Sunset at Blandings (15 page)

Lord Emsworth Entertains

Blandings Castle Fills Up

Gally to the Rescue

The Weird Old Buster

All’s Well at Blandings

Trouble at Blandings Castle

Gally Takes Charge

Unrest at Blandings Castle

Gally in Charge

Rely on Gally

Leave it to Galahad

The Helping Hand of Galahad

Life with Galahad

Women are Peculiar

Love
at the Castle

The title he would
not
have
given the novel is
Sunset at Blandings.
That was suggested, with subtle
daring, by either Mr. Chatto or Mr. Windus and agreed instantly by the other.
It is apt. But Wodehouse himself would never have locked, even if only by
suggestion, the great gates of the castle. He would have wanted it there, with
its sun high in the sky, for another visit if the mood took him, to incarcerate
another pretty girl, dispatched, or brought, by another (what, another? That
would make eleven) Threepwood sister to the Bastille, to be followed by another
nephew or protégé of Galahad’s or Lord Ickenham’s under a false name.

Wodehouse
would have been ninety-four in October 1975. He had been knighted in the New
Year’s Honours list. He had been Sir Pelham Wodehouse for forty-six days when
he died. He had gone into the Southampton hospital on Long Island for tests to
find out the cause and cure of a troublesome skin-rash. He hated hospitals,
but, as for the last three-quarters of a century, he could forget the world
anywhere as long as he had plenty of pencils, pens and paper, a typewriter, a
pipe or two, tobacco and, for occasional pauses, a pile of detective novels. He
had all these, except the typewriter, with him in the hospital and he had been
working on this novel on the morning of February 14th. He died that evening, of
a heart attack. It was Valentine’s Day. The American flag above the Post Office
at Remsenburg, where the Wodehouses had lived for the last fifteen and more
years, was lowered to half-mast, barely clearing the piled up snow beneath it.

On the
typescript of the sixteen chapters there are, in increasingly difficult
handwriting, a number of freestanding corrections and additions. These have
been incorporated here. In a few places Wodehouse had decided that he had gone
off the rails and the sequences needed to be re-worked and re-written. Against
these he may have put a cross (X) and the word ‘Fix’. Those passages have not
been ‘fixed’ here, but you can see where he wanted immediate changes if you
study that January 19th 1975 scenario.

The
thirty-three pages of notes that were found in the hospital almost all looked
forward to the end of the book. Only seven of them had date-lines at their
head: those of June 10th 1974, June 22nd, November 2nd, December 20th, December
30th, January 9th 1975 and January 19th.

These
were the hundred and twenty-three pages, typescript and notes, collected from
the hospital, that were offered to Chatto & Windus in November 1976—the
last Wodehouse novel, albeit incomplete and in an unpolished form, and
thirty-three pages of notes with a suggestion for the ending. But it soon
became obvious to us that there must have been, and probably still existed
somewhere, many more pages of notes. Thirty-three was a fraction of the number
of pages Wodehouse had covered with notes for previous novels. Happily, further
papers did come to light in Remsenburg and from these I was able to identify
another one hundred and fifty autograph pages which clearly had something to do
with this novel. The names, Jeff, Vicky, Piper, Gaily, Florence, Beach,
Blandings —these sprang to meet the eye.

I have
not been able to piece the newly retrieved pages into any certain sequence. Ten
of them are dated, and their sequence is June 10th 1974, June 12th, June 13th,
June 14th, June 25th, June 26th, June 27th, June 28th, August 3rd and January
16th 1975. This shows that it wasn’t just his last thirty-three pages of notes
that Wodehouse took with him to the hospital with the typescript. The earliest
date on a page found in the study at home is the same (June 10th 1974) as the
earliest date on a page Wodehouse had with him in the hospital. And the page
headed January 16th 1975 was found in the study.

Of the
remaining, undated, pages, some show themselves to be early rather than late.
For different periods in the early stages of the build-up to this novel, for
instance, Jeff and Vicky are still ‘hero’ and heroine’, and the ‘heroine’ gets
named Nicky at first, and sometimes even after ‘Vicky’ has come in. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer starts as the Lord Chancellor, Florence starts as
Dora, Claude Duff as Claude Winkworth. There are three such clues visible in
the page dated June 14th 1974 (page 129). Sometimes a train of thought links
two or three pages. Sometimes a note refers specifically to the number of a
page in the typescript. It is probably fair to assume that notes building
towards a sequence in Chapter 10, say, of the typescript were written before
notes that can be referred to something in Chapter 15. Fair, but not absolutely
safe. The handwriting itself sometimes suggests a link between one page and
another, seldom more than that. But, if there is enough textual evidence in
those hundred and eighty-three pages of notes for a scholar to establish a
chronologically sure 1—183 pagination, I am not that scholar. And I am sure
that one hundred and eighty-three is not the total that Wodehouse had written.

What we
have in sum is a treasure trove: a rough narrative of two-thirds of a novel,
and a hoard of good insights into Wodehouse’s method of composition: his ideas
for the ending, his dry runs at passages later given temporary approval in
typescript under the stamp of ‘Aziz’, his criticisms of his own jotted-down
notes.

We have
given a wide sample of the note pages. We have put them into type as plainly as
possible. When you study the reproductions, which have been reduced from 8½” x
1 I”, you will see that we have been faced with difficulties. We have done our
best.

Wodehouse’s
personal shorthand for ‘Enter’ was ‘plus’ or ‘+’; for ‘Exit’ it was ‘minus’ or ‘—’.
Thus, ‘Plus Ld E —F’ would be ‘Enter Lord Emsworth, exit Florence’. Wodehouse’s
‘Aziz’ means ‘Leave it as it is for now’. He used Ø as a signal to a note below
or in the margin. So also A (once) . Italic in the transcript here means a
word, or words, underlined by Wodehouse; or it is a marginal note or other
addition, made apparently at the time of writing. Marginalia are indicated in
the transcribed pages by a single round bracket. Square brackets indicate my
interpolations. Thus [     ] means that there is a handwritten word that I
cannot read.
Bold type
(like that) means a Wodehouse postscript in the
margin or in the text, usually in red ink.

We have
transcribed all the datelined pages of the Wodehouse notes and given a number
of them, with a few others, in reproduction. Note (e.g. under date June 10th 1974)
that in transcription we have not always omitted, or indicated, words and lines
that Wodehouse crossed out.

Two
beginnings, later discarded, are echoing through the first datelined pages. In
one, when Gally arrives at the castle, some of the castle’s inhabitants (not
Lord Emsworth) have gone to have lunch at a neighbour’s house where they meet a
fascinating, fine, rich and unattached lady, sister of the Lord Chancellor. In
another, there has been a fire at a (or the) neighbour’s house and Lord
Emsworth’s sister Dora (who later becomes Florence, and later still Diana)
proposes to ask all the inhabitants and guests there to come and stay at the
castle pending repairs.

There follow
transcriptions of the datelined pages in the order of their calendar dates:

*

*

CHARACTERS

1. Chancellor of Exchequer

2.
His Sister

3. Ld Emsworth

4. Dora, his sister

5. Gally

6. Hero

7. Heroine

8. Beach

9. Chancellor’s
bodyguard