Jeevesville, USA.

UNABLE ALWAYS TO SUPPRESS the smartarse which lurks within me, I experienced a sense triumph recently when I became convinced at I had discovered the true source of P.G. Wodehouse's inspiration.

Is this a matter of consequence to the intellectual life of the twenty-first century? To reassure myself before making the results of my research public, I asked my most sophisticated early-thirties Australian friend if she and her contemporaries read Wodehouse. She e-mailed:

   I always keep a few of his books on hand
   in ease I feel blue. I bought a stack of
   Blandings Castle novels in Connaught
   Circus, Delhi, and read them to relieve my misery
   while stranded in a slum hotel there. He is very
   popular in India. You can buy him in any bookstore.
   Several of my friends read him but they are not
   typical of my contemporaries. J., for instance,
   doesn't read anything, not even picture magazines.
   A. [my friend's husband] is too earnest for
   Wodehouse. I counselled an English friend to read
   Bertie Wooster books when she was complaining of
   depression and she says they cured her when Prozac
   and psychotherapy wouldn't. I recently met a young
   literature PhD candidate from Columbia University
   who grew up near the town in Long Island where
   PGW lived and he loved his books, knew all about
   them and was very analytical.

Sydney's three most urbane bookshops keep popular Wodehouse books--mainly the Jeeves and Blandings Castle sagas--always in stock. An American publisher, the Overlook Press, is twenty handsome volumes into a proposed forty in its Collectors' Wodehouse uniform edition, begun in 2002.

Though Wodehouse's present-day readers may be a coterie, his longevity and transcultural appeal are unique. The life of the farceur is short. Wodehouse's once popular contemporary comic novelists, such as A.A. Milne, Denis Mackail and Jerome K. Jerome, have vanished virtually without a trace. Mark Twain and Evelyn Waugh were very funny when they chose to be but mostly they didn't. Georges Feydeau's plays are still performed, but in English mostly at festivals and other gatherings of literati. Ben Travers, famous in the 1920s and 1930s for his Aldwych Theatre farces, is pretty much forgotten. Only W.S. Gilbert, whom Wodehouse acknowledged as an exemplary influence, matches the creator of Lord Emsworth in lasting appeal, and he had some very good music to boost him.

When I happily resumed association with Wodehouse this year, after twenty years or so of now inexplicable neglect, I became conscious fairly soon of something not quite right about his characters, as beautifully as they fitted his narrative. Lord Emsworth, Bertie, Jeeves, Galahad, Uncle Fred, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps and the others gave out no identifying echoes when I applied to them the radar of my respectfully distant observations of, and occasional shoulder rubs with, the British upper classes. Yet it was improbable that a writer as gifted as Wodehouse could inaccurately represent the inhabitants of a milieu to which he had contributed so much in the way of structural design.

Suddenly I was struck by a revelation which, in an instant, put me a step ahead of less perceptive literary critics, such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

In a 1946 essay, Orwell peremptorily dismissed as illusion the then general belief that Wodehouse's world existed in the between-wars 1920s and 1930s. "His picture of English society," Orwell wrote:

   [was] formed before 1914. It was a naive, traditional
   and, at bottom, admiring picture. His books are
   aimed not, obviously, at a highbrow audience but at
   an audience educated along traditional lines. The
   period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie
   Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed around 1915.

Waugh, in turn, rejected Orwcell's timeline as balderdash. "Mr Wodehouse's characters," he wrote in 1961:

   are not, as has been fatuously suggested, survivals of
   the Edwardian age. They are creations of pure fancy
   ... All, whatever the delinquencies attributed to
    them, exist in a pristine paradisal innocence.

      For Mr Wodehouse there has been no fall of
    Man: no "aboriginal calamity" ... The gardens of
    Blandings Castle are that original garden from
    which we are all exiled,

Orwell's portrayal of Wodehouse as Edwardian has lost favour with most critics, who tend to accept the Waugh interpretation. However, Waugh's theory of the parthogenetic origin of Wodehouse's characters strikes me as sentimental and his exposition of it uncharacteristically arch. He, ahead of most, would have known that humour cannot exist in a paradisal vacuum. To disrupt expectations, its essential characteristic, it needs to bump hard up against something or against something hard.

Four novels into the Blandings Castle saga, with Right Ho, Jeeves intervening, I felt myself on track to the true location of Wodehouse's world.

I had read the five books aloud to an audience of one, this being an enjoyable activity I have pursued for nearly fifty years. The audience and I had been engaged during the previous month with V.S. Naipaul's two brilliant and disquieting accounts of life in the failed nations of Islam, Among the Believers and Beyond Belief We felt the need for a move to a softer climate. Summer Lightning, the third of Wodehouse's Blandings Castle sequence, published in 1929, provided five-star resort accommodation. The audience's giggling, chortling and snorting frequently impaired her handling of core duties, like preparing my dinner. As reader, I exercised more self-control. A lead player with a script that offers a laugh a line, if properly milked, doesn't mess around with editorial comment. But I, too, found this seventy-eight-year-old popular (to free it from the burden of academic respectability) novel as freshly funny as anything I have read.

Once caught in the Wodehouse web there was no escape. We went on to Heavy Weather (1933), in which the narrative begun in Summer Lightning is more or less continued. Right Ho, Jeeves intervened because a friend said this was Wodehouse's funniest novel. Maybe. Choice of the best of the best varies. Wodehouse's own selection, Quick Service, is on the idiosyncratic side. We restarted at the first Blandings epic, Something Fresh (1915), continued with the next in the sequence, Leave it to Psmith (1923). I don't think we have broken free of Wodehouse yet.

Reading him aloud, and thus paying attention to every word, I began to sense a familiarity with Wodehouse's world that was out of proportion to my slight knowledge of the ways of the British upper classes and, for that matter of Edwardian England, to which watching Upstairs, Downstairs had made the chief contribution.

From whence this familiarity? Et voila, as the saying goes. Wodehouse's settings were not English at all and his characters didn't feel quite right because they weren't English, either. They were American, a milieu with which am familiar.

At its lightest level, the Wodehouse oeuvre is a spin-off from genial American stereotypes of England and the English--except for the lively, self-reliant young romantic heroines, and one leading character to whom I will come later, who are authentically American. The stereotypes survive to this day, expressed through the possibly waning but recently broad popularity with American moviegoers of Hugh Grant, playing Wodehousian silly asses but with sex appeal, and the cult status of Basil Fawlty, most Wodehousian of modern comic characters, darker and madder than Bertie Wooster, but clearly heir to the crazed Duke of Dunstable.

What a discovery! The Wodehouse dramatis personae with hardly a true Brit among them! Regrettable that Orwell and Waugh hadn't survived to squirm over their failure to see what I had seen.

Unfortunately, like most, if not all, of my intellectual discoveries, this one turned out to have been discovered already. Wodehouse blew the secret himself in a 1951 letter to his friend Denis Mackail. Taking somewhat belated umbrage over Orwell's preserving him in Edwardian wax, Wodehouse wrote:

   It's perfectly all right for [Orwell] or any other critic
   to say that my stuff is ... out of date. I know it is.
   But why try to drive it home by saying that my
   out-of-touchness with English life is due to the fact
   that I did not set foot in England for sixteen years
   before 1939?

      If only these blighters would realise that I started
   writing about Bertie Wooster and comic earls
   because I was in America and couldn't write
   American stories and the only English characters the
   American public would read about were exaggerated
   dudes. It's as simple as that.

Although his most affectionately invasive biographer, Frances Donaldson, considered Wodehouse an unreliable source of information about himself, I've no doubt he told it as it was to Mackail about the genesis of his comic masterpieces. However, I am not convinced that it was "as simple as that", or, at any rate, that it remained as simple as that.

I owe a debt to Murray Hedgcock, a distinguished Australian expatriate journalist and prominent member of the Wodehouse Society, UK (there are also Wodehouse societies in the United States, in such improbable places as Russia and Sweden, and at least two in India), for directing me to evidence of Wodehouse's role in entrenching and strengthening the American stereotype of class-ridden English society. From official documents made public in 2002, the BBC broadcast the revelation that Wodehouse had been proposed for the title of Companion of Honour in 1967 but that the British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Patrick Deane, had opposed it, partly on the grounds of controversial but innocuous broadcasts Wodehouse had made while a civilian internee in Germany during the Second World War but also, and I think primarily, because "the award of this high honour would give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character which we are doing our best to eradicate".

Later, in 1971, when Wodehouse was being considered for a knighthood, eventually conferred in 1975, weeks before his death, the Foreign Office again stood in the way, on the grounds that Wodehouse, having become an American citizen, would only be entitled to honours for some service to British interests. An official, unable to suppress the prat within, minuted the opinion that "the fact Mr Wodehouse writes in English can scarcely be held to constitute services to this country".

That Westminster mandarins attributed to ostensibly ephemeral and frivolous works of fiction such power to give the wrong impression is remarkable. It indicates a suspicion on their part that, beyond its reflection of American stereotypes of English life, Wodehouse's work had been infiltrated by some alien, un-English cultural influence. Sir Humphrey was, as usual, right on the ball.

One shouldn't make too much of Wodehouse's notorious inability to get straight the timetables of trains running between Paddington and Market Blandings, and the duration of the journey, but there is a solid case to be made for his laying the foundations of Blandings Castle in Shropshire and then carrying the plans with him to America, where he finished construction, in stages--with departure times from Paddington increasingly irrelevant. Wodehouse spent by far the greater part of his adult life outside England, including the last thirty years on seventeen wooded acres identified by Herbert Wind in a New Yorker profile (anticipating me by thirty-five years, the sod) as "Blandings Castle, Long Island".

Wodehouse became enormously rich in America, earning as much as $US50,000 from the Saturday Evening Post for a serial, writing the lyrics for Jerome Kern's songs in a succession of Broadway musical hits and, in the midst of the Depression, getting more than $100,000 a year from Hollywood for, as it turned out, doing practically nothing. His American residences, suites in grand hotels, a penthouse on Park Avenue, Manhattan, and rented mansions hither and thither, were all Blandings Castle as a work in progress. Waugh would have been on the ball with Sir Humphrey had he presented this American Blandings as a paradise from which the British landed gentry were specifically exiled. Wodehouse's paradise had central heating.

Those sceptical about the un-Englishness of Blandings should take note of this passage in a letter from Wodehouse to Mackail in 1930:

   I sometimes don't get out of the garden for three or
   four days at a time ... My days follow each other in
   a regular procession. I get up, swim, breakfast, work
   till two, swim again, work till seven and the day is
   over ... It's really rather jolly. We go out very little.

This is the preferred routine of Lord Emsworth (work for him being gardening and tending his prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings) when havoc is not loose at Blandings--but Wodehouse was writing from Beverly Hills, from a house leased from Norma Shearer.

It is inconceivable that somebody as gifted and intelligent as Wodehouse, setting foot in America for the first time at the age of twenty and spending nearly fifty years of his next seventy-three years there, would not have moved through the superficiality of American stereotypes to see class-ridden English society with a clear eye as bizarre, inefficient and intrinsically undesirable. Too good-humoured for satire, Wodehouse employed robust burlesque to bounce his comic invention hard off the anomaly of British class distinction in the twentieth century. I'm not convinced by assertions (by Orwell among others) that Wodehouse viewed the England he left behind with unqualified admiration and affection. Did his potty peers and pampered Drones need to be quite as moronic as he made them out to be? For his literary purposes, yes.

Jeeves is Wodehouse's quintessential non-English character, preposterous in his guise as an English valet, as phony, in fact, as the many imposters who bring disarray and confusion to life at Blandings. No English lower-class autodidact could have equipped himself with the range of literary references and Latin tags with which Jeeves swamps Bertie. No English gentleman's gentleman, valuing class distinction at least as highly as your average earl, would blend so much dumb insolence with bossiness towards his master. Jeeves's arrogance in keeping Bertie in the dark about most key plot developments is not the behaviour of an English lackey. Not to mention his letting Bertie go ungentlemanned to Cannes because he, Jeeves, did not want to miss Ascot. Or his Machiavellian manoeuvre of sending Bertie on a purposeless thirty-kilometre night-time bicycle ride (Right Ho, Jeeves) so that, in his absence, Jeeves could calm a variety of house party feuds by focusing everybody's hatred on his employer.

I asked myself: what category of downtrodden but subversive American was Wodehouse likely to have observed during his fifty expatriate years, low of status no matter what their array of skills, often in forced subservience to people vastly inferior in energy and intelligence?

As a stereotype and imposter, I suppose Jeeves passes muster as an Englishman, but when it comes to soul Jeeves is clearly a black American.