Sunset at Blandings (13 page)

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 persuade 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

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.’