In my last entry, I alluded to the fact that, aside from pure enjoyment, there was another reason that I enjoyed reading My Man Jeeves. There are a lot of writers who have issued lengthy statements about why they write, or how to write, but one rarely sees an example of a writer actually at work. One could, I suppose, track down original manuscripts and do textual analysis between various drafts and the published product, but I don’t believe that my employers would consider that to be included in the “other duties as assigned” part of my job description. Forget the weekends, as those are generally occupied by my family members on both extremes of the age spectrum.
Having read Carry On, Jeeves in December, the stories were still freshish in my head, and I was able to notice differences. The most striking one was Bertie’s allusions to his wealth in the earlier versions of the stories. These references were not ostentatious, more comparisons where he would state that he had pots of dosh as oppose to some of his friends, who had to work to keep food in mouth. I don’t remember seeing anything like that in later works. Perhaps it has something to do with when the books were written. My Man Jeeves was originally published in 1919. From the little I know of the era, it reminds me of the go-go- 80’s, when people were not afraid to flaunt wealth, or even the late 90’s/early noughties, when those tech-fueled binges happened, mostly, I think, because the geeks were overwhelmed by the novelty of having massive amounts of credit at their disposal and the power to command attention (well, what they ultimately did was crash the economy- talk about a true show of power- but that’s a discussion for another time). Certainly, although Bertie never became truly impoverished, he never did make the same references. Perhaps Wodehouse felt that his simply not having to work and being able to employ a valet were evidence enough of his net worth. As his writing career went on, and the Depression happened and then the privations that accompanied the Second World War, I am guessing that he consciously toned down the “I have money,” lines and let the circumstances speak for themselves.
The one thing that I noticed is that the second published version of the stories has more in the description arena. From what my hazy memory tells me, the descriptive passages lengthened, moving away from the staccato nature of pages of rapid-fire dialogue that were the hallmarks of his earlier works. It is something that makes sense, at least on an instinctual level. Recently, I took up a book that I wrote about ten years ago. After the initial cringes that always come on whenever I read something I wrote, I took out a pen and started re-writing. Oddly enough, instead of taking things out, I added quite a bit. This is not to suggest in any way that my writing is at all comparable to Wodehouse’s, but I wonder if he felt the same way about his earlier works. Certainly, there is a school of thought about writing that emphasizes the importance of revision. Most recently, this was highlighted in an essay by Colson Whitehead that appeared in The New York Times. One of the main observations about Plum’s work is that he merely re-wrote the same plot umpteen times. While I do not entirely agree with this, it is becoming more apparent to me that he was an ardent revisionist, and simply could not stop, even if the work in question had been published.
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