trump by OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS

Owen Dudley Edwards rewrites the understanding of genre and sees satire as a form of literary criticism. His knowledge of mid-twentieth century literature is both encyclopaedic and peculiar. Wodehouse, for example, is always an anomaly, but using his works as a handrail to guide us round the voids created by a current day fascist is weirdly novel.

 WODEHOUSE AS CRITIC

My female Friends, whose tender Hearts

Have better learn’d to act their Parts

Receive the news in doleful Dumps.

The Dean is dead, (and what is trumps?)

                              — Jonathan Swift, ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’ (1731-32)

[P. G. Wodehouse died 50 years ago — 14 February 2025.]

WHO’S YER WULLY SHAKESPEARE NOO?

Swift was the father of modern literary criticism in the English language.   He didn’t necessarily derive its full paternity in the English language, certainly, since Gulliver (for one) originated in an ancient Irish Gaelic fairy-story told round the firesides, and if he didn’t know that much Gaelic he knew those who did, or (in the ancient Irish cliché), if he hadn’t been to school he met the scholars.

            Swift and his friend Alexander Pope proved that fundamentally all satire is literary criticism.   Nearly 200 years ago, Pope proclaimed it as apocalyptic end of The Dunciad when universal darkness covers all, apparently prefiguring the condition of world politics today.

(This is not to say that all literary criticism is satire: too much of it isn’t funny  enough.)

            To declare P. G. Wodehouse a satirist may seem unfair to the customers since he is supposed to be harmless (or, when interpreted by his targets, pointless).   But in 1938 he created the finest satire against Fascism produced by English fiction The Code of the Woosters where Roderick Spode leads the Saviours of Britain as they shout ‘Heil Spode!’ wearing black football shorts because the supply of shirts has run out, but leaving him open to blackmail by Bertie Wooster (briefed by Jeeves) on the source of his income which proves to be the designing of ladies’ underclothing marketed as Eulalie Soeurs.

Where is the literature it satirised?   Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for one.   And  Mussolini’s articles in Encyclopedia Italiana repetitiously affirming that Mussolini is always right, for another.   But great satiric literature has much to tell of the futures in which we read it.  

Wodehouse as artist, Wodehouse as critic, satirically prophesied what we have now elected, purged of his wit and wisdom.  

Wodehouse himself frightened literary critics too much for them to proclaim his ouevre’s literary antecedents.    Dig hard enough, and the lit. crit. lads and lassies might discover the joke was on them.   ‘The Man Who Gave Up Smoking’ (Mr Mulliner Speaking (1929)) exhibits murder as a fine art when art-critics are ‘going round the studios of Chelsea’:

Only a day or so ago, one of England’s leading animal-painters had chivvied him for nearly an hour in a fruitless endeavour to get at him with a short bludgeon tipped with lead.

A variation in a master’s theme is its own form of satire, however valedictory.   Wodehouse’s multi-striking Summer Lightning (1929) is homage to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Sue Brown (inspired by Wodehouse’s beloved stepdaughter Leonora) who comes to Blandings Castle disguised as the American millionaire’s daughter Myra Schoonmaker derives from Viola disguised as Cesario. The temporarily tragic Olivia becomes Wodehouse’s Millicent having broken off her engagement to Hugo to announce a different engagement in a voice like Schopenhauer announcing the discovery of a caterpillar in his salad.   Millicent’s uncle the Hon. Galahad Threepwood resembles Olivia’s uncle (Sir Toby Belch) in denouncing the sobriety of his juniors and in treating the puritanical ambitious secretary the Efficient Baxter as insane like Olivia’s steward Malvolio.   Feste the singing servant aiding in the hoodwinking of Malvolio, is echoed by Beach the butler (who sings briefly in Summer Lightning), and Lord Emsworth at his dottiest recalls the witless aristocrat Sir Andrew Aguecheek:

            Sir Gregory choked.

            ‘I always knew, Emsworth, that you were as mad as a coot.’

            ‘As a what?’ whispered his lordship.

                        ‘Coot’ said the Hon. Galahad curtly.   ‘Sort of duck.’

                        …

            ‘Why a coot?’ asked Lord Emsworth, who had been brooding for some time in silence.

Wodehouse’s fiction as lit. crit. reached its plateau in ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’  (Meet Mr Mulliner (1927)) a ghost story sufficiently terrorizing to make Henry James unscrew the Turn: a thriller-writer — James Rodman — inherits a sludgy-romance novelist’s home to find his own output haunted and repossessed, so that instead of the corpse expiring outside the hero’s door gasping ‘The beetle!   Tell Scotland Yard that the blue beetle is —’, Lester Gage sees on the mat:

the most beautiful girl he had ever beheld.   A veritable child of Faerie.  She eyed him for a moment with a saucy smile, then with a pretty, roguish look of reproof shook a dainty forefinger at him.   ‘I believe you’ve forgotten me, Mr Gage!’ she fluted with a mock severity which her eyes denied.  

And then Rodman finds the intrusive story clinging around himself, with matrimony apparently ahead as his impending doom.   (Pretty irresistible atmosphere: it also infects his doctor and his literary agent.)

Wodehouse became a best-selling author in 1918 with Piccadilly Jim finding him a new London publisher Herbert Jenkins who ‘simply worked himself to death’ (mourned his author in 1923).   In 1915-18 Wodehouse had won a place with George Newnes’s Strand monthly magazine (originally made by the Sherlock Holmes short stories in its first year, 1891, simultaneously winning their immortality).   It was appropriate enough, Jeeves-Wooster being the best development of the Holmes-Watson partnership series in Wodehouse’s ‘bloke and his valet’ Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, though their book form in My Man Jeeves (1919), needed more editorial vigilance and marketing fire under Newnes’s imprint.   Conan Doyle had Holmes’s adventures reprinted as books with other publishers though keeping their 56 magazine premiers and last two novels in the Strand until the last short story in April 1927.   As Jenkins’s devotion to his products won media attention Wodehouse moved personally and subjectively back to England (Wooster-Jeeves had begun set in a lengthy American sojourn), culminating in the new Strand Jeeves series put in hard covers by Herbert Jenkins (posthumously) as The Inimitable Jeeves (1924).   The American market continued:   Robert McCrum’s biography Wodehouse (2004) noted $10,000 from serialisation in the Saturday Evening Post for A Damsel in Distress issued in London in 1919 by Jenkins with whose firm PGW would maintain almost all his UK book-published fiction for his lifetime.

NOTHING FAILS LIKE SUCCESS

Wodehouse’s serialisation, books, musical comedies, plays and films gave him a good income which his more extravagant wife helped him to manage and spend, but he noted with amusement how Jenkins’s industry (however self-sacrificial) built up the names of future potential stars and won disciples amongst his rivals for publishing publicity.   In particular Ernest Hodder-Williams, inheriting the 50-year-old Hodder and Stoughton, had already been gathering his rosebuds while he might, such as using his own Great War propaganda work under John Buchan in 1916 to sign up his boss’s next novel Greenmantle and all other Buchan fiction until the posthumous Sick Heart River a quarter-century later.   The post-war seasons of boom and bust prompted use of advertisement and stunt, as Jenkins had anticipated and Dorothy L. Sayers would report so well in Murder Must Advertise (1933).  

Hodder-Williams in 1921 saw the potential in the 46-year-old Edgar Wallace, a bastard born into a theatre family who then left him to kindly upbringing among Cockney workers, learning milk-delivery, serving and reporting in the Boer War, winning shaky credentials from the young Daily Mail, perpetually bankrupting himself and selling his royalties dirt cheap for seemingly endless magazine and book fiction.    Ultimately the British Museum Catalogue listed 142 of his first editions in 26 years including 20 in World War 1 (when death and sales multiplied) but never reaching 6 per year until 1922, never thereafter below it with 17 in 1926, 13 in 1927, 10 in 1928, 24 in 1929, ending with death in Hollywood in 1932 having scripted King Kong.   The Times Literary Supplement had noticed 4 out of his initial 44 titles before 1922: it reviewed 55 published from 1922 to 1932.   Twenty-first century statistics credit him with sales of 50 million copies, and Wodehouse with 100 million.   Wodehouse yearned to hold high literary standards; Wallace sneered ‘The good stuff may be all right for Posterity, but I’m not writing for Posterity.   I’m writing for to-morrow morning’s newspaper.’  Wodehouse in 1929 writing about Thrillers (reworked for his Louder and Funnier (1930)) posited a detective story whose villains defied capture:

Travers Jerningham laughed a bitter laugh.

‘Because, my dear fellow, they aren’t in the book at all.   The fiends were too cunning to let themselves get beyond the title page.  The murderers of Sir Ralph Rackstraw were Messrs Hodder and Stoughton.’

A modern equivalent might be an arbitrating dictator who has already settled the war and insured his financial returns while publishing his pusillanimous progress.

The ultimate determinant in British popular fiction best-sellers were American sales, brazenly pirated in the USA until 1891 and beyond, inducing plot-character in UK writers’ topical output basically or in details.   That didn’t necessarily require American themes, but enhanced authors’ American awareness.   In the later 1930s British writers such as Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase hit the jackpot with bogus-American thrillers, explicit in sadism, anticipating the real American thing provided postwar by Mickey Spillane, and then Anglified by Fleming.   UK inter-war book-salesmanship still outflanked American in appealing to reader amusement no less than vulgarity, Hodder impudently pushing its ‘Yellow Ninepennies’: ‘IT IS IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO BE THRILLED BY EDGAR WALLACE’, with texts readable accessible and durable.

Hodder-Williams’s first Wallace affirmed the new mount’s potential in The Crimson Circle later singled out in Bloody Murder (1972, 1985, 1992) by the historian Julian Symons as one of Wallace’s three best crime stories: its ‘amazing psychometrical detective’ Derrick Yale is ultimately revealed as the mass murderer having made an unrecognised debut at the start when being saved from the guillotine by a nail misplaced by a drunken executioner, and then winning the last word at his actual (and English) execution ‘I hope this rope won’t break’.    The replacement of the amateur by the professional — usually less literally and brutally — was defined by George Orwell (‘Grandeur et decadence du roman policier anglais’ (Fontaine,1944)):  ‘C’est Edgar Wallace qui devait lancer la mode du policier professionnel de Scotland Yard. … Parmi les modernes, il faut sans doute placer en tete de liste le sombre Edgar Wallace, plus enclin a terroriser son lecteur qu’a le guider dans la maquis des problems complexes.’   (Orwell, Complete Works — Two Wasted Years 1943 [vol. 15] (1998) 314-15.)   In his famous essay ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ (Horizon, October 1944), Orwell somewhat judicially pronounced ‘The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace’s admiration for the police is pure bully-worship.   A Scotland Yard detective is the most powerful kind of being that he can imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw against whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves in the Roman arena.’  Wallace’s gigantic output makes such generalisation a little unwise, granted that this offers a new road to Orwell’s 1984 whose O’Brien is a policeman masquerading as a rebel, and that Wallace’s police sometimes seem to know rather too much about crooks.

 But his plots seldom crossed over into sadism, merely hinted at its imminent but unrealised possibility accompanied by chilling civility promising murder.   Wodehouse parodied this convention in Thank You Jeeves (1934) when during Jeeves’s temporary resignation Bertie Wooster finds that his replacement has become berserk drunk, convinced Bertie is the Devil, and, having pursued him with a carving-knife through a country cottage:

Brinkley was at the keyhole, begging me to come out and let him ascertain the colour of my insides, and, by Jove, what seemed to me to add the final touch to the whole unpleasantness was that he spoke in the same respectful voice he always used.   Kept calling me ‘Sir’, too, which struck me as dashed silly.   I mean, if you’re asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it’s absurd to tack a ‘Sir’ on to every sentence.   The two things don’t go together.

At this point it seemed to me that my first move ought to be to clear up the obvious misunderstanding that existed in his mind.   I put my lips to the woodwork.

‘It’s all right, Brinkley.’

‘It will be if you come out, sir’, he said civilly.

‘I mean, I’m not the Devil.’

‘Oh, yes, you are, sir.’

In the Conan Doyle tradition in his Brigadier Gerard Napoleonic stories, the reader perceives realities which the narrator misconstrues.   Brinkley is a morose evangelical as revealed by his hymn-singing when sober, but Bertie is convinced he is a resentful Socialist turned by booze into a homicidal Red revolutionary — thus sending up thriller conventions of a Communist plot to overthrow Civilisation as we know it. 

International diplomacy today is conducted on similar lines and assumptions.

The classic Wallace precedent was anarchist-related, though with ambiguities as to its loyalties as well as civilities among its adversaries.   Introducing the reissue (1964) of the memorable Edgar Wallace — The Biography of a Phenomenon (1938) by the subject’s daughter-in-law Margaret Lane, Graham Greene affirmed that Wallace’s first novel The Four Just Men (published 4 June 1905) ‘moves at a deeper level of invention than he ever tapped again’.   Greene was an immortal name by 1964, but he clearly intended some accolade for Wallace so often belittled by pompous critics.   He quoted the passage describing the police sweeping London Embankment and Westminster Bridge clear of pedestrians and vehicle operators in (correct) expectation the Four Just Men will murder the Foreign Secretary at the time they have named, punishing his resolve to introduce the Alien Extradition (Political Offences) Bill condemning refugees to repatriation in their tyrannical countries of origin.   Multitudes fill the nearest permissible points, Wallace concluding the passage:

A stranger arriving in London, bewildered by the gathering asked for the cause.   A man standing on the outskirts of the Embankment throng pointed across the river with the stem of his pipe.

            ‘We’re waiting for a man to be murdered’, he said, as one who describes a familiar function.

              Greene, a professional spy-journalist-novelist, would have recognised Wallace’s employer the Daily Mail thinly disguised as the Daily Megaphone emerging as the story’s part-hero, its editor while under the gun of one of the Four commissioning ‘an article about yourselves.   You needn’t give us any embarrassing particulars, you know, something about your aspiration, your raison d’etre’.   The Just Man salutes him as an artist and delivers copy the following day, while the newspaper’s snobbish rival the Telegram accuses it of treason or fraud.   In real UK political life the preceding Prime Minister Robert Cecil 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury (who had voted against the Second and Third (franchise) Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884) dismissed the Mail as ‘written by office-boys for office-boys’.  His nephew and successor Arthur James Balfour was actually piloting an immigration restriction Bill through Parliament in 1904-5 (Winston Churchill had left the Tory party partly in protest against it): the Mail sympathised, but Wallace’s novel was professional rather than partisan.   Wallace’s authenticity was at its surest when deriving from identity as pressman and former working-class Cockney kid (the book’s most convincing portrait being Billy Marks, a thief who steals a Just Man’s pocket-book): he had Dickens’s literary confidence born of deprivation.   Wodehouse was the Tocqueville of his time. authoritative witness to aristocrats bereft of power, ruthless in money-hunger.   So also is Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875).

The Four Just Men reflects the Europe of Wallace’s day in its own literary Impressionism momentarily illuminating backgrounds from Cadiz to the Commons, or from the intending assassins’ memories of their former triumphs inseparable from banality (a Serbian regicide’s corsets impeding his execution by duel recalling Serbia’s Alexander I’s real assassination in March 1903)), and in glimpses of Sir Philip Ramon the Foreign Secretary’s growing objectivity and dignity nearing his death in defying the Four whom initially he faced with mere obsessive obstinacy — which the Four seem to realise, concluding that of all whom they have killed he would be the first they thought virtuous.   In preparing for their crime the Four increase reality in their individual mistakes and inspired rectifications, culminating in their ultimate success by accident.   It is Sir Philip Ramon who progresses, outgrowing his secret cowardice and public ill-temper, as though absolved ready for his death — perhaps ultimately inspiring Greene.   What remains constant is Ramon’s professional skill, however questionable its uses: ‘He was a master of dialectic, a brilliant casuist, a coiner of phrases that stuck and stung.’

The Four Just Men keeps the reader at arms’ length from loyalties to various protagonists.   The story is no less and no more convincing than an article in the Megaphone.   The identities of the Four themselves remain unknown to the authorities to the book’s end.   When first the Foreign Secretary releases their threat to assassinate him unless his obnoxious Bill is withdrawn, the Megaphone writes up his police-furnished report of the Four to be duly disbelieved by its rivals who instead credit the Mafia, Corsican vendetta &c (alternatives still regurgitated by Ian Fleming in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 60 years later, together with much else of Edgar Wallace, Bulldog Drummond, Dr Fu-Manchu, the Saint, &c).   Back in 1901 a Polish anarchist killed US President William McKinley which as a reporter Wallace knew remained in his public’s memory, and so before Sir Philip’s death the Just Four noted that

itinerant street singers introducing extemporised verses into their repertoire declared the courage of that stateman bold who dared for to resist the threats of coward alien and deadly anarchist. There was praise in these poor lyrics for Sir Philip, who was trying to prevent the foreigner from taking the bread out of the mouths of honest working men.  

The leader of the Four, George Manfred, is amused: ‘I think the verse about deadly foreign anarchist taking the bread out of the mouth of the home-grown variety is distinctly good’.

A KING COME TO JUSTICE         

Crime and Detection (1926) published by Oxford University Press’s World’s Classics, edited and introduced by the Canadian historian Edward Murray Wrong (father of the Scottish historian Rosalind Mitchison), was the first academic study of its subject in fiction (while other scholars contented themselves with foolish incessant games turning on Sherlock Holmes as a real person), and unlike many successors Wrong looked closely at Wallace, albeit with an Oxford tutor’s magisterial direction:

If each murder is to be done from the highest motives (as those by Mr Wallace’s Four Just Men) it will not be easy for there to be enough of them to keep our interest and approval.   Even the Four Just Men began public life by killing a fairly harmless Secretary of State to prevent the Cabinet, of which he was but one member, from carrying a bill through Parliament.   We might wink at this if we disapproved of the bill, but can it be called justice?   Was this the only way?

After all, if we are to regard murder as just, we must credit the murderer with an omniscience that we deny to our courts of law.   Even if he thinks himself omniscient has he any business to act on his own opinion, regardless of the consequences to the innocent?

That question still applies at the highest level.

Wrong was right in covert anticipation of readers’ ultimate judgment:  circumstances would turn the Just Four from possible anarchists to anti-anarchists.   Wrong was also right to scrutinise it as a detective story.   Perhaps ‘detection story’ might have been more precise, since it is howdunit rather than whodunit: Wallace with a Mail graduate’s lifelong quest to gain publicity for his self-published masterpiece bankrupted himself by publishing the first edition with the last chapter replaced by a competition asking readers to explain how Sir Philip was killed.   Too many guessed, and his accompanying hired publicity ran far beyond any Wallace budget.   Alfred Harmsworth, master of the Mail, rescued him. 

Wrong saw the artistic limitations on the ‘just’ murder being part of a series, and  Wallace had usually limited such references to a judgment a time.  Beyond Wallace the classic justified murders of unpunished murderers would be Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers (1939) later retitled And Then There Were None.   Its murderer of all fellow-guests, himself not hitherto a murderer, is previously unacquainted with any of his victims.   Christie had previously produced a justified murder performed by an ultimately unpunished conspiracy of avengers of a beloved murdered child in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and Wallace made a hero of an avenging murderer    staged by Sir Gerald Du Maurier as The Ringer (1926) whose forbear as novel The Gaunt Stranger was dedicated to ‘my friend P. G. Wodehouse’.  Christie also paid Wodehouse such homage, both of them in the 1920s drawing on his works’ inspiration. 

            The Four Just Men might be defended as no more partisan than a chess report.

But Wilde’s thesis that Nature imitates Art now became Nature’s interference.    On 31 May 1906, almost a year after the Four’s first appearance, Wallace was in Madrid reporting the wedding of King Alfonso XIII of Spain (born a King in 1886 after his father’s death) to Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter Victoria Eugenie, the guests including the future UK King George V.   As Wallace recalled it twenty years after in his People (re-titled Edgar Wallace):

Keeping behind the Coach of Respect, I footed it along the hot asphalt roadway   The crowd was frenzied in its joy.   Queen Ena, as we called her — Victoria Eugenie, as she is named — looked beautiful.   The young King Alfonso was one broad smile.   There never was a braver fellow than Alfonso.   Nothing ever scared him.  His main recreation was driving a motor-car at something between 70 and 90 miles an hour over the uncertain country roads of Spain. The Calle Mayor is a narrow thoroughfare, but at one point it widens, and the royal coach was reaching the wider space where stands a church.  … Something made me look up.   The windows above both sides of the street were crowded, and, as I raised my eyes, I saw a bunch of flowers hurtling down from an upper window and caught a glimpse of a man’s bare head.   The moment I saw those flowers, my heart nearly stopped beating.   They were dropping at such a rate that there could be no question that they concealed something heavy, something sinister. … The force of the explosion almost lifted me off my feet, and in a second I was in the middle of a confused, screaming throng of people, mad with fear.   I had a glimpse of dying horses, of blood lying on the roadway, of a half-fainting queen being assisted from the carriage, her white dress splashed with blood. But more vivid still is the impression of the king, as he stood up, an immovable smile on his long face, his fingers waving encouragement to the crowd — the one calm man in that horrible nightmare of screaming confusion.

            The assassin was the Barcelona anarchist Mathieu Morral whose bomb killed 24 bystanders and wounded 100.  That ended any identification of the Just Four with Anarchists.

And it eventuated in their recruitment of Alfonso XIII to replace the dead Fourth Man, in the sequel to The Four Just Men — The Council of Justice (1908) where they destroy ‘the Red Hundred’ (anarchist international).   In his last Just Men stories in the mid-1920s Wallace suggested an early source when Leon Gonsalez compares their own current identities with those of the aged musketeers in Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask.   In their first story The Three Musketeers (1843) the eponymous three become four with the unexpected advent of D’Artagnan, who saves them all at critical moments, as does Alfonso in The Council of Justice: ‘I Call myself Bernard Courlander’ otherwise ‘the Prince of the Escorial’ — residence of the Bourbon Kings of Spain where the real Alfonso dying in 1941 was reburied in 1980.  ‘Courlander’ (aka Prince Carlos) is also a self-identified Habsburg as was Alfonso’s mother and sole surviving parent.  

Wallace in People saluted Alfonso as ‘a sportsman — and as white as any Christian in Europe’ a commonplace if disgusting usage of the day, and a little tactless since Alfonso’s paternity was sometimes maliciously questioned.   As author of the UK imperialist ‘Sanders’ stories between 1911 and 1928 Wallace took colour prejudice as normal, but he freely chose heroes from the Mediterranean which racial bigots would think deplorable.  (The only Englishman among the Four seems to be George Manfred, a Byronic name:  Byron was named George, Manfred his most famous play, and he died embattled against tyranny.)   Wallace was standing up for King Alfonso who by 1926 had  abandoned constitutionalism by accepting in 1923 the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera after whose death in 1930 Spain opted for a republic and Alfonso left it for ever — and for Mussolini’s Italy — in 1931.    (In The Council of Justice Manfred — presumably thinking of Plato’s classification in the Republic reinforced by Cromwell and Napoleon  —  had told the Red Hundred’s leader (‘The Woman of Gratz’ ) that successful regicide would only result in ‘a dictator, who is worst of all’.)

   The Council of Justice was grand opera rather than Impressionism.   It pitches the Four against ‘the Red Hundred’ a supreme anarchist organization (however inimical to organization Anarchism should remain).   Courlander has already won respect and fellowship in the Red Hundred before rescuing Manfred and Raymond Poiccart from police and anarchists in a single coup, thus qualifying for Just status.  Resuming his royal identity, his sumptuous wedding in Madrid is saved by the rest of the Four from obliteration.    The novel concludes with the Hundred’s defeat (partly by falcons destroying their airships about to bomb London), Manfred’s arrest, trial, sentence and set-up for execution in Chelmsford Gaol, interrupted by his premature drop from the scaffold under which he is carried to cars and thence to the Essex coast ending:

The serene blue of the sea was unbroken, save where, three miles away, a beautiful white steam yacht was putting out to sea. Attracted by the appearance of the warders, a little crowd came round them. ‘Yes’, said a wondering fisherman, ‘I seed ‘em, three of ‘em went out in one of they motor boats that go like lightnin’ — they’re out o’ sight by now.’

‘What ship is that?’ asked the chief warder quickly and pointed to the departing yacht.

The fisherman removed his pipe and answered: ‘That’s the Royal Yacht.’

‘What Royal Yacht?’

‘The Prince of the Escorials’ said the fisherman impressively.

The chief warder groaned.

‘Well, they can’t be on her!’ he said.

The Four Just Men had told its story with an objective if ironic impartiality.  The Council of Justice began with a thousand-word Foreword beginning ‘It is not for you or me to judge Manfred and his works’ with its last words ‘But in my heart I am with them in all they did.’   Its ethos justified murder when the law fails, its outcome saved the killers by kings beyond reach of the law, its emotions might be condemned as sharing racist lynch law with its exact contemporary the American white supremacist Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) later filmed as Birth of a Nation (1915) whose inflamed viewers murdered several Blacks.

THE DREAMING OF THE BONES

The hero’s superiority to the law in Wallace was sufficiently traditional, as many a Victorian Justice of the Peace exhibited.   Wallace, ably writing from his Cockney roots, symbolised such force and limits in his early The Fourth Plague (1913) when the rural magistrate Sir Ralph Morte-Manory officially reads the Riot Act whose victims shoot him dead while his wife flees to the arms of their Italian leader (whose brother is the detective hero).  In real life a quarter of a million Protestant Tories were drilling and arming under the greatest barrister of the day Sir Edward Carson to resist an Irish Home Rule Act, firmly claiming superiority to the law, his weekend followers including Belfast workers building the Titanic in 1912, with officers usually Ulster magistrates.   Twenty years later Carson was enjoying his retirement chiefly reading Wallace and Wodehouse.

            The pre-war Ulster Volunteers symbolised the last mass exaltation of British imperialism in seeing themselves above the law with the same certainty as the Four Just Men.   Wallace’s dozen ‘Sanders’ books (1911-27) drew on his 1907 reportage for the Daily Mail near the Congo River whose British frontiers he imagined under the wisdom of a British Commissioner laying down the law more than lying under it.   Wodehouse in ‘The Bishop’s Move’ (Meet Mr Mulliner (1927)) brutally guyed the Sanders type lording over the jungle, such as:

General Sir Hector Bloodenough, VC, KCIE, MVO, on retiring from the army, had been for many years, until his final return to England, in charge of the Secret Service in Western Africa, where his unerring acumen had won for him from the natives the soubriquet of Wah-nah-B’gosh-B’jingo — which, freely translated, means Big Chief Who Can See Through The Hole in a Doughnut.

And as Chairman of the Board of Governors he stands for discipline as administered by Sanders:

‘Monstrous!’ he exclaimed.  ‘Monstrous.   Monstrous.   Never heard of such a thing.  This boy must be expelled, Headmaster.   Expelled.   Ex — ‘

‘No!’ said the headmaster in a ringing voice. 

                        ‘Then flogged within an inch of his life.   Within an inch.   An inch.’

In 1907 the Daily Mail had sent Wallace to the Congo investigating enslavement, torture, mutilation of the Africans under the Belgian King Leopold’s personal rule of the Congo, while the UK House of Lords aired it in July.   The UK authorities were slow in its pursuit although the British Consul Roger Casement had compiled devastating reports.

UK observers contrasted his findings from the humanity of British rule.   But Sanders and his British minions regularly administer floggings and hangings.  Wodehouse regularly acquired all Wallace — thriller, mystery, or Empire — telling his daughter Leonora in 1924 that he had just got the latest 3 although one proved a dud.   On 10 March 1928 he explained reading another author ‘To fill in the time before Edgar Wallace writes another one’.  Wallace had aged Sanders into retirement, but in 1923,1926 and 1928 he capitalised on Sanders’s early popularity by (sometimes successfully) pitching the latest stories back to the Edwardian heyday.   The white reader a century later may be left feeling ashamed of his own skin.

The fisherman gazing after the Prince’s bonny boat was an appropriate coda for  

Wallace, symbolically Christian but vocally British working class.   His tales moved fearlessly amongst all classes, but his voice was surest among the lowly.   His next series was the Cockney ‘Smithy’ carried from 1905 into World War 1 (Smithy and the Hun &c), and he entertained readers in the mid-1920s with Educated Evans and its sequels starring a comic crook enmeshed in farcical horse-racing swindles and chances, drawing on Wallace’s own misadventures in equine ownership and gambling.   Similar figures frequently of marginal criminality appeared in innumerable Wallace thrillers often winning more reader affection than their aristocratic or bourgeois detectives.

Not all of his Cockneys were English — or white.   His African reportage of the  Congo and its Belgian enslavement prompted his longest fiction series of all, begun with Sanders of the River (1911) whose real hero is Bosambo the brave, brilliant Congo river chieftain, trickster and (usually) ally of the British Imperial hero Mr Commissioner Sanders, yet himself firmly in traditions of unreliable reliability ranging from Odysseus to Robin Hood.   The Empire is assumed to be the supreme authority, with ambiguities, for instance its very last published story ‘M’gala the Accursed’ (Again Sanders (1928)) ends with reader delight at a black man killing a sadistic white ‘Inspector of Native Territories and Protectorates’:

            The spear he had thrust at Banks’ throat was noiseless.

And that night, the white-faced wife sat in her bed-room trying not to be thankful that the hand of M’gala the accursed had fallen upon her husband’s shoulder.

Wodehouse and Wallace exchanged dedications in 1925, The Gaunt Stranger  staged and renovelised in 1926 as The Ringer (starring its director Sir Gerald Du Maurier) a variant on the Just Men theme, here limiting the killing of the miscreant to vengeance for a betrayed female relative. Wodehouse chose Sam the Sudden mixing suburbs and crooks.   Suburbs were alien to the slums product Wallace as to the impoverished aristocrat Wodehouse, and under middle-class domination probably supplied the bulk of each one’s UK readership along with train-journey voyagers grasping bookstalls.   Both writers are valuable sources for the history of Edwardian journalism, Wodehouse’s Psmith, Journalist (1915) anatomising ‘muck-raking’ in New York as it defined the American Progressive era.   The monocled public-school Socialist Psmith had established Wodehouse’s first series beginning in the last (and greatest) of his school novels Mike (1909) and concluding in the second Blandings Castle tale Leave It to Psmith (1923).   Jeeves and the master he manipulated Bertie Wooster made first magazine appearances from 1915, then 4 in My Man Jeeves (1919), connected short stories The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) with short story collections in 1925 and 1930, 1934 (2 novels), 1938 and onward.

            But if Jeeves was inimitable was Bertie an imitation?   On 16 October 1914 Wallace added a new character to his Sanders series in the Weekly Tale-Teller, a monocled ‘silly ass’ Lieutenant Augustus (‘Bones’) Tibbetts whom Wallace’s biographer Margaret Lane hinted might have been an ancestor for Bertie Wooster.  Bertie was born in ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ in the Saturday Evening Post (18 September 1916) and then in the Strand (October) where Wodehouse had proceeded Wallace — seven years his senior — by about a decade.   But writers learn from one another, a little at a time, and Bertie may owe Bones an asininity or two, especially in imagining schemes he thinks proof of his intellectual superiority to Jeeves (as in Right Ho, Jeeves! (1934) where his arrogance is punished by martyrdom on an 18-mile midnight bicycle ride whose futility reconciles the warring protagonists whom his aid had sundered).   But Wodehouse makes our laughter his primary ambition, where Bones’s follies may kill natives.

            Bones and Bertie have a more obvious common parent in the obstinate, bone-headed, chivalric, courageous, esprit-de-corps public-schoolboy Hon. Arthur Augustus (‘Gussy’) D’Arcy the Earl’s son in St Jim’s appearing in the weekly Gem from 1907 to 1939 (by Martin Clifford aka Frank Richards) defined by Orwell (‘Boys’ Weeklies’ Horizon (March 1940)) as a ‘seeming figure of fun evidently much admired’ by readers.  … He is the “knut” of the early twentieth century or even the “masher” of the ‘nineties … the monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Cateau’ in August 1914.’   The knut or masher, ridiculed in the music-halls — and more subtly by Shaw and Wilde — invited some contempt as privileged and predatory, especially in conviction the law applies to lesser breeds but only to him when he permits.   As officers in higher death-count than all other ranks, knut and masher won greater home-front affection in the Great War, the short story collection Bones hitting bookstalls in 1915.   Augustus was a popular Royal (UK Hanoverian) family name much imitated among the socially pretentious, Wodehouse’s most famous use being the newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle (Right Ho, Jeeves).  The Hanoverians were commended for their obsessional hobbies, notably George V’s philately.   The English executed or exiled royal Stuarts, but their monarchical successors’ stupidity seemed to put them above the law on either side of the Atlantic, pretenders seeking infection.

            But Wallace produced an interesting variation.   When Bones and Sanders return to London post-war, Bones proves a wizard of stock-market manipulation, and Sanders in his turn the gullible idiot.   That was in 1921.  Wodehouse’s Jeeves was certainly not working-class — his genuine compliments were reserved for ‘sturdy lower middle-class stock’ — but he had learned lessons from valeting crook millionaires in his time, and from his masters’ encounters with swindlers.   Wallace created comic crook millionaires, sometimes more homicidal than hilarious, but before him Wodehouse in his New York youth showed in A Gentleman of Leisure (1910) how the New York police could be a happy hunting-ground for ruthless fortune-hunters (here an ex-Etonian immigrant shrewdly changing his surname from English to Irish).    The ‘muck-rakers’ whom he would write up in Psmith, Journalist won public definition when Lincoln Steffens published ‘The Shame of Minneapolis’ in McClure’s Magazine in 1903, exposing police corruption and fortune building.

            Our present urgent need to keep ourselves laughing at billionaires luxuriating       above the law — while they destroy humanity — was anticipated supremely by Wodehouse in Thank You, Jeeves (1934), probably English Literature’s best comic novel. but with an ominous undertone.   J. Washburn Stoker (whose conversation anticipates his modern successor by noises ‘like a pig swallowing half a cabbage’) has inherited millions from a cousin certified sane by the fashionable specialist Sir Roderick Glossop for whom Stoker promises to purchase Chuffnell Hall from the destitute Baron Chuffnell (‘Chuffy’) to become a luxury recuperation haven for Sir Roderick’s elite patients.   The Great Crash of 1929 turned the fiction market back from short stories (symbolic of the brittle 1920s) to novels.   Wodehouse’s books through the ‘20s had evenly divided themselves between novels and story collections, but thereafter novels dominated (his disciples Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers following suit).   They also became sharper indictments of millionaire malice.   Big Money (1931) turns on a Croesus-wealthy plutocrat swindling his own secretary by exploiting his trusting requests for financial advice.   Stoker proclaims the doctrine that money puts its makers above the law when Sir Roderick is held prisoner on a charge of burglary by Constable Dobson:

‘What’s the matter’, he wanted to know, ‘with going and breaking the door down and getting him out and smuggling him away and hiding him somewhere and letting those darned cops run circles round themselves, trying to find him.’

Chuffy demurred.

                        ‘We couldn’t.’

                        ‘Why not?’

                        ‘You heard Jeeves say Dobson was on guard.’

                        ‘Bat him over the head with a shovel.’

            Chuffy didn’t seem to like the idea much.   I suppose if you’re a J. P., you have to be careful what you do.   Bat policemen over the head with shovels, and the County looks askance.

            ‘Well, darn it, then, bribe him.’

            ‘You can’t bribe an English policeman.’

            ‘You mean that?’

            ‘Not a chance.’

            ‘My God, what a country!’ said old Stoker, with a sort of whistling groan, and you could see that he would never be able to feel quite the same towards England again.

Sir Roderick has been arrested when secluding himself in a garage attached to a  Chuffnell Hall cottage under Bertie Wooster’s temporary tenancy, Dobson taking him for a black-faced minstrel previously performing on Stoker’s yacht, and thus one of the potentially criminal classes.   The black-faced minstrels had originally been white Americans in music-hall performance in the 1840s ridiculing black slaves as congenitally stupid, to counter growing antislavery protest.   From Civil War to World War 1 black actors were cold-shouldered and blacked-face whites took their roles.

In 1928 the great black singer Paul Robeson took over the part of the black worker Joe in Show Boat scripted by Oscar Hammerstein II and composed by Jerome Kern, formerly collaborator with Wodehouse in American musicals.   Show Boat included Bill, hitherto unused and written for a Kern-Wodehouse show in 1918.   Wodehouse was back to London where he could see Robeson give the production its opening triumph ‘Ol’ Man River’, with range and richness seeming to embody the whole history of black suffering under white oppression.

 Thank you, Jeeves gave Wodehouse initial difficulties writing in 1931-32 as he  had to stretch Bertie’s narratives from their lengths in the previous 32 stories — the last 8 appearing monthly in 1929-30 — to the current novel.   He told his old friend Bill Townend ‘it’s not all jam writing a story in the first person.   The reader can know nothing except what Bertie tells him, and Bertie can know only a limited amount himself.’   ‘That first person stuff cuts both ways’, he wrote Denis Mackail.  ‘It gives you speed, but you’re up against the fact that nothing can happen except through the eyes of the hero’.

And Bertie’s limits circumscribe what he realises he is communicating.   Wodehouse had outlived his previous career as lyricist for American musicals when he began writing Thank You, Jeeves, but firmly opened it scene-setting Bertie (as it were) ‘discovered’ calling himself ‘perturbed’ or ‘pensive’ (like Antonio’s unexplained sadness opening The Merchant of Venice):

                        ‘Jeeves’, I said, ‘do you know what?’

                        ‘No, sir.’

His stage ‘business’ here begins the action:

As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late …

And then:

            I played five bars of ‘Old Man River’ with something of abandon …

Robeson would make textual changes in 1938 partly under bullying from his Communist party friends, but what Wodehouse heard him sing during the 350 London performances from 3 May 1928 to 2 March 1929 began:

            Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi,

            Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be!

            What does he care if de world’s got troubles?

            What does he care if de land ain’t free?

Writing in 1931-32 Wodehouse could assume his readers would roughly remember the opening to the great song and its permanently haunting performer.   Hammerstein was imagining the mind of American blacks during slavery, and as a German-descended Jew may also have reflected on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.    Readers would hardly attribute such thoughts to Bertie Wooster, whose mentalite expresses itself in the series Bertie plays a few pages later including: ‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ [1929 version], and ‘I want an Automobile with a Horn that Goes Toot-Toot’.  

‘Ol’ Man River’ isolated at the start constitutes an overture.  And the novel will  turn on white men arrested because they look like blacks.  

Ancient Morningside (or Kelvinside) taught us that sex was what the coal comes in, and in general Wodehouse and Wallace took us little farther.    Sex is the square on which chess pieces would be endangered but may not go.   The heroine is threatened with it, credited with it, denounced for it, but never commits it.    Bertie recoils in horror from the thought of it and is put to excruciating embarrassment about it , especially when it seems Stoker may suspect his relations with his daughter Pauline:

She mused awhile.

‘I’m trying to remember if father is a Southerner or not.’ 

‘A what?’

‘I knew he was born at a place called Carterville but I can’t recollect if it was Carterville, Kentucky, or Carterville, Massachusetts.’

‘What the dickens difference does it make?’

‘Well, if you smirch the honour of a Southerner’s family, he’s apt to shoot.’

There are Cartervilles in Illinois and in Texas, both settled frontier-style postwar in the 1860s which may have inspired Wodehouse who certainly did not directly mean either.

Stoker seems to imply the Southern hypothesis when he confronts Bertie having imprisoned him aboard his yacht:

                        He eyed me musingly.

            ‘There was a time, when I was younger, when  I would have broken  your  neck.’

I didn’t like the trend the conversation was taking.   After all, a man  is as young as he feels, and there was no knowing that he wouldn’t suddenly get one of these — what do you call them? — illusions of youth.

Stoker intends to enforce a shotgun wedding when Jeeves rescues Bertie by disguising him under boot-polish as a blackfaced minstrel performing on the yacht with his bandmates for Stoker’s son’s birthday.    If challenged, Jeeves proposed to declare the black Bertie someone with whom he has made friends.   Readers were probably to presume that the bandmen are blacked up, not actual blacks (but Jeeves variously calls them ‘negro’ and ‘negroid’ and will claim companionship with either).    Chesterton ends ‘The God of the Gongs’ (The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914)) with the black murderer disguising himself as a blackfaced minstrel and evading capture, an obvious source for Wodehouse’s inspiration, but Thank You, Jeeves assumes wild panic at the sight of Bertie in disguise whether the viewer takes him for black or blackface.   Meanwhile Stoker has quarrelled with Sir Roderick and repudiated his endowment of the elite asylum, and on  prompting from Sir Roderick’s fiancée Chuffy’s Aunt Myrtle the great alienist had also donned boot-polish to amuse her son Seabury whose invitation to the minstrels Stoker had also rescinded, but when Seabury floored his stepfather-designate on a butter-slide and received retribution Aunt Myrtle evicted Sir Roderick from the Hall for Odyssey through the night in black disguise to ultimate police arrest.

            Lynchings of blacks in the USA were 82 in 1905 when Wodehouse first settled in the USA, 78 in 1918, 60 in 1920, 22 in 1926, 20 in 1930, one-sixth of the alleged charges being rape of white females.   When Bertie, refugee from Stoker’s yacht, tries to find Jeeves at the back door of Chuffnell Hall:

                        It was opened by a small female — a scullerymaid of sorts, I  put her down as — who, on observing me, gaped for a moment with a sort of shocked horror, and then with a piercing squeal keeled over and started to roll about and drum her heels on the floor.   And I’m not so dashed sure she wasn’t frothing at the mouth.

The like of that could have been preliminary towards a contemporary Florida lynching.

            And now a century later we have our Stokers and their consequences, above all the sufferers across the world condemned to disease and starvation at the whim of the present heir of former benefactors. Wodehouse was lord of laughter.   We need its volume, but we also need the penetration that lay so powerfully behind it.