Dr Karl Marx, your Lordship

Extract

In point of technique, the great triumph of the Wodehouse novels was in the use of first-person narrative. It is curious how little he in fact used the first person. As Usborne has noted, the novels consist of Laughing Gas (1936) which, involving a switch of personalities, really needs something like this, Love Among the Chickens (where Wodehouse was very nervous about it) and the Wooster-Jeeves cycle. The stories told by the Oldest Member, Mr Mulliner and the Drones Club Crumpet have very little action by the narrator: from time to time the Oldest Member plays a small part in one of his own stories (although on the only occasion when Mr Mulliner does so, to any degree, in ‘George and Alfred’, the result is poor). The Ukridge short stories give a good deal of action to Corky. The Reggie Pepper episodes brought out the weakness and strength of the technique. Wodehouse brooded on the problem when writing his first Jeeves novel:

By the way, it’s not all jam writing a story in the first person. The reader can know nothing except what Bertie tells him, and Bertie can know only a limited amount himself.

What he came to do was to capitalise on this, turning the novels into a series of shock discoveries, part thriller, part increase of psychological perceptions. Usborne very properly notes the great debt to Conan Doyle at this point (ibid., 152-3). The model is clearly The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle’s one unflawed Holmes novel. If Wodehouse learned from Moriarty that an absent Aunt Agatha could be far more effective than her presence, he also drew the lessons on how to keep the Holmes figure off-stage for much of the action, especially when the mysteries loomed darkest.