Sunset at Blandings (21 page)

Wodehouse,
bless his old heart, went to his honoured grave without issuing a funeral note
or a solemn message to anyone, with a farce novel warm in his typewriter. He
had earned laurels enough since the 192 OS, and, if he had worn them ever, it
would have been on the side of his head. He had never rested on them. He went
on being frivolous to the last. He had always been very serious about his work
of being funny.

THE CASTLE

AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

WODEHOUSE built Blandings
Castle from his typewriter and from far away. As a young, struggling, English
author in New York, he had been writing, primarily for the American market,
light romantic stories set in America.
Something Fresh
(or
Something
New,
as it was called in America) justified its name; it was largely farce
and it was set in England.

There
had been a Shropshire castle, Dreever, in an earlier, but more serious novel,
A
Gentleman of Leisure
(November 1910. It had been published in New York as
The
Intrusion of Jimmy
in May. And it was later a play, starring Douglas
Fairbanks Sr., and, later still, John Barrymore) . Dreever Castle had an
amorphous Anglo-American house-party, a rose garden, a lake, a butler and a
bossy aunt. But it was only a foreshadow of Blandings.

Wodehouse
told me that he got the skyline grandeur of Blandings Castle from memories of
Corsham Court, near Bath, seen from its frozen lake. He had been taken to skate
there by an aunt one winter during school holidays. He had, after leaving the
Bank, lived in a small house named Threepwood in the village of Emsworth, on
the borders of Hampshire and Sussex and not far from Bosham, and he used those
names for his noble family and its title. Owen Dudley Evans, in an appendix to
his
P. G. Wodehouse
(1977), suggests that Beatrix Potter’s
The Tale
of Pigling Bland,
published in 1913, may have given Wodehouse the name for
his castle and a succession of later plots. Well, well.

Blandings
first opened its gates in 1915. Afterwards, when Wodehouse was drawn back,
story after story, novel after novel, to the green Shropshire pastures, he
regretted that he had chosen a location so far from London: about four hours by
train. That distance was time-consuming and took a little of the bustle out of
his scenarios. The castle drew most of its visitors, genuine and impostors,
from London. London was where Lord Emsworth had to go for the opening of
Parliament and to hire a new head gardener. Barribault’s Hotel, the Drones,
Mario’s restaurant and secretarial agencies were all in London. And only
London provided loony-doctors, detectives and pig-portrait painters. In this
story the restless Galahad does the double journey, Blandings/London/Blandings,
three times in what seems to be less than a week, but one might suppose that
this was his elderly author showing a last defiance of the difficulty with
which he had saddled himself in his springtime.

Wodehouse
built another stately home of England, Belpher Castle in Hampshire, in
A
Damsel in Distress,
published four years after
Something Fresh.
It
was very much the same sort of establishment as Blandings, and there are some
noticeable echoes of names. And it was within commuting distance of London. It
is odd that Wodehouse didn’t keep Belpher going and retire Blandings. Well,
still not realizing that he had a saga taking shape, he had given the dreamy
Earl of Marshmoreton an autumn romance with a charming American chorus girl,
and they had married in Chapter 25. For saga requirements Wodehouse needed to
have his chatelain a widower. So (this is an informed guess) he closed Belpher
Castle and re-opened Blandings to his public. (By that I mean his reading
public. But Wodehouse names, once launched, had a friendly way of breeding in
space over the Atlantic. When Hollywood, for the second time, made a film of
A
Damsel in Distress, in
1937, one of the songs, written by the Gershwin
brothers and recorded in Ira Gershwin’s book
Lyrics on Several Occasions,
is
given as ‘Sung in Totleigh Castle by the Belpher Society for the Preservation
of Traditional English Ballads, Madrigals and Rounds’. And another is ‘Sung by
Fred Astaire to Joan Fontaine on the downs of Totleigh Castle, located in Upper
Pelham-Grenville, Wodehouse, England’.)

It was
at Blandings Castle that Wodehouse placed the bulk of
Leave it to Psmith
(1923).
And, as the stories and novels multiplied, the Blandings pattern remained
familiar and always fresh: the hay-harvest weather week after week, the dreamy
old widower earl, the bossy sister, the incarcerated niece, the butler, the
impostors, the young lovers, the theft, the criss-cross blackmail, the happy
endings engineered by fate, or Galahad, or Lord Ickenham.

Wodehouse
tells us hardly anything about the past of the castle. It was built of grey
stone, solid against possible attack, in the mid-fifteenth century. It had
turrets and battlements in profusion. It had interested Viollet-le-duc (18 14—1879.
French architect, medievalist and writer). It stands at the head of the Vale of
Blandings. It is one of the oldest inhabited houses in the country, with
fifty-two bedrooms and staterooms, some of which have not been occupied since
Queen Elizabeth I and other royalty were visitors. In
Leave it to Psmith
Psmith
suggests that Cromwell had been a less welcome visitor. But as Psmith gives
the date of Cromwell’s visit as 1550, we must suppose either that Psmith wasn’t
being serious or that it is a misprint that has unaccountably survived.

But
now, in the twentieth century, the castle is obviously a very large,
comfortable, warm house, set in a great expanse of splendid gardens, with a
long curling drive, and with lawns and parkland stretching into sun-soaked
distances in all directions. The railway station is Market Blandings.
Shrewsbury is over there. You can see the Wrekin from the tower, and the Severn
is very much part of the landscape and view. After that we must rely on conjecture,
studying the evidences in Wodehouse’s texts and piecing together, where we can
make them fit, rooms, floors, terraces, gardens, lawns, trees, tennis courts,
pigsties, paddocks, streams, water meadows, cowsheds, drives, vistas,
villages, churches and railway lines.

But in
a succession of Blandings books spanning sixty publishing years you mustn’t
look for a purist consistency of topography. Not from Wodehouse. You wouldn’t
say he was careless. Carefree is a better word. He was not disturbed, or even surprised,
when devoted readers wrote to him and pointed out that passage A in novel X
didn’t square with passage B in novel Y. Certainly he has left a large number
of difficulties for the jigsaw-puzzler and, I think, four or five positive
impossibilities. Yet here we come, offering drawings and maps
in print—the
dust
cover of this book, the sketch of Market Blandings station, the end-papers,
plans of the ground floor and first-floor interiors of the castle. We have
worked them out scrupulously from the Blandings books. But, even if allowances
are made (as they must be) for artistic licence, the publishers and I expect to
receive a hail of protests, counter-claims and derision for our daring to give
fiction the semblance of fact, and staking our claims on probable locations,
directions, shapes, sizes and distances in the fabled demesne.

First,
artistic licence. Take the sun on the front cover, soon to set behind the hills
on the back. Of course the sun wouldn’t be setting that way in the northern
hemisphere. But the artist has splendidly interpreted his commission, which was
to illustrate the title of the book. The magnificence of the castle, the
harassed expression of Lord Emsworth, the cool effrontery of Galahad and, in
the background, comfort (Beach the butler) and conflict (Lady Florence) — these
are fine embellishments. On the back of the book — or left of the whole picture
if you have the cover properly framed by now — is the Empress of Blandings in
her new sty with, again, Lord Emsworth and Galahad in attendance. You’re right.
The new sty isn’t
there.
You’ll find it, correctly placed, we think, on
the map that the artist drew from a helicopter and that makes our end-papers
(24K
[46]
),
Ionicus has put the ping and her protectors central to the back cover because
they are the central forces for good, Lord Emsworth in all, the Empress in most
and Galahad in the best of the Blandings
oeuvre.
You may say that the
pivot of this novel is not the pig-sty, but the hammock under the cedars. The
artist thought the Empress had a deeper significance in the context of the
whole Blandings canon.

Still
looking at the cover, you may say the castle ought to be grey, not brown. But
remember where that sun is and how the evening light plays tricks with stone
colourings. Remember, too, that, with the anxiety about Brenda’s lost
necklace, with Sir James’s inability to propose to Diana, and with Florence and
her husband not on speaking terms, a good artist will naturally want to darken
the stone and get his brushes thick with sombre symbolism. You may say there
ought to be more ivy mantling the frontage of the castle in the cover picture.
An agile Jeff could well have climbed what is shown, but possibly on the day
the artist painted the cover picture, McAllister had lowered much of the
otherwise visible ivy to clear out old birds’ nests and mend some of the
wiring. Wodehouse did not live to unknot the plot and plotlets of the story
inside the covers of the book. It is natural that Ionicus should want to evoke
a little of the mood of Childe Roland when he (if it was he; Browning is so
obscure) set the slug-horn to his lips.

And,
speaking of Childe Roland, what about that tower on the left, with the standard
flying from it (1 7R)? On the cover we are looking at the castle from, roughly,
the south. Wodehouse refers to that tower in two similar passages in two
separate books. It is the tower over the west wing of the castle, and it is
separated from the main block by a gravel path. It seems to be served by a
small, dark door at ground level and inside, winding steps to the roof. It is a
footman’s duty to run the flag up in the morning and lower it in the evening,
apparently taking it away with him and locking the ground-level door for the
night.

It was
on the turret of this tower that Lord Emsworth looked forth through his
telescope and saw his son Frederick kissing Aggie Donaldson in the
water-meadows by the lake (‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’,
Blandings Castle)
.
It was twenty-seven times round its chimney stack that Monty Bodkin had seen Galahad
chase his nephew Ronnie with a whangee for having put tin-tacks in his chair.
It was here that Sue Brown, sighing her soul for the blows that fate was
dealing to her engagement to Ronnie, was unobserved by the flag-lowering
footman and was locked up, or in, till jealous Ronnie came to rescue her and
found Monty’s tell-tale hat
(Heavy Weather).

What
was this tower, other than a pedestal for the flagpole? What and where was the
west wing if this solitary tower dominated it? This is a crux. We have tackled
it boldly. We have made the tower dominate a west wing
which is no longer
there.
It has all gone to ruin, and its battlements, halls and dungeons
have given their stone to the more modern parts of the estate. The curtain
wall, what’s left of it, guards nothing now, and gardens, lawns and meadows
cover the courts where Threepwood after early Threepwood jousted, sang
madrigals, gloried and drank deep.

Then,
in the early nineteenth century, the sixth earl’s factor got that Shrewsbury
architect (name unknown) to re-plan the patched-up old fortress as a
comfortable manor house, with Georgian grace, primitive central heating in
addition to the huge open fires, double-hung sash windows, bathrooms and
lavatories plumbed in and the facilities for getting the food hot from kitchens
to tables. But the west wing remained as a name only, its last remaining
reality being the singular tower flying the Emsworth flag. Or that’s the way we
read it.

And,
though there is no record of Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown re-shaping the park,
our guess is that the fourth earl had met Brown when he was at work on Weston
Park, near Shifnal, for Lady Winlbraham, and got him to make Blandings, from
boundary to boundary, his next commission. Give them twenty-five years to
settle and mature — much longer for young cedars — and those vistas, those
clumps of Scotch firs (‘Brown’s buttons’), those free-roaming gardens … they
would grow in grace, beyond fashion, and be vulnerable only to a profligate
heir (one has to worry about the present Lord Bosham, what little one knows of
him) and alien property developers.

Vanessa
Polk, in
A Pelican at Blandings,
looked from the tower and could see the
Wrekin (1 2A) and ‘a fascinating panorama of Shropshire and its adjoining
counties’. She must have been looking north to north-east. And she would have
been able to see the tributary of the Severn (1 3D) that watered Market
Blandings and flowed below the garden of the Emsworth Arms. But the Severn
itself was also distantly visible if you looked south across the lake
(Leave
it to Psmith, Summer Lightning
and
Heavy Weather)
. So Blandings
Castle is lapped in one of Sabrina’s fair curves. Our end-papers show you how.
Don’t compare them too closely with any of those misleading county maps.