At the time I couldn’t locate that particular title. So I bought a copy of Psmith in the City instead. It was Wodehouse’s twelfth novel, published in 1910 and I loved it. Last spring I got around to reading another of Wodehouse’s 71 novels – Love Among the Chickens. Not the original 1906 version, but the 1921 rewrite, which everyone claims is an improvement on the original. I loved it, too.
At the end of October, with the November 3rd election only a week away, I decided to return to Wodehouse, and I found a copy of Joy in the Morning. I also found that it had a great deal more to recommend it besides my sister. James Wood called it “one of the funniest of the Jeeves and Wooster novels.” And Robert McCrum ranked it no. 66 among the 100 Greatest Novels. “A late-season masterpiece, Joy in the Morning is both an elegy and an encore.”
But aside from the delights of the text itself, Joy in the Morning has a somewhat miraculous history. In his essay “In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse,” George Orwell tells us:
When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P.G. Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book."(1)
That was in May 1940. Wodehouse was 58 and had been working on Joy in the Morning, but in June he was arrested by the Germans as a “enemy alien” and sent to detainment in Upper Silesia. He left the manuscript of his unfinished novel with his wife.
In a radio broadcast from Berlin, later transcribed for the Saturday Evening Post, Wodehouse said:
There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side.
In the habit of writing, while in detention Wodehouse wrote the novel Money in the Bank and, after his release by the Germans in 1943, he returned to his unfinished manuscript. Unfortunately, the Germans had already put Wodehouse to some use by persuading him to make radio broadcasts from Berlin that were interpreted by some British commentators as not just poking fun at the British but downright treasonous. The fact that Wodehouse was utterly innocent of anything other than being a boob has been established in the years since. “Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster,” according to one interviewer.
But in 1943 Wodehouse, thoroughly embarrassed, sought refuge in the only place where the extreme limitations of his political sense didn’t matter – his writing. When he had finished the novel, he submitted it to his American publisher first, who published it in 1946. A British edition was published the following year.
Wodehouse and his wife departed Europe for the U.S. in 1947. He had lived there before, and he had a long-standing relationship with American publishers and magazine editors. He took up residence for what turned out to be the rest of his life in a house on Long Island.
One of Bertie Wooster's comic flaws is how he recalls his impeccable education in bits and pieces. He invariably manages to garble every bit of wisdom or poetry imparted to him by his masters so that it comes out as hilarious nonsense. For instance, he opens chapter XXIX of Joy in the Morning with this retelling:
I don’t know if the name of Lot’s wife is familiar to you, and if you were told about her rather remarkable finish. I may not have got the facts right, but the story, as I heard it, was that she was advised not to look round at something or other or she would turn into a pillar of salt, so, naturally, imagining that they were pulling her leg, she looked round, and – ping – a pillar of salt.
That bit of a warning, “I may not have got the facts right,” only increases the comedy. This is perfect satire because it exposes the rock-bottom stupidity of an “educated class” as well as the uselessness of bothering to educate them in the first place.
The gags abound in Joy in the Morning. Bertie’s Uncle Percy tells him that a man he is meeting at a fancy dress ball will be dressed as Edward the Confessor:
“A bearded bozo, was he not, this Edward?” I asked.
“To the eyebrows,” said Uncle Percy. “Those were the days when the world was a solid mass of beavers. I shall keep my eye open for something that looks like a burst horsehair sofa.”
At the party, Uncle Percy sees the man in disguise,
“And I refuse to believe that Edward the Confessor really looked like that. Nobody presenting such an obscene appearance could possibly have held the throne of England for five minutes. Lynching parties would have been organized, knights sent out to cope with the nuisance with battleaxes.”
Wodehouse found the title of his book in Psalm 30, verse 5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” He closes the novel where he began, with tinkling contentedness:
It was as we [Bertie and Jeeves] were about half-way between Steeple Bumpleigh and the old metrop, that I mentioned that there was an expression on the tip of my tongue which seemed to me to sum up the nub of the recent proceedings.
“Or, rather, when I say an expression, I mean a saying. A wheeze. A gag. What I believe is called a saw. Something about Joy doing something.“
“Joy cometh in the morning, sir?”
“That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s dashed good,” I said.
(1) “In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse,” The Windmill, No. 2 [July] 1945.
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