The Code of the Woosters

P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938) is the author’s third full-length novel featuring Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves. Beginning in 1916, Wodehouse published 35 short stories and 11 novels about the duo, and this novel is essentially a sequel to his second Jeeves novel, Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), which features some of the same secondary characters and whose action it immediately follows. Foremost among these characters is the socially hapless “newt-fancier” Gussie Fink-Nottle, whose first, awkward attempts to woo Madeline Bassett were central to the earlier novel. The Code of the Woosters opens the morning after Wooster’s small bachelor party for Gussie, where Wooster toasted his friend’s happiness via drunken excess born of intense relief. In the earlier novel, Wooster agreed to act as a go-between for the shy Gussie, but unfortunately the impressionable Madeline mistook his “softening up” for a personal declaration of love. As occurs often in the Jeeves stories, Wooster found himself threatened with an unwanted engagement but was far too chivalrous and soft-hearted to correct the young lady’s “unfortunate construction.” By the novel’s end, with Jeeves’s help, everything was neatly resolved.

Throughout his Jeeves stories, including The Code of the Woosters, Wodehouse reprised many farcical elements, verbal witticisms, and plot threads, like variations on a theme. Some of the similarities between it and Right Ho, Jeeves include Wooster’s overnight stay at a big country house (Totleigh Towers and, in the former novel, Brinkley Court) at the behest of friends or relatives (like Aunt Dahlia and Gussie Funk-Nottle); the romantic ups and downs of young couples (including Gussie and Madeline) whose betrothals teeter on the brink of disaster; attempts to squeeze money out of a miserly partner (like Aunt Dahlia’s attempts to extort money for her magazine from her miserly husband, Tom); the threatened loss of a dear servant (like Anatole, Dahlia’s beloved French chef); and Jeeves’s attempts to help someone (as to cure Gussie of his shyness), which, through no fault of his own, always misfire.

In Right Ho, Jeeves, the butler advises Gussie to disguise himself as the devil Mephistopheles for a masquerade ball, hoping that it will “embolden” him enough to woo Madeline; later, to lend Gussie fortitude to give an awards ceremony speech (which he dreads), Jeeves spikes Gussie’s orange juice with gin. In both cases, disaster follows. However, in this novel, Gussie’s notebook of insults takes Jeeves’s advice to a catastrophic new level. In the Jeeves stories, when Wodehouse recycles an idea, he often tightens the screws to intensify the dramatic (and comedic) results.

Likewise, in this novel, Wooster again faces the dismal prospect of marrying Madeline—and perhaps even losing Jeeves—unless Gussie can pull himself out of the soup. Again, the novel raises the stakes from the earlier novel, since Madeline seems even more receptive than before to a love match with Wooster: No longer resigned that her feelings for him will never match the “flamelike passion” she felt for Gussie, she gushes, “With you beside me, I shall be able in time to exorcize Augustus’s spell” (183).

In the beginning of the novel, Wooster acknowledges that some catching-up is in order for those unacquainted with the previous novel: “If I take it for granted that my public knows all about Gussie Fink-Nottle and just breeze ahead, those publicans who weren’t hanging on my lips the first time are apt to be fogged” (8). Hence, he resolves to sum up the “salient facts as briefly as possible” (8). The joke here is that his windup for the recap goes on and on—like Hamlet’s Polonius, forever promising (and failing) to be “brief.” Although Wodehouse knows that some readers will require catching up, since the previous novel appeared four years earlier, Wooster’s loquacious dilution of the salient with the tangential adds an extra layer of humor. His contrast with the reserved, laconic valet Jeeves couldn’t be greater. If, as the adage goes, “still waters run deep,” then shallow waters, like Wooster, run on like a babbling brook.