The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
P. G. Wodehouse · a novel · Herbert Jenkins, London, 1934 · scored on Wodehouse’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Country-house farce as first-person comic narration; the clever servant’s comedy, told by the master who does not know he is its butt
Mythos
The clever servant who runs the household’s intrigues and rescues the foolish young master; the innocent fool protected by his own goodness; the aunt as an ogre softened to farce: myth built into the plot, and kept inside the genre’s machinery
Phase
A short season at Brinkley Court, from Bertie’s quarrel with Jeeves over a mess jacket to the night of the fire bell, when every couple is reunited and every crisis closed
Presentation
Fiction; a novel narrated throughout in the first person by Bertie Wooster, the second full-length Jeeves novel, following the stories collected from 1919
Register
One comic register sustained without a lapse: the clubman’s slang, the mangled tag and the exact absurd simile in Bertie’s voice, set against Jeeves’s Latinate deference
Scale
One country house, one school hall, about a dozen speaking parts, four courtships and a household’s money
Governing Proposition
Bertie Wooster, idle, kind and certain of his own genius, decides that his man Jeeves has lost his grip and takes into his own hands the management of four troubles at his aunt’s country house: a newt fancier who cannot propose, an engagement broken over a shark, an aunt’s debt at baccarat, and a chef driven to give notice. Every scheme he makes fails, and Jeeves restores order at the cost of his master’s dignity. The wager of the novel is that a comic machine of four interlocked plots, told by the one man who cannot see what it is doing, can be made so exact that nothing in it is idle and nothing in it is harmed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title is Bertie’s assent, “Right ho, Jeeves”, and in three words it holds the book’s whole relation of master and man. The young gentleman agrees; the man he employs has already decided. Bertie Wooster tells the story himself, from first page to last, and he tells it as a man who believes himself in charge. That belief is the engine of the comedy, and the voice that carries it, the slang of the clubman, the tag half-remembered from school, the simile exact and absurd at once, is the instrument on which the whole book is played.
The voice was not new in 1934. The stories had made it, from the late 1910s through the 1920s, and Right Ho, Jeeves is the second full-length novel built on it, after Thank You, Jeeves earlier the same year. What the novel adds is length and number: more threads, a larger cast, and four plots run at once where a story carries one or two. The form is the country-house farce and the plot of musical comedy, which Wodehouse knew from his years writing for the stage, and the book wagers nothing on it that the stories had not already won.
What the voice can carry is the measure of the book. It can carry a mind that is kind, loyal and almost entirely unreflective, and make that mind delightful. It cannot carry grief, and is never asked to. The world it describes is sealed against harm: no one in it is hurt and nothing in it costs. Within that seal, everything is made with an exactness that leaves very little idle, and the comedy lies in the gap between what Bertie reports and what the reader can see.
Movement II
The quarrel is over a white mess jacket. Bertie, offended, decides that Jeeves has lost his grip, and takes the management of everyone’s affairs upon himself. It is the clever servant’s comedy turned on its head for a season: the master who has always been rescued resolves to do the rescuing, and the book is the record of what follows. Jeeves is never shown from the inside, and his reserve is recorded by a narrator who does not understand it.
The affairs are four, and they are wired together. Gussie Fink-Nottle, a fancier of newts, cannot bring himself to propose to Madeline Bassett, whose fancies are a parody of the sentimental sublime. Bertie’s cousin Angela has broken with Tuppy Glossop over whether the thing that menaced her at Cannes was a shark or, as Tuppy holds, a flatfish. Aunt Dahlia has lost money at baccarat and must wheedle a cheque out of her husband, Tom Travers, for her paper, Milady’s Boudoir. Each trouble is tied to another, and the cheque is tied to Tom’s temper.
Tom’s temper depends on Anatole, the chef, whose cooking is the one thing that keeps him sweet. Bertie’s advice is to feign a broken heart and leave one’s dinner untouched, and the plates go back to the kitchen full. Anatole takes it to heart and gives notice. One piece of advice threatens the cheque, the paper and the household at once, and the four threads are drawn tighter by the man who means to loosen them.
Movement III
Gussie drinks orange juice. Bertie puts gin in it. Jeeves, unknown to Bertie, puts gin in it as well. The device is planted, doubled and set aside to be paid off, and the doubling is the whole joke of the book in small: the master’s scheme and the servant’s run side by side, and only one of them is known to the man telling the story.
This is the making at its plainest. The book is built like a clock, and every part is required by the mechanism: remove the gin, the newts, the shark, the baccarat or the chef, and the machine stops. The necessity is the necessity of clockwork. The parts are compelled by the plot rather than by anything the book has to say, and the digressions of the narrator, which are the voice, are permitted rather than compelled. But within the plot nothing is wasted, and what is planted goes off.
The sentences are made with the same care as the plot. The transferred epithet, the mangled quotation, the precise piece of slang, each is timed to a beat, so that the paragraph lands its joke on its last words. The command of the register is complete. It is a narrow register, and the book never asks it to bear weight it cannot carry; but within it the command is near the top of English comic prose.
Movement IV
The gin is paid off at the prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Gussie, drunk and terrified, addresses the assembled school. He accuses a boy of cheating at the scripture-knowledge prize, and he abuses the headmaster’s guests. The scene is built over several pages, and it rises steadily rather than in a single stroke, each turn a little higher than the last and the escalation never slackening.
It is the summit of the book and among the summits of comic writing in English. It shows what kind of height the book can reach: transport that is wholly comic, made of timing, accumulation and the collapse of every decency the occasion assumes. There is no terror in it and no grandeur, and it does not change the ground under the reader’s feet. It is height of one altitude, reached often in the sentences and once, at length, here.
The excursion takes the comedy out of the country house and into the school and the parish, the one public order the book admits. The scripture prize and the headmaster’s guests obey the same law as the newts and the baccarat debt: everything can be overturned, and nothing can really be harmed. The law holds across the whole book without a lapse. The range it has to cover is a country house and a school hall.
Movement V
Every scheme of Bertie’s has failed in sequence, and the order is restored on the night of the fire bell, with a bicycle ride for Bertie. Jeeves’s stroke reunites every couple, and unites them in a common indignation against Bertie. The wise servant wins, and his victory is paid for in the master’s dignity. The book does not show the plan from the inside; it shows only its result, because the plan was Jeeves’s and the account is Bertie’s.
The ending is the form’s argument. Told in the third person, or by Jeeves, the gap between Bertie’s account and the truth would close, and the joke would go. Bertie tells the story of his own defeat without quite grasping that it is one, and Jeeves’s opacity, kept from the first page to the last, is what lets the stroke land. The clever servant of Plautus and Terence, of Molière and Beaumarchais, is the load-bearing beam, and the innocent fool is protected by his goodness to the end.
What the book holds is a household: aunts and an uncle, a cousin, four courtships, a valet, a chef and a butler, a debt, a magazine and a grievance against the income tax. It holds them together and lets none of them hurt. The book has been read for ninety-two years and is reread for the pleasure of its execution, and on return it yields that pleasure more than a meaning. It perfects a manner. That is the measure of what it achieves, and of where it stops.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds very little idle. The book is a farce of four interlocked troubles, and each is wired to the others: Gussie Fink-Nottle cannot propose to Madeline Bassett; Angela has broken with Tuppy Glossop over whether the thing that menaced her at Cannes was a shark or, in Tuppy’s view, a flatfish; Aunt Dahlia has lost money at baccarat and must wheedle a cheque for her paper out of Tom Travers; and Anatole, whose cooking keeps Tom sweet, gives notice when Bertie’s advice sends every plate back full. Remove any thread and the machine stops. The gin in Gussie’s orange juice is planted, doubled and paid off. Held below the top because the necessity is that of clockwork: the parts are required by the mechanism rather than by anything the work must say, and Bertie’s digressions, though they are the voice, are permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What the book brings into the open is real and slight beside its making. It discloses, by inversion, the relation of master and servant: the idle young gentleman who believes himself in charge, and the man he employs, who does the thinking and is never once shown from the inside. It shows a class whose troubles are aunts, engagements and chefs, and lets that triviality be seen for what it is without ever saying so. It shows how a stock of half-remembered quotation, school slang and the clubman’s phrases can carry a mind that is kind, loyal and almost entirely unreflective. But the world is sealed against harm by design: no one is hurt and nothing costs. The disclosure is of a manner and a mood, the lower kind, and the book declines the meaning it could reach.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The axis is indifferent to the kind of elevation, and comic transport counts. The prize-giving at Market Snodsbury, at which a drunk and terrified Gussie addresses the assembled school, accuses a boy of cheating at the scripture-knowledge prize and abuses the headmaster’s guests, is among the summits of comic writing in English, and it rises steadily over several pages rather than in a single stroke. The sentences rise often and at small scale: the simile, the transferred epithet, the mangled tag, each timed to a beat. What holds the axis in the middle sevens is the register’s ceiling. There is no beauty that is not also a joke, no terror and no grandeur; the book never reaches the kind of height that changes a reader’s footing, and does not try to. The heights are frequent, real, and of one altitude.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked. The clever servant who runs the household’s intrigues and rescues the foolish young master, the servus callidus of Plautus and Terence and the valet of Molière and Beaumarchais, is the load-bearing structure of the plot, and here it is turned to full use: Bertie decides that Jeeves has lost his grip and takes the management of everyone’s affairs upon himself; his schemes fail in sequence; and Jeeves restores order by a stroke that leaves every couple united in indignation against Bertie, the wise servant’s victory paid for in the master’s dignity. Bertie is a version of the innocent fool, protected by his own goodness; the aunts are an ogre pattern softened to farce. Held below the bar because the myth stays inside the genre’s machinery and opens onto nothing larger than the comedy’s world.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The great swerve of the Wooster books, a first-person narration by the fool that turned a stock comic servant plot into a sustained voice, was made in the stories of 1917 to 1930, not here. This novel takes a proven instrument and extends it to the length of a novel, with more threads and a larger cast than the stories carry, and its handling of four interlocking plots at once is a real advance on them. But the stake is small. The form, the country-house farce and the musical-comedy plot Wodehouse knew from his years writing lyrics and books for the stage, is inherited; the voice was already made; and the book wagers nothing it had not won before. It is a deviation within a tradition its author had himself already turned.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Change the form and the book stops being able to say most of what it says. Its comedy lives in the gap between Bertie’s account and what the reader sees: Bertie reports his own plans as masterstrokes, records Jeeves’s reserve without understanding it, and tells the story of his own defeat without grasping that it is one. Told in the third person, or by Jeeves, the gap closes and the joke goes. Jeeves is kept outside throughout, never shown from within, and his opacity is the condition of the ending, which only works because neither Bertie nor the reader has been let into the plan. The instrument is exact. Held at its figure because what the form knows is chiefly comic knowledge: it carries precisely what it carries, and that is narrow.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The book is reread, and by many readers often; the evidence of ninety years of rereading is real. What it yields on return is mostly the pleasure of execution: the sentences, the timing, the way a thing planted early goes off later. That is formal depth, and it counts. Semantic depth is limited. Criticism has returned to Wodehouse chiefly on two questions, the Edwardian idyll and its relation to the England of the 1930s, as in Orwell’s defence of 1945, and the style itself; neither has found in this book a meaning that keeps opening. A reader can know it almost entirely after three readings and still enjoy the fourth. That is a different thing from a well without a bottom.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the novel in English in the 1930s, and comic fiction within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book is perhaps the fullest realisation of a comic manner that is Wodehouse’s own, and it consolidated the Jeeves and Wooster form at the length of a novel; but it did not reorganise the possibilities of fiction in English, whose turns in that decade were made by Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner, and in comedy by Waugh. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Wooster voice became the model for a long line of English comic first-person prose; the pairing of Jeeves and Wooster was adapted for television, in the Granada series of 1990 to 1993, and for the stage; and Jeeves’s name passed into the language for the indispensable servant. That reach is broad, but it belongs to the series and the manner more than to this book, and it is reach in comedy, not in the novel’s capacity.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over ninety-two years. The text of 1934 survives whole, with no question of recension, and has been continuously in print, read, translated and adapted since publication. Its presence is wide, and wide among ordinary readers rather than mainly in the academy, which is a strength. Two charges hold it at the bottom of the figure usual for its span. Its presence is partly the presence of the series and the name, of which this book is one of the most read but not the only bearer, and fame is given nothing here. And its surface is period, spats, clubs, aunts and a valet; but it was already a fantasy of a vanished Edwardian world when it was written, and it has outlived that world without loss, which is evidence of survival rather than against it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The making is the book’s chief strength. Its command of the medium at the level of the sentence is near the top of English comic prose: the simile that is exact and absurd at once, the slang that is always precise, the mangled quotation whose half-memory is itself characterisation, the paragraph timed so that the joke lands on its last words. The construction matches it: four plots run at once and are brought down together, the orange juice is planted and doubled before it is paid off, and the prize-giving is built over pages with an escalation that never slackens. The making sits level with the best of the posted literature below the summit. Held short of the top because the command, though complete, is command of a narrow register: the prose never has to carry grief, landscape or argument, and the highest marks ask for making that bears more weight.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the newts and the baccarat debt, or the scripture-knowledge prize and the chef’s notice. One physics governs them, and the whole, without a lapse: this is a world in which nothing can really be harmed, every engagement can be broken and restored by teatime, and every crisis is answered by a contrivance. The registers obey the same law, from Bertie’s slang to Jeeves’s Latinate deference. The law never breaks. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range the law has to cover is small: it holds across a country house and a school hall, in one tone. The coherence is complete and the achievement is bounded by what it is asked to cohere.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is the size of the world the book chooses. The orders it holds are present and integrated in the plot: the family, in aunts, an uncle, a cousin and the marriage of the Traverses; courtship, four times over; labour in its comic form, the valet, the chef, the butler Seppings, and a household’s dependence on Anatole; money, in the baccarat debt, the cost of running a magazine and Tom Travers’s grievance against the income tax; the school and the parish, in the prize-giving and the scripture prize; and a parody of the sentimental sublime in Madeline Bassett’s fancies. Consciousness is present only as comedy; the state, history and the sacred barely. A small form, honestly held: the figure describes the form, and it clears the floor of 6.0.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, and The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.0. A text of 1934 that survives whole and has been read continuously and widely for ninety-two years, its period surface already a fantasy when written; a comic prose commanded at the level of the sentence, with four plots run at once and the orange juice planted, doubled and paid off; and a farce in which nothing is idle, told in the only form that keeps the joke, the fool’s own account.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: a country house, four courtships, a school hall and a household’s money, with the state, history and the sacred barely present. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 7.0: a disclosure of a manner and a mood, the inverted relation of master and servant in a world sealed against harm; then The Swerve at 7.2, a proven instrument extended to the length of a novel on a small stake, and The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 7.4, a yield chiefly of execution and a reach that belongs to the series and the manner more than to this book.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, Pressure on Tradition at 7.4, The Swerve at 7.2 and The Unconcealment at 7.0 each fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.0, The Swerve, 7.2, The Bottomless Well, 7.4, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, first published in London by Herbert Jenkins in 1934, and in the United States the same year as Brinkley Manor: the second full-length Jeeves novel, after Thank You, Jeeves earlier the same year. It is scored as the novel of 1934 in Wodehouse’s English, narrated throughout in the first person by Bertie Wooster. The Jeeves stories collected from 1919 and the earlier novel are cited as context for the book’s swerve and reach and are neither credited nor charged to it; the television and stage adaptations are named as evidence of reach only. No text of the book was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Wodehouse’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the title phrase, Bertie’s assent. Facts that could not be verified, among them the American publisher, the serialisation before book publication and its dates, the chapter and word counts, the wording and order of the opening pages, the exact phrasing of Madeline Bassett’s fancies, the order of the middle chapters, and the particular acknowledgements of Wodehouse by later writers, are not given. Citations are by episode.