A Wodehouse a Week #61: The Mating Season

Bertie Wooster is, as per usual, in a spot of trouble:

It was the being without advisers that made the situation so bleak. On these occasions when Fate, having biffed you in the eye, proceeds to kick you in the pants, you want to gather the boys about you and thresh things out, and there aren't any boys to gather. Jeeves was in London, Catsmeat in Basingstoke. It made me feel like a Prime Minister who starts to call an important Cabinet meeting and finds that the Home Secretary and the Lord President of the Council, have nipped over to Paris and the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and the rest of the gang are at the dog-races.

True, that could sum up a number of Bertie and Jeeves adventures, but it suits The Mating Season (1949) to a T, which is just as well, because it is from The Mating Season. Appropriate that, what?

Oh yes: Bertie's in the soup again, and a fine mulligatawny it is too—this is one of the sharpest and funniest of the Bertie Wooster books, from the golden immediate Post War-age of Wodehouse, the same era that brought us the sublime Joy in the Morning. It, too, is a Dickens of a Wodehouse (or is that a Wodehouse of a...no, sorry, no it isn't). Bertie's set off to pastoral Deverill Hall, Hampshire, with a smile on his lips but sadly minus Jeeves (for the moment). Even more fearsome, Deverill is inhabited by a cadre of aunts (luckily, not Bertie's) intent on splitting up the much-delayed wedding of newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett (she who thinks the stars are God's daisy chain). Sadly, Gussie's in the clink: arrested for a tipsy tottle through the fountains at Trafalgar Square, he's unable to make it to Deverill. Bertie to the rescue: he will pose as Gussie to impress all concerned. Simple enough, eh?

Not so fast. Enter pal o' Bertie and Gussie's, "Catsmeat" Potter-Pirbright, posing as Bertie/Gussie's servant. Why couldn't Jeeves come along? Because Jeeves's uncle Charlie is butler at Deverill, and one glance at nephew Jeeves would spill the beans that "Gussie" is not who he says he is. Fair enough, what? Well, then, to confuse things further, enter the real Gussie Fink-Nottle, released from jail early, posing as Bertie Wooster, and making even more of a mess of it than Bertie would. And the fake Bertie is of course accompanied by the real Jeeves, cool as a cucumber even though the rest of us need a scorecard to keep track of which guest is whom.

A sudden blinding light flashed upon me.

'You means it was gussie to whom Uncle Charlie was referring when he said that Mr Wooster has punched the time-clock? I'm here saying I'm Gussie, and now Gussie has blown in, saying he's me?'

'Precisely, sir. It is a curious and perhaps somewhat complex situation that has been precipitated—'

'You're telling me, Jeeves!'

Only the fact that by doing so I should have upset the tray prevented me from turning my face to the wall. When Esmond Haddock in our exchanges over the port had spoken of the time that try men's souls, he really hadn't a notion of what the times that try men's souls can really be, if they spit on their hands and get right down to it. OI levered up a forkful of kipper and passed it absently over the larynx, endeavoring to adjust the faculties to a set-up which even the most intrepid would have had to admit was a honey.

Wodehouse is firing on all pistons in The Mating Season, which is not only a doozy of a plot but also features some of his funniest dialogue and narrative. As a die-hard PGW fan, I tend to look at his entire oeuvre as the bee's knees, but so much of the golden stuff falls right after the war that it can't be a coincidence: whatever was in the Long Island water after Plum moved to America had to be inspiring his writing. The action is fast but not frenzied, the cast varied but not overwhelming, and Wodehouse shows his mastery of keeping his audience turning the pages with a funny, spanner-in-the-works cliffhanger revelation at the end of most chapters as well as a driving plot that follows reverse bell-curve that is the perfect definition of comedy. In fact, Bertie even comments on the slope of his fortunes in nearly the dead center of the novel:

And as the days went by, these unsettled outlooks because more unsettled, those V-shaped depressions even V-er. It was on a Friday that I had clocked in at Deverill Hall. By the morning of Tuesday I could no longer conceal it from myself that I was losing the old pep and that, unless the clouds changed their act and started dishing out at an early date a considerably more substantial slab of silver lining that they were coming across with at the moment, I should soon be definitely down among the wines and spirits.

One cause of the Btfsplkesque little dark cloud hovering over Bertie's head is the threat that soon he will have to recite poetry at the local village fete. Not merely any poetry, but the soppy Christopher Robin poems of A. A. Milne. This jab can't be coincidence: Milne was one of Wodehouse's most outspoken critics during WWII, painting Wodehouse as a traitor for his ill-advised but well-intentioned radio broadcasts while a prisoner of war. (Read "Why A.A. had it in for P.G." for a full examination of the two writers' connection and spats). Wodehouse doesn't quote from any Milne in the book, so I will:

Oh Timothy Tim
Has ten pink toes
And ten pink toes
Has Timothy Tim
They go with him
Wherever he goes
And wherever he goes
They go with him.

'How wet," Bertie might exclaim, and even I, a little stuffed bull of six, would agree. (I much prefer Edward Lear.) To Bertie, who'd been expecting to take part in a music-hall-style comedy review featuring bearded Irishmen, of course it's something that Jeeves must get him out of. Catsmeat's no help, of course:

I was sorry for the unhappy one blister, of course, but it piqued me somewhat that he seemed to consider that he was the only one who had any troubles.

'Well, I've got to recite Christopher Robin poems.'

'Pah!' he said. 'It might have been Winnie the Pooh.'

Well, there was that, of course.

It's all complicated (of course) by Bertie's Aunt Agatha announcing her arrival at the manor in one chapter, threatening to blow the elaborate Bertie/Gussie ruse sky high, and no sooner is that solved and swept away under the rug than Madeline Bassett, Gussie's fianc#233;, announces the same thing. Bertie and Co. can't catch a break, and the action speed from complication to complication like a roller coaster, except with more tea and scone breaks. Then Gussie falls in love with another girl at Deverill. Then Catsmeat falls in love with Uncle Charlie's daughter. Jeeves to the rescue, of course—was there ever any doubt? But the fun's as much in the journey and its hills and valleys as it is in the destination, and Wodehouse gives us plenty of lovely scenery to admire along the way:

The door opened, revealing some sixteen stone of butler.

'Good evening, sir,' said this substantial specimen. "Mr Wooster?'

'Fink-Nottle,' I said hastily, to correct this impression.

As a matter of fact, it was all I could do to speak at all, for the sudden impact of Charlie Silversmith had removed the breath almost totally. He took me right back to the days when I was starting out as a flaneur and man about town and used to tremble beneath butlers' eyes and generally feel very young and bulbous.

Older now and tougher, I am able to take most of these fauna in my stride. When they open front doors to me, I shoot my cuffs nonchalantly. 'Aha, there, butler,' I say. 'How's tricks?' But Jeeves's Uncle Charlie was something special. He looked like one of those steel engraving s of nineteenth-century statesmen. He had a large, bald head and pale, protruding gooseberry eyes, resting on mine, heightened the Dark Tower feeling considerably. The thought crossed my mind that if something like this had popped out at Childe Roland, he would have clapped spurs to his charger and been off like a jack-rabbit.

...and...

Unlike her sister Muriel, who had resembled a Criterion barmaid of the old school, Poppy Kegley-Bassington was long and dark and supple, with a sinuous figure suggestive of a snake with hips; one of those girls who can do rhythmic dances at the drop of a hat and can be dissuaded from doing them only with a meat-axe.

Not to mention...

...I subjected Catsmeat to a glance. I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover—the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.

But finally, this is the novel that really cements my opinion of Bertie Wooster as a hero, not a patsy. I've mentioned here before that I take offense when critics refer to Bertie as a twit or as brainless. Pshaw, I say, or to quote Nero Wolfe, pfui. Bertie has plenty of grey matter and he's often quite sharp on the uptake. Wodehouse simply spins his world to ensure the cards are stacked against Bertie, or that his friends or relations wind up complicating his plans, and Bertie's the one who winds up with egg on his face. But his intentions are clear and bright, and his plans, while complicated, have a chance of succeeding, if only the omniscient PGW weren't spinning him round like a gramophone record, or, as Jeeves might observe: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport." I would certainly argue that his plans are solid if complicated, and more important, his heart is always in the right place—altho' he's occasionally blackmailed into it, Bertie is always gung-ho to help out a mate and dive into a complicated scenario involving mistaken identities and pushing small children into rivers if it helps a Drones Club comrade seal the marriage deal. Bertie observes:

...I found myself musing, as I have often had occasion to do, on the callous way in which Nature refuses to chip in and do its bit when the human heart is in the soup.

Nature refusing to help out a pal, maybe. Bertie refusing? Never. Well, aside from a few feeble protests, maybe. But the Wooster of The Mating Season is a brave and mature Bertie. How so? Why, at the end of the novel, at the point where he and Jeeves often scurry away to avoid a complicated situation or an angry aunt, Bertie actually holds his ground to stay and face the music (i.e., the ferocious Aunt Agatha):

'...I understand there is an excellent milk-train at two-fifty-four. Her ladyship is expressing a desire to see you.'

It would be deceiving my public to say that for an instant I did not quail. I quailed, as a matter of fact, like billy-o. And then, suddenly, it was as if strength had descended upon me.

'Jeeves,' I said, 'this is grave news, but it comes at a moment when I am well-fitted to receive it. I have just witnessed Esmond Haddock pound the stuffing out of five aunts, and I feel that after an exhibition like that it would ill beseem a Wooster to curl up before a single aunt. I feel strong and resolute, Jeeves. I shall now go downstairs and pull and Esmond haddock on Aunt Agatha. And if things look like becoming too sticky, I can always borrow that cosh of yours, what?'

I squared the shoulders and strode to the door, like Childe Roland about to fight the paynim.

Despite being one of Wodehouse's finest novels, it isn't currently available in paperback (altho' you can probably find it at used bookstores or online in paper). Or, click on the Amazon link to the right and pick yourself up a new hardcover in the Overlook Wodehouse series. It's all good. Believe me, with a Wodehouse this funderful, it doesn't matter which edition you get: just pick it up and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

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