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‘This looks like being another of your successes. I’ve always said, and I always shall say, that for sheer brain, Jeeves, you stand alone. All the other great thinkers of the age are simply in the crowd, watching you go by.’
‘Thank you very much, sir. I endeavour to give satisfaction.’
‘Bertie,’ said Bingo reproachfully, ‘I saved your life once.’
‘When?’
‘Didn’t I? It must have been some other fellow, then.’
I bit the bullet and had a dash at being airy.
‘Oh, well, tra-la-la!’ I said.
‘Precisely, sir,’ said Jeeves.
‘This is a rotten country,’ said Cyril.
‘Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!’ I said.
‘Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!’ I said. ‘What?’ There didn’t seem much else to say.
‘The Inimitable Jeeves’ by P.G. Wodehouse, published in 1923, was the first of the Jeeves novels. It wasn’t originally conceived as a single narrative and was cobbled together from 11 previously published short stories featuring the same characters.
All the stories had previously appeared in The Strand magazine in the UK, between December 1921 and November 1922, except for one, ‘Jeeves and the Chump Cyril’, which had appeared in the Strand in August 1918.
This was the second collection of Jeeves stories, after ‘My Man Jeeves’ (1919) although the four Jeeves stories in that collection would be reprinted in the next one, ‘Carry On, Jeeves’, in 1925.
The stories are connected and feature either Bertie Wooster’s friend Richard ‘Bingo’ Little, who is always falling in love (with no fewer than seven young ladies in this volume):
Or Bertie himself as he tries to dodge romantic liaisons organised by his fearful Aunt Agatha.
In most of the stories Jeeves smoothly saves both Bertie and Bingo, proving himself an invaluable and almost supernaturally clever valet.
Bertie is a fussy dresser, almost a dandy:
As a rule, I’m what you might call a slow and careful dresser: I like to linger over the tie and see that the trousers are just so;
Jeeves lays out his outfit for him every morning. But another thread running through the stories is that Bertie and Jeeves have disagreements, almost like lovers’ tiffs, caused when Jeeves disapproves of one of Bertie’s clothing choices, such as a bright red cummerbund or a pair of mauve socks or coloured spats, and a coldness affects their relationship.
I went straight back to my room, dug out the cummerbund, and draped it round the old tum. I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said in a sort of hushed voice. ‘You are surely not proposing to appear in public in that thing?’
‘The cummerbund?’ I said in a careless, debonair way, passing it off. ‘Oh, rather!’
‘I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘The effect, sir, is loud in the extreme.’
Hence the three or four periods of froideur in the relationship. But not for long.
Another theme is that, despite his modesty, Bertie is the only one with any money. All the other posh young men he knows – Bingo, Eustace and Claude – are constantly touching him for small loans. Bertie himself admits he enjoys ‘a sizable private income and a topping digestion’.
Cliché for centuries that posh young aristocrats had nothing to do except gamble. Same here, in a comic mode. Bertie and pals are shown routinely betting on horse races. hence the chapter set at the Goodwood races, and its sequel, the comic chapter when the young chaps bet on how long local vicars’ sermons will be.
If there is one thing we Woosters are simply dripping with, it is sporting blood.
I’m always surprised by the number of stories in which Bertie jaunts off to New York. He goes there to escape Aunt Agatha’s wrath after he had a disastrously bad lunch with Sir Roderick Glossop, father of Honoria Glossop who Agatha wanted Bertie to marry. The story in question (A Letter of Introduction) features a priceless exchange between another Brit newly arrived in the city, Cyril Bassington-Bassington and Bertie’s long-time pal George Caffyn:
‘This is a rotten country,’ said Cyril.
‘Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!’ I said.
‘We do our best,’ said George.
‘Old George is an American,’ I explained. ‘Writes plays, don’t you know, and what not.’
‘Of course, I didn’t invent the country,’ said George. ‘That was Columbus. But I shall be delighted to consider any improvements you may suggest and lay them before the proper authorities.’
1. First-person narrative by Bertie, which consists of:
2. Direct address – treating the reader as a confidential chum:
The audience was settling down into the sort of torpor usual on these occasions, when the first of Bingo’s interpolated bits occurred. It was that number which What’s-her-name sings in that revue at the Palace—you would recognise the tune if I hummed it, but I can never get hold of the dashed thing.
A small boy with a face like a turbot edged out in front of the curtain, which had been lowered after a pretty painful scene about a wishing-ring or a fairy’s curse or something of that sort, and started to sing that song of George Thingummy’s out of ‘Cuddle Up’. You know the one I mean. ‘Always Listen to Mother, Girls!’ it’s called, and he gets the audience to join in and sing the refrain.
3. This artless candour is related to disarming honesty about his charming brainlessness.
4. It’s easy to overlook that the entire thing is a satire on the kind of posh dimwits epitomised by Bertie and his friends.
5. Much of this is embodied in the prose style of the text and, in particular, in the relentless use of upper-class slang.
Two things. 1) the text is so solidly stuffed with upper-class slang, in both dialogue and the first-person narrative, that it creates its own world. 2) It is so exuberant and creative and original that the endless slang is a major contributor to the light, bubbly comic vibe. Thus:
Bingo biffs about London on a pretty comfortable allowance given him by his uncle…
He had been clearing away the breakfast things, but at the sound of the young master’s voice cheesed it courteously.
Bingo, while not absolutely rolling in the stuff, has always had a fair amount of the ready. [money]
The man was goggling. His entire map was suffused with a rich blush. [face]
If anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard…
Anyway, he was there, swinging a dashed efficient shoe. [dancing well]
‘What might you have missed?’ I asked, the old lemon being slightly clouded.
If he cut off my allowance, I should be very much in the soup. So you put the whole binge to Jeeves and see if he can’t scare up a happy ending somehow.
To round it all off, my Aunt Agatha had gone to France and wouldn’t be on hand to snooter me for at least another six weeks.
Never before had I encountered a curate so genuinely all to the mustard.
Little as he might look like one of the lads of the village, he certainly appeared to be the real tabasco.
I mean, even a chappie endowed with the immortal rind of dear old Sid is hardly likely to have the nerve to come back and retrieve these little chaps.’
‘Well, then, dash it, I’m on velvet. Absolutely reclining on the good old plush!’
I knocked but no one took any notice, so I trickled in.
Once a year Jeeves takes a couple of weeks’ vacation and biffs off to the sea or somewhere to restore his tissues.
‘Worships the ground you tread on, but can’t whack up the ginger to tell you so.’
‘And what might all this be, Jeeves?’ I said, giving the thing the glassy gaze.
‘I’m feeling frightfully braced, don’t you know!’
‘My jolly old guv’nor wouldn’t stick it at any price. Put the old Waukeesi down with a bang.’
‘Toodle-oo!’ I said sadly, and the blighter scudded off.
What with trying to imagine how Aunt Agatha was going to take this thing, and being woken up out of the dreamless in the small hours every other night to give my opinion of some new bit of business which Cyril had invented, I became more or less the good old shadow.
‘Well, never mind about him, Jeeves. Read this letter.’ He gave it the up-and-down.
I gave the couple the wary up-and-down…
‘Of course,’ I said, after I had given it the east-to-west, ‘I expected this, Jeeves.’
I mean to say, he sent me over here to broaden my jolly old mind and words to that effect, don’t you know, and I can’t help thinking it would be a bit of a jar for the old boy if I gave him the bird and went on the stage instead.
‘Isn’t she the most wonderful girl you ever saw in your puff?’ [in your life]
Few people have ever looked fouler than young Bingo in the fungus. [with a beard]
‘Well, when I tell you he got me through Smalls, you’ll gather that he’s a bit of a hummer.’
I found him eventually in his room, lying on the bed with his feet on the rail, smoking a toofah.
‘Bertie,’ said Claude, deeply agitated, ‘unless we take immediate action and do a bit of quick thinking, we’re in the cart.’
He started in about the female the moment we had begun to hoof it. [walk]
I can’t go chucking all my engagements every second week in order to biff down to Twing.
He gave one frosty look at the spats and biffed off.
The blighter had appeared from nowhere and was in my bed, sleeping like an infant with a sort of happy, dreamy smile on his map.
Anything merrier and brighter than the Twins, when they curveted into the old flat while I was dressing for dinner the next night, I have never struck in my whole puff. [life]
‘You heard about the binge, Bertie?’ [spot of bother]
‘He could use a bit of the right stuff paid every quarter, if you felt like unbelting.’ [money]
‘Something tells me that this show of his is going to be a frost.’ [failure, disaster]
‘This morning young Bingo went and jumped off the dock.’ [got married]
The good old persp. was bedewing my forehead by this time in a pretty lavish manner. [perspiration]
I had just had one quick and another rather slower, and was feeling about as cheerio as was possible under the circs. [circumstances]
‘I think we’ve had about enough of the metrop. for the time being, and require a change.’ [metropolis i.e. London]
‘I’m beginning to wonder,’ said Eustace gloomily, ‘if there’s such a thing as a cert. in this world.’ [certainty – racing term]
We Woosters are all for the good old mediæval hosp. and all that… [hospitality]
I sent Jeeves a telegram saying I was coming, and drove straight to Bingo’s place when I reached town. I wanted to find out the general posish of affairs.
Jeeves poured silently in.
I then perceived that the stout stripling had trickled into the room.
About half-past ten next morning, just after I had finished lubricating the good old interior with a soothing cup of Oolong, Jeeves filtered into my bedroom…
He sallied forth,
Old Rowbotham took three and dropped the subject, and Jeeves drifted away.
‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, who had just meandered in with my breakfast.
And then through the doorway there shimmered good old Jeeves in the wake of a tray full of the necessary ingredients…
Jeeves had materialised from nowhere, and was standing at my elbow.
The text has moments of self criticism or self awareness, albeit themselves played for laughs, one useless upper class layabout berating his pals for being useless upper class layabouts – the entire ‘serious’ world of politics, socialism and so on co-opted, emptied and turned into yet another trope for gags.
‘Good night!’
‘But, I say, George, old man!’
You didn’t get my last remark. It was ‘Good night!’ You Idle Rich may not need any sleep, but I’ve got to be bright and fresh in the morning.’
And:
I saw that the bearded chappie was pointing at us. ‘Yes, look at them! Drink them in!’ he was yelling, his voice rising above the perpetual-motion fellow’s and beating the missionary service all to nothing. ‘There you see two typical members of the class which has down-trodden the poor for centuries. Idlers! Non-producers! Look at the tall thin one with the face like a motor-mascot. Has he ever done an honest day’s work in his life? No! A prowler, a trifler, and a blood-sucker! And I bet he still owes his tailor for those trousers!’
Young Bingo is long and thin and hasn’t had a superfluous ounce on him since we first met; but the uncle restored the average and a bit over. The hand which grasped mine wrapped it round and enfolded it till I began to wonder if I’d ever get it out without excavating machinery.
I tottered back to my room to dress for dinner, feeling like a toad under the harrow.
At this point the brother, who after shedding a floppy overcoat and parking his hat on a chair had been standing by wrapped in the silence, gave a little cough, like a sheep caught in the mist on a mountain top.
She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.
The stage seemed to stretch out in front of me like a trackless desert, and there was a kind of breathless hush as if all Nature had paused to concentrate its attention on me personally.
I could see that these harsh words had hit the old Bassington-Bassington family pride a frightful wallop. He started to get pink in the ears, and then in the nose, and then in the cheeks, till in about a quarter of a minute he looked pretty much like an explosion in a tomato cannery on a sunset evening.
On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James’s letter about Cousin Mabel’s peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle (‘Please read this carefully and send it on to Jane’), the clan has a tendency to ignore me.
I’m a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.
(Bertie Wooster stating the fundamental premise of the stories.)
‘This is the first time I’ve been let out alone, and I mean to make the most of it. We’re only young once. Why interfere with life’s morning? Young man, rejoice in thy youth! Tra-la! What ho!’
Put like that, it did seem reasonable.
The Jeeves and Wooster stories began during the First World War. Jeeves and Bertie first appeared in ‘Extricating Young Gussie’, a short story published in the US in September 1915 and in the UK in 1916. In the story, Jeeves’s character is minor and Bertie’s surname appears to be Mannering-Phipps.
The first fully recognisable Jeeves and Wooster story was ‘Leave It to Jeeves’, published in early 1916. Most of the Jeeves stories were originally published as magazine pieces before being collected into books.
Altogether the Jeeves canon consists of 35 short stories and 11 novels. With minor exceptions, the short stories were written and published first (between 1915 and 1930), the novels later (between 1934 up to as late as 1974).
The first collection to include fully formed Jeeves and Wooster stories is ‘My Man Jeeves’, published in 1919 although, of the eight short stories in the volume, only four are about J&W, the other four concern a character called Reggie Pepper.
All four ‘My Man Jeeves’ stories were subsequently reprinted, some substantially rewritten, in the 1925 collection ‘Carry On, Jeeves’.
But before that collections came the first book consisting entirely of Jeeves and Wooster stories, 1923’s ‘The Inimitable Jeeves’. In this book 11 short stories originally published in magazines were reworked and divided into 18 chapters to make the first collection devoted entirely to J&W.
After this rather shaky start, the Jeeves series runs like this:
Plus six further novels, but let’s see if I can read this lot first.
There is a whole comic approach where you exaggerate the ordinary and everyday to dizzy heights of absurdity. In the tradition of learnèd wit (Rabelais, Erasmus, Swift, Sterne) the exaggeration is designed to highlight the absurdity of scholarly learning. In E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books it is to bring out the exquisite small-town bitchiness of the characters. In comedy like Wodehouse’s, the aim is to emphasise the utter uselessness of his empty-headed posh boys. Thus the mock heroic exaggerations of the trivialest things, rendered in absurdly affected argot.
‘What are your immediate plans, Bertie?’
‘Well, I rather thought of tottering out for a bite of lunch later on, and then possibly staggering round to the club, and after that, if I felt strong enough, I might trickle off to Walton Heath for a round of golf.’
‘I am not interested in your totterings and tricklings.’
A massive part of the pleasure derives from the posh-boy slang or argot which the narrator (Bertie Wooster) employs, with specialised words or phrases in almost every sentence. The slang – and the insouciant attitude behind it – is the most obvious way in which the text takes you into Wodehouse-world. Here are some quotes from just the first few short stories.
I forget now how I got it, but it had the aspect of being the real, red-hot tabasco.
[the real thing]
I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don’t you know.
[brain]
Now, a great many fellows think that having a rich uncle is a pretty soft snap.
[cushy position]
He has got a pippin of an idea.
[a cracker]
I don’t know why it is—one of these psychology sharps could explain it, I suppose… [psychologist]
Time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.
[pull a bone = made a mistake]
‘There are moments when I can almost see the headlines: “Promising Young Artist Beans Baby With Axe.”‘
[wallops, hits, strikes]
I patted his shoulder silently. My sympathy for the poor old scout was too deep for words.
[chap]
I as near as a toucher rebelled when he wouldn’t let me wear a pair of cloth-topped boots which I loved like a couple of brothers.
It will show you pretty well how pipped I was when I tell you that I near as a toucher put on a white tie with a dinner-jacket.
I didn’t want to have England barred to me for the rest of my natural.
[…days i.e. life]
I gave Motty the swift east-to-west.
[surveyed his appearance]
I was just starting to say that the shot wasn’t on the board at any price…
[this plan was not on]
It was as if he were deliberately trying to give me the pip.
[irritate him]
Motty was under the surface.
[drunk]
He can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon.
[in trouble]
I began to see that, unless I made the thing a bit more plausible, the scheme might turn out a frost.
[failure]
Devilish efficient sort of chappie, and looked on in commercial circles as quite the nib!
The point is there is a comic exuberance in this plethora of words, there is a joy of language, an infections smile triggered by the sheer multitude of terms Wooster reels off.
She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.
I’m all for rational enjoyment and so forth, but I think a chappie makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan.
He picked up his glass and drained it feverishly, overlooking the fact that it hadn’t anything in it.
The moment I saw the man standing there, registering respectful attention, a weight seemed to roll off my mind. I felt like a lost child who spots his father in the offing. There was something about him that gave me confidence.
Jeeves is a tallish man, with one of those dark, shrewd faces. His eye gleams with the light of pure intelligence.
Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can’t do that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.
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The administration is hopeful Americans won't necessarily spend the $2,000 tariff checks President Trump has promised, and instead pump them into "Trump accounts" for kids, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says.
Why it matters: Amid a growing affordability crisis, the Trump administration is arguing inflation is under control and prices will come down soon — while also raising the prospect of pumping hundreds of billions into the economy.
Catch up quick: President Trump said Monday that $2,000 checks would start going out in mid-2026, just ahead of midterm elections. (Officials concede legislation will be necessary to actually make it happen.)
Yes, but: The risk of rising prices remains a huge concern for consumers, and against that backdrop, Fox News asked Bessent Tuesday night how the government would avoid another bout of stimulus-driven inflation if the checks happen.
Context: The "big, beautiful bill" included the creation of a new class of investment accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028.
By the numbers: A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that 40% of the 2020 CARES Act stimulus payments under Trump were spent, 30% used to pay down debt, and 30% saved.
What to watch: The next steps remain unclear; the administration has not yet proposed a bill to actually authorize the checks, nor has it clarified exactly who might be eligible.
Last night, I watched Juno for the first time since I saw it in the theater. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t hold up incredibly well. What really works now (maybe it did then and maybe it wasn’t obvious) is that Jason Bateman’s wannabe hipster not ready to have a child is initially portrayed as a cool guy and then becomes the worst possible character. when he decided he’s not ready and leaves his wife. The film is fairly obvious about this when Juno ends up giving the baby to Jennifer Garner anyway. But boy does nearly 20 years of bad male behavior make Bateman’s character seem awful now. And of course he’s perfect in that role, which isn’t all that different than his supposed nice guy in Arrested Development. It’s perhaps too bad that Elliott Page (the former Ellen Page) doesn’t act a heck of a lot these days, but hey, whatever, people can do what they want. Still, it was a hell of a performance from a young actor. I was also struck at how clean the language was. Not a “fuck” to be found in that movie, which you’d at least expect among the friends. But maybe we’ve become a lot coarser since 2007. I know the world has.
I also thought even at the time that the liberal critique of “she should have just gotten the abortion” to be as tiresome then as it was now. First, there’s no movie that way. Second, lots of people make the choice to have the child. Not every film has to reflect the choices you would make. That’s how you end up with fan fiction, one of the true horrors of the modern world.
Anyway, thought it might be interesting to see how people consider this film in 2025.
The post LGM Film Club, Part 516: Juno appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
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