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- The Inimitable Jeeves
- By P.G. Wodehouse
- Audiobook app for Apple iPad,
iPhone & iPod Touch - Read by Frederick Davidson
- Approx 6.0 hrs.
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The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
When Bingo falls in love at a Camberwell subscription dance and Bertie Wooster drops into the mulligatawny, there’s work for a wet-nurse. Who better than Jeeves?
This is the first Jeeves and Wooster story “Plum” ever wrote. Wodehouse weaves his wit through a wide collection of terrifying aunts, miserly uncles, love-sick friends, and unwanted fiancés. Bertie gets into a bit of trouble when one of his pals, Bingo Little, starts to fall in love with every second girl he lays his eyes on. But the soup gets really thick when Bingo decides to marry one of them and enlists Bertie’s help. Luckily, he has the inimitable Jeeves to pull him out of it.
My ‘Book of the Century’….P. G. Wodehouse at his shining best.
—
Daily Telegraph
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 by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made 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 outgeneralled 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.
—Introduction to Summer Lightning
(1881—1975) was, by life’s end, an enormously popular writer whose bibliography included short stories, full novels, plays, lyrics, and the odd bit of musical theatre. Between his birth and death, he witnessed an extraordinary change in the world, the people who lived there, and their expectations. As someone born into the gentry, he spent most of his life in France and the United States, though his work was almost exclusively focused on the pre-War upper-class denizens of British society.
“Plum” was the nickname given to Wodehouse by family and friends, and it seemed that for some while it was a plum life indeed. His father was a judge in British-occupied Hong Kong, where he spent some of his very earliest years. By three years, he was in the care of a nanny, seeing his parents for a grand total of six months over the next twelve years. His family ties were mostly focused on one of his older brothers, with whom he shared interests such as art, and with one or another aunt who would take him in at holidays—a practice which gave rise to his character Bertie Wooster’s family background.
Educated at various boarding schools and prep schools, he expected to follow his brother Armine to Oxford University and study classics. However, as a Boer War pensioner, the senior Wodehouse had his pension income pinned to the Indian rupee, which fell dramatically around this time. Rather than attending university, P.G. was made to take a position with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (the modern HSBC). Rather than following the prescription of learning for two years and then accepting a posting to Hong Kong, Wodehouse worked to improve his journalism and writing skills, eventually replacing a friend on staff with The Globe, in 1902.
Over the next few years, he was a contributor to many publications, including Punch and Vanity Fair. In 1909 he was living in Greenwich Village, New York and wrote two short stories for Cosmopolitan and Collier’s, garnering more income than he had ever previously received. With dollar signs in his eyes, he resigned from his position with The Globe, stayed in New York, and wrote for a variety of publications under a number of pseudonyms.
Around 1915, he was writing for the Saturday Evening Post, collaborating with Jerome Kern on musical comedies for the theater, found himself married to Ethel Wayman, and the adoptive father to Ethel’s daughter, Leonora.
Most people read Wodehouse stories as definitively English, yet by 1909 he was splitting time between homes in England and New York. As a man unusually disinterested by global politics, he was perhaps taken by surprise when World War II broke out. He and his family remained ensconced in their seaside home at Le Touquet, France, not thinking that repairing to England might be a good idea. Wodehouse was captured by the Germans in 1940 and placed in internment camps for the next year, first in Belgium, then at Tost (now Toszek) in Upper Silesia (now in Poland). Years after the experience he is said to have quipped, “If this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like….”
While at Tost, he entertained fellow prisoners with witty dialogues he developed and these became the basis for a series of radio broadcasts aimed at citizens of the United States (not yet at war with Germany) that the Nazis tricked him into making once they took him from the camps and brought him to Berlin. Perhaps naïvely, Wodehouse believed he would be admired by the English and the Yanks as having shown himself to have not lost his composure during wartime. His homeland had no heart for a countryman’s witty banter on German radio, however, and the broadcasts led to many accusations of treason. Libraries even banned his books.
According to Wikipedia:
Foremost among his wartime critics was author of the Winnie the Pooh series. As revenge on his one-time friend, Wodehouse wrote a parody in which a character (based on Milne) writes about his ridiculous son, “Timothy Bobbin.”
Another critic was the playwright Sean O’Casey who, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph in July 1941, wrote: “If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English literature’s performing flea.” Wodehouse deflected the insult by giving the title Performing Flea to a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.
Among Wodehouse’s wartime defenders were authors and An investigation by the British security service MI5 concurred with Orwell’s opinion, concluding that Wodehouse was naïve and foolish but not traitorous. Documents declassified in the 1980s revealed that while living in Paris, his living expenses were paid by the Nazis. However, papers released by the British Public Record Office in 1999 showed these had been accounted for by MI5 investigators when establishing Wodehouse’s innocence.
Continued post-war criticism made Wodehouse and Ethel feel forced to make New York their permanent home. He became an American citizen in 1955 and would never return to his homeland, spending the remainder of his life in Remsenburg, New York.
Even still, the Queen Elizabeth II made him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE), just six weeks before his death in 1975. The award was received on his behalf by Ethel. Together with his likeness on display at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, this last honor prompted Wodehouse to pronounce that he had no further ambitions in life.
Wodehouse was not keen on lending his characters and stories for adaptations, but that has not stopped Hollywood and others from borrowing. For example, the film
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