The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The world of Wodehouse was the Garden of Eden
In Galahad at Blandings, the pigman George Cyril Wellbeloved takes exception to the Earl of Emsworth calling him a fool for suggesting the Empress of Blandings might have swine fever. “I suppose you know what happens when you call your brother a fool,” he retorts, “You’re in danger of hell fire, that’s what you’re in danger of.”
Lord Emsworth replies, reasonably enough: “You’re not my brother.” Not to be worsted scripturally, Wellbeloved insists: “‘For purposes of argument I am. All men are brothers. That’s in the Good Book, too.”
PG Wodehouse was as much at home with the Authorised Version of the Bible as Bertie Wooster, winner of the Scripture Knowledge Prize at his first school. Wodehouse referred to passages in it 2,500 times in his novels and stories, as Paul Kent, no mean Wodehousean, notes in
What Ho! P G Wodehouse on
Faith, a 60-page essay in a series in which he has already tackled Wodehouse on Food, Love, Sport, Class, Fashion, Money, Cats & Dogs and Childhood.
In a way the author’s initial instinct to focus on Wodehouse and the Church (of England) was correct. He expanded the scope to Faith because 60 books in Wodehouse’s library were on spiritualism and related esoterica, with titles like Life Beyond Death With Evidence
or Nurslings of Immortality.
In 1924-25, Wodehouse went to three seances, in suburban Kingston upon Thames. At one, a deceased cousin, Ernest, came through and said he’d been with him in Harrogate a year earlier. This struck Wodehouse because at Harrogate he’d had an inexplicable inspiration for a successful story “Honeysuckle Cottage”.
It was not enough to convert the writer to spiritualism. Two years later he wrote a passage in The
Small Bachelor in which a stage clairvoyant, Madame Eulalie, tells a customer, Mrs Waddington: “The letter M seems to be forming itself among the mists.”
“I have a stepdaughter, Molly.”
“Is she tall and dark?”
“No. Small and fair.”
“Then it is she!” Wodehouse enjoyed making light of fashionable notions that readers would recognise. One that Mr Kent may have felt was too far from his subject was the optimistic autosuggestion of Emile Coué (1857-1826) whose mantra was: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” Wodehouse refers to it in at least eight books, usually, as Neil Midkiff notes, in the alternative translation of “Day by day in every way...” In “Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate” (1923), we get: “Every day and in every way I was feeling sorrier and sorrier that I had been foolish enough to put money which I could ill spare into a venture which had all the earmarks of a washout...”
But the CofE remains at the heart of the world of Wodehouse, which, as both Evelyn Waugh and WH Auden remark, is Edenic.
Such a state of existence leaves no serious role for Christianity, but gives plenty of opportunity for jokes, such as “The Great Sermon Handicap”, where two disparate categories, preaching and betting, are yoked together.
Yet Wodehouse is wary of being “serious” or pi. Joy in
the Morning takes its title from Psalm 30, but Jeeves does not say to Bertie Wooster, as one of Mr Kent’s authorities avers, “Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.”
It is Bertie who has on the tip of his tongue “an expression ... a saying ... a saw ... about Joy doing something.”
“Joy cometh in the morning, sir?”
“That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?”
“No, sir.”