My
pseudonym "Jeeves" was not chosen at random ...
Jeeves, who
represents the archetype of what we usually generalize as the "English
Butler" was sublimely believed by P.G.Woodhouse.
As with all
the stories that want to exaggerate in an eccentric and comical way the
character of its protagonists, Jeeves was created in complementary polarization
with his "boss" Bertie Wooster.
Jeeves is
not exactly a butler but a valet.... although with very special features.
Thus a
butler refers to the management of the service of a house (Majordomo)
A Valet
(from Chambre) refers to the service of the person.
And what a
person... for Bertie is an aristocrat head in the air, with great talent for
engaging in constant misdeeds and with a unique spontaneity and innocence of
the "Upper Classes".
Jeeves constantly
"shines" in the effective, subtle and intelligent way as he saves his
master, simultaneously producing cunning solutions and citing the great
classics in moments of great erudition and clairvoyance.
Of course
Jeeves dominates Bertie's life without him realizing it, but never explicitly,
but only implicitly and subtly ...
JEEVES / António
Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho
O meu pseudónimo
"Jeeves"não foi escolhido ao acaso ...
Jeeves, que
representa o arquétipo daquilo que costumamos generalizar como o "Mordomo
Inglês"foi crido de forma sublime por P.G.Woodhouse.
Tal como em todas
as histórias que pretendem exagerar de forma excêntrica e cómica os carácteres
dos seus protagonistas, Jeeves foi criado em polarização complementar com o seu
"patrão" Bertie Wooster.
Jeeves não é
propriamente um mordomo mas um valet .... embora com características muito
especiais.
Assim um mordomo
refere-se à gestão do serviço de uma casa (Majordomo)
Um Valet (de
Chambre) refere-se ao serviço da pessoa.
E que pessoa...
pois Bertie é um aristocrata cabeça no ar, com grande talento para se envolver
em trapalhadas constantes e com uma espontaneidade e inocência únicas das
"Upper Classes".
Jeeves
"brilha" constantemente pela forma efectiva, subtil e inteligente
como salva o seu amo, produzindo simultaneamente soluções ardilosas e citando
os grandes clássicos em momentos de grande erudição e clarividência.
Claro que Jeeves
domina a vida de Bertie sem que ele se aperceba disso, mas nunca de forma
explicita, mas apenas de forma implícita e subtil ...
JEEVES / António
Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho
The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever
written
By Nicholas
Barber
24th
December 2020
In our
latest essay in which a critic reflects on a cultural work that brings them
joy, Nicholas Barber pays tribute to the blissfully escapist comic novels of PG
Wodehouse.
I
If we’re
talking about culture that makes people happy, we have to start with the works
of PG Wodehouse. There are two reasons why. One reason is that making people
happy was Wodehouse’s overriding ambition. The other reason is that he was
better at it than any other writer in history.
This
article was originally published in June 2020.
Some
authors may want to expose the world’s injustices, or elevate us with their
psychological insights. Wodehouse, in his words, preferred to spread “sweetness
and light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in
the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent
character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every
utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a
flutter on the choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he
wanted to whisk us far away from our worries. Writing about being a humourist in
his autobiography Over Seventy, Wodehouse quoted two people in the Talmud who
had earnt their place in Heaven: “We are merrymakers. When we see a person who
is downhearted, we cheer him up.”
As PG Wodehouse himself said, his primary aim was to
spread “sweetness and light”
My own
introduction to this supreme merrymaker came via Jeeves and Wooster, the
television series adapted from some of his most beloved stories about a young
toff and his unflappable manservant. Hugh Laurie starred as Bertie Wooster, the
moneyed bachelor who seemed to care about nothing except food, drink and
fashionable socks, but who always came to the aid of the numerous old
schoolmates who were even more stupid than he was. Stephen Fry co-starred as
Jeeves, who had the brains that his young master lacked. As an undernourished,
overworked student, stressed by essays and exams, I was always relieved when I
could nip down to the college’s TV room (yes, it was a long time ago) for my
weekly escape into a jazz-age wonderland of art-deco flats and panelled
gentlemen’s clubs, “tissue-restoring” cocktails and buffet breakfasts served on
silver platters.
A crafter
of perfect sentences
Nearly
three decades on, I’m currently rewatching the DVDs with my daughter, and
Jeeves and Wooster is still pretty much flawless. When I interviewed Laurie in
2000, I gushed about the series, and he cited what was, at the time, his
favourite Wodehouse line: “The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered
by what sounded to his strained senses like GK Chesterton falling on a sheet of
tin.”
There are
so many other lines he could have gone for. How about this one?
“It is
never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of
sunshine.”
Or this?
“It isn’t
often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong
men climb trees and pull them up after them.”
Or this?
“Like so
many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on
marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping
from crag to crag.”
The one
that has me chuckling to myself on a regular basis is this Bertie Wooster gem
from the novel Right Ho, Jeeves: “‘Very good,” I said coldly. ‘In that case,
tinkerty tonk.’ And I meant it to sting.”
We could
keep listing zingers like that all day: there were 96 Wodehouse books published
in his lifetime, and he was drafting another when he died in 1975 at the age of
93. What these excerpts prove is that, however much we may cherish the bumbling
aristocratic characters and their convoluted escapades, what really makes
Wodehouse so addictive is the prose: the phrases which appear to float along so
effortlessly, but which came about because he would, he said, “write every
sentence 10 times”.
He is the greatest musician of the English language,
and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day – Douglas Adams
To read any
of those sentences is to marvel at the elaborate but elegant route it takes to
a perfect punchline; to delight in how it glides between Shakespeare and
race-track slang, between understatement and exaggeration, between gentle
humour and stinging wit. “What Wodehouse writes is pure word music,” said
Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. “It matters
not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme of pig kidnappings,
lofty butlers, and ludicrous impostures. He is the greatest musician of the
English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what
musicians do all day.”
He could
certainly have written darker, more soul-searching books if he hadn’t been so
naturally jovial: he had plenty of raw material to draw on. Pelham Grenville
Wodehouse was born in 1881. (Perhaps he was thinking of his own names when he
had Bertie commenting that “there’s some raw work pulled at the font from time
to time”.) His Victorian colonial parents were rarely in the same country as he
was, according to his biographer, Robert McCrum. “In total, Wodehouse saw his
parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15, which is by any
standards a shattering emotional deprivation,” he noted in 2005’s Wodehouse: A
Life. Nonetheless, “Plum” relished his Dulwich College schooldays, and was
looking forward to his university years when the next blow fell: his father
announced that he had to go straight to a job in a bank instead.
The
disappointment didn’t stop him. He always knew that he wanted to be a writer,
and so he sold short stories at a superhuman rate until he could make a living
from them. Soon he graduated to anthologies and novels, some featuring Jeeves
and Wooster (who debuted in 1915), others featuring the canny Psmith or the
garrulous Mr Mulliner, some set at mossy Blandings Castle, others set at Marvis
Bay Golf and Country Club. Beyond these, there were Broadway musicals and
Hollywood screenplays, and a long and harmonious marriage. (He made the money
and his wife spent it, an arrangement which suited them both.)
Wodehouse seemed to be more effective at warding off
despair than the antidepressants that I was taking – Jay McInerney
But while
his professional and personal lives were blessed, they included episodes which
could have been turned into sombre literature. During World War Two, his adored
stepdaughter Leonora died unexpectedly, aged 40, after a minor operation, and
Wodehouse himself was arrested in northern France, where he was living at the
time, and sent to a German internment camp for almost a year. Even there, he
kept writing, and polished off a novel in captivity, the appropriately titled
Money in the Bank. He was then moved to a hotel in Berlin, where he was invited
by German radio to broadcast a series of comic accounts of his internment.
Naively, he agreed, keen as he was to assure his fans that he was in good
health and good spirits. What he didn’t realise was that he was playing into
the hands of the Nazi government, which could claim to be treating its
illustrious guest well. In Britain, he was accused of colluding with the enemy,
and his reputation never quite recovered, but there was hardly a trace of anger
or self-recrimination in his work. He stuck to prelapsarian yarns in which
everyone was essentially comfortable and fortunate – except, of course, when
they found themselves briefly engaged to a woman who believed in healthy eating
and gainful employment.
Whatever
was going on in his life, Wodehouse stayed buoyant; and whatever is going on in
the reader’s life, he keeps us buoyant, too. “I was clinically depressed for
most of 1999,” said Jay McInerney, the author of Bright Lights, Big City in a
2016 interview “and I would turn to Wodehouse, possibly the funniest writer in
the English language. It seemed to be more effective at warding off despair
than the antidepressants that I was taking.”
Maybe you
can spot some deeper themes in his books if you look hard enough. At times I
can persuade myself that there is something subversive in Bertie’s lack of
interest in the conventional status markers of a career and a marriage, and
something instructive in his insistence on helping his lovestruck friends,
however ungrateful they may be. I can even argue that Wodehouse was
revolutionary because his characters didn’t defeat villains in fist fights or
shootouts (although they sometimes stole policemen’s helmets on Boat Race
night). Perhaps he was teaching us that we can’t all be high achievers, let
alone rugged action heroes, but that we can all be kind and generous. In other
words, we can live according to the code of the Woosters. But I admit that this
is a stretch. As Stephen Fry put it, “You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection:
you just bask in its warmth and splendour.”
Evelyn
Waugh might have agreed. “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale,” he
said in 1961. “He will continue to release future generations from captivity
that may be more irksome than our own.” Captivity doesn’t get much more irksome
than the one we’re enduring now, but Wodehouse can still release us from it.
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