The Mating Season (1949) by P.G. Wodehouse

reviewed by John Murphy

If laughter is indeed the best medicine, then the collected works of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) should be prescribed by doctors as a matter of course. It is literally impossible to be downhearted while reading the words of Wodehouse. Believe me, I’ve tried, but then that incomparable fathead, Bertram Wooster, begins his tale in media res before admitting, “But half a jiffy. I’m forgetting you haven’t the foggiest what this is all about. It so often pans out that way when you begin a story. You whizz off the mark all pep and ginger, like a mettlesome charger going into its routine, and the next thing you know, the customers are up on their hind legs yelling for footnotes.” At that point, the clouds part and Wodehouse’s glittering words win me over.

I was painting the basement this week—a distinctly humorless chore, I assure you—and needed some bucking up. So I put on the great Frederick Davidson’s masterfully uproarious reading of The Mating Season to pass the time. Consequently, I’ve been battling gigantic spiders, inhaling toxic fumes, and kneeling on cold, hard concrete with a constant smile plastered to my face. Only Wodehouse can do that, God bless him (and/or the paint fumes).

Though The Mating Season is the title under review, the classic Jeeves & Wooster tales are virtually interchangeable. This is not a criticism. Like the proverbial pair of slippers or a warm cup of tea on a gray, rainy afternoon, the Jeeves & Wooster series is balm to any soul. One opens a Wodehouse like a bottle of something vintage: ready to be soothed and satiated. A snivelly critic once accused Wodehouse of publishing a book with all the “Wodehouse types” given new names. Wodehouse responded:

“A certain critic–for such men, I regret to say, do exist–made the nasty remark about my last novel [Heavy Weather] that it contained `all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha; but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

How can you resist Wodehouse? So far as I’m concerned, he smote that critic’s ruin on the mountainside. We don’t read Wodehouse for his plots, though he does have a deft talent for keeping a story zipping along. Wodehouse is less concerned with what the story is about than with how he’ll be about it. The Mating Season happens to find that classic duo, Wooster and Jeeves—the airheaded English aristocrat and his genius “gentleman’s gentleman,” respectively—holed up for a spell in the foreboding Deverill Hall, seat of five formidable aunts. Wooster confesses:

“On the cue ‘five aunts’ I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of five aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not the aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them, I pulled myself together.”

Bertie visits Deverill Hall gussied up as Augustus Fink-Nottle, a friend of his doing a spell in the jug after drunkenly wading for newts in Trafalgar Square (don’t ask). Bertie is afraid that if Gussie doesn’t make his appointment at Deverill Hall, Gussie’s fiancé, the dopey Madeline Bassett, will break off the engagement and turn her romantic attentions to Bertie. Needless to say, Wooster has no desire to be “served his sentence” by marrying the Bassett out of a sense of gentlemanly duty.

Wodehouse’s world is an idyllic world, a dream of England circa the Roaring Twenties when Aunts were forces of nature, gentlemen were silly asses, and butlers were the brains of the operation. The most nefarious crime in a Wodehouse plot tends to be pinching some police constable’s helmet. His is a world of scenic British country-houses, frighteningly competent man-servants, cups of tea, bottles of port, and silly romantic imbroglios that require Jeeves to save the day. Along the way, characters are described as follows:

Aunt Agatha: The one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.

Gussie Fink-Nottle: Goofy to the gills, face like a fish, horn-rimmed spectacles, drank orange juice, collected news, engaged to England’s premiere pill, Madeline Bassett…

Madeline Bassett: from topknot to shoe sole the woman that God forgot.

It may be difficult to write a gut-wrenchingly tragic book, but I dare say it’s even more difficult to write a gut-bustingly funny one. No doubt that is why (to the great consternation of his contemporaries) Hillaire Belloc proclaimed Wodehouse the finest prose stylist of his epoch. That’s all well and good, but better proof is this: Dostoevsky certainly won’t get me through an afternoon of painting the blasted basement. Writers like Dostoevsky mirror the human heart. Writers like Wodehouse make the human heart rejoice. They are different but equal geniuses.