A Book About Nothing

Gustave Flaubert used to write to one of his mistresses about art, in particular the art he practised, that of novel writing:

What strikes me as beautiful, what I would like to create is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, held aloft by the internal voice of its own style, as the earth stays aloft on its own, a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would, if possible, evaporate.

Novels about nothing, or at least about very little, were rare at the time. There had been Tristram Shandy of course, but it was a one-off, and according to Dr Johnson had never looked like lasting. “Make ’em laugh. Make ’em cry. Make ’em wait!” was Wilkie Collins’s prescription for a successful novelist. Waiting to know what happens next, agog for the next number to come out, that was what common readers wanted, is what common readers now still often want. But the literary novel of today will rarely give them that. They have to go to the detective stories of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell to find it. And if you want to know who is to blame for this state of affairs it is very probably Flaubert:

The most beautiful works are those that have the least matter; the closer expression hugs thought, the more words cleave to it and disappear, the more beautiful it is. Therein lies the future of Art. As it grows, it grows more ethereal, from the Egyptian pylons to Gothic lancet windows, from Hindu poems twenty thousand lines long to Byron’s ejaculations.

And later, in another letter:

What a beastly thing prose is! It’s never finished; there is always something to do over. A good prose sentence must be like a good line of verse, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Here we might quote something from Finnegans Wake. Or from Dorothy Richardson, a standard-bearer of Modernism once. As the American poet Anthony Hecht put it:

Higgledy-piggledy
Dorothy Richardson
Wrote a huge book with her
Delicate muse

Where (though I hate to seem
Uncomplimentary)
Nothing much happens and
Nobody screws.

This what it sounds like:

Whenever she found herself alone she began to sing, softly. When she was with others a head drooped or lifted, the movement of a hand, the light falling along the detail of a profile could fill her with happiness.

And there is so much of it. Pilgrimage really is huge, stretching to thirteen volumes.

So how do we get from this to P.G. Wodehouse, who never wrote a long novel in his life? Though not an Oxford man like his brothers (his father ran out of money, the fault of the rupee, according to his ever-forgiving son), he was intelligent and well-read, particularly in the English poets and the classics. But emphatically not a Dorothy Richardson man. Nor, I hazard, a James Joyce man or a Virginia Woolf man.

Nevertheless …

“The most beautiful works are those that have the least matter.” That does not necessarily mean those that have the least plot. Wodehouse was a plot man to the nth degree. He worked them out obsessively until he knew exactly what was going to happen before he wrote a single word. But I think we must consider the nature of these plots, and it may be as well to remember that his early fame was principally as a writer (with or without Guy Bolton) of books to musical comedies where the function of the plot was to act as a scaffold on which the songs and dances depended.

So in his novels and stories the plots were there so that he could write like P.G. Wodehouse, and that was entirely a matter of style. His favourites among his stories, he said in an interview he gave the BBC arts program Monitor, were those involving Bertie and Jeeves, and it is here, in the voice of Bertie, that his style can be seen at its purest and his plots at their most abstract. Wodehouse claims in the same interview that Bertie’s world existed just before the First World War and that he knew lots of people like that then. But Wodehouse is not always to be believed, particularly when talking to journalists. His main aim is always to get rid of them and leave himself free to do what he wanted. The great Wodehouse scholar Richard Usborne points out that while Bertie’s slang started out as Edwardian, it gradually purged itself of reality and by the 1930s, “he had virtually made his own language … frozen and timeless to the last”.

Wodehouse wrote thirty-seven short stories and eleven novels featuring Bertie and Jeeves. Thirty-six of the stories and ten of the novels are narrated by Bertie, and one of the first things to be said is how often the plots repeat themselves. The typical story works like this. One of Bertie’s friends is in trouble and comes to Bertie for assistance. Or rather comes to Jeeves. But Jeeves is unavailable or Bertie does not wish to avail himself of Jeeves because of some froideur. Jeeves disapproves of some course of action Bertie wishes to take or has indeed taken. Bertie sets out to solve his friend’s problem on his own. Bertie’s scheme comes to nothing disastrously and Jeeves at the last minute saves the day. Bertie is grateful and tells Jeeves he will now as a mark of his gratitude throw away the article of clothing or ukulele or whatever it is that had offended Jeeves. Often, as a kind of coda, it is revealed that Jeeves has already disposed of the offending object.

You recognise this? Of course you do. Sometimes Wodehouse comes up with a corker, as in “The Great Sermon Handicap”, which involves a betting ring and a crooked bookie. Bertie bets his all and loses his shirt but Jeeves, who has backed the winner owing to inside knowledge (he always has inside knowledge) saves the day. Wodehouse liked this plot so much he used it again, with the same crooked bookie. This time it is school sports but the principle is just the same. Do we care? We do not. The stories exist for moments like these:

SERMON HANDICAP

RUNNERS AND BETTING

PROBABLE STARTERS

Rev. Joseph Tucker (Badgwick), scratch.

Rev. Leonard Starkie (Stapleton), scratch.

Rev. Alexander Jones (Upper Bingley), receives three minutes.

Rev. W. Dix (Little Clickton-on-the-Wold), receives five minutes.

Rev. Francis Heppenstall (Twing), receives eight minutes.

Rev. Cuthbert Dibble (Boustead Parva), receives nine minutes.

Rev. Orlo Hough (Boustead Magna), receives nine minutes.

Rev J.J. Roberts (Fale-by-the-Water), receives ten minutes.

Rev. G. Hayward (Lower Bingley), receives twelve minutes.

Rev. James Bates (Gandle-by-the-Hill), receives fifteen minutes.

Look at the names of the vicars and the villages if you want to know about a pure style, rhythmic and sonorous. And here is “The Purity of the Turf”:

“Girls’ Open Egg and Spoon Race,” read Bingo.

“How about that?”

“I doubt if it would be worth while to invest, sir,” said Jeeves. “I am told it is a certainty for last year’s winner, Sarah Mills, who will doubtless start an odds-on favourite.”

“Good, is she?”

“They tell me in the village that she carries a beautiful egg, sir.”

The phrase that causes the subject to evaporate is, of course, “she carries a beautiful egg, sir”.

I have not yet mentioned aunts. Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen is the title of Wodehouse’s last Bertie and Jeeves book, and neither they are. Aunts are savage gods, particularly when named Agatha; they have to be propitiated and kept in the dark. Another repeating plot involves a friend who is supposed to be at A but is in fact at B (prison perhaps). The avenging aunt must not know this. Bertie tries to keep up the deception in vain. Jeeves steps in. Aunt mollified. Here’s another one. Aunt demands Bertie take certain course of action (marry, get a job). Bertie jibs in vain till Jeeves does as before.

Of course the stories are peopled with characters. But they are the merest cardboard. Take Bertie’s four ghastly ex-girlfriends, who are more or less identical. Honoria Glossop, her identical cousin Heloise Pringle, and Florence Craye are beautiful, statuesque, bossy and intellectual. They wish Bertie to read Nietzsche. As Jeeves remarks: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.” Madeline Bassett is also beautiful, statuesque and bossy, and she differs only in being not intellectual but wet, supposing that “every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born” and that “the stars are God’s daisy chain”. As Bertie avers stoutly (but inwardly), “they are nothing of the sort”.

There is another kind of girl. She has a boy’s name or nickname, Nobby or Corky or Stiffy or Bobbie, she (this is Bobbie) “moves like indiarubber” and “looks like a boy dressed in his sister’s clothes”; her function is to be “a ticking bomb” inclined at any moment to cause mayhem. The story “Bertie Changes his Mind” gives us a younger version. In the words of Jeeves: “a red-haired young person with a snub nose and an extremely large grin. Her age, I should imagine, would be about twelve.” Ladies of misrule, as it were. This does rather seem to have been the role of Wodehouse’s own wife. Without her he would hardly have got out at all.

There are Bertie’s friends. Bingo falls in love with any girl at all and is ridiculously forgetful. Gussie has a face like a fish and keeps newts. Tuppy Glossop likes practical jokes and can be violently vengeful. And there are Bertie’s enemies, the alphabetical A.B. Filmer, L.P. Runkle, the egregious Roderick Spode, leader of the fascist Black Shorts. All are powerful men of affairs.

There is one nice aunt, Aunt Dahlia. She is short and loudly bonhomous with a marvellous chef called Anatole that people are always trying to entice away, five times by Usborne’s reckoning. The magazine that she edits, Milady’s Boudoir—to which Bertie once contributed an article on “What the well-dressed man is wearing”—is permanently short of funds, and with a name like that one is hardly surprised. She turns up many times and she is always exactly the same.

Bertie himself is unchanging, the silly ass with the heart of gold—another type rather than a character. And Jeeves (whose name Wodehouse got from an old copy of Wisden, the cricket annual) is Sancho Panza or, better, is Figaro, the fixer. They are not characters who develop. They are there, complete and finished. From the first moment Jeeves “floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr” he was the complete article. Bertie has a hangover. Jeeves has the remedy, as always:

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if someone had touched a bomb off inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone through the windows; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

So, if we are not agog to know what happens next, if we might find, if we ever thought about it, that, as in Paradise Lost according to Dr Johnson, “the want of human interest is always felt”, why do we read? And why do we reread? For the turn of a phrase, “she carries a beautiful egg, sir”, for a verb, “strolling” in the above passage, an adjective, “Idiopsychological Ethics” one of the chapters Bertie is required by Florence to peruse, a noun, “Aunt Agatha in her lair, writing letters”, a simile, “closing the door with the delicate caution of one brushing flies off a sleeping Venus”—for the style, for the style, for the style.