They are few, and they were roses when he first showed them. He would have cast them out as yesterday’s blooms had he been spared the time. And, in the natural course of fleshing out the barebones script, he would have added many more, new ones. In its unfinished state Sunset at Blandings has given us a chance, more recent and more detailed than Performing Flea (1953) did, to see the professional at work.
He wouldn’t have much liked the idea of people looking over his shoulder at his working notes, still less trying to write his missing last chapters. His notes, he would have thought, wouldn’t have made much sense to anybody else anyway. Often they made no sense at all to him. We are privileged here to be reading what was strictly his business.
It is clear that the idea of a Cabinet Minister and his guard had been bumping round in Wodehouse’s mind for years. In December 1976 there came up for sale by auction at Sotheby’s in Chancery Lane two items, described in the catalogue as follows:
The Property of a Lady
602 WODEHOUSE (Sir PELHAM GRENVILLE) DRAFT OF HIS NOVEL ‘MUCH OBLIGED, JEEVES’, opening:
As I parked myself at the breakfast table that morning, and started to dig into the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I took a quick glance at the world and liked the look of it. Not a flaw in the setup, it seemed to me.
“Jeeves,” I said, “I am happy today.”
“I am very glad to hear it, sir.” …
c. 170 pages of typescript with extensive autograph revisions, c. 10 pages of autograph text, with over 50 pages of mostly autograph ‘scenario’ notes interspersed through the text, c. 250 pages in all, loose, 4to
ù Much Obliged Jeeves was published in 1971. The present draft is dated in one place 9 August 1970. INCLUDED IN THE LOT IS A VOLUME OF AUTOGRAPH WORKING NOTES FOR THE NOVEL, c. 50 pages, the recto of the tenth leaf marked by Wodehouse: “This is where the notes for MUCH OBLIGED, JEEVES start”, in a ‘Criterion’ school note-book, upper cover inscribed “Jeeves Notes”, 4to.
603 WODEHOUSE (P.G.) DRAFT OF HIS NOVEL ‘GUESTS AT THE CASTLE (A BLANDINGS CASTLE NOVEL)’, opening:
The summer day was drawing to a close and dusk had fallen on Blandings Castle, shrouding from view the ancient battlements, dulling the silver surface of the lake and causing that supreme Berkshire sow Empress of Blandings to leave the open air portion of her sty and withdraw into the covered shed which formed her sleeping quarters. A dedicated believer in the maxim of early to bed and early to rise, she always turned in at about this time. Only by getting its regular eight hours can a pig keep up to the mark and preserve that schoolgirl complexion …
c. 250 pages of typescript with extensive autograph revisions and an autograph title-sheet, loose, 4to.
ù INCLUDED WITH THE PRESENT DRAFT ARE c. 130 PAGES OF AUTOGRAPH WORKING-NOTES variously headed “Cabinet Minister and Guard Novel” and “Blandings Novel”, dated between December 1966 and May 1968, loose, 4to.
As a matter of record, Lot 602 was sold for £1,000, Lot 603 for £900. As a matter of interest, when a similar bundle of typescript and autograph notes, for Jeeves in the Offing, had come up in a sale for charity at Sotheby’s in 1959, it had gone to a New York dealer for £100.
I was particularly interested, this time, in Number 603. Guests at the Castle eventually got changed to A Pelican at Blandings, as you may recognize from that opening paragraph. Parts of the draft were cut, other parts re-located and many of the revisions were re-revised before it all came to print in 1969. But more particularly I wanted to see the working notes for that story that he had headed Cabinet Minister and Guard Novel. Surely that could be, surely that is, a foretaste of the novel we’ve got here in 1977?
No. It’s not as easy as that. The first entry, hand-written in red ink, dated November 23rd 1967, reads:
Try this :— Hero loves ward in chancery.
Lord Chancellor won’t give consent.
Lord Chancellor infatuated with some girl.
Girl makes him go in for strenuous athletics
Elderly woman tells him he’s crazy wooing young girl
He won’t listen to her. He writes to her proposing.
Some scene where girl makes him do something which exhausts him (e.g. riding)
He goes off girl. How to recover letter?
Hero recovers letter and gets consent to marry heroine.
Lord Chancellor marries elderly woman.
Where’s the guard in that? He has been dismissed already. But characters flickering to and fro in pages following begin to suggest to Wodehouse’s mind that the Blandings scenery would do for the story, and many of the Blandings costumes. The notes drift away from the Lord Chancellor, and Blandings through the mists rises into towers. It is going to be a Blandings novel. Lord Emsworth is there, wishing he was alone. But Lady Constance is there, and the Duke of Dunstable, and Uncle Fred.
And here the Lord Chancellor comes back:
Nov 29th 1967
Try this. Ld Ch sees Empress & is fascinated, as he is a pig breeder. He offers to buy her. Ld E appalled. Ld E consults Uncle Fred (or Gally), who says he knows Ld Ch of old as a man who sticks at nothing, and says imperative to get a tec immediately to watch Ld Ch. He looks in Classified Telephone Directory. The name on top is J. Sheringham Adair.
I think it wd be funny if Gally (or UF) told Beach to go and engage Chimp.
Chimp comes as friend of Ld E (son of old friend?) or pig expert, much to indignation of Lady C.
I think Beach wd make Chimp shave his moustache.
Try this. At end of story UF tells Lady C that he is a little surprised at her leaving Schoonmaker alone in New York. He has known S all his life & he knows no more sterling character, but he is so amiable that he might quite easily get entangled with some woman. (‘You see how Ld C did’ ‘But S is not like Ld C.’ ‘No. No, of course not, but — ‘) . This makes Lady C leave in a hurry.
Then a final little scene of Ld E and UF at Empress’s sty, feeling how nice it is to be alone.
Good. No. Better have UF draw a poignant picture of Schoon’s loneliness).
Try this. Dolly gets idea of stealing pig so that Soapy can restore it and get in good with Ld E. Soapy is afraid of pig; so D. starts to steal it & gets in some trouble, which UF gets her out of. Or else she falls foul of Chimp and beans him, and Chimp tells UF that D is Mrs. Soapy.Φ
Φ This is all v. vague at present. Work on it.)
X Soapy shd somehow get in bad with Ld. E.
Then, after many intervening pages:
Dec 1 1967
Does the Lord Chancellor have a secret service guardian?
Dolly tells Soapy it’s lucky they made her his daughter, as she confidently expects to sell Ld C oil stock. Good)
In their first scene she tells him that a v. big pot is arriving—the Ld Ch of England.
This plants Ld C. Lady C has referred to him as George X, and she has been told by UF that he is Ld Ch. Good)
Try this. Hero is composer or lyrist with a big show coming on on B’way. He asks Ld Ch for consent— refused as income uncertain. Then cable comes saying show smash. He looks for Ld Ch to tell him & is interrupted by Lady C, who kicks him out.
V Good XX)
Instead of Ld Ch’s guard make it George, Ld E’s grandson, who takes a violent fancy to Ld Ch and never leaves him—cp Denis the Menace & Mr Wolson [?].
The last entry, under the dateline April 13th 1968, is:
For end try this:
1. Duke gives Lord E letter
2. Next day UF goes to see Duke.± Lady C, says she has had letter from Schoonmaker saying he can’t get to England, so she is returning to America. She adds about Mother losing her memory [?money] —Lady C. Duke tells UF about letter. UF is sympathetic, but has nothing to suggest.
X)
3. Mother leaves [..?…] UF meets Lord E, who says he has just found letter in his pocket. UF goes to Duke, says he told John abt letter. John recovered it. How I don’t know. He has his secret method
s. Duke says give it to me. UF says about John losing Linda and won’t give up letter till Duke has written consent to marriage.
This looks nearly right)
In 1967/8 Wodehouse was a mere eighty-six, rising eighty-seven. In March three years later he is jotting down another suggestion for a novel:
Middle aged man in love with energetic girl
He has old Nanny who looks on him as a child.
She notes his wooing and disapproves of it. (Master Willie)
Make him Cabinet Minister with policeman guarding him (see An English Crime).
Every time he is about to propose, he sees cops watching …
That novel died unborn.
Wodehouse hadn’t thought of a title for this last Blandings novel that you have just read. Or rather, he thought of fifteen and jotted them down in the sidelines of various pages of notes:
Lord Emsworth Entertains
Blandings Castle Fills Up
Gally to the Rescue
The Weird Old Buster
All’s Well at Blandings
Trouble at Blandings Castle
Gally Takes Charge
Unrest at Blandings Castle
Gally in Charge
Rely on Gally
Leave it to Galahad
The Helping Hand of Galahad
Life with Galahad
Women are Peculiar
Love at the Castle
The title he would not have given the novel is Sunset at Blandings. That was suggested, with subtle daring, by either Mr. Chatto or Mr. Windus and agreed instantly by the other. It is apt. But Wodehouse himself would never have locked, even if only by suggestion, the great gates of the castle. He would have wanted it there, with its sun high in the sky, for another visit if the mood took him, to incarcerate another pretty girl, dispatched, or brought, by another (what, another? That would make eleven) Threepwood sister to the Bastille, to be followed by another nephew or protégé of Galahad’s or Lord Ickenham’s under a false name.
Wodehouse would have been ninety-four in October 1975. He had been knighted in the New Year’s Honours list. He had been Sir Pelham Wodehouse for forty-six days when he died. He had gone into the Southampton hospital on Long Island for tests to find out the cause and cure of a troublesome skin-rash. He hated hospitals, but, as for the last three-quarters of a century, he could forget the world anywhere as long as he had plenty of pencils, pens and paper, a typewriter, a pipe or two, tobacco and, for occasional pauses, a pile of detective novels. He had all these, except the typewriter, with him in the hospital and he had been working on this novel on the morning of February 14th. He died that evening, of a heart attack. It was Valentine’s Day. The American flag above the Post Office at Remsenburg, where the Wodehouses had lived for the last fifteen and more years, was lowered to half-mast, barely clearing the piled up snow beneath it.
On the typescript of the sixteen chapters there are, in increasingly difficult handwriting, a number of freestanding corrections and additions. These have been incorporated here. In a few places Wodehouse had decided that he had gone off the rails and the sequences needed to be re-worked and re-written. Against these he may have put a cross (X) and the word ‘Fix’. Those passages have not been ‘fixed’ here, but you can see where he wanted immediate changes if you study that January 19th 1975 scenario.
The thirty-three pages of notes that were found in the hospital almost all looked forward to the end of the book. Only seven of them had date-lines at their head: those of June 10th 1974, June 22nd, November 2nd, December 20th, December 30th, January 9th 1975 and January 19th.
These were the hundred and twenty-three pages, typescript and notes, collected from the hospital, that were offered to Chatto & Windus in November 1976—the last Wodehouse novel, albeit incomplete and in an unpolished form, and thirty-three pages of notes with a suggestion for the ending. But it soon became obvious to us that there must have been, and probably still existed somewhere, many more pages of notes. Thirty-three was a fraction of the number of pages Wodehouse had covered with notes for previous novels. Happily, further papers did come to light in Remsenburg and from these I was able to identify another one hundred and fifty autograph pages which clearly had something to do with this novel. The names, Jeff, Vicky, Piper, Gaily, Florence, Beach, Blandings —these sprang to meet the eye.
I have not been able to piece the newly retrieved pages into any certain sequence. Ten of them are dated, and their sequence is June 10th 1974, June 12th, June 13th, June 14th, June 25th, June 26th, June 27th, June 28th, August 3rd and January 16th 1975. This shows that it wasn’t just his last thirty-three pages of notes that Wodehouse took with him to the hospital with the typescript. The earliest date on a page found in the study at home is the same (June 10th 1974) as the earliest date on a page Wodehouse had with him in the hospital. And the page headed January 16th 1975 was found in the study.
Of the remaining, undated, pages, some show themselves to be early rather than late. For different periods in the early stages of the build-up to this novel, for instance, Jeff and Vicky are still ‘hero’ and heroine’, and the ‘heroine’ gets named Nicky at first, and sometimes even after ‘Vicky’ has come in. The Chancellor of the Exchequer starts as the Lord Chancellor, Florence starts as Dora, Claude Duff as Claude Winkworth. There are three such clues visible in the page dated June 14th 1974 (page 129). Sometimes a train of thought links two or three pages. Sometimes a note refers specifically to the number of a page in the typescript. It is probably fair to assume that notes building towards a sequence in Chapter 10, say, of the typescript were written before notes that can be referred to something in Chapter 15. Fair, but not absolutely safe. The handwriting itself sometimes suggests a link between one page and another, seldom more than that. But, if there is enough textual evidence in those hundred and eighty-three pages of notes for a scholar to establish a chronologically sure 1—183 pagination, I am not that scholar. And I am sure that one hundred and eighty-three is not the total that Wodehouse had written.
What we have in sum is a treasure trove: a rough narrative of two-thirds of a novel, and a hoard of good insights into Wodehouse’s method of composition: his ideas for the ending, his dry runs at passages later given temporary approval in typescript under the stamp of ‘Aziz’, his criticisms of his own jotted-down notes.
We have given a wide sample of the note pages. We have put them into type as plainly as possible. When you study the reproductions, which have been reduced from 8½” x 1 I”, you will see that we have been faced with difficulties. We have done our best.
Wodehouse’s personal shorthand for ‘Enter’ was ‘plus’ or ‘+’; for ‘Exit’ it was ‘minus’ or ‘—’. Thus, ‘Plus Ld E —F’ would be ‘Enter Lord Emsworth, exit Florence’. Wodehouse’s ‘Aziz’ means ‘Leave it as it is for now’. He used Ø as a signal to a note below or in the margin. So also A (once) . Italic in the transcript here means a word, or words, underlined by Wodehouse; or it is a marginal note or other addition, made apparently at the time of writing. Marginalia are indicated in the transcribed pages by a single round bracket. Square brackets indicate my interpolations. Thus [ ] means that there is a handwritten word that I cannot read. Bold type (like that) means a Wodehouse postscript in the margin or in the text, usually in red ink.
We have transcribed all the datelined pages of the Wodehouse notes and given a number of them, with a few others, in reproduction. Note (e.g. under date June 10th 1974) that in transcription we have not always omitted, or indicated, words and lines that Wodehouse crossed out.
Two beginnings, later discarded, are echoing through the first datelined pages. In one, when Gally arrives at the castle, some of the castle’s inhabitants (not Lord Emsworth) have gone to have lunch at a neighbour’s house where they meet a fascinating, fine, rich and unattached lady, sister of the Lord Chancellor. In another, there has been a fire at a (or the) neighbour’s house and Lord Emsworth’s sister Dora (who later becomes Florence, and later still Diana) pro
poses to ask all the inhabitants and guests there to come and stay at the castle pending repairs.
There follow transcriptions of the datelined pages in the order of their calendar dates:
June 10. 1974
1. Try this. Gally arrives at Blandings, expecting to find Lord Emsworth alone and the castle is full. Ld E explains about Dora and the fire. (Sn At sty)
Good)
There are at Castle Chancellor of Exchequer, rich woman (his sister?), and Chancellor’s nephew (heroine’s friend), Dora and her daughter, heroine. Also hero? And bodyguard
2. It might be better if Gally first meets Beach and goes to sty to comfort Ld E. Finds Ld E with hero.