A Comparison of Walter R. Brooks and P. G. Wodehouse by Peter V. Tamas
WARNING: These articles are written with the assumption that the reader has already read the story in question. Don’t read this article if you want any surprises to be preserved for you.
Link to Friends of Freddy Book Club Meeting – May 24
Like Walter R. Brooks, P.G. Wodehouse’s second most well-known literary accomplishment was a humorous series of novels with a pig in it.
Instead of focusing on talking animals, Wodehouse (pronounced Wood-house) poked fun at the rich. Accordingly, Wodehouse’s humor was much less gentle than Walter’s. One of Wodehouse’s detractors described his work as “relentless flippancy.” This example will remind most of us of a particularly bad day: “He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
Given that these two authors are unusually effective at composing humorous descriptions, some comparison is inevitable. I focus on their aunts and a butler genre, specifically:
-Freddy and Mr. Camphor
-Freddy Goes Camping
-Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
I could not help but wonder if Walter took some inspiration from Wodehouse. At one point, I turned to Michael Cart, who told me that Walter did not have a single Wodehouse in his library. I now believe that the inspiration was on the level of having succeeded with baseball, football and various things that fly, Walter thought he might as well try aunts and a butler.
P. G. Wodehouse was born in 1881, five years before Walter. He wrote about 90 novels. The first was published in 1902. He was working on a novel when he died in 1975 at the age of 93. Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen was his last completed novel.
Wodehouse wrote several series of novels, which generally poked fun at the rich. His most famous characters are Bertrand “Bertie” Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, usually narrated by Bertie. One of Wodehouse’s most famous lines resulted from an initial setback to Jeeves’ attempts to influence Bertie’s taste in clothing: “I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.” Bertie described another incident this way: “Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.”
Typically, Bertie is pressured into helping with several complicated schemes, which, of course, backfire. Then Jeeves comes up with a brilliant solution, which also fails due to poor execution and bad luck. Here is a typical summation from Bertie: “As Jeeves said later the whole situation resembled some great moment in a Greek tragedy, where somebody is stepping high, wide and handsome, quite unconscious that all the while Nemesis is at his heels.”
Ultimately, Jeeves provides the key to the solution to whatever problem Bertie finds himself in. As a result, Bertie’s friends and relatives are very impressed with Jeeves’ intelligence. It was a fan’s homage that an early web search engine, ask.com, was originally called Ask Jeeves. As a point of reference, Google, the most famous search engine, was founded in 1998 while Ask Jeeves was founded two years earlier in 1996.
While Bertie is not as well-read as his valet, he clearly has some education. Bertie likes to make allusions to Shakespeare in particular. For example: “She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.”
While Bertie sometimes overestimates himself, he is not preposterously misinformed about his limitations. He makes self-deprecating remarks about his own intelligence. However, you get the feeling that the situation is worse than Bertie realizes, even at his most modest. Certainly, while Bertie often makes the safe bet of attributing clichés to Shakespeare, more often that not he makes the relatively improbable mistake of choosing clichés Shakespeare did not actually invent.
Some of Bertie’s comments betray a garbled sense of logic: “You can’t expect a dog to pass up a policeman on a bicycle. It isn’t human nature.”
Bertie has redeeming characteristics, and there are a few women who are very interested in him. Bertie is unfailingly polite and is often unconvincing when he tries to reject their advances. Once when Bertie inadvertently became engaged, we get one of his excellent descriptions of Jeeves: “As always when I tell him I’m engaged to be married, he betrayed no emotion, continuing to look as if he had been stuffed by a good taxidermist.”
Bertie will sometimes try to seem as if he knows more than he really does. A women to whom Bertie was once engaged sees him buying a gift for Jeeves, a book by the famously challenging 17th century philosopher Spinoza. She asks him if he likes Spinoza, and he says: “Oh, rather. When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.” She concludes that Bertie has, in fact, grown as a result of their relationship. She misinterprets his friendliness, dumps her fiancee and moves forward with plans to marry Bertie. The adventure begins.
An important difference between Brooks and Wodehouse’s handling of these characters is Mr. Camphor’s intelligence. When he we first meet Mr. Camphor, he is spending the summer consulting the government on an important project. Other than a momentary lapse when he believed the father of “the dirty faced boy” rather than Freddy, Jimson Camphor is no fool. Bertie Wooster, on the other hand, might very well be a fool.
Walter and Wodehouse both make fun of their characters’ poor behavior. Wodehouse famously described one unsavory character appearance being “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.”
Walter, on the other hand, is also good at making fun of people’s weaknesses. However, he is much gentler and kinder.
Uncle Wesley was no fool and he saw that the joke was on him. He was pretty grumpy about it at first, but when Freddy had assured him that they wouldn’t play jokes on him if they didn’t like him, and when Jinx had slapped him on the back and called him “Wes, old pal,” he stopped sulking.
We meet Jeeves’ counterpart in Freddy and Mr. Camphor. We really do not know if Bannister, Mr. Camphor’s butler, is as intelligent as Jeeves, because Mr. Camphor does not rely on Bannister to solve his problems. (This burden falls, of course, on Freddy and his friends.) But in keeping with the theme of an intellectual valet, Camphor and Bannister compare proverbs. When we first meet Bannister, he accidentally steps on Jinx’s tail. A few minutes later, Jimson Camphor asks Bannister:
That brings up another proverb: curiosity killed the cat. What do you say to that, Bannister?
“I don’t believe it, sir. This cat, if I may say so, is almost too much alive.”
“I’m sorry I clawed you,” said Jinx. “But when you stepped on my tail—”
“Pray don’t mention it, sir,” said Bannister. “I should no doubt have clawed you if you’d done the same thing to me.”
Further, Bannister realizes that Freddy was unjustly accused by the Winches before Mr. Camphor does.
Incidentally, Jeeves is not a butler, he is a valet. A butler is actually a managerial position while a valet specializes in taking care of one gentleman. Strictly speaking, it seems unlikely that Bannister has a butler’s managerial responsibilities, he did not seem to have any authority over the other staff. On the other hand, Bannister did have an important role in the household, which is to add dignity.
Freddy described this to Mrs. Wiggins: “He’s just being a good butler. He explained it to me once. A good butler has to be dignified and formal for everybody in the house. That’s what he’s hired for—to keep everything very high class and ceremonious. That’s the advantage of having a lot of money like Mr. Camphor: if you don’t want to bother about being dignified, you can hire somebody to be dignified for you.”
Already in Freddy and Mr. Camphor, we get some indications that aunts will eventually be making their appearance. When we first meet Bannister and he realizes that Freddy and his friends are animals: “He gave a sharp bark of surprise. ‘Oh my aunt– pigs!’”
Later in the same book, Freddy asks Breckenridge the Eagle about his aunt in a line that if it weren’t from Walter I’d think was an imitation of Wodehouse: “She is indeed completely her old self again. Quite capable, as she says in her quaint way, of tearing a rabbit with the best of them.”
Whenever Wodehouse’s readers meet Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia, she is involving him in one of her schemes. These range from acts of charity, such as supporting a local school, to plots make her husband, Tom Travers, more willing to fund the the costs of the magazine she owns. These schemes often backfire. In one memorable case, she explained to Bertie: I ought to have known that a clergyman was bound to have scruples, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.
Aunt Dahlia will scold Bertie when he does not go along with her schemes. “Where’s your pride? Have you forgotten your illustrious ancestors? There was a Wooster at the time of the Crusades who would have won the Battle of Joppa single-handed, if he hadn’t fallen off his horse.”
When Bertie tried to get his friend to speak at a school event instead of him, Aunt Dahlia Travers fired off a series of telegrams: Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot nephew counts as murder. Consider you treacherous worm. I hope you get run over by an omnibus. Love. Travers.
Here’s the thing: this is the aunt that likes Bertie. His Aunt Agatha is another matter. Bertie describes Aunt Agatha this way: tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert. Another description is: Aunt Agatha is like an elephant—not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets.
In Joy in the Morning, written while Wodehouse was detained by the Nazis, there is a portrait of Aunt Agatha which make Bertie and his rich uncle a bit uncomfortable.
Even Jeeves remarks about Aunt Agatha, saying this about the headmistress of a girls’ school: “In some ways she reminded me of Mr Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, with the same cool stare and the same obvious unwillingness to put up with any nonsense.” Jeeves once remarked to Bertie: “I am inclined to doubt whether the gentleman exists who could be master in a home that contained her ladyship, sir.”
Jimson Camphor’s aunts appear in Camping. When Freddy meets Jimson Camphor’s aunt, she says to her nephew:
Sorry, sorry? What good does that do? That’s what you always say. Why don’t you think a little beforehand?
Later, Jimson Camphor apologies to the animals:
I know I ought to have stood up for you better. After all it is my house.
Freddy grinned. “Not anymore, it isn’t”
The animals encourage Jimson to stand up to his aunt. When Aunt Minerva realizes that she is eating lunch with a pig and a cow:
Jimson! What are these creatures doing here? Now clear them out! I spoke to you once about them! I’ve never eaten with pigs, and I’m not going to now.
“Better late then never, eh, Bannister?” Said Mr. Camphor and giggle faintly into his soup spoon.
“As you say, sir,” the butler replied. “There’s no time like the present.”
Miss Minerva turned and stamped out of the room.
Bertie tries to appease his aunts. In Camping, the animals encourage JC to handle his aunts in a constructive way.
With Aunt Minerva, they teach Jimson that sometimes complements are necessary to get someone to change their behavior. Freddy complements her soup. She responds:
The first word of praise for my cooking that I’ve ever heard in this house and it had to come from a pig!
As Mrs Wiggins tells Jimson:
Well, good land, it wouldn’t hurt you to pay her a compliment now and then. If you praised her cooking she might improve it.
Later, even Mr. Bean gets into the act with a wink. By the end of Camping, he is cooking with Aunt Minerva.
While Jimson and Berties each have two aunts, Walter diverges from Wodehouse model with their aunts’ personalities. While Bertie’s aunts are variations on the same theme, Aunt Elmira is an entirely different type of unpleasent personality. She is one of those people who simply cannot be happy and makes everyone about her depressed. As Jimson puts it: “Depressed! Ha!—just plain squashed. All day long she sits in that chair. You think of something nice to do, and then you look out the window and see her. It’s as if a black cloud came over the sun. It’s as if you had a stomach ache that you’d forgotten about, and then it starts up again. Nothing seems like fun, and the more you look at her, the more you wonder why you don’t just go up and lock yourself in your room and set fire to the house.”
In the end , the animals outdo her in being unhappy. Being unhappy that she is not the unhappiest, she leaves to go live in a swamp.
In Camping, the characters grow by learning to handle difficult people. The animals also accept others as they are. As they accept Wesley, even when Jinx pokes fun at him, they learn to accept that Aunt Elmira will always be unhappy.
In contrast, Bertrand Wooster Bertie does not grow. Instead: he leaves the country to avoid his aunts.
In Bertie’s last speech in his last appearance in a Wodehouse novel he says:
…We are tranquil. And I’ll tell you why. There are no aunts here. And in particular we are three thousand miles from Mrs Dahlia Travers.
In contrast, Jimson Camphor’s aunts’ bad behavior is managed. In fact, once Aunt Minerva’s behavior improves, Walter begins to refer to her as Miss Minerva.
It is Miss Minerva that notices that the world has improved.
Miss Minerva looked out across the lake, and then up at the sky. “Dear me,” she said, “I do believe the sun is going to come out.” “It does seem brighter,” said Mr. Camphor, “but the clouds are just as heavy.” “What’s brighter is that Miss Elmira’s gone,” Freddy said.
Notes
Gruntled: Code of the Woosters
Purple socks: The Inimitable Jeeves
Some great moment in a Greek tragedy: Code of the Woosters
Ask Jeeves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Like Lady MacBeth: Joy in the Morning
Dog – policeman: Code of the Woosters
Stuffed by a good taxidermist: Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
Nature had intended: Code of the Woosters
Umbly, umbly: Freddy and Mr. Camphor
Ten minutes and practically his entire vocabulary: Freddy Goes Camping
Proverbs, Oh my aunt, tearing a rabbit: Freddy and Mr. Camphor
Scruples, Illustrious ancestors: Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
Legal advice: Right Ho, Jeeves
Vulture in the Gobi desert: Much Obliged, Jeeves
Well-bred vulture, master in a home that contained her ladyship: Joy in the Morning
Jimson Camphor’s aunts: Freddy Goes Camping
Obligatory by-line (written in the third person as if this had been edited):
Peter Tamas has a background in Economics and Finance which led to working with financial trading systems, a career with its share of angst, gnashing of teeth and humorous absurdity. It is unclear if he genuinely believes there is an “aunts and a butler genre”. He would like to leave the last word of this article to Bannister: “There is no friend like a good book.”