Right you are, Jeeves.

My Man Jeeves

P.G. Wodehouse

Jeeves--my man, you know--is really most extraordinary chap. So capable. Honestly, I shouldn't know what to do without him. On broader lines he's like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble battlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked "Inquiries." You go up to them and say: "When's the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?" and they reply, without stopping to think, "Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco." Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.

So apparently I am the last person on earth to know about Jeeves and Wooster. How? How did this happen? This kind of upstairs-downstairs thing is just up my alley. These stories--they're set in the 1920s! They mention Brylcreem and phonographs and "old scouts" and gin joints and they take place in Manhattan! And there was a TV show and Dr. House played Bertie Wooster! HOW did I not know? I blame all of you. SHAME. FOR SHAME.

(I also blame you all for not telling me that WODEHOUSE is pronounced WOODHOUSE. Durn it, I hate hate hate when I sound stupid and I did when I first started telling people about these stories and pronounced it wrong. Some of the people I gabbled on to didn't correct me and now I know they were secretly judging me. It's like when I was in 9th grade and was showing off and talking about Jungian archetypes in English class. Only I pronounced Jung like it looks, not like YOONG. Three years later I asked the teacher of that class to write me a college recommendation letter, and I have always, always suspected that she brought it up.)

In case one of you has been living under and even more remote rock than I: I will let you know, mes petites. Aunt Constance will help you, so you do not make her mistakes. Jeeves and Wooster are two popular characters created by P.G. Wodehouse. Bertram Wilberforce Wooster is a wealthy young English dandy living in New York at the end of the nineteen-teens. He is stupid. Jeeves is his dry, patronizing valet. He is smart. Bertie (or one of Bertie's friends) is always getting into trouble and Jeeves is always bailing him out with his quick thinking. (The first four stories in My Man Jeeves deal with Wooster by name; the last four are about "Reggie Pepper," an earlier prototype for Wooster's character). It's a plot as old as Plautus. It's Lear and his Fool. In one story, Wooster tries to help a friend get his parents to approve of his chorus-girl fiance and almost before he's posed the question, Jeeves has the solution.

"So you see what it amount to, Jeeves. We want you to suggest some way by which Mr. Worple can make Miss Singer's acquaintance without getting on to the fact that Mr. Corcoran already knows her. Understand?"

"Perfectly, sir."

"Well, try to think of something."

"I have thought of something already, sir."

"You have!"

"The scheme I would suggest cannot fail of success, but it has what may seem to you a drawback, sir, in that it requires a certain financial outlay."

"He means," I translated to Corky, "that he has got a pippin of an idea, but it's going to cost a bit."

When I started reading the first story I kept going into my husband's study every time I came across a funny line, to read it to him; finally I just sat down on the floor and read him the whole thing. Wodehouse has such a way of turning a phrase. He can convey a character's whole attitude, bearing and history, and the relationship with that character and those around him, with just a few lines.

"Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.

I'm sorry I never read these stories before, not only because they are funny, but because of the way that the characters of Wooster, and especially Jeeves, have so thoroughly permeated the zeitgeist. You have movies like Gosford Park, and you have websites like askjeeves.com, you have "Jeeves" as the name of a stereotypical butler. The OED even defines Jeeves as "the personification of the perfect valet." These little, diverting stories have had lasting popular effect.

And there's the fact, too, that in with these stories, Wodehouse shows an interesting aspect of this time period, one that isn't much discussed. You think of the '20s as being a time of glittering parties, and champagne, and flappers. But when Jeeves and Wooster first appeared on the scene, America had just emerged from the Great War as a world power, and lines cutting across social classes were becoming less and less distinct. When you have Wooster butt heads with slick working girls and gruff-talking cab-drivers, you see how ridiculous it is, and how Wodehouse is trying, along with entertaining us, to encapsulate this shift from one thing to the other. He could have achieved the same effect by having dinosaurs roam around among the Model Ts on Madison Avenue. Which one of these things, he's asking us, doesn't belong here?

I read in a short biography of Wodehouse that towards the end of his career, the US wanted to honor him with an award for his writing, but that the British government discouraged it. They felt that honoring Wodehouse would somehow glorify an idea of the British aristocracy that they were trying to de-emphasize. To which I say that they missed the point entirely! Wodehouse isn't glorifying his characters. He wanted his stories to be funny, but I don't think we should miss the fact that he's also offering us a snapshot of a dying way of life.

Don't read these stories in one fell swoop, like I did. That is the advice (other than how to correctly pronounce "Wodehouse") that I am giving you. I did, and toward the end of the book I kind of wanted to shoot Wooster every time he said something was "rummy" or "bally." And I started wondering what kind of health benefits poor oppressed Jeeves was getting, and why he didn't just grind up glass into Wooster's morning coffee. The schtick wore thin after a while, is what I'm saying. But then a friend sent me this clip, and I was all right with the world again. Singing Hugh Laurie makes everything better.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars.