"That the work can march so easily, morally speaking, on an empty stomach; that it can achieve so many traditionally literary things without ever daring the scandal of meaning; that it can be bottomless--ungrounded, unmoored by reality--but threaten no abysses whatsoever, is completely fascinating, because it seems so fatly happy with what, for most of us, would be hardship and starvation--a cosmos of eternal and relentless frivolity."*
I was thinking the same thing when I took up Wodehouse’s first Blandings Castle novel, Something New (called Something Fresh in Britain), smiling all the way to the last pages of the penultimate (11th) chapter, when I came to a scene in which, to my surprise and delight, something like a philosophical statement appears. The novel’s hero, Ashe Marson, has triumphed and is looking for Joan Valentine, a woman with whom he’s been in undeclared love for most of the story:
Joan was nowhere to be seen. In none of the spots where she might have been expected to be at such a time was she to be found. Ashe had almost given up the search when, going to the back door and looking out as a last chance, he perceived her walking slowly on the gravel drive.
She greeted Ashe with a smile, but something was plainly troubling her. She did not speak for a moment and they walked side by side.
“What is it?” said Ashe at length. “What is the matter?”
She looked at him gravely.
“Gloom,” she said. “Despondency, Mr. Marson. A sort of flat feeling. Don’t you hate things happening?”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, this affair of Aline, for instance. It’s so big. It makes one feel as though the whole world had altered. I should like nothing to happen ever, and life just to jog peacefully along. That’s not the gospel I preached to you in Arundel Street, is it! I thought I was an advanced apostle of action; but I seem to have changed. I’m afraid I shall never be able to make clear what I do mean. I only know I feel as though I have suddenly grown old. These things are such milestones. Already I am beginning to look on the time before Aline behaved so sensationally as terribly remote. To-morrow it will be worse, and the day after that worse still. I can see that you don’t in the least understand what I mean.”
“Yes; I do—or I think I do. What it comes to, in a few words, is that somebody you were fond of has gone out of your life. Is that it?” Joan nodded.
“Yes—at least, that is partly it. I didn’t really know Aline particularly well, beyond having been at school with her, but you’re right. It’s not so much what has happened as what it represents that matters. This elopement has marked the end of a phase of my life. I think I have it now. My life has been such a series of jerks. I dash along—then something happens which stops that bit of my life with a jerk; and then I have to start over again—a new bit. I think I’m getting tired of jerks. I want something stodgy and continuous.
“I’m like one of the old bus horses that could go on forever if people got off without making them stop. It’s the having to get the bus moving again that wears one out. This little section of my life since we came here is over, and it is finished for good. I’ve got to start the bus going again on a new road and with a new set of passengers. I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one set of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?”
What Joan is complaining about, in a roundabout way, is that she has reached the end of a wonderful experience – one from which she has derived a message, but which she, as a woman frozen in Wodehouse’s eternally frivolous universe, can’t articulate. It is the message Robert Frost wrote at the end of his poem “Reluctance”:
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
But it’s that strange question she asks, “I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one set of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?” Joan is simply using a metaphor to help explain – especially to herself – how she feels, but suddenly she’s feeling sympathy for an old horse pulling a wagonload of people. She can manage the strenuous effort that one stretch of her life requires of her once she gets going, but it’s reaching the end of the stretch, the stopping and the having to start again that bothers her. And, as she makes clear to the reader, and hopefully to Ashe, it’s an existential bother. Joan is riven by the knowledge that something wonderful has ended and she can’t accept what would seem to be the inevitable outcome, which for her will mean a return to her life – her struggle – alone. Ashe senses this:
A sudden dryness invaded Ashe’s throat. He tried to speak, but found no words. Joan went on:
“Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It’s like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it’s about nothing—just a jumble.”
“There is one thing,” said Ashe, “that knits it together.”
“What is that?”
“The love interest.”
Their eyes met and suddenly there descended on Ashe confidence. He felt cool and alert, sure of himself, as in the old days he had felt when he ran races and, the nerve-racking hours of waiting past, he listened for the starter’s gun. Subconsciously he was aware he had always been a little afraid of Joan, and that now he was no longer afraid.
“Joan, will you marry me?” Her eyes wandered from his face. He waited.
“I wonder!” she said softly. “You think that is the solution?”
“Yes.”
“How can you tell?” she broke out. “We scarcely know each other. I shan’t always be in this mood. I may act restless again. I may find it is the jerks that I really like.”
“You won’t!”
“You’re very confident.”
“I am absolutely confident.”
“ ‘She travels fastest who travels alone,’ ” misquoted Joan.
“What is the good,” said Ashe, “of traveling fast if you’re going round in a circle? I know how you feel. I’ve felt the same myself. You are an individualist. You think there is something tremendous just round the corner and that you can get it if you try hard enough. There isn’t—or if there is it isn’t worth getting. Life is nothing but a mutual aid association. I am going to help old Peters—you are going to help me—I am going to help you.”
“Help me to do what?”
“Make life coherent instead of a jumble.”
“Mr. Marson -”
“Don’t call me Mr. Marson.”
“Ashe, you don’t know what you are doing. You don’t know me. I’ve been knocking about the world for five years and I’m hard—hard right through. I should make you wretched.”
“You are not in the least hard—and you know it. Listen to me, Joan. Where’s your sense of fairness? You crash into my life, turn it upside down, dig me out of my quiet groove, revolutionize my whole existence; and now you propose to drop me and pay no further attention to me. Is it fair?”
“But I don’t. We shall always be the best of friends.”
“We shall—but we will get married first.”
“You are determined?”
“I am!” Joan laughed happily.
“How perfectly splendid! I was terrified lest I might have made you change your mind. I had to say all I did to preserve my self-respect after proposing to you. Yes; I did. How strange it is that men never seem to understand a woman, however plainly she talks! You don’t think I was really worrying because I had lost Aline, do you? I thought I was going to lose you, and it made me miserable. You couldn’t expect me to say it in so many words; but I thought—I was hoping—you guessed. I practically said it. Ashe! What are you doing?”
Ashe paused for a moment to reply.
“I am kissing you,” he said.
“But you mustn’t! There’s a scullery maid or somebody looking through the kitchen window. She will see us.”
Ashe drew her to him.
“Scullery maids have few pleasures,” he said. “Theirs is a dull life. Let her see us.”
The last thing I would do is accuse Wodehouse of having a single philosophical bone in his body, but even at the moment of utmost fulfilment (in the sex-free Wodehouse universe, that is) for Ashe and Joan, there is a flash from an unknown life – that of a scullery maid – who might be windowgazing longingly on their happiness. It’s a beautiful, transcendent moment in an outpouring of whimsy.
* "The Moral Baby," The New Republic, Mar 13, 2005.
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