Sunset at Blandings (26 page)

[19]
Claude Duff
and Gally, after their
chance meeting, ending so cordially, seem to have separated. We would like to
know how, and would surely have been told when the typescript had been finally
revised for print.

[20]
Fortnum & Mason (which I have always supposed to be
Wodehouse’s recurrent ‘Duff & Trotter’) tell me that a raised pie is made
as follows: pastry, lightly cooked, is moulded round, or raised up, a wooden
mould. The mould is removed and the pastry then filled with meat, usually game
or pork, and the contents closed over with pastry again. The pie is then baked
and served cold after a savoury jelly has been poured into the top to surround
and seal off the meat.

[21]
Second son of Lord Emsworth, originally a sore trial to his
father. But then he married the daughter of an American millionaire (she is a ‘sort
of cousin’, too, of the Blandings head gardener, McAllister) and rose to great
heights in his father-in-law’s dog-biscuit business in America. Freddie’s
father is glad to have him married and a success and, especially, far away in
America. At his first appearance, in
Something Fresh
(1915), Freddie is
described as ‘a heavy, loutish youth’. But in later books it might seem as
though he had taken Slimmo and ‘come over all slender’
(Full Moon,
1952).
He started as an ass and he remains a bit of an ass. But at no time is he such
an ass as his elder brother, the heir, Lord Bosham (see especially
Uncle
Fred in the Springtime
(1939)).

[22]
Yes, Hermione Wedge was a
Threepwood
sister, and she would probably have been changed to ‘Florence’ in a final draft
here.

[23]
‘Blandings Castle has impostors like other houses have mice’,
Galahad has said on another occasion. Many of them have been introduced by him.

[24]
Ovens’s pub, the Emsworth Arms (see picture, page 150) in
Market Blandings, famed for its home-brew ale served at all times of the day or
night, has been just offstage from the very first Blandings book to this last.
It is almost an ante-room to the castle. And its home-brew, taken in sufficient
quantities, has changed many a man’s mood as a hinge in the plots. It is
strange that in this typescript here Piper seems to have escaped from his
guardian Murchison. Stranger, because in Wodehouse’s preparatory notes,
Murchison is sitting in a corner of the bar, guarding the gloomy Cabinet Minister,
as his duty is.

[25]
Wodehouse had had a classical education and he ought to have
remembered that the Gorgon, in Greek mythology, turned people to stone, not
ice.

[26]
This sentence is a good example of Wodehouse ‘writing short’.
He would, of course, have made much more, in later drafts of the action
sequence here. After the Second World War, when the
Saturday Evening Post
was
no longer serializing his novels, Wodehouse was sometimes asked, by other and
lusher American magazines, to submit his novels for pre-publication as
one-shotter’s — a whole 70,000-word book to be carved down to 25,000 words for
a single issue of the magazine. Wodehouse could do it, and he did it, for
substantial rewards. But to the reader brought up on his 70,000-word point-to-points,
these 25,000-word one-shotters read like five-furlong sprints: very good, but
not Wodehouse’s natural distance. The sixteen chapters of
Sunset at
Blandings,
in the barebones form to which Wodehouse had brought them when
he went into hospital, remind me of his one-shotters in pace and discipline. He
would have had every intention of filling the chapters out and slowing the book
down. He had every intention of living to his century.

[27]
The typescript is here scored out, and the handwritten
correction is impossible to read. But a page of the notes provides an
alternative, ‘the older Mr. Bessemer’s companies’.

[28]
Three times in these chapters Wodehouse equates a character’s
look of despondency with the Mona Lisa. And he has done the same, several
times, in earlier novels. In
The Code of the Woosters,
it is clear that
Bertie Wooster has learnt this piece of imagery from Jeeves. But Wodehouse,
Jeeves and Bertie have got it wrong. Walter Pater’s
Studies in the History
of the Renaissance
had been published in 1873, and no doubt the passage
about the sensuous Mona Lisa (which is in Quiller-Couch’s 1925
Oxford Book
of English Prose)
was already, at the very end of the nineties and in
Wodehouse’s Classical Sixth days at Dulwich, being set to boys for scholarly
rendering into Greek. My guess is that Wodehouse, having tackled the passage as
a schoolboy translator, misremembered it and that for ‘Hers is the head upon
which all the “ends of the world are come”,’ he was substituting, ‘all the
sorrows of the world are come’. Neither in Pater’s view, nor in that of any
other published critic that I have come across, had ‘Lady Lisa’ a sorrowful
countenance. It is odd that Wodehouse’s misremembering should have persisted
beyond 1934 when
Anything Goes
was produced on Broadway and in London.
Wodehouse and Bolton wrote the book, Cole Porter the lyrics and music and it
was in this musical that Porter’s ‘You’re the Top!’ was first sung, containing
the lines:

You’re the
Nile, you’re the Tow’r of Pisa,

You’re the
smile on the Mona Lisa …

[29]
We haven’t heard of a croquet lawn (see end-papers map 26P) at
Blandings before. Clock golf, yes. Bowling green (26P), yes. Tennis courts
(27Q), yes. But the croquet lawn is new. Gally says they didn’t play croquet in
South Africa in the days of his banishment. They do now, and they take it very
seriously.

[30]
The song-writer is Noël Coward, and the song ‘Mad Dogs and
Englishmen’. This was a bit of rhyming that Wodehouse, himself a past master
lyric-writer (he used the word ‘lyrist’) for the stage, very much admired.

[31]
Why can’t he call Jeff ‘Jeff’ ? He might be Jeff Smith. It’s
the surname, Bennison, which might remind Lord Emsworth of the man (Jeff’s
father) who got away with thousands of pounds of his cash. But, again, why not ‘Jeff’?

[32]
It is not a bit clear why Gally says that the job Jeff is
after is to be Lord Emsworth’s secretary. Why not to paint the Empress?

[33]
This is the first Bentley reported as belonging to the castle.
We have seen an Antelope and a Hispano-Suiza in earlier books.

[34]
How did Jeff know about J. B. Underwood being notoriously
popular with the other sex? Not clear yet.

[35]
The Bill Lister incident. See
Full Moon.

[36]
Rooks’ eggs are green mottled with olive. Bill-stamps are that
violet-indigo-blue colour from ink-pads for rubber stamping, as on the backs of
cheques.

[37]
Wodehouse, on his typescript, has a big cross against the next
four lines of dialogue, and the word ‘fix’ scrawled big. I cannot see what
difficulty he had to surmount here. But ‘fix’ in his language to himself meant ‘Do
it again and get it right’.

[38]
Blissful Blandings weather: hammocks by day and a warm moon at
night! The Californian climate is normal for Wodehouse’s England, especially in
Shropshire. Changes in the weather are always purposeful, as on page 83 to get
Jeff off the terrace and to the realization that he has been locked out. On
page 53 we find that strong sunshine (‘get the lady a large hat’) is used to
arrange an entrance. In an earlier Blandings book,
Heavy Weather,
a
sudden downpour of rain drives the sundered lovers into each other’s arms in a
deserted cottage in the West Wood. In
Full Moon,
if you can believe
young Prudence Garland, a fortnight of rain had driven Freddie Threepwood to
propose marriage to his first cousin Veronica Wedge as ‘a way of passing the
time when bored with backgammon’.

[39]
Still this slur on Sir Gregory. His is the face at the window
of the Empress’s sty in
Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Pigs Have Wings
and
one story in
Blandings Castle.
In another story in that book his is the
face peering into the pumpkin frame. But had he really done anything worse than
bad neighbourliness to the Blandings lot? He has certainly ‘lured’ George Cyril
Wellbeloved away from the curacy of the Empress, to take up the ditto, for more
cash, of the Pride of Matchingham across the fields. And he has bought a great
fat pig in Kent, named her Queen of Matchingham and entered her against the
Empress for the Shrewsbury Fat Pigs prize. This (see
Pigs Have Wings)
is
considered unsporting, but there is nothing against it in the rule-book, he
claims. And, in the theft and counter-theft of pigs in that book, Sir Gregory
is a laggard compared with Gally and his accessories, Penny Donaldson and
Beach. ‘Tubby’ Parsloe had been a rip-roaring young man about town, though such
a past is always to a middle-aged man’s credit in Wodehouse (see Jimmy Piper
here, and Gally himself; see also Lord Worplesdon). Gally may still bear
rancour that the young, untitled Gregory Parsloe had nobbled his (Gally’s) dog
Towser in a ratting contest. But in his heart Gally must surely admire a man
who has stolen Lord Burper’s false teeth and pawned them in the Edgware Road,
and has been thrown out of the
Café de l’Europe
for trying to raise the
price of a bottle of champagne by raffling his trousers.

[40]
Flask of strong
drink emptied into the
Empress’s food-trough. See
Galahad at Blandings.

[41]
Lord Emsworth’s favourite
book is
referred to in the texts variously as Whiffle’s
On the Care of the Pig,
Whiffle’s
The Care of the Pig, Whiffle on the Care of the Pig
and just
Whiffle.
It is published by Popgood and Grooly, and the true name of its author may
remain one of the minor mysteries of English letters. Lord Emsworth had a shelf
devoted to pig books in his library, we know. In
Summer Lightning
he was
reading ‘his well thumbed copy of
British Pigs’
and, later in the same
novel,
Disease in Pigs.
We are not told the name of the author of either
book. Then, in ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’, Lord Emsworth is shown harassed
by his sister Constance, his niece Jane, his grandson George and his
bête
noir,
Rupert Baxter:

Sighing a little, Lord Emsworth
reached the library and found his book.

There were not many books which at a time like this could have
diverted Lord Emsworth’s mind from what weighed upon it, but this one did. It
was Whiffle on
The Care of the Pig
and, buried in its pages, he forgot
everything. The chapter he was reading was that noble one about swill and
bran-mash, and it took him completely out of the world….

This is the first mention of the book.
It appears in several subsequent passages, especially in
Uncle Fred in the
Springtime.

Then, in
1965, in
Galahad at Blandings,
not only was the man named Whipple, but
it turned out that Galahad knew him: Augustus (Gus to his friends) Whipple,
member of the Athenaeum. And Galahad had the nerve to get the current young
hero into the castle (to pursue the heroine, of course) in the guise of
Augustus Whipple, the author of the great pig book. Then, again of course, the
real
Whipple turned up, anxious to see the splendid prize-winning Empress of
whom he had heard so much. And Gally got his brother to start writing Whipple a
cheque for
£1,000
to cover his gambling debts incurred in a poker game
at the Athenaeum. At least, that was Gally’s story, and a mere £1,000 was
nothing to Lord Emsworth to help the man whose book he doted on. But why was he
Whipple? Neither of Wodehouse’s publishers, in England or America, knows why
the honoured name was changed in
Galahad at Blandings.
In
A Pelican
at Blandings,
published four years after
Galahad at Blandings,
it’s
Whiffle again, described as an orthodox thinker in comparison with the unnamed
author of the ‘startling, ultra-modern pig-book’
Pigs at a Glance.
And
now, in
Sunset at Blandings,
we have, literally, Wodehouse’s last word
on the subject. The name of the author of the pig classic appears twice in
Wodehouse’s own typescript. The first time he is Whiffle. The second time it
starts as Whipple, and in Wodehouse’s recognizable hand, the two p’s have been
changed firmly to two f’s.