My most delightful Christmas gift was Life With Jeeves. Nearly as delightful are the video versions which include a young Hugh Laurie (House). My children claim that House is hateful, because Jeeves has left him.
For me, the compilation of three of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels was the perfect antidote to the serious nature of our times.
There is the War.
There is an election coming.
There is poverty and injustice.
On the other hand, the gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves must save Bertie from an ill advised marriage to a woman of the sort who “suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain. . .”
Wooster is a wastrel, albeit a lovable one. The Empire could survive his loss, but not the loss of Jeeves. If the Bertie Woosters provide the light hearted entertainment, and the spending that gives so many of us jobs, the Jeeves is the rock that keeps the system going.
And the alternatives to keeping the system going, useless anomalies and all, are Soviet-like in their horror. Better to let a few Woosters frolic in the Drone’s Club, then to make everything efficient by sending them to the Gulag. A nation that cannot cheerfully tolerate, without approving of them (and that is important!), a few Woosters will almost certainly end by destroying all the Jeeves.
There are of course any number of real life Jeeves who deal with much bigger problems than those posed by Mr. Wooster. Most nurses I know get none of the credit, doctors suck up all the glory in the room, but nurses do a good bit of the managing of health care. When modern Woosters face the physical wages of their sin, it will be a nurse who helps them out.
The pastors of small parishes get no media attention, but (as a pastor’s son I know this well) work hard, heroically hard, helping people the culture ignores or despises. If Wooster ever runs out of money or hits bottom, it will be a pastor that will help clean him up and keep him going. When libertines are abandoned by the meritocracy, then pastors will find them a home.
Teachers in our government schools are often overworked and underpaid. They work hard, but face an anti-intellectual culture and children the pop culture works hard to spoil for school. On top of that, those that cannot teach can criticize from the sidelines. Burdened by a union nobody not a radical can like, they stay rescuing those they can from Homer Simpson-hood.
But the best heroes I know, the Jeeves of millions, are hard working mothers. They get their Woosters up and going. . . loving us whatever our merits. They create civilization in every action. Every day, they defy convention and work for love and not money. They create room for their families to thrive.
My goal is to be a good bit less Wooster myself today and a good bit more Jeeves to my hard working homeschool mother. I need to serve her as she serves me. It is no good to be a Wooster outside a book. . . and so I need more stiff-upper lip, meaningful labor, and cultured living.
So I laugh at Wodehouse and Wooster, but try to become more like his Jeeves (and the Jeeves I know) and not like his Wooster.
Thinking of this duty in this way makes it more pleasant. For those of us determined to become more like Jeeves, Wodehouse is the two lumps of sugar that makes our medicine go down in the most delightful way.