Code of the Woosters, Code of the Wimseys

In her comment on the post Animal Control, Mrs Norman Maine admits, ruefully, that she spent waaaay too much time recently pondering a question. To wit: Would Lord Peter Wimsey have been chummy with Bertie Wooster? Or as Mrs Maine put it, would, "Lord Peter Wimsey -- who was apt to launch into Woosterian dialogue to disarm his suspects...have considered Bertie an insufferable ass [or would he] have actually liked him"?

Now, I happen to think that a person cannot spend waaaaay too much time pondering important questions, and this one ranks right up there as one of life's top i.q.'s, and if you have your priorities straight, as Mrs Maine and I do, you too have probably spent some time pondering the same i.q. yourself.

Which is to say, you've read and re-read Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter mysteries and P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves stories and found yourself the better person for the effort.

Mrs Maine has come to a, I think, very reasonable conclusion. Which is, she writes:

I think he would have liked Bertie. Wimsey may have only played at being the kind of chipper-but-clueless fop that Bertie actually was, but ultimately the codes of the Woosters and the Wimseys are one in the same.

Wimsey reserved his contempt for truly callow heiresses (and whatever their male counterparts would be called -- heirs?) who never quite grasped the concept of noblesse oblige.

He might never have actually asked Bertie over for a cigar to help him figure how a murder could have happened in a locked room with no other entry points, but he would have appreciated Bertie's simple, good heart.

This sounds right to me. It struck me the first time I cracked the spine of one of Sayers' novels that Lord Peter, although not nearly the frivolous playboy his sister and sister-in-law take him to be---"My family," Lord Peter has observed, "have frequently accused me of being unrestrained and wanting in self-control. They little know me."---would still be quite at home in the Drones Club. Far more at home there than he was at the Bellona Club.

Mrs Maine is right, the Code of the Woosters and the Code of the Wimseys have a lot in common. But there's more to it, I think.

Bertie and Lord Peter have similar outlooks on life. For the most part they are both breezy optimists, ready to see the good in everybody and always expecting that right will triumph. But they are both deeply spiritual men and have, beneath the sunny exterior, basically a tragic view of life.

Lord Peter is steeped to the gills in Scripture, St Augustine, Aquinas, and the Book of Common Prayer, and can break a code based on the first lines of a couple of psalms without batting a monocled eye. And Bertie won a prize for Scripture Knowledge back in school. Their religious training has given them both a stoic's fatalism, and in the midst of a crisis, when things get really rocky, they're both apt to express themselves philosophically, although in different idioms.

Lord Peter, for instance, upon discovering that a silly parlor maid has accidentally dusted the fingerprints off a bottle that was a clue to a murder, might wax poetically, thus:

"Bunter," said his lordship, "what is the verse about the struck eagle stretched upon the plain, Never through something clouds to soar again? It expresses my feelings exactly. Take up my tea and throw the bottle in the dust-bin. What's done cannot be undone. In any case the fingerprints were probably of no importance. William Morris once wrote a poem called The Man Who Never Laughed Again. If the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast, should never again be heard upon my lips, you will know why. My friends will probably be devoutly thankful. Let it be a warning to you never to seek for happiness out of a bottle."

Or when an investigation has uncovered secrets hurtful to innocent by-standers, Wimsey might turn inward and give vent to self-laceration:

"I rather wish I hadn't come buttin' into this. Some things may be better left alone, don't you think? My sympathies are all in the wrong place and I don't like it. I know all about not doing evil that good may come. It's doin' good that evil may come that is so embarrassin'."

More finely put, perhaps, but in spirit not far removed from Bertie's when trouble comes his way in the form of his having to help his pal Tuppy in a matter of love when what he wants to do is exact revenge upon Tuppy for causing him to fall into the pool at the Drones Club in full dinner dress:

I turned to Jeeves, who had shimmered in with the morning meal.

"Lunch for three today, Jeeves," I said.

"Very good, sir."

"You know, Jeeves, it's a bit thick. You remember my telling you about what Mr Glossop did to me that night at the Drones?"

"Yes, sir."

"For months I have been cherishing dreams of getting a bit of my own back. And now, so far from crushing him into the dust, I've got to fill him and fiancee with rich food and generally rally around and be the good angel."

"Life is like that, sir."

"True, Jeeves. What have we here?" I asked, inspecting the tray.

"Kippered herrings, sir."

"And I shouldn't wonder," I said, for I was in a thoughtful mood, "if even herrings have troubles of their own."

"Quite possibly, sir."

"I mean, apart from getting kippered."

"Yes, sir."

"And so it goes on, Jeeves, so it goes on."

But like Mrs Maine I've been thinking waaaay too much about this, and I've come to the conclusion that there's more to it than Bertie and Wimsey being kindred spirits.

My first clue came when I was reading Murder Must Advertise. Early in the book, two of the typists at the advertising agency where Wimsey has gone undercover as a copy writer are discussing the new man and one of them describes him as looking exactly like Bertie Wooster!

And I solved it midway through the book when the same two typists bump into Wimsey out of disguise on the street.

How, I asked myself, wishing I had a Bunter or a Jeeves to shimmer in with an evening refresher so I could bounce my idea off of him, How did Wimsey know that he could pass himself off as his own lookalike cousin to people who knew him as one or the other?

The answer came to me in a flash of insight.

He knew he could do it because he had been doing it all along.

Lord Peter is Bertie!

Wimsey is Wooster and Wooster is Wimsey!

I mean, I ask you! Here's Lord Peter.

And here's Bertie.

Rummy, what? Distinctly rummy.

Comments

[mrs. norman maine]

Your piece was the bee's knees. Nothing much I can add to it. Except....

From the female's point of view, the big difference, THE important line in the sand, between Wooster and Wimsey is that while it would be great fun to go clubbing with Bertie, one certainly (to use his own litmus test against him) wouldn't want to face him over the old b. and e. every morning for the rest of one's life.

Wimsey, on the other hand, has more than gallantry and a fat wallet on his side. His pursuit of Harriet Vane over the course of three novels and her assent at the end of a fourth makes for one of the best love stories in fiction, detective or otherwise.

And it's comforting to know, from a subsequent honeymoon novel and a short story that takes place a few children later, that their marriage seemed to be in no danger of jumping the s.

Best to stop now, before we start speculating on whether Kinsey Milhone or V.I. Warshawski is the bettert lay. (Especially when it's so clearly Warshawski.)