Aunts, Comrades, Gentlemen . . . According to Hilaire Belloc, in the first serious critical appreciation to which Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was subjected, one of the most “intensely national” things about this profoundly yet idiosyncratically English novelist was that he had created “one more figure in that long gallery of living figures” who people English fiction. Belloc meant, specifically, Jeeves, the costar of Wodehouse's longest fictional saga. But, of course, Jeeves, the “gentleman's personal gentleman” or valet (emphatically not a butler), and Bertie Wooster, his employer, who imagines he is also his master, are a kind of binary star system, endlessly spinning around each other. In such a system, by the way, the brighter partner is officially defined as primary, and the dimmer as secondary, which confirms that “Jeeves and Wooster” gets things the right way round. Yet they are truly inseparable. Ring for Jeeves(1953), the only time Jeeves appeared without Wooster, is generally recognized as the least successful installment in the series.
Belloc's claim has been vindicated by the fact that in recent years Jeeves has joined the growing list of characters who, by popular demand, have been revived after their author's demise. The resuscitation of fictional characters is much in vogue now. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Lord Peter Wimsey have all received the treatment, as have Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy. So, it was perhaps inevitable that P. G. Wodehouse's literary legacy would be revisited in the same way. Two notable revivals of Jeeves and Wooster have recently been penned, one by Sebastian Faulks and another by Ben Schott. It would be easy to lock and load the lorgnettes at this, dismissing it as at best nerdy nostalgia or at worst crass commercialism. But many of our finest authors have borrowed other people's characters, and even other people's stories, for our entertainment (one thinks, for example, of G. Chaucer and W. Shakespeare, whose endeavors in this vein are far from negligible).
Ben Schott's Jeeves and the King of Clubs, written if not by commission then at least by permission of the Estate of P. G. Wodehouse, is set amid the gathering storm of World War II. Following the example of the Master himself, Schott assembles a familiar cast—not only Florence Craye, but also Madeline Bassett, along with Aunt Dahlia, an ample chorus of occasional Drones and, wonderfully, Roderick Spode, the leader of the Black Shorts, England's answer to the Fascists and the Nazis. Though by now ensconced in the House of Lords, where he goes under the pseudonym of the Earl of Sidcup, Spode still harbors vaulting ambitions as Duce of his still sublimely hapless, but now also mildly sinister, political movement. The Black Shorts, we learn, have provoked anxiety in high places on account of the suspiciously ample funding they enjoy for their floundering political activities. As the clouds of war pile up on the horizon like spent bread rolls in the corner of a dining room, Bertie is recruited by the intelligence services (of which Jeeves and his colleagues at the Junior Ganymede Club, it transpires, are officers and agents) to play a key role in an operation designed to crack Spode's code and uncover his mysterious backers.
The plot (of which I shall otherwise strive to reveal as little as possible) is unfailingly gripping and in the best sense ridiculous. As he aged, Plum (as Wodehouse's friends called him) frequently lamented the increasing difficulty he found in contriving strong new plots. With the low cunning of the successful author, he often got around this by recycling old ones. Occasionally, as with Much Obliged, Jeeves, which triumphantly marked his ninetieth birthday in 1971, he came up with something fresh. He would probably have traded a Peke for what we get in King of Clubs: Schott's plot hits the spot, time after time. Wodehouse could never have resisted the chain of circumstances that places Bertie at the counter of Spode's former lingerie emporium, Eulalie Soeurs, covering for the new proprietress (Spode's far more sympathetic niece) while she pops out on an errand. The ensuing dialogue between Bertie and an embarrassed husband in search of a present for his wife is a hilarious masterpiece of English understatement—though maybe “understatement” unduly exaggerates the directness and precision of this sequence of hesitant and unfinished sentences.
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