American Captain of industry doesn’t do anything out of business hours when he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a Captain of industry again" ("The Artistic Career of Corky" 45). Accordingly, when stoutness becomes a physical concern, bringing dyspepsia and steamed vegetables in its wake, American tycoons are apt to take up some expensive hobby to alleviate these undesirable symptoms.
For some tycoons, marriage may be considered a hobby. Along with physical largesse, the American millionaire is usually also well endowed with ex-wives. A wondering Lord Emsworth describes Wilbur J. Trout, "He’s an American. What the Yanks call a playboy. . . . He told me he loved his wife. She was his third wife" (No Nudes is Good Nudes 33). Ikey. alias Ivor Llewellyn of the Superba-Llewellyn Corporation, also has a propensity to tie the knot somewhat frequently, having five divorces to his credit by the time he has run his career as Wodehouse’s favorite movie mogul (Bachelors Anonymous); Vincent Jopp has three. Chinnery in Summer Moonshine is similarly unable to resist the temptation to overmarry; "[l]ike so many substantial citizens of his native country, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag" (35).
The wives of American millionaires are also inclined to be somewhat stout although most of them are reported to have been quite beautiful before their prosperity. We are told that some of them are prone to mysticism. Mrs. Sigsbee H. Waddington, stout chatelaine of the Waddington home, will conduct no affair of importance without consulting the crystal ball of Madame Eulalie (The Small Bachelor). Rosalinda Spottsworth, wealthy American widow, is devoted to psychic research and is led to buy Towcester Abbey from an impoverished earl because she feels she has "been" there before (The Return of Jeeves). They are attracted to stately English homes, and sometimes their male occupants as well. These ladies, like their male counterparts, are apt to remarry somewhat often. Readers will often find them in England, bailing out impoverished sons of the titled gentry.
Lesser beings who are not millionaires are still well-heeled enough to inspire the reverence of the Old World. Nicholas Jules St. Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufrigneuse et Valerie-Moberame, alias Old Nick, is overjoyed to hear that his son Jeff is dating an American girl, he himself having married an American heiress who subsequently divorced him: "Old Nick quivered at the magic word. Americans were always rich. God bless America, he had often felt, unconsciously plagiarizing the poet Berlin" (French Leave 61). Monsieur Boissonade, a stern French gendarme,
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is no less susceptible to the magic of the New World: "The flame in M. Boissonade’s eyes died to a mere flicker. He relaxed. He did not like Mrs. Pegler’s manner—very few people did—but what she had said had soothed him. ‘America’ was the operative word. He held the simple creed of French officials that all Americans were made of money and that some of it generally sticks to the fingers of the man who does them a service" (76). Even those in a menial capacity to Americans have a good chance of making their pile. Speculating on the prosperity of Keggs in Something Fishy, ,Jane explains: "He was years in America before he came to you, working for Mr. Bunyan, the father of the frightful young man who’s taken Shipley. I suppose the Bunyan home was always full of guests at week-ends, and American week-end guests never tip the butler less than a thousand dollars" (23). It so happens that Jane is mistaken in attributing Keggs’ wealth to the generosity of Bunyan’s guests; he has made his pile by eavesdropping on Bunyan and his associates and thus picking up valuable stock marketing tips. Nevertheless, she represents the usual response to America and the Americans as moneyed individuals in a land of plenty.
Truth be told, poor Americans are something of a rarity in Wodehouse’s America. When they do appear, they usually have compensations. At the very least, Wodehouse’s American characters have a ready resource that can be cashed in to bring a happy marriage or some monetary benefit. The Trent girls in French Leave pluckily stake their little fortune on a trip to France to find wealthy husbands. Do they succeed? Anyone who reads Wodehouse cannot doubt that his American hero and heroine on the make (quite like their English counterparts actually) cannot fail to achieve what they desire, be it an attractive spouse or a fortune. They all share the spirit of adventure. In this respect, Wodehouse’s Americans are not so different from his English. However, if there is a difference, it is that the American is likely to be a shade less dreamy than his English cousin. He is determinedly adventurous rather than merely impulsive. This subtle difference between the European and American sensibility is exemplified in the person of John Maude, son of an American heiress and a fortune-hunting prince of an obscure Mediterranean island, Mervo. Having skipped from work to watch a Giants/Athletics ball game, John is subsequently asked for an explanation by his uncle. What are his feelings as he approaches the dread table? "It had been Mervo that had sent him to the Polo Grounds on the previous day. That impulse had been purely Mervian. No Prince of that island had ever resisted temptation. But it was America that was sending him now to meet his uncle with a quiet unconcern as to the outcome of the interview. The spirit of adventure was in him" (The Prince and Betty 27).
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American pluck, like the basics of American tycoonery, can be acquired by willing visitors. James Bartholomew Bedford is in love with Angela, niece of Lord Emsworth. Denied his suit, James fierily demands an explanation. Lord Emsworth is mortified: "Directness of this kind, he told himself with a pang of self pity, was the sort of thing young Englishmen picked up in America. Diplomatic circumlocution flourished only in a more leisurely civilization, and in those energetic and forceful surroundings you learned to Talk Quick and Do It Now and all sorts of uncomfortable things" ("Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey" 343).
American girls are also well endowed with pluck. They cross into England frequently and find eligible mates. In If I Were You, Polly, an inconsequential hairdresser from America, wins everyone’s hearts rapidly, even in a snobbish English ambience. She is beloved of a titled earl, and objections to her position have to be tempered with the reminder that "Polly was an American, and even when the American girl is vulgar she is so with a difference" (34). Anne, in Laughing Gas, is said to possess a sort of bright, cocksure, stand-no-nonsense bossiness, such as so many self-supporting American girls have" (99). They are also generally believed to possess plenty of "oomph," Wodehouse’s term for sexual appeal, we are told. Like the male, they have all the resource and charm necessary to win the day.
If these portraits of Wodehousean Americans—the stout dyspeptic millionaires, the dashing financial wizards, the glib and adventurous American men, and the plucky American girls, lead us to believe that Wodehouse was trafficking in stereotypes, we should not be alarmed. Wodehouse was doing the same with England and the English, albeit on a much larger and much more developed scale. David Jasen says in the Introduction to The Eighteen-Carat Kid and Other Stories, "The Wodehouse world was one of his own creation, peopled not with beings from the real world, but from his own imagination. His popularity was gained not by caricaturing the real world or by holding up a mirror, but by taking universal traits and easily recognizable habits and making us see ourselves" (ix).
The picture of America that emerges is a creative mixture of some fact and a great deal of delicious fiction. Popular impressions of America’s wealth, the American Wild West, American enterprise, and American crime are exploited as Wodehouse creates the Great American Joke in much the same way that he creates the Great English Joke. The English are satirized as foolish fops, as gentlemen of leisure with one eye on the day’s races and another on what tie to wear for the evening’s binge at Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright’s or Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps’; as impoverished and dotty earls who prefer gardening to commerce; as imperious,
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snobbish, and dominating chatelaines who prowl and prowl around the stately homes of England like the Midian troops. Wodehouse laughs at the English and the American, indeed at human nature itself, and at the reader whose susceptibility to stereotypes he has so adroitly manipulated in all his works. Wodehouse could not have created American jokes if he did not feel comfortable in his new home. It is a measure of Wodehouse’s affection for his adopted country that he felt the need to recreate it in his fiction just as he had his native country.
In the final analysis, Wodehouse’s America seems not to be as insignificant a world as one would at first imagine. To be sure, it is not the America of a realistic writer. Wodehouse did not traffic in sordid reality. Once, an American publisher who had commissioned a series of short stories was disappointed that there were not many American characters in an American setting in his stories. Wodehouse commented: "It can’t have come on him as a stunning shock to find that I was laying my scene in England. What did he expect from me? Thoughtful studies of sharecropper life in the Deep South?" (Author! Author! 82). Wodehouse cheerfully leaves this task to other writers. When he talks about America and the Americans, it is with the same breezy cheer that accompanies his descriptions of England and the English. Wodehouse’s genius is to create a wonder world of delight where the ultimate triumph is to win a charming spouse (or to avoid one!) and where pain and suffering are usually limited to pangs of dyspepsia. Wodehouse makes of America what he makes of England—too rarified a world to admit creatures too real. If the reader is at first overwhelmed by the number of Englishmen and women who crowd this unique little world, he should look carefully again. Jostling through the crowd of earls and fops and imperious ladies of the manor is the odd but interesting American who beckons the reader to cross the trans-Atlantic bridge that Wodehouse has obligingly constructed for those who desire the excitement of both worlds—the English and the American.
Bowling Green State University
Works Cited
Cosmo, Hamilton. "P. G. Wodehouse: A Mere Humorous
Person." People Worth Talking About. London: Hutchinson, 1934.
Green, Benny. P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography. London: Pavilion, 1981.
Jasen, David A. Introduction. The Eighteen-Carat Kid and Other Stories. New York:
Continuum, 1980. ix-xii.
Wind, Herbert Warren. The World of P. G. Wodehouse. New York: Praeger, 1972.
Wodehouse, P[elham] G[reenville]. America, I Like You. New York: Simon, 1956.
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_____. Laughing Gas. New York: Doubleday, 1935.
_____. "The Nodder." Blandings Castle. New York: Burt, 1924. 2 18-40. No
Nudes is Good Nudes. New York: Simon 1970.
_____. "Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey." The Most of P. G. Wodehouse. New York: Simon,
1960. 335-52.
_____. The Prince and Betty. New York: Watt, 1912.
_____. TheReturn of Jeeves. P. G. Wodehouse: Five Complete Novels. New York:
Avenel, 1983. pp. 3-41.
_____. The Small Bachelor. New York: Burt, 1926.
_____. Something Fishy. London: Jenkins, 1957.
_____. Spring Fever. P. G. Wodehouse: Five Complete Novels. New York: Avenel, 1983.
283-437.
_____. Summer Moonshine. New York: Doubleday, 1937.
_____. Uneasy Money. New York: Macaulay, 1915.
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