P. G. Wodehouse Interview

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

What ho again! I just saw this posted over on Facebook, and had to share it here:

https://youtu.be/Re9QXetFipM

This is an interview between P. G. Wodehouse and Alistair Cooke from the 1960s. Wodehouse talks about the inspiration for Bertie Wooster, among other things.

He mentions an Anthony Mildmay as being the "Bertie Wooster type," so naturally I had to look him up. He was talking about this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Bingham_Mildmay,_2nd_Baron_Mildmay_of_Flete

He's too young to have directly inspired the creation of Bertie, but it's interesting to think this might be what Wodehouse had in mind as he was writing some of the Jeeves and Bertie stories at the height of his career:




And I was also fascinated to hear Wodehouse directly address the age difference between Jeeves and Bertie: apparently he envisioned them about 20 years apart, with Bertie in his 20s and Jeeves in his 40s.

Comments

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! Thank you!

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! For some reason I really geek out over these little glimpses of how Wodehouse envisioned his characters, maybe because he was so sparing with his descriptions in the actual stories. It's like solving a big puzzle, putting together all these tiny scraps of information about what Jeeves and Bertie were supposed to look like, how old they were, etc. This interview has so much great stuff, it actually had me wowing out loud.

(Sorry, I am a huge nerd and I must squee)

[haikitteh.livejournal.com]

I can't wait to watch this, thank you so much for pointing us to it.

I'm both surprised and a bit not that PG imagined such a big age difference between J&W. I always imagined Bertie to be 25, Jeeves 35-38-ish, so I guess it isn't that big a stretch for Jeeves to be just another 5 years or so older. His work history does indicate that he'd be around the 40-year mark.

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

You're welcome, delighted to share! :)

Yeah, I had always gotten the sense that Jeeves was older than Bertie, but it's left so utterly vague that I could easily picture him being anywhere from 30-something to 60-something. (For slashing purposes, I tend to put him on the younger end of that spectrum, but it's interesting to imagine them developing a relationship with a relatively large age gap.)

I wonder why Wodehouse kept these details so vague in the stories? I imagine it was probably a conscious decision, but I'm not sure what the reason would be.

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

I always imagined Jeeves as much older, purely due to US pop culture butlers in cartoons and whatnot, and I think it was the TV show that introduced me to the idea that they could be the same age, or close to it. I find young Jeeveses really interesting -- I feel like it makes the class difference between them more pronounced, because there's no age gap adding an additional variable into the power dynamic.

eta: re: Wodehouse being vague on description in general -- I wonder if it allowed him to keep things moving at a clip.

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

In general, I'd agree. He tends to give a very quick and sketchy description of each character as they are introduced, and sometimes takes the shortcut of comparing them to some pop culture icon or historical figure (which I always like, because then I can look that person up and get an idea of his mental template for what the character looked like).

But when it's a character that comes up again and again, he tends to drop new details here and there about appearance, age, vocal quality, etc. A fairly clear picture of Bertie emerges eventually, in bits and pieces, but Jeeves is always vague.

I wonder if it's partly because he felt it preserved the air of mystery and that almost supernatural quality Bertie seems to attribute to Jeeves. He's an ageless and shifting figure, like a Dickensian ghost or something.

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

A Dickensian ghost! I love that! Now wishing for someone to have, idk, Spode visited by the three ghosts of Christmas. I guess the more likely scenario would be Bertie being visited by the three Aunts of Christmas, bu that seems a little cruel.

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

Oh! Another thing I found interesting (but not directly related to Jeeves and Bertie) is how Wodehouse seems to give his foreign readers a lot more credit for intelligence/perceptiveness than Alistair Cooke does. Cooke asks him if he thinks his readers in other countries take the stories seriously as accurate portrayals of life in England, and Wodehouse's reaction is basically "lol wut?!"

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

Wodehouse's reaction is basically "lol wut?!

Ahaha, good on ya, Plum.