The Salmon of Doubt

Sunset at Blandings This is P. G. Wodehouse’s last—and unfinished—book. It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is also unfinished. A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised—its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in. Much of Sunset at Blandings would probably still have been obscured by the chair backs. It was a work in progress. Many of the lines in it are just placeholders for what would come in later revisions—the dazzling images and conceits that would send the pages shooting up the walls. Will you, anyway, find much evidence of the great genius of Wodehouse here? Well, to be honest, no. Not just because it is an unfinished work in progress, but also because at the time of writing he was what can only be described as ninety-three. At that age I think you are entitled to have your best work behind you.

In a way, Wodehouse was condemned by his extreme longevity (he was born the year that Darwin died and was still working well after the Beatles had split up) to end up playing Pierre Menard to his own Cervantes. (I’m not going to unravel that for you. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote.” It’s only six pages long, and you’ll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you.) But you will want to read Sunset for completeness and for that sense you get, from its very unfinishedness, being suddenly and unexpectedly close to a Master actually at work—a bit like seeing paint pots and scaffolding being carried in and out of the Sistine Chapel.

Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be Shakespeare.

Evelyn Waugh, I think, compared Wodehouse’s world to a pre-fall Eden, and it’s true that in Blandings, Plum—if I may call him that—has managed to create and sustain an entirely innocent and benign Paradise, a task that, we may recall, famously defeated Milton, who was probably trying too hard. Like Milton, Wodehouse reaches outside his Paradise for the metaphors that will make it real for his readers.

But where Milton reaches, rather confusingly, into the world of classics gods and heroes for his images

(like a TV writer who only draws his references from other TV shows), Wodehouse is vividly real. “She was standing scrutinising the safe, and heaving gently like a Welsh rarebit about to come to the height of its fever.” “The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.” When it comes to making metaphors (well, all right, similes if you insist), you don’t mess with Master. Of course, Wodehouse never burdened himself with the task of justifying the ways of God to Man, but only of making Man, for a few hours at a time, inextinguishably happy. Wodehouse better than Milton? Well, of course it’s an absurd comparison, but I know which one I’d keep in the balloon, and not just for his company, but for his art.

We Wodehouse fans are very fond of phoning each other up with new discoveries. But we may do the great man a disservice when we pull out our favourite quotes in public, like “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes,” or “... like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag” or (here I go again) my current favourite, “He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk” because, irreducibly wonderful though they are, by themselves they are a little like stuffed fish on a mantelpiece. You need to see them in action to get the full effect. There is not much in Freddie Threepwood’s isolated line “I have here in this sack a few simple rats” to tell you that when you read it in context you are at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments in all English literature.