Monday, December 22, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 66 / Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)

The 100 best novels: No 66 – Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)

PG Wodehouse’s elegiac Jeeves novel, written during his disastrous years in wartime Germany, remains his masterpiece

Robert McCrum
Monday 22 December 2014

or PG Wodehouse, this novel, completed amid the horrors of wartime Germany, was something of a miracle, “the supreme Jeeves novel of all time”, he wrote. Defying gravity, English literature’s “performing flea” effortlessly reminded his postwar readers of a world whose day was done and also of a literary sensibility that had entranced a generation now facing retirement. A late-season masterpiece, Joy in the Morning is both an elegy and an encore.

“The super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my uncle Percy…” is one of those imbroglios that Bertie Wooster believes his biographers will refer to as “The Steeple Bumpleigh Horror”.

A more brilliant example of Wodehouse’s literary escapism, his capacity to conjure sweetness and light out of airy nothing, would be hard to find. Not only does he weave together many of his best characters and themes around the old plot of a Wodehouse heroine (Florence Craye) and her matrimonial designs upon Bertie (“She was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove”), it was also conceived and written during the “phoney war”, and all but completed during the Nazi occupation of Le Touquet (Wodehouse’s interwar home).

PG Wodehouse

Joy in the Morning is an anthology of Wodehouse’s favourite comic situations: the impending doom of a mesalliance; a blazing country cottage; a nocturnal confrontation; a fancy-dress ball. Style and content achieve a perfect union when a running gag about “the fretful porpentine” culminates with “a hidden hand” concealing a hedgehog in Bertie’s bed. The novel also contains some of Wodehouse’s most immortal similes, including the moment when one of the characters, caught in the act, spins round “with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk”. There’s also, for readers troubled by Wodehouse’s terrible wartime gaffes, a line of oblique self-justification. “I doubt,” says Bertie, speaking of the writer Boko Fittleworth, “if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.”

A note on the text

Joy in the Morning was the novel Wodehouse was working on at home in Le Touquet when the German army burst into France with the blitzkrieg of May 1940. Two months later, he was interned as an “enemy alien” and had to leave his unfinished MS in the care of his wife Ethel.

During his internment in Upper Silesia (“If this is Upper Silesia,” he joked, “what must Lower Silesia be like?”) Wodehouse wrote another novel, Full Moon, and did not return to the final chapters of his incomplete Jeeves and Wooster novel until 1943, after his release from captivity, and more especially, after his disastrous radio broadcasts from wartime Berlin. Battered, and embarrassed, but unbowed, he took for his title a quotation from Psalm 30, verse 5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” This, perhaps, was a coded affirmation of his determination to ride out the controversy surrounding his wartime behaviour.

PG Wodehouse

Eventually, Joy in the Morning would be completed in the idyllic rural solitude of Degenershausen, a country house deep in the Harz mountains. From there, the typescript was shipped back to his American publisher, Doubleday Doran, which launched it, with some misgivings about its reception after the scandal of the broadcasts, on 22 August 1946. An English edition from Herbert Jenkins followed on 2 June 1947. In the event, the reviews were good, and the hardback sales respectable, some 20,000 copies at first.

For a writer who preferred to give little away, and (as he put it) “wear the mask”, Wodehouse’s preface to Joy in the Morning is surprisingly candid, revealing his creative anxiety about the effect of the second world war on his art and his audience. “The world of which I have been writing since I was so high…” he conceded, “has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it.” Although he would go on writing about silly young men in spats, butlers, posh girlfriends, and country houses for another 30 years, he never recovered his vintage prewar form (with the possible exception of The Mating Season, 1949). His best work was done. Some Wodehouse fans may want to dispute this, but Joy in the Morning stands, for me, as his masterpiece, rivalled only by Uncle Fred in the Springtime, The Code of the Woosters and Heavy Weather.