Sunset at Blandings (20 page)

For six
pages of notes (undated, so they may have been made on six separate days,
before the pages dated December 20th and December 30th) Wodehouse wondered who
this man, ‘X’ or Kevin, was who was going, by sudden domination, to earn his
return to Lady Florence’s respect and love. Husband? Divorced husband? Fiancé?
And/or butler Beach’s nephew? we have transcribed four of these pages.

*

*

*

*

In the Preface to
his 1929 Blandings novel
Summer Lightning
Wodehouse wrote:

A certain critic
— for such men, I regret to say, do exist — made the nasty remark about my last
novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’.
He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made a mock of
the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a
similar charge against
Summer Lightning.
With my superior intelligence,
I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse
characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather
fancy …

Seven
Blandings novels (eight with
Sunset at Blandings)
and nine short stories
came after
Summer Lightning.
One of the difficulties in multi-volumed
saga-writing is to know how much introductory explanation you’ve got to give to
an old character in a new novel. When the eighth Blandings novel hits the
bookstalls, for how many of its readers will it be their first visit to the
castle? And how do you explain Lord Emsworth to these first-time readers
without boring your old faithfuls?

Wodehouse
dusted away this difficulty in amusing short pieces in the first chapters of
several novels. But it remained a difficulty. And, in the later Blandings
novels especially, I think that the author found this difficulty getting
compounded with others. He came to know his characters so well that he could
repeat an introduction that had served him as a repeat in an earlier novel. In
the case of
Sunset at Blandings
I am thinking, in passing, of the
introduction of Galahad (page 18). This would probably have been re-written,
with fresh phrases and rhythms, in a final version, but as it stands it is
almost a transcript of the paragraph presenting Gally in
Galahad at
Blandings,
which was itself almost a transcript of its equivalent in
Full
Moon.

And
Wodehouse knew the Blandings habitat so well by 1974 that he could move his
characters like chessmen to and from positions that you feel are almost like
chalk-marks on the floor of a stage. In this novel the main moves are to and
from the Emsworth Arms, the hammock, Beach’s pantry, the croquet lawn, the
pig-sty and one or two key bedrooms (always one to be searched for the missing
jewel, pig or memoir). In the page of notes dated December 30th 1974 (page 145)
Wodehouse wrote ‘G. goes to Ems Arms because he has to be alone, to think,
which rules out Beach’s pantry’. You’d suppose that Gally could have found
somewhere in the castle to be alone other than in the pantry — in his own
bedroom? practising cannons in the billiard room? having a bath?—without
needing to walk three miles to Market Blandings. By the time that this novel
would have received its final polish, there would have been a better reason for
Gally’s move. But at the early note stage it is his need to get away somewhere
to think that leads Gally’s feet across those miles to the pub.

There
is a last difficulty. Wodehouse in his nineties, and, indeed, in his seventies
and eighties, was writing short, and sadly conscious that he was writing short.
He liked his plots to be as complicated as ever, and he wanted to move his
characters in the same mazy notions. But they tended, as he got older, to get
from A to B in about a quarter of the number of words that he had so easily
given them, straight out of the typewriter, in the three golden decades between
1925 and 1955. In those days, when the scenario was right, the stuff came
bubbling out of his mind and pouring into his typewriter. Bertie Wooster would
cadge a lunch or submit to some blackmail from his Aunt Dahlia; Lord Emsworth
would move from drawing room to pig-sty. And each scene, dialogue or narrative,
would be made in a dance of prose well spotted with ‘nifties’ . At the end of a
day he was 2,500 words, good words, to the good. Cutting them down ‘raking out
the clinker’ was a phrase of Kipling’s that appealed to Wodehouse, and
polishing them to a near-final 1,500 next morning in revision was a pleasurable
chore logodaedaly following logorrhea. He met the annual deadline for a novel
for the Christmas trade easily, with a stint in Hollywood, work on a couple of
plays, and a dozen stories making an average year’s output.

In his
old age Wodehouse had to start in handwriting: notes, sentences and paragraphs.
He couldn’t get it going on the machine. And when he totted up the day’s score,
it might be 500 words, a fifth of what he could do in his
floruit
period.
The verbal flourishes and pirouettes just weren’t there. They had to be cobbled
in later. It was less fun fleshing it out than cutting it down. But he did it.
He remained the great provider, with books to size, seamless and without
padding. If the going had remained good
Sunset at Blandings
might, under
another title, have been ready for Christmas 1976.

*

Well, the revels at
Blandings Castle are now ended. But its cloud-capped towers shall not dissolve.
And Wodehouse’s old brain stayed untroubled to the end. I have not researched
this, but my guess is that published novels written by English authors aged
ninety-three can be counted on the thumbs of one hand. And if there have been
more than that, I would expect to find them tired, petulant, gloomy and grey,
showing their author’s age; certainly not funny, fresh, young in heart and full
of hammocks, sunshine and four pairs of lovers headed for altars in the last
pages.