Something Fresh

There are writers who make us laugh by constructing elaborate jokes, and there are writers who make us laugh merely by placing perfectly chosen words in precisely the right order. P. G. Wodehouse belongs gloriously, almost preposterously, to the latter category. In Something Fresh, first published in 1915, Wodehouse created the first novel set at Blandings Castle and, in the process, inaugurated a comic universe in which aristocratic eccentricity, romantic entanglement, misplaced ambition, financial desperation and an almost indecent appetite for food could coexist with impeccable ease.

On the surface, Something Fresh is a country-house comedy involving a priceless Egyptian scarab, a missing object, mistaken identities, romantic complications and two young people attempting to improve their financial circumstances by rather unconventional means. Beneath that deceptively uncomplicated premise, however, lies one of Wodehouse’s most characteristic achievements: the transformation of the conventional English country-house novel into a comic playground in which every social convention becomes an invitation to absurdity.

The great attraction of Something Fresh is that Blandings Castle is not merely a setting; it possesses something approaching a personality of its own. At its centre stands Lord Emsworth, the amiable, absent-minded and magnificently impractical owner of Blandings. His devotion to horticulture is so profound that ordinary human affairs appear to him less as matters requiring attention than as tiresome interruptions to the contemplation of his beloved flowers. For Lord Emsworth, the world of people is perpetually encroaching upon the far more agreeable world of plants.

The novel begins with the familiar ingredients of a country-house mystery. Mr Peters, a retired American millionaire and enthusiastic collector of Egyptian antiquities, possesses a priceless scarab. Through one of those delightful chains of circumstance that Wodehouse can make appear both inevitable and utterly ridiculous, the object finds its way into Lord Emsworth’s possession. Peters is determined to recover it, and offers a substantial reward of £1,000 for its return. But Wodehouse has little interest in permitting this apparently promising premise to develop into an ordinary detective story. The scarab is merely the pebble dropped into the pond; the real entertainment lies in watching the ripples spread through Blandings.

Peters’ daughter, Aline, is engaged to marry Lord Emsworth’s son, Freddie Threepwood. Yet Freddie has an embarrassing complication of his own. Before his engagement, he had developed a brief romantic infatuation with Joan Valentine and had written her some highly sentimental poetry. Now, with marriage to a millionaire’s daughter imminent, he is understandably anxious that these youthful indiscretions should not come to light. He therefore engages a detective, Jones, to retrieve the incriminating letters.

At the centre of the resulting confusion are Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine, two intelligent young people whose chief difficulty is that intelligence has not yet translated itself into financial security. Ashe is a detective novelist, while Joan earns her living by writing. Both are weary of their humdrum existence and sufficiently desperate for money to contemplate entering the curious world of domestic service. Ashe assumes the role of Peters’ valet; Joan becomes Aline’s maid. Thus they descend upon Blandings Castle, where their presence coincides with the scarab, the missing letters, the reward money and a collection of aristocratic personalities whose capacity for misunderstanding is virtually inexhaustible.

Then comes Jones, the hired detective. Having overheard a conversation concerning the reward offered by Peters, he begins to formulate plans of his own. What was initially a relatively straightforward problem consequently becomes a labyrinth of competing schemes, disguises, assumptions, romantic complications and increasingly desperate improvisations. In Wodehouse, one complication does not merely follow another; complications breed.

Yet the real pleasure of Something Fresh lies not in its plot. It lies in Wodehouse’s prose.

He possesses that rare and almost miraculous ability to make the most trivial occurrence sound momentous. A glance, a hesitation, an entrance into a room, a minor disagreement or an entirely ordinary conversation can suddenly acquire the rhetorical grandeur of an epic event. His similes frequently begin in perfectly familiar territory before swerving unexpectedly into some gloriously inappropriate comparison. The reader is never quite certain where the sentence is going to end, which is precisely why the sentence becomes so funny.

Wodehouse’s humour is also remarkably economical. He rarely explains why something is funny. He simply describes a character behaving in exactly the wrong way and trusts the reader to appreciate the consequences. His narration repeatedly establishes a tone of solemnity, only to puncture it with an observation of exquisite absurdity. It is this contrast between elevated language and ridiculous subject matter that constitutes one of the foundations of his comedy.

The prose, in other words, is not merely the vehicle for the joke. The prose itself is the joke.

Although Wodehouse is often described, somewhat dismissively, as an escapist writer, Something Fresh displays a keen awareness of the absurdities inherent in the social world it inhabits. Blandings is a universe governed by titles, servants, money, inherited privilege and rigid distinctions of class. Yet Wodehouse repeatedly demonstrates that social rank and practical intelligence are by no means synonymous. Lord Emsworth may be an earl, but he can be astonishingly helpless when confronted with the ordinary complications of human existence. The servants frequently understand the household better than their masters, while young outsiders possess the resourcefulness required to manipulate situations that leave the aristocracy in a state of bewilderment.

And yet Wodehouse is rarely savage in his satire. He is not writing a political indictment of the British aristocracy. His method is gentler, more affectionate and considerably more mischievous. He loves his ridiculous characters. That distinction is important. His aristocrats are rarely villains; they are simply human beings whose peculiarities have been magnified by the strange social ecosystem in which they happen to live.

The structure of the novel also reveals Wodehouse’s growing mastery of farce. The typical Wodehouse plot operates according to a deceptively simple principle: take one relatively minor problem and allow every character to make it considerably worse. That is precisely what happens here. The missing scarab, the romantic entanglements, Freddie’s anxiety about his letters, the reward money, secret identities and competing schemes gradually become hopelessly entangled. Every attempt to resolve one difficulty creates another, until the narrative resembles an intricately wound ball of string which nobody can remember having begun to unravel.

This is where Wodehouse’s genius for comic timing becomes apparent. He understands that farce is not simply a matter of piling one absurdity upon another. It depends upon escalation, rhythm and anticipation. The reader knows that disaster is approaching; the characters, naturally, do not. Their attempts to avert catastrophe merely hasten its arrival. The pleasure lies not in discovering what will happen, but in watching the inevitable happen in precisely the wrong way.

The greatest achievement of Something Fresh, however, is the creation of a world in which nothing is quite as serious as it initially appears, and yet everything is treated with exquisite comic seriousness. The plot may concern a stolen Egyptian scarab, romantic anxieties and financial difficulties, but the true treasures are Wodehouse’s characters, his timing and, above all, his language.

He takes the country-house novel, the romantic comedy, the mystery and the farce, tosses them into the same literary hat and produces something unmistakably his own. With Something Fresh, Blandings Castle became more than an address: it became a comic universe, populated by eccentrics whose follies could generate an inexhaustible supply of laughter.

And perhaps that is the enduring magic of Wodehouse. In the hands of a lesser writer, a lost scarab would have been merely the centre of a mystery. In Wodehouse’s hands, it becomes an excuse for an aristocratic comedy of manners, a romantic entanglement, a miniature crime caper and an exhibition of linguistic virtuosity.

Blandings Castle would go on to acquire a distinguished literary history, but its first appearance already established what would become one of Wodehouse’s most enduring gifts to English comedy: a world where absurdity reigns supreme, catastrophe is perpetually imminent, and the English language is made to dance magnificently upon the tightrope between elegance and lunacy.

Something Fresh is therefore not merely a promising beginning to the Blandings saga. It is a delightful demonstration of how little a writer needs when he possesses Wodehouse’s greatest resource: the ability to make almost anything funny simply by finding the perfect words for it.