the castle trying for the secretary job when Jeff is already installed as the artist to paint the Empress.
As the last sentence of Chapter 16 shows, Vicky has some minutes’ start on Gally and must act without his advice. Gally has only just learnt that Florence has rumbled Jeff’s alias. Vicky has had time to remove a necklace from the jewel case that Brenda has carelessly left in the hail. Her purpose is to delay, if not prevent, Jeff’s being given marching orders by his hostess, her step-mother. No suspect will be allowed to leave the castle until the necklace is found, and Jeff is without doubt going to be suspected.
Vicky tells Gally that she has pinched the necklace, and she gives it to him. He puts it in some obvious place in Lord Emsworth’s study. Brenda discovers the loss of the necklace and sure enough the finger of suspicion points to Jeff, by now known to be Vicky’s demon lover, in need of money, and here under an assumed name. Florence and Brenda decide to ask Claude Duff to search Jeff’s room for the necklace. Jeff still doesn’t know that Brenda and Florence know that he is an impostor, let alone that they have told Vicky that he is to be kicked out of the castle immediately. He does not know anything about any necklace, nor that Vicky has stolen it to make it inconvenient for ‘them’ to kick him out.
Gally tells Lord Emsworth that Florence is kicking out the man who is, at last, painting his beloved pig’s portrait, and is anyway his, Lord Emsworth’s, guest. This is where Lord Emsworth begins to see red and become the dominant male. He slates Brenda for having put Claude on to search a guest’s room. Brenda goes and complains to Florence, and while she slates him for having been rude to Brenda, he slates her for attempting to kick Jeff out.
Now, here comes Florence’s husband. Inspired by Ovens’s home-brew beer and urged on by Galahad, he has been sneaked into the castle and intends to plead with his estranged wife. So he has hidden himself in a cupboard in her room. He hears Lord Emsworth slating her, and he emerges in his wrath from the cupboard and, pending his appeal to Florence, he wades into Lord Emsworth for his harsh words to her. When Florence gets over her shock at seeing her husband (Kevin) again and coming out of a cupboard, she stands amazed, as Lord Emsworth does, too, by the man’s courage in giving Lord Emsworth the rough of his tongue.
Lord Emsworth leaves Florence’s room, shaking his head. But he returns for a moment to say, ‘Is this the necklace you’re all making such a lot of trouble about? I found it in my study. Very careless to leave it about, whoever did.’
Florence and Brenda leave the castle in a fury against Lord Emsworth and Gaily and Jeff. They take Kevin with them, and he will henceforth dominate railway porters, head-waiters and the actors in, and the producers of, his instantly successful plays. He will also dominate the willing Florence, his ever-to-be-loving wife. But his first act of dominance over her has been to pe
rsuade her to give her blessing to Vicky and Jeff’s marriage and to release Vicky’s money to her. It was Gaily who helped Kevin to re-win his wife and Kevin owes it to Gaily to fix that for him. And, if we worry that Lord Emsworth may still be suffering from shock after being bawled out by Kevin, we should remember the end of A Pelican at Blandings. There Lord Emsworth, in the thick of battle for 200 pages, has forgotten everybody and everything within a few days of being left in peace, perfect peace, alone with Gally in his own castle.
It would create a bit of a problem in Wodehouse’s strict code of morals if Vicky and Jeff were left together at the end of this book, chaperoned only by males (Lord Emsworth, Gaily and Beach). But this is where we pick up Claude Duff. An early sequence of Wodehouse’s notes shows that he had Claude Duff (at that stage Claude Winkworth) pencilled in as a major, rather than a minor, character:
Secretary
Claude Winkworth
Crushed from childhood by being ordinary son of illustrious parents.
Aunt, Dame Daphne: Father, the eminent historian, Professor Ernest W: Uncle, novelist Alistair W: Sister, Claudine [ . . ? . .] Shakespearean actress: Mother, artist.
Much too tall for his width.
Claude accosts Gaily because he feels he must cure himself of shyness.
Why is Jeff Claude’s hero? At school together. Jeff athlete, always treated him as equal. At Cambridge, Rugger blue.
In the typescript first draft Claude is minor, and he suffers, in terms of Wodehouse characterization, from good looks. He is rich, well dressed, a pianist, a bachelor and a great success with the girls. And — and this has always, in Wodehouse’s books, spelt r-o-t-t-e-r — he is very handsome. And now he has fallen in love with Vicky, not knowing of her love for his old friend, and hero, Jeff, or of Jeff’s for Vicky.
Wodehouse would have developed Claude and found a much fuller purpose for him than has so far been revealed. My own bet is that Claude would have lost his good looks, either by their being simply omitted from the preliminary sketch or, the hard way, as Hollywood’s Mike Cardinal did in Spring Fever, by getting his face re-arranged in some honourable fight or scuffle. Claude would then have been built up in two or three good scenes, at least one of them retroactively to the first half of the book.
My guess is, then, that in an early chapter Vicky had begged to be allowed to ask a school friend to come and stay with her in her captivity. And this her step-mother was only too glad to grant. Now, though everybody had forgotten about her, this girl arrives. She is welcomed by all as providing a modicum of chaperonage for Vicky when Diana goes back with Sir James, taking Murchison, Marilyn and Claude Duff with them. But there is just time, before they go, for Claude to lose his heart as suddenly to Vicky’s friend as he did to Vicky. So he doesn’t go back with his boss. Sir James, in a yeastly benevolence as a result of his own approaching nuptials, gives Claude indefinite leave.
So Jeff stays on and finishes the Empress’s portrait, with Vicky in the background during working hours. Claude and Vicky’s friend stay on the premises too. And then, in addition to the portraits that Jeff is asked to paint, of Sir James Piper for a start and then, Gaily hopes, of all the other members of the Cabinet, Claude gets Jeff the job of Advertising Manager of Duff & Trotter, where the money is good and steady and he can pay his whack with Vicky as man and wife.
The Empress’s portrait, we all wish to think, will now hang in the family portrait gallery. Lord Emsworth can enjoy looking at it whenever he is not out at the sty looking at its sitter. Gaily and Beach ring down the curtain over a glass or two of port in the pantry. Beach is now distantly step-related to Gaily (and Lord Emsworth, Florence, Connie and all the other eight sisters), but he will continue to be the supreme butler. McAllister is still head gardener, though his cousin married Freddie Threepwood. And Beach’s niece, Maudie Stubbs (Maudie Montrose of the Criterion bar) is, we have reason to believe, Lady Parsloe at Matchingham Hall, just across the fields from the castle. She might indeed have been Lord Emsworth’s second Countess if Jerry Vail hadn’t retrieved that ardent letter from and for his master in Pigs Have Wings. Had that sudden infatuation led to the altar, Lord Emsworth would have been calling his butler ‘Uncle Sebastian’. For many books now Beach has been butler at the castle ‘for eighteen years’. Lady Constance has tried to sack him or get him pensioned off. At least twice he has tendered his own resignation. I think that Wodehouse must here have wanted to give Beach ‘tenure’, a hoop of steel binding him to the family, a seat for life in the Upper House.
Have we left anybody out? Yes, Freddie Threepwood, and purposely. In this first draft he only threatens to come to the castle. He doesn’t come. It’s a threat because, if he did come, he would certainly blow the gaff on his old friend Jeff’s imposture, as he did for Bill Lister’s in Full Moon. No. That journey of Gally’s to London in the Bentley just to warn Freddie off—that will come out. Freddie will remain ‘off’ and threaten nobody in this last book. The bad news that he hasn’t been able to sell Jeff’s strip cartoon in America, or the good news that he has sold it (Wodehouse tries it both ways in his notes), can be telephoned to the castle. Wodehouse is going to need all the space he can get now, to tie up existing loose ends and to add the flesh and muscle to the bare bones of the narrative as it will stand when he has given the last six chapters the same treatment as the first sixteen.
That is my guess, based on the January 19th 1975 scenario, at how Chapters 17—22 might have run. What we have read in Chapters 1—16 is the first typescript of two-thirds of a novel by a great professional humorist of ninety-three. Ninety-three. The remaining work might have taken Wodehouse weeks, or months. But once a scenario was leak-proof, with couples coupled and loners left happily alone, Wodehouse put together his first rough typescript and reckoned his main labour and slog-work was over. There remained the part he really enjoyed: revising, cutting, adding, adding, adding, shaping, smoothing to a high polish.
Evelyn Waugh was an outspoken admirer of Wodehouse’s writings, and Wodehouse admired much of Waugh’s. Waugh had a nearly complete set of Wodehouse, bound in leather. He was one of the many who were prepared to refer to Wodehouse as ‘The Master’. Frances Donaldson, who knew the Wodehouses, but is not quite a devotee of Wodehouse’s writings, says, in her book on Evelyn Waugh, that she questioned Waugh about ‘the Master stuff’. He replied, ‘One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to each 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.
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br /> 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’.
Sunset at Blandings Page 9