PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Shakespeare are not obvious
buddies. Yet all were populist writers, all masters of figurative language and
all with a connection to the Elizabethan stage since both Wodehouse and
Chandler attended Dulwich College - a school in south east London founded by
Edward Alleyn in 1619. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s, he was an actor for
whom Kit Marlowe wrote many title roles, though he made his fortune through
ownership of theatres, beer-gardens and perhaps brothels. He was also ‘Chief
Maister of Beares, Bulls, Mastiff Dogs and Mastiff Bitches’, so quite a guy.
Seven years
apart, Wodehouse and Chandler were equally happy at Dulwich. Their later work has
much in common. They exude a gift for language, especially the vernacular; they
voice their work through first person narrators and their main protagonists
inhabit male milieu in which females frequently represent complication or
threat. Their novels are intricately plotted (though you feel Chandler is
sometimes unsure where things are headed) and their fictional worlds are eerily
unchanging. The first Jeeves and Wooster novel was written in 1915 and the last
in 1974, yet the stories contain no hint that the twentieth century was a problematic
time to be alive.
Chandler’s gritty
crime novels are predicated on the fact that times were tough, but the settings
of his novels vary little from one to another – the swimming pools and
manicured lawns of the rich, the police cells and endless mean streets are all
familiar territory. The context is almost incidental. What counted for Chandler
was character. His great protagonist was Philip Marlowe, his name a conflation
of Philip Sidney (paradigm of Tudor chivalry) and Christopher Marlowe (atheist,
spy, dramatist, provocateur).
As it happens,
Chandler was a student in Marlowe House at Dulwich and the name he gave to his
battered hero can’t have been accidental. Choice of name rarely is. Sharing a classical
education, he and Wodehouse were conscious of literary heritage and their
novels are scattered with references to earlier literature. In Wodehouse’s Jeeves
and the Feudal Spirit, for example, there are more than thirty allusions to
Shakespeare – though some of these are almost incidental, since phrases
such as ‘cheek by jowel’ or ‘into thin air’ have entered everyday usage.
Much of
Wodehouse’s fiction turns on the complications of love (as does about 90% of
all fiction, come to that), so it’s not surprising that Othello should put in
three appearances (generally personifying jealousy), while Hamlet features eight times (mostly brooding
melancholy), and Romeo and Juliet also get a mention - ‘I clutched the brow.
I am a pretty astute chap, and I could see that this was not the language of
love. I mean, if you had heard Juliet saying a thing like that about Romeo, you
would have raised the eyebrows in quick concern, wondering if all was well with
the young couple.’
Wodehouse’s
humour typically relies on comic incongruity. In the passage above we have
Wooster’s misperception of himself as a ‘pretty astute chap’ when even his
doting Aunt Dahlia knows him as a blithering dunderhead as well as the implied
comparison between the mutually ghastly D’arcy ‘Stilton’ Cheesewright and
Florence Craye and Shakespeare’s immortal lovers.
Comic incongruity
is equally central to the relationship between Wooster and his manservant. It
is Jeeves who is the brains of the outfit. And it is Jeeves who supplies
Bertram with his range of Shakespeare reference, although much of the time his
master seems to think his man the author, not the Bard,
‘There is a
method by means of which Mrs Travers can be extricated from her sea of
troubles. Shakespeare.’
I didn’t know why he was addressing me as
Shakespeare, but I motioned him to continue.
This confusion of Jeeves with Shakespeare appears only a
few paragraphs later, to equally comic effect,
‘Let’s go. If it were - what’s the
expression of yours?’
‘If it were done when ‘tis done,
then ‘twere well it were done quickly, sir.’
‘That’s right. No sense in
standing humming and hawing.’
‘No, sir. There is a tide in the
affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. I couldn’t have
put it better myself.
Although Hamlet
is referenced more often, Macbeth is
quoted at fuller length and a theme develops around Lady Macbeth’s lines to her
husband when urging him to murder Duncan – though hardly to such dark and
intense effect,
Halting abruptly, as if he had
walked into a lamp-post, he stood goggling like a cat in an adage. Cats in
adages, Jeeves tells me, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, and I could see
with the naked eye that this was what Stilton was doing.
‘Goggling’ is a great word. In the next chapter the cat
makes a return,
He will have to continue to
maintain the non-belligerent status of a mild cat in an adage.
before showing up finally at the conclusion of the
novel when Florence’s new suitor is about to
declare himself and love finds its true course,
For a moment he stood there
letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’. Then he spoke.
Chandler also references Shakespeare in The Long Good-bye, though more
sparingly. In one scene, the alcoholic writer Roger Wade is put to bed by
Marlowe, drunkenly muttering, ‘Stop thinking, stop dreaming, stop loving, stop
hating. Good night, sweet prince. I’ll take that other pill’ echoing Horatio’s
words on Hamlet’s death. Not surprisingly, Wade later ends up dead.
An extended
reference to Hamlet features again
towards the end of the novel and there are many reasons why Wodehouse and
Chandler might wish to quote from or make allusion to Shakespeare. In the case
of Wodehouse’s creation Bertie Wooster, the allusions would have been in
keeping with his background. For although an idiot, he was an expensively
educated idiot, having been to Eton and Oxford (though more in debt to Jeeves,
than either).
Apart from
allusions to Shakespeare, Wooster also quotes from Tennyson, Byron, Keats, EW
Henley and the Bible. Marlowe’s list is as varied, including mentions of T.S.
Eliot, Dante, Kafka and Kierkegaard – as well as to musicians Katchaturian,
Hindemith and Toscanini.
On one level
these many references help establish character. In Wooster’s case his constant
misquoting or inappropriate context or mixture of serious quotation with casual
colloquialisms defines him as good-natured imbecile while adding comic value.
With Marlowe, they provide depth. He may be able to take a punch, handle a gun
or cope with a stretch in the slammer, but he knows Katchaturian, Kierkegaard
and Hindemith. Who doesn’t? In other words, he’s not just a Private Dick, he’s
a sensitive Private Dick.
These namedrops
also flatter the reader. They reassure that although you might be reading light
humour or crime fiction it’s OK because you know that ‘My strength is as the
strength of ten’ is a quotation from Tennyson’s Sir Galahad or that as a musical theorist, Paul Hindemith opposed
the twelve-tone technique – and that even if you didn’t, it’s still OK because
the author does. And if the author is that smart, what you’re reading must be superior
to other varieties of low-brow literature.
Chandler seems to
like playing games. Wade’s phrase, ‘Goodnight, sweet prince’ is itself a near
echo of T.S. Eliot’s borrowing from Hamlet,
‘Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight’, lines which close A Game of Chess (another passion of Marlowe’s) in The Wasteland. Later, Marlowe has a chat
with his client’s chauffeur who drops him home,
I offered him a buck but he
wouldn’t take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T.S. Eliot. He said he
already had them.
This motif returns many pages further on when the
chauffeur asks, ‘”I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my
trousers rolled.” What does that mean, Mr Malowe?’
‘Not a bloody
thing. It just sounds good.’
Chandler was evidently conflicted about his writing,
upset that in the US his work was regarded as little more than pulp fiction –
so perhaps the literary and other cultural references were as much to reassure
himself as his readers. Wodehouse was far less troubled, happy to turn out almost
a hundred books as well as film scripts and musicals. Much was lightweight and
forgettable, but he didn’t agonize about his status as a writer of low-brow
work. In this he was probably much closer to Shakespeare, who wasn’t
critically regarded during his lifetime and was much less celebrated than Ben
Jonson.
What each of them
show is that it isn’t a question of high-brow or low brow, it’s about good
writing and bad writing. Wodehouse and Chandler were brilliant exponents of
their genres, widely loved, much parodied and instantly recognizable. Chandler
liked to sign off his chapters aphoristically, the way Shakespeare closed
scenes with a rhymed couplet, so he can have the last quote.
The French have a phrase for
it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say
good-bye is to die a little.
Hard to argue with that. Top stuff.
