Wodehouse dusted away this difficulty in amusing short pieces in the first chapters of several novels. But it remained a difficulty. And, in the later Blandings novels especially, I think that the author found this difficulty getting compounded with others. He came to know his characters so well that he could repeat an introduction that had served him as a repeat in an earlier novel. In the case of Sunset at Blandings I am thinking, in passing, of the introduction of Galahad (page 18). This would probably have been re-written, with fresh phrases and rhythms, in a final version, but as it stands it is almost a transcript of the paragraph presenting Gally in Galahad at Blandings, which was itself almost a transcript of its equivalent in Full Moon.
And Wodehouse knew the Blandings habitat so well by 1974 that he could move his characters like chessmen to and from positions that you feel are almost like chalk-marks on the floor of a stage. In this novel the main moves are to and from the Emsworth Arms, the hammock, Beach’s pantry, the croquet lawn, the pig-sty and one or two key bedrooms (always one to be searched for the missing jewel, pig or memoir). In the page of notes dated December 30th 1974 (page 145) Wodehouse wrote ‘G. goes to Ems Arms because he has to be alone, to think, which rules out Beach’s pantry’. You’d suppose that Gally could have found somewhere in the castle to be alone other than in the pantry — in his own bedroom? practising cannons in the billiard room? having a bath?—without needing to walk three miles to Market Blandings. By the time that this novel would have received its final polish, there would have been a better reason for Gally’s move. But at the early note stage it is his need to get away somewhere to think that leads Gally’s feet across those miles to the pub.
There is a last difficulty. Wodehouse in his nineties, and, indeed, in his seventies and eighties, was writing short, and sadly conscious that he was writing short. He liked his plots to be as complicated as ever, and he wanted to move his characters in the same mazy notions. But they tended, as he got older, to get from A to B in about a quarter of the number of words that he had so easily given them, straight out of the typewriter, in the three golden decades between 1925 and 1955. In those days, when the scenario was right, the stuff came bubbling out of his mind and pouring into his typewriter. Bertie Wooster would cadge a lunch or submit to some blackmail from his Aunt Dahlia; Lord Emsworth would move from drawing room to pig-sty. And each scene, dialogue or narrative, would be made in a dance of prose well spotted with ‘nifties’ . At the end of a day he was 2,500 words, good words, to the good. Cutting them down ‘raking out the clinker’ was a phrase of Kipling’s that appealed to Wodehouse, and polishing them to a near-final 1,500 next morning in revision was a pleasurable chore logodaedaly following logorrhea. He met the annual deadline for a novel for the Christmas trade easily, with a stint in Hollywood, work on a couple of plays, and a dozen stories making an average year’s output.
In his old age Wodehouse had to start in handwriting: notes, sentences and paragraphs. He couldn’t get it going on the machine. And when he totted up the day’s score, it might be 500 words, a fifth of what he could do in his floruit period. The verbal flourishes and pirouettes just weren’t there. They had to be cobbled in later. It was less fun fleshing it out than cutting it down. But he did it. He remained the great provider, with books to size, seamless and without padding. If the going had remained good Sunset at Blandings might, under another title, have been ready for Christmas 1976.
*
Well, the revels at Blandings Castle are now ended. But its cloud-capped towers shall not dissolve. And Wodehouse’s old brain stayed untroubled to the end. I have not researched this, but my guess is that published novels written by English authors aged ninety-three can be counted on the thumbs of one hand. And if there have been more than that, I would expect to find them tired, petulant, gloomy and grey, showing their author’s age; certainly not funny, fresh, young in heart and full of hammocks, sunshine and four pairs of lovers headed for altars in the last pages.
Wodehouse, bless his old heart, went to his honoured grave without issuing a funeral note or a solemn message to anyone, with a farce novel warm in his typewriter. He had earned laurels enough since the 192 OS, and, if he had worn them ever, it would have been on the side of his head. He had never rested on them. He went on being frivolous to the last. He had always been very serious about his work of being funny.
THE CASTLE
AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
WODEHOUSE built Blandings Castle from his typewriter and from far away. As a young, struggling, English author in New York, he had been writing, primarily for the American market, light romantic stories set in America. Something Fresh (or Something New, as it was called in America) justified its name; it was largely farce and it was set in England.
There had been a Shropshire castle, Dreever, in an earlier, but more serious novel, A Gentleman of Leisure (November 1910. It had been published in New York as The Intrusion of Jimmy in May. And it was later a play, starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and, later still, John Barrymore) . Dreever Castle had an amorphous Anglo-American house-party, a rose garden, a lake, a butler and a bossy aunt. But it was only a foreshadow of Blandings.
Wodehouse told me that he got the skyline grandeur of Blandings Castle from memories of Corsham Court, near Bath, seen from its frozen lake. He had been taken to skate there by an aunt one winter during school holidays. He had, after leaving the Bank, lived in a small house named Threepwood in the village of Emsworth, on the borders of Hampshire and Sussex and not far from Bosham, and he used those names for his noble family and its title. Owen Dudley Evans, in an appendix to his P. G. Wodehouse (1977), suggests that Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland, published in 1913, may have given Wodehouse the name for his castle and a succession of later plots. Well, well.
Blandings first opened its gates in 1915. Afterwards, when Wodehouse was drawn back, story after story, novel after novel, to the green Shropshire pastures, he regretted that he had chosen a location so far from London: about four hours by train. That distance was time-consuming and took a little of the bustle out of his scenarios. The castle drew most of its visitors, genuine and impostors, from London. London was where Lord Emsworth had to go for the opening of Parliament and to hire a new head gardener. Barribault’s Hotel, the Drones, Mario’s restaurant and secretarial agencies were all in London. And only London provided loony-doctors, detectives and pig-portrait painters. In this story the restless Galahad does the double journey, Blandings/London/Blandings, three times in what seems to be less than a week, but one might suppose that this was his elderly author showing a last defiance of the difficulty with which he had saddled himself in his springtime.
Wodehouse built another stately home of England, Belpher Castle in Hampshire, in A Damsel in Distress, published four years after Something Fresh. It was very much the same sort of establishment as Blandings, and there are some noticeable echoes of names. And it was within commuting distance of London. It is odd that Wodehouse didn’t keep Belpher going and retire Blandings. Well, still not realizing that he had a saga taking shape, he had given the dreamy Earl of Marshmoreton an autumn romance with a charming American chorus girl, and they had married in Chapter 25. For saga requirements Wodehouse needed to have his chatelain a widower. So (this is an informed guess) he closed Belpher Castle and re-opened Blandings to his public. (By that I mean his reading public. But Wodehouse names, once launched, had a friendly way of breeding in space over the Atlantic. When Hollywood, for the second time, made a film of A Damsel in Distress, in 1937, one of the songs, written by the Gershwin brothers and recorded in Ira Gershwin’s book Lyrics on Several Occasions, is given as ‘Sung in Totleigh Castle by the Belpher Society for the Preservation of Traditional English Ballads, Madrigals and Rounds’. And another is ‘Sung by Fred Astaire to Joan Fontaine on the downs of Totleigh Castle, located in Upper Pelham-Grenville, Wodehouse, England’.)
It was at Blandings Castle that Wodehouse placed the bulk of Leave it to Psmith (1923). And, as the stories
and novels multiplied, the Blandings pattern remained familiar and always fresh: the hay-harvest weather week after week, the dreamy old widower earl, the bossy sister, the incarcerated niece, the butler, the impostors, the young lovers, the theft, the criss-cross blackmail, the happy endings engineered by fate, or Galahad, or Lord Ickenham.
Wodehouse tells us hardly anything about the past of the castle. It was built of grey stone, solid against possible attack, in the mid-fifteenth century. It had turrets and battlements in profusion. It had interested Viollet-le-duc (18 14—1879. French architect, medievalist and writer). It stands at the head of the Vale of Blandings. It is one of the oldest inhabited houses in the country, with fifty-two bedrooms and staterooms, some of which have not been occupied since Queen Elizabeth I and other royalty were visitors. In Leave it to Psmith Psmith suggests that Cromwell had been a less welcome visitor. But as Psmith gives the date of Cromwell’s visit as 1550, we must suppose either that Psmith wasn’t being serious or that it is a misprint that has unaccountably survived.
But now, in the twentieth century, the castle is obviously a very large, comfortable, warm house, set in a great expanse of splendid gardens, with a long curling drive, and with lawns and parkland stretching into sun-soaked distances in all directions. The railway station is Market Blandings. Shrewsbury is over there. You can see the Wrekin from the tower, and the Severn is very much part of the landscape and view. After that we must rely on conjecture, studying the evidences in Wodehouse’s texts and piecing together, where we can make them fit, rooms, floors, terraces, gardens, lawns, trees, tennis courts, pigsties, paddocks, streams, water meadows, cowsheds, drives, vistas, villages, churches and railway lines.
But in a succession of Blandings books spanning sixty publishing years you mustn’t look for a purist consistency of topography. Not from Wodehouse. You wouldn’t say he was careless. Carefree is a better word. He was not disturbed, or even surprised, when devoted readers wrote to him and pointed out that passage A in novel X didn’t square with passage B in novel Y. Certainly he has left a large number of difficulties for the jigsaw-puzzler and, I think, four or five positive impossibilities. Yet here we come, offering drawings and maps in print—the dust cover of this book, the sketch of Market Blandings station, the end-papers, plans of the ground floor and first-floor interiors of the castle. We have worked them out scrupulously from the Blandings books. But, even if allowances are made (as they must be) for artistic licence, the publishers and I expect to receive a hail of protests, counter-claims and derision for our daring to give fiction the semblance of fact, and staking our claims on probable locations, directions, shapes, sizes and distances in the fabled demesne.
First, artistic licence. Take the sun on the front cover, soon to set behind the hills on the back. Of course the sun wouldn’t be setting that way in the northern hemisphere. But the artist has splendidly interpreted his commission, which was to illustrate the title of the book. The magnificence of the castle, the harassed expression of Lord Emsworth, the cool effrontery of Galahad and, in the background, comfort (Beach the butler) and conflict (Lady Florence) — these are fine embellishments. On the back of the book — or left of the whole picture if you have the cover properly framed by now — is the Empress of Blandings in her new sty with, again, Lord Emsworth and Galahad in attendance. You’re right. The new sty isn’t there. You’ll find it, correctly placed, we think, on the map that the artist drew from a helicopter and that makes our end-papers (24K[46]), Ionicus has put the ping and her protectors central to the back cover because they are the central forces for good, Lord Emsworth in all, the Empress in most and Galahad in the best of the Blandings oeuvre. You may say that the pivot of this novel is not the pig-sty, but the hammock under the cedars. The artist thought the Empress had a deeper significance in the context of the whole Blandings canon.
Still looking at the cover, you may say the castle ought to be grey, not brown. But remember where that sun is and how the evening light plays tricks with stone colourings. Remember, too, that, with the anxiety about Brenda’s lost necklace, with Sir James’s inability to propose to Diana, and with Florence and her husband not on speaking terms, a good artist will naturally want to darken the stone and get his brushes thick with sombre symbolism. You may say there ought to be more ivy mantling the frontage of the castle in the cover picture. An agile Jeff could well have climbed what is shown, but possibly on the day the artist painted the cover picture, McAllister had lowered much of the otherwise visible ivy to clear out old birds’ nests and mend some of the wiring. Wodehouse did not live to unknot the plot and plotlets of the story inside the covers of the book. It is natural that Ionicus should want to evoke a little of the mood of Childe Roland when he (if it was he; Browning is so obscure) set the slug-horn to his lips.
And, speaking of Childe Roland, what about that tower on the left, with the standard flying from it (1 7R)? On the cover we are looking at the castle from, roughly, the south. Wodehouse refers to that tower in two similar passages in two separate books. It is the tower over the west wing of the castle, and it is separated from the main block by a gravel path. It seems to be served by a small, dark door at ground level and inside, winding steps to the roof. It is a footman’s duty to run the flag up in the morning and lower it in the evening, apparently taking it away with him and locking the ground-level door for the night.
It was on the turret of this tower that Lord Emsworth looked forth through his telescope and saw his son Frederick kissing Aggie Donaldson in the water-meadows by the lake (‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’, Blandings Castle) . It was twenty-seven times round its chimney stack that Monty Bodkin had seen Galahad chase his nephew Ronnie with a whangee for having put tin-tacks in his chair. It was here that Sue Brown, sighing her soul for the blows that fate was dealing to her engagement to Ronnie, was unobserved by the flag-lowering footman and was locked up, or in, till jealous Ronnie came to rescue her and found Monty’s tell-tale hat (Heavy Weather).
What was this tower, other than a pedestal for the flagpole? What and where was the west wing if this solitary tower dominated it? This is a crux. We have tackled it boldly. We have made the tower dominate a west wing which is no longer there. It has all gone to ruin, and its battlements, halls and dungeons have given their stone to the more modern parts of the estate. The curtain wall, what’s left of it, guards nothing now, and gardens, lawns and meadows cover the courts where Threepwood after early Threepwood jousted, sang madrigals, gloried and drank deep.
Then, in the early nineteenth century, the sixth earl’s factor got that Shrewsbury architect (name unknown) to re-plan the patched-up old fortress as a comfortable manor house, with Georgian grace, primitive central heating in addition to the huge open fires, double-hung sash windows, bathrooms and lavatories plumbed in and the facilities for getting the food hot from kitchens to tables. But the west wing remained as a name only, its last remaining reality being the singular tower flying the Emsworth flag. Or that’s the way we read it.
And, though there is no record of Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown re-shaping the park, our guess is that the fourth earl had met Brown when he was at work on Weston Park, near Shifnal, for Lady Winlbraham, and got him to make Blandings, from boundary to boundary, his next commission. Give them twenty-five years to settle and mature — much longer for young cedars — and those vistas, those clumps of Scotch firs (‘Brown’s buttons’), those free-roaming gardens … they would grow in grace, beyond fashion, and be vulnerable only to a profligate heir (one has to worry about the present Lord Bosham, what little one knows of him) and alien property developers.
Vanessa Polk, in A Pelican at Blandings, looked from the tower and could see the Wrekin (1 2A) and ‘a fascinating panorama of Shropshire and its adjoining counties’. She must have been looking north to north-east. And she would have been able to see the tributary of the Severn (1 3D) that watered Market Blandings and flowed below the garden of the Emsworth Arms. But the Severn itself was also distantly visible if
you looked south across the lake (Leave it to Psmith, Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather) . So Blandings Castle is lapped in one of Sabrina’s fair curves. Our end-papers show you how. Don’t compare them too closely with any of those misleading county maps.
If you had asked Wodehouse how, exactly, he had seen the rooms, the gardens, the trees, the woods and the landscapes in his mind, he would have shuffled his feet modestly and changed the subject in order to prevent himself from replying, testily, that he couldn’t be bothered with details unless they affected his immediate plot and scenario. He could give Lord Emsworth five sisters or ten. He could put a Gutenberg Bible in the Museum (Something Fresh) and then, in all subsequent books, forget both the museum and its bible.[47] He could put the Amber Drawing Room upstairs in one book and on the ground floor (with french windows) in others. He could magic a deserted gamekeeper’s cottage into the West Wood (6S) just when he needed it and without the son of the house (Freddie) knowing even of its existence. He could have Lord Emsworth looking out of the Library window and seeing Baxter going in at the front door (Summer Lightning). He could have the evening sunlight shining on Baxter’s spectacles when he was outside the window of the Writing Room (‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’) . Accept that since so many rooms, in so many contexts, are described as looking out onto the terrace, the terrace must go round three sides of the house. Those last two data confound our positioning of the Library and the Writing Room. And it is a wrench, for me, to have Baxter (always making difficulties, this Baxter) pelting flower pots into Lord Emsworth’s bedroom (Leave it to Psmith) from the eastern terrace. But we will accept objections only from such critics as can make composite maps that elucidate more of the clues overall than ours do.