As the Christmas Octave continues, Simon May takes an affectionate ecumenical look at Plum Wodehouse’s treatment of the numerous Anglican clergymen with which Bertie Wooster’s world seemed to be filled. In light of the recent Census it gives pause for thought, as the Church of England’s retreat from its parishes continues.
A charming 1930 short story by PG Wodehouse, “Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit”, contains much traditional English Christmas atmosphere. “It being Christmas Eve,” says Bertie Wooster, “there was, as I had foreseen, a good deal of revelry and what not: first the village choir surged round and sang carols outside the front door, and then somebody suggested a dance.” There is the usual Wodehouse imbroglio and Jeeves ends up getting his trip to Monte Carlo – but nobody goes to church.
You will look in vain in the index of any of the standard lives of Wodehouse for the words “Church” or “ Christianity” (though he did profess an interest in Spiritualism) and critics down the years have attempted to address this. In the envoi to her 1982 biography, Frances Donaldson says that Wodehouse “had many of the qualities of a saint. Kind, modest and simple, he was without malice or aggression.” Evelyn Waugh made a very grand excuse for the eirenic, indeed paradisal world of Wodehouse: “For Mr Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no ‘aboriginal calamity’… He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”
Nonetheless, the Wodehousean world is one permeated by images of of the Church of England – which he certainly expected his readership to recognise and acknowledge. Wodehouse grew up in a family steeped in Anglicanism. Norman Murphy found that of Plum’s fifteen uncles by blood or marriage, four were clergymen in the Church of England, with not a dissenter among them.
It is telling that one of the chapters of Wodehouse Nuggets, edited by Richard Usborne, should be called “Churches and Churchmen.” In the Wodehouse oeuvre Noncomformity is seen, but on the social margins and well away from the Landed Gentry: “The cook said something about the Wrath of the Lord and the Cities of the Plain, she being a bit on the biblical side.” There is no Catholicism.
Wodehouse’s depiction of Christianity is in fact rather de haut en bas: his clergy and their families play a joint part in conserving the social order. One vicar trying not to confuse his “rustic flock” is soon enough “lost in his labour and oblivious to everything but the problem of how to find a word of one syllable that meant Supralapsarianism”; another vicar’s daughter takes soup to the deserving poor: “Amazing the way these bimbos absorb soup. Like sponges.” The lower orders duly acknowledge their place in the hierarchy: “I’ve seen the light,” said a policeman, hitherto an atheist, “and what I wanted to ask you, Sir, was do I have to join the Infants’ Bible Class or can I start singing in the choir right away?”
Wodehouse’s clergy are regular Englishmen, often of the Muscular-Christian style, as evidenced by the Revd Stanley Brandon, whose curate feared physical violence at his hands – “it was some quite trivial point that had come up, a question of whether the pumpkin would look better in the apse or the clerestory” – and the Revd Harold “Stinker” Pinker, a gentle giant who played rugby for England.
Their names are never demotic; they include the Revd Francis Heppenstall, the Revd Orlo Hough and the Revd Cuthbert Dibble – who must have been borrowed, surely, by the later writers of Trumpton). They are all graduates of the older universities and sometimes have a missionary outreach in the East End of London, like the Revd Rupert “Beefy” Bingham who runs “a Lads’ Club for the local toughs – you know the sort of thing – cocoa and back-gammon”.
Wodehouse’s famous story “The Great Sermon Handicap” (of which the centenary falls in 2023) is believable because a hundred years ago the Church of England was fully functioning at a local level: all you need is a dozen hamlets within a radius of six miles, and then you make a book on who preaches the longest sermon. The ten “probable starters” are a miniature Crockford’s Clerical Directory: each parish has its incumbent, and the parish names are a beautiful litany in themselves: Twing, Boustead Parva, Boustead Magna, Lower Bingley, and so on.
Bertie fancies the chances of the local vicar, Heppenstall: his sermon on Brotherly Love was known to last forty-five minutes, containing, as it does, “a rather exhaustive excursus into the family life of the early Assyrians”. He is also employed as a tutor for university entrance: Bertie’s two cousins who are behind the idea for the handicap are “reading for some exam with Heppenstall the vicar… he’s known far and wide as a pretty hot coach for those of fairly small intellect.”
There is clerical crossover, too, with the world of the public schools. The Revd James Bates (who borrows his uncle’s sermon in “The Great Sermon Handicap”) is an Eton beak and “one of the candidates for the headmastership of a well-known public school.” Bertie remembers him “in his fourth year at Oxford when I was a fresher. Rather a blood. Got his rowing Blue and all that.”
In “The Voice from the Past”, the iron will that Sacheverell Mulliner has acquired thanks to a correspondence course in self-assertion vanishes in a blink when his ogre of an old headmaster, JG Smethurst, turns up in the small hours at the country house where he is staying – having morphed in the meantime into the Bishop of Bognor. His stentorian tones can still chill the blood.
In another story, “The Bishop’s Move”, both headmaster and bishop (having got wildly drunk) go out and paint the statue of Lord Hemel of Hempstead bright pink. The headmaster is worried that if this gets out then “bim goes my chance of ever being made a bishop”. The matter is sorted out by the bishop’s chaplain, the Revd Augustine Mulliner, who bribes his schoolboy brother to confess. Mulliner is then promptly given the incumbency of a desirable parish by the bishop, freed now from taint of scandal.
This handy Anglican notion of the “advowson” – the ancient right of presentation to an ecclesiastical living – is a favourite plot device, and Wodehouse presses it into service. But how to escape the wrath of the “lady Bishopess” (in those days the bishop’s wife, an austere escapee from the world of Trollope) who had wanted the vacant living for her cousin? “England was littered with the shrivelled remains of curates at whom the lady bishopess had looked through her lorgnette.”
The Bishop has the answer, and in deploying it uses the familiar Wodehousean trope of employing familiar quotations in new contexts, in this case from the King James Bible. “Mulliner”, he says, “the point you raise had not escaped me. But I have the situation well in hand. ‘A bird of the air shall carry the voice and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.’ Ecclesiastes 10:20. I shall inform her of my decision on the long-distance telephone.”
As Bertie Wooster happily observed at Market Snodsbury Grammar School when GG Simmons stepped forth to collect his prize for knowing the Old Testament: “We scripture-knowledge sharks stick together.” Could the same be said today?
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