#lord ickenham

[joemerl]

He was right.

[princelysome]

Lord Ickenham comes to Blandings (under his own name this time) and proceeds to unravel the various knotty problems of the dwellers there. A true masterpiece by Wodehouse.

[funnuraba]

Facts that are canon to the Wodehouse shared universe as a whole:

- People can swap bodies under the right circumstances, e.g. both being unconscious at the dentist at exactly the same time (established in Laughing Gas; Reggie, Lord Havershot, is a member of the Drones Club and references several known Drones as his acquaintances)

- Dogs can directly understand human speech, and communicate detailed information from dog to dog (established in Money for Nothing; Ronnie Fish from this book is Lord Emsworth's nephew, Hugo Carmody later becomes his nephew in law, and the Molloys and Chimp Twist also recur in other stories)

- Birds are also sapient, though somewhat less eloquent in their speech (Money For Nothing again)

- After sustaining head trauma, the best thing to do is go to sleep (ibid.)

- Blandings Castle exists in a temporal anomaly wherein it is always spring or summer, and Beach the butler has always worked there for 18 years, no matter how many years pass

- 90% of all falling in love happens at first sight

- 95% of all husbands yield to their wife's will immediately and without question

- However, the surefire win method to securing a woman's heart is to grip her firmly in your arms out of nowhere, waggle her about like a sack of coal, kiss her repeatedly, and announce, "My mate!" This is known as the Ickenham System.

[isfjmel-phleg]

Evidently on multiple occasions, Wodehouse toyed with the idea of a Jeeves and Blandings crossover novel. Of course that never went anywhere. One scenario, to be entitled Very Foxy, Jeeves, went on to become Service with a Smile, which features in the role of the brilliant force of nature Uncle Fred rather than the esteemed gentleman’s gentleman.

I’m wondering whether Jeeves never made it into a Blandings novel because he just doesn’t fit into that environment. His goals and style of manipulation don’t quite work with the setting.

The point of most of the Blandings stories is getting a couple (or two) together, or getting them the means to get together, and in general beating the system put in place by tyrannical enforcers of Order. The castle at its ideal is a laidback, peaceful place and must be restored to such despite all Connie’s or Baxter’s efforts. Which is why the audacious, free-spirited sorts like Psmith, Uncle Fred, and Galahad Threepwood thrive in these plots. They have a natural tendency to shake things up and put zany schemes in motion that utterly disarm the rigid. And their motives are seldom entirely selfish. Psmith seeks money, but only for his best friend. Uncle Fred is all about spreading sweetness and light. Gally was robbed of his chance at young romance and is making up for it by helping out nephews and godsons.

On the other hand, the Jeeves stories usually boil down to one thing: if Jeeves objects, it will go away, one way or another. The plots are often about keeping Bertie out of marriage or anything else that will challenge the status quo as approved by Jeeves. He has a particular order that he prefers, and he will go any lengths to preserve it. In this regard, he has more in common with Baxter and Connie than he does with the usual Blandings schemers. His machinations are less bizarre and more Machiavellian. He’s a puppet master, not a trickster. And though he ostensibly is helping Bertie, most of the time it’s because there’s something in it for him.

Blandings couldn’t house a Jeeves any more than it could Uncle Fred and Gally at the same time because it already has at least one unyielding authority figure, and a plot in which Lord Emsworth gets to escape tyranny while Bertie must succumb to and enjoy it wouldn’t be very thematically consistent.

[holisticfansstuff]

"It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke’s better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not have any."

P G Wodehouse, Uncle Fred In The Springtime

[thenotes]

Lush /// "Sweetness & Light" /// Gala

Oh, yeah: this one.

[isfjmel-phleg]

Lord Ickenham is an extension of Psmith in the final novel, not the earlier ones. Lord Ickenham has no enemies, only a desire to stave off boredom in whatever reckless manner takes his fancy. Wodehouse’s best short story—an opinion backed by a survey of the members of all the Wodehouse societies worldwide—is Uncle Fred Flits By, where Lord Ickenham creates amiable havoc and confusion simply for the sheer hell of it, as a pleasurable way to spend a rainy afternoon. Here he was being self-indulgent, normally he is well-motivated in his schemes—what he calls his efforts to “spread sweetness and light.” Psmith can also be self-indulgent, but also acts altruistically. But both of them only set out to be altruistic in such a manner that will allow them to have plenty of fun along the way. Lord Ickenham enters the canon impersonating other people, just as Psmith had spent his final book at Blandings Castle in the guise of Ralston McTodd, a Canadian poet. When Uncle Fred is given a novel to star in, he heads for Blandings in the guise of Sir Roderick Glossop, noted loony doctor. He is retracing Psmith’s footsteps. Like Psmith, he is thin of build and sends himself up. Psmith claims to be shy and poor with words and Lord Ickenham gives this very inaccurate self-analysis to his long-suffering nephew Pongo: “The quiet rural life does have a wonderful effect on people. Take me. There are times, I admit, when being cooped up at Ickenham makes me feel like a caged skylark, though not of course looking like one, but there is no question that it has been the making of me. I attribute it to the fact that I have become the steady, sensible, perhaps rather stodgy man I am today. I beg your pardon?” Psmith, recounting the brief story of his life to Miss Clarkson, says: “When I was but a babe, my eldest sister was bribed with sixpence an hour by my nurse to keep an eye on me and see that I did not raise Cain. At the end of the first day she struck for a shilling, and got it.” Lord Ickenham’s infancy was not dissimilar: “My personal attendants generally left me at the end of the first month, glad to see the last of me. They let me go and presently called the rest of the watch together and thanked God they were rid of a knave.” For Psmith, conversation acts like a mental stimulus. He gets ideas while talking and we cannot be certain that he knows where he is going with any train of thought, only that he is enjoying the journey. Psmith is frequently described as a “buzzer.” Lord Ickenham can buzz with the best of them, and when he  is in danger of being exposed by a police constable who knows the real Major Brabazon-Plank, and is so aware that Lord Ickenham is not he, his lordship rallies superbly, with a feast of word play Psmith would be envious of: “Just a slip of the tongue, such as often occurs. He meant Brabazon-Plank, major. As opposed to my brother, who, being younger than me, is, of course, Brabazon-Plank, minor. I can understand you being confused,” said Lord Ickenham with a commiserating glance at the officer, into whose face had crept the boiled look of one who find the conversation becoming obtuse. Three kippers, four eggs and half a loaf of bread, while nourishing the body, take the keen edge off the mental powers. “And what makes it all the more complex is that as I myself am a mining engineer by profession, anyone who wants to get straight on the Brabazon-Plank situation has got to keep steadily before them the fact that the minor is a major and the major is a miner. I have known strong men to break down on realising this. So you know my minor, the major do you? Most interesting. It’s a small world, I often say. Well, when I say ‘often’, perhaps once a fortnight. Why are you looking like a stuffed pig, Bill Oakshott?” As with Psmith, Wodehouse was not sure what to do with Uncle Fred. He only gives him four novels, and he gets two of these only by being slotted into the role Gally more customarily plays at Blandings. In his second novel, Uncle Dynamite, the characterization goes a bit askew. Why is Uncle Fred a stranger to a near neighbour of long standing? He excuses himself by saying that he tries to avoid society in the country, but how does this fit with his desire for adventure and his longing for an audience for his word-play? Also, how has he gathered such an impressive local reputation for eccentricity under such a handicap? With Wodehouse, plot was paramount and characters do what the plot requires of them. But the Uncle Fred of this novel does not fit with what we expect of him. Psmith appeared in only three-and-a-bit works, as he gets only half of Mike and Uncle Fred manages only four and a very-little-bit as he only gets one short story in Young Men in Spats. Lord Ickenham is in the tradition of Psmith, and worthy of the former’s creator. He is Psmith without the edge, but then so, too, was Psmith by the time of Leave It to Psmith.

The Novel Life of P. G. Wodehouse, Roderick Easdale