What’s Up? Jeeves and Wooster [and now Uncle Fred]

I'm republishing this from The Valve, where it appeared on Oct. 19, 2009 (and still abides on the WayBack Machine), and occasioned a fair amount of debate over a queer reading, proposed by Adam Roberts, and a bit of consternation over fact that I had not actually read Wodehouse on Jeeves and Wooster, but only seen Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie play them on TV. However, looking over that debate, I notice that, during the course of it, I'd taken myself over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded Right Ho, Jeeves. Anyhow, I am now embarked on Uncle Fred in the Springtime, from 1939, where I found this rather tasty sentence, "And we had scarcely sat down to lunch, when up popped a soufflé looking like a diseased custard." 

Anyhow, read this post as you wish, and take a look at Adam Roberts' queer reading as well. But above all else, read some Wodehouse. Some have said he's the funniest writer in the English language.

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Sometime in my early teens I discovered the boxes of old paperbacks my father kept in the basement. That’s where I found 1984, Brave New World, some miscellaneous Freud, and this that and the other. The other included some books by P. G. Wodehouse, which I didn’t read but which, for whatever reason, I took note of. Since then I’d bump into references to Wodehouse here and there, often taking the form of praise for his language, and finally, just last week, I found a cache of YouTube videos devoted to Jeeves and Wooster, a 1990s British TV series based on Wodehouse stores and starring Stephen Fry and Hugh “Dr. House” Laurie. So I watched a bunch of them.

What are these stories about?

Sure, they’re about a young gentleman of means, Bertie Wooster, and his valet (a gentleman’s personal gentleman), Reginald Wooster. Wooster is a good sort of chap, personable, not terribly well educated, who is constantly getting into scrapes helping his chums, or his aunts, out of this or that dicy situation. Jeeves is well-read – Spinoza is a favorite – highly competent in a wide variety of tasks, somewhat of a stickler for appropriate style, and most ingenious. He’s the one who comes up with stratagems for rescuing Bertie & Co. from their troubles.

That’s the premise of these stories, but what’s their cultural appeal? Bertie Wooster is of the idle rich, with a good nature that leavens his idleness. He doesn’t have to work and so he doesn’t. Jeeves does have to work, but he works as a servant to the affable Wooster, who is a Good Boss; there is, in fact, something of a comradeship between the two, though proprieties are maintained at all times. The net economic output of the pair is zero. Wooster’s wealth allows them to live in the world, but they need not be fully of it.

The premise is thus rather utopian. And the relationship between the two protagonists is one of balance. In some ways, Wooster, the aristocrat, is more of an Everyman than Jeeves, the valet. Jeeves, like most of us, has to work for a living, but his superior mien and education are at odds with his Everyman economic status. Taken together, the two add up to (some version of) an ideal middle-class male living in an economic utopia.

Or so it seems, on first take.