BERTIE WOOSTER SEES IT THROUGH

Background: Published in the U.S. in 1955 (originally published in the U.K. in 1954 as Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit)

This is the one where: Bertie grows a mustache, Florence Craye and Stilton Cheesewright break up (for real this time), and Aunt Dahlia sells Milady’s Boudoir

The action takes place at: Brinkley Court

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Florence Craye, Aunt Agatha’s stepdaughter (“She is one of those intellectual girls, her bean crammed to bursting point with the little gray cells, and about a year ago, possibly because she was full of the divine fire but more probably because she wanted something to take her mind off Aunt Agatha, she wrote this novel and it was well received by the intelligentsia, who notoriously enjoy the most frightful bilge.”)

But she’s really in love with:

1. G. D’Arcy “Stilton” Cheesewright, a jealous rower and former policeman with a “head like a pumpkin” (“in addition to bulging in all directions with muscle he was glaring at me in a sinister manner, his air that of one of those Fiends with Hatchet who are always going about the place Slaying Six”)...but after they break it off, she ends up with
   
2. Percy Gorringe, a poet who wants to produce a play of Florence’s novel Spindrift, secretly writes detective novels (with titles such as The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish, which Bertie is reading) under the name “Rex West,” and has “a face disfigured on either side by short whiskers and in the middle by tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles”

The task at hand: Keep Stilton from killing Bertie in a jealous rage, keep Uncle Tom from finding out that Aunt Dahlia has pawned her pearl necklace to buy a Daphne Dolores Morehead story for Milady’s Boudoir, keep Lord Sidcup from recognizing that Aunt Dahlia has replaced the real pearl necklace with a fake, and help Aunt Dahlia persuade L.G. Trotter to buy Milady’s Boudoir

Other characters include:

• Aunt Dahlia Travers (“A girlhood and early womanhood spent in chivvying the British fox in all weathers under the auspices of the Quorn and Pytchley have left this aunt brick-red in color and lent amazing power to her vocal cords...If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is inclined to talk to you when face to face in a small drawing-room as if she were addressing some crony a quarter of a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds. For the rest, she is a large, jovial soul, built rather on the lines of Mae West, and is beloved by all including the undersigned.”)

• Uncle Tom Travers (whose middle name is revealed in this book to be “Portarlington”), “a man with grayish hair and a face like a walnut”

• L.G. (which turns out to stand for “Lemuel Gengulphus”) Trotter, Percy’s stepfather, a newspaper publisher from Liverpool, “a little man with a face like a weasel”

• Mrs. Trotter, Percy’s mother, “a burly heavyweight with a beaked nose who talked all the time, principally about some woman she disliked named Blenkinsop”

• Daphne Dolores Morehead, a well-known novelist with “a figure as full of curves as a scenic railway,” whom Stilton falls in love with
  

• Lord Sidcup, aka Roderick Spode, a silver collector, jewelry expert, fascist, and seller of ladies’ underclothing under the name “Eulalie Soeurs” (“a man about seven feet in height with a square, powerful face, slightly mustached toward the center”)

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: being arrested in a nightclub raid while taking Florence out to do research for her next book, being repeatedly threatened with having his spine broken by a jealous Stilton, accidentally climbing through Florence’s window in an attempt to stage the theft of Aunt Dahlia’s necklace, and accidentally stealing the wrong pearl necklace (Mrs. Trotter’s) from the house safe

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: mustache, which Bertie grows while Jeeves is on vacation (“Round about the beginning of July each year he downs tools, the slacker, and goes off to Bognor Regis for the shrimping, leaving me in much the same position as those poets one used to have to read at school who were always beefing about losing gazelles.”)

First paragraph: “As I sat in the bath tub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar,’ it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy. The evening that lay before me promised to be one of those sticky evenings, no good to man or beast. My Aunt Dahlia, writing from her country residence, Brinkley Court down in Worcestershire, had asked me as a personal favor to take some acquaintances of hers out to dinner, a couple by the name of Trotter.”

Bertie fashion moment: None, except another reference to the article he once wrote on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing” for Milady’s Boudoir

Slang I’d like to start using: “pipterino,” apparently an attractive woman (or man?): “Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that he is not a man who usually slops over when speaking of the opposite sex. He is cool and critical. He weighs his words. So when I describe this girl [Dahphne Dolores Morehead] as a pipterino, you will gather that she was something pretty special.”

Bertie gets no respect: As in any book featuring Aunt Dahlia, the insults fly toward Bertie left and right, but let’s restrict them to the digs at his mustache this time:

• “A dark stain like mulligatawny soup.”—Jeeves

• “Revolting. You look like something in the chorus line of a touring revue.”—Stilton

• “I always say that a man who can lower himself to wearing a mustache might just as well grow a beard.”—Daphne Dolores Morehead
  

• “That mustache of yours is the most obscene thing I ever saw outside of a nightmare. It seems to take one straight into another and a dreadful world.”—Aunt Dahlia

Best Jeeves moment: When he notices the mustache: “Speech seemed to have been wiped from his lips, and I saw, as I had foreseen would happen, that his gaze was riveted on the upper slopes of my mouth. It was a cold, disapproving gaze, such as a fastidious luncher who was not fond of caterpillars might have directed at one which he had discovered in his portion of salad, and I knew that the clash of wills for which I had been bracing myself was about to raise its ugly head…. I yield to nobody in my respect for Jeeves’s judgment in the matter of socks, shoes, shirts, hats, and cravats, but I was dashed if I was going to have him muscling in and trying to edit the Wooster face.”

Best bit of description: “‘Me too,’ [Aunt Dahlia] said, picking up the Agatha Christie and hurling it at a passing vase. When deeply stirred, she is always inclined to kick things and throw things. At Totleigh Towers, during one of our more agitated conferences, she had cleared the mantelpiece in my bedroom of its entire contents, including a terra cotta elephant and a porcelain statuette of the Infant Samuel in Prayer.
[Later in the same scene] “‘This isn’t good,’ she said, picking up a small foot-stool and throwing it at a china shepherdess on the mantelpiece.”

Best bit of dialogue:
Aunt Dahlia: “Did you notice how he looked when he said ‘Florence’? Like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.”
Bertie: “And did you notice...how he looked when you said ‘Bertie Wooster’? Like someone finding a dead mouse in his pint of beer.”

My review: Meh. Three stars. Any Wodehouse is better than no Wodehouse, and I liked some of the individual elements here (Aunt Dahlia is my favorite recurring non-Jeeves-or-Bertie character, plus it features the surprise return of Roderick Spode, now Lord Sidcup), but overall, this one just didn’t do it for me. The plot was pretty weak and meandering, with a lot of potentially funny elements introduced but then quickly discarded without being used (the Drones darts championship, Mrs. Trotter trying to steal Anatole away, L.G. Trotter refusing a knighthood). Jeeves doesn’t even get to do much to fix things, really; they just sort of work themselves out. It’s far from the twisty, tightly woven cleverness of The Mating Season. The characters are mostly forgettable—Florence Craye is pretty funny (particularly all the descriptions of her melodramatic writing), but I don’t like Stilton at all and really hope he doesn’t pop up again later. The best thing in the entire book is Bertie’s mustache; Florence is the only person who likes it, which becomes Bertie’s adorably backwards rationale for finally shaving it off: “Recalling the effect of its impact on Florence Craye, I saw clearly that it had made me too fascinating. There peril lurked. When you become too fascinating, all sorts of things are liable to occur which you don’t want to occur, if you follow me.”

Had I read it before? I think so, because I remember the mustache. I must have only read it once, though, because I didn’t remember anything else...but on the other hand, it wasn’t that memorable of a book, so who knows?

Next up: Jeeves in the Offing