The Mating Season by P G. Wodehouse

English comic fiction

Source – Personal copy

As many of you know, I love the biannual Year Club Simon and Karen have run on their blogs for years. It means I do something I love: look at lists of books and writers, and come up with the lists for each year. But for me, there are a few writers you can often find books from, and P. G. Wodehouse is one of them. He wrote 99 novels and story collections; this Everyman copy says they are all available from Everyman.  This novel is from his most famous creations, Jeeves and Wooster.  This was also one of the novels adapted into an episode of the TV series Jeeves and Wooster.

Well, he seemed to hint, unless I misunderstood him, that the above Haddock hadn’t, as it were, done right by our Nell.

According to Catsmeat, you and this modern Casanova were at one time holding hands, but after flitting and sipping for a while he cast you aside like a worn-out glove and attached himself to Gertrude Winkworth. Quite incorrect, probably. I expect he got the whole story muddled up?

She came clean. I suppose a girl who has been going about for some weeks as sore as a gumboil, and with the heart cracked in two places gets to feel that maidenly pride is all very well but that what eases the soul is confession. And, of course, making me her confidant was not like spilling the inside stuff to a stranger. No doubt the thought crossed her mind that we had attended the same dancing class, and it may be that a vision of the child Wooster in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and pimples rose before her eyes.

No, he didn’t get the story muddled up. We were holding hands. But Esmond didn’t cast me aside like a worn-out glove, I cast him aside like a worn-out glove. I told him I wouldn’t have any more to do with him unless he asserted himself and stopped crawling to those aunts of his?’

The Aunts always make me smile in Wodehose

Where to start with this tale? As with any Bertie story, it starts with two threads that end up connected. His Aunt Agatha pushes Bertie to travel to Devrill Hall to meet Gertrude, a single girl she’s heard about through Gertie’s aunt. So he is expected. But when he is due to go, he meets up with his newt-loving friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, whom he is supposed to see the godmother of his fiancée, Madeline, but she has been called away. But then, after a night at the drone club, Gussie ends up in court.  Bertie volunteers to be Gussie for the weekend, and they soon discover they are due to see the same person. So when Bertie arrives as Gussie to get the nod from Dame Winkworth and Madeline’s other four aunts.HE is surprised when, a little later, Gussie appears pretending to be Bertie with Jeeves. Add to this, they found out at the Drones from another drone, Catmaca, that he wants Gussie’s hand but got a no from the chorus of aunts.  Add all this, and you get a classic series of events involving Bertie as he blunders through, and as ever, Jeeves is there to save the day.

Well, I did get there before midnight, of course, but I was dashed late, all the same. As might have been expected on a day like this, the two-seater, usually as reliable as an Arab steed, developed some sort of pox or sickness half-way through the journey, with the result that the time schedule was shot to pieces and it was getting on for eight when I turned in at the main gates. A quick burst up the drive enabled me to punch the front-door bell at about twenty to. I remember once when he and I arrived at a country house where the going threatened to be sticky, Jeeves, as we alighted, murmured in my ear the words

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, sir, and at the time I could make nothing of the crack. Subsequent inquiry, however, revealed that this Roland was one of those knights of the Middle Ages who spent their time wandering to and fro, and that on fetching up one evening at a dump known as the Dark Tower he had scratched the chin a bit dubiously, not liking the look of things.

Bertie arrives later and that sets it all off

I always love a few hours in the world of Jeeves and Wooster, those days of house parties, aunts controlling families, and who saw who; it captures upper-class England in the interwar years.  With its many twists and turns, disaster seems to lurk around the corner, as people keep appearing, but not as themselves. Add to that the collection of mad names we have: GUSSIE AND HIS newts, Catsmeat that actor. Gertie, as Bertie points out, if they got together, they’d be Bertie and Gertie! More aunts than normal, Agatha, as ever, hoping to see her nephew Bertie settle down once and for all. Then the chorus of aunts, five in all, at Deverill Hall. Add to this, they all have to perform whilst at the hall: who will end up with whom, when the deception will fall apart, and that they know Bertie isn’t Gussie, and Gussie isn’t BERTIE. As ever, Jeeves saves the day with his knowledge of everything going on and the various connections and loves among those involved. I always laugh at his books; they feel like a bygone age, and he always makes it work out, no matter how twisted it sounds to us, readers.  My first book for Club 1949. Do you have a favourite Wodehouse book?