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The misadventures of Bingo Little
Sep. 27th, 2023 08:49 amIt’s been a while since I immersed myself in the adventures of Upper-Class Twit of the Year Bertie Wooster and his long-suffering valet Jeeves, so in the interest of knocking out a light, fast read in between some longer, heavier ones I’ve got scheduled, I settled in with the ebook of The Inimitable Jeeves, the second volume in P.G. Wodehouse’s infamous series. I may or may not have read this one before, since I’ve apparently only got one Wodehouse book tracked as read on Goodreads but I’m know I’ve read more than that, which means whichever ones I did read I read before I started tracking properly and their memory has been lost to the mists of time.
The Inimitable Jeeves is a series of short vignettes in the life of Bertie Wooster. The vignettes alternate like clockwork between ones that involve the sorry love life of Bertie’s school chum Bingo Little, and ones about something else. One of Bingo’s great character flaws is that he falls in love with about every other girl he sees, and each time is wholly convinced that he has never truly been in love before and this one is totally different from all the other ones. Bingo’s other great character flaw is his habit of continually begging for help from Bertie to sort out the various scrapes his romantinc misadventures land him in, occasionally because he thinks Bertie himself will actually be able to help, but often enough he does have the sense to directly beg that Bertie bring in Jeeves. Intertwined with his romantic escapades, Bingo is always doing things to cause his uncle to cut off his allowance, thus necessitating that most degrading of activities, getting a job. The jobs in question are almost always tutoring jobs, in which Bingo goes out to some country estate or other to teach some gentry stripling to pass his exams, and then he falls in love with the stripling’s older sister or the local parson’s daughter or whatever suitably aged girl is around, and then Bertie and Jeeves have to go visit and push someone into the lake, or what have you.
Not all of these escapades, in town or in the country, involve Bingo’s love life, however. Some of them involve Bertie’s frightful younger cousins Claude and Eustace, who go to Oxford, or at least they go to Oxford until they get expelled for pouring a beverage (there is disagreement about what kind) on one of the higher-ranking teachers (there is disagreement about which one) and get themselves shipped off to South Africa. All the country stories also seem to involve a man called Steggles, an unscrupulous bookie who induces all the gents to bet on the outcomes of various dramas of village life and then interferes shamelessly with the unwitting contestants. The fearsome Aunt Agatha makes a few appearances, one of which goes so poorly that Bertie has to visit New York for several weeks to avoid her.
As always, the adventures themselves are fairly light and silly–and certainly entertaining–but the real comic joy here is Bertie’s voice, an unfiltered torrent of extremely time-and-space-and-class-specific slang from a man with no capacity or inclination to code-switch and not a whole lot of brains. Bertie is a delightfully dim bulb who manages to express his emotions effectively, if not eloquently, with a lot of “What, what?” and “I say” and the occasional petulant “bit rummy.” For some reason I was especially tickled by his referring to London on occasion as “the old metrop” and I intend to become insufferable and start referring to Boston the same way.
Anyway, whether or not I had read this before, I’m certainly glad I read it now, and I need to not wait so many years before getting to the next one. I could probably find them all in a box set, if I looked, and then they’d be sitting on the shelf instead of on Kindle and it might remind me to read them more than one every ten years.
The Inimitable Jeeves is a series of short vignettes in the life of Bertie Wooster. The vignettes alternate like clockwork between ones that involve the sorry love life of Bertie’s school chum Bingo Little, and ones about something else. One of Bingo’s great character flaws is that he falls in love with about every other girl he sees, and each time is wholly convinced that he has never truly been in love before and this one is totally different from all the other ones. Bingo’s other great character flaw is his habit of continually begging for help from Bertie to sort out the various scrapes his romantinc misadventures land him in, occasionally because he thinks Bertie himself will actually be able to help, but often enough he does have the sense to directly beg that Bertie bring in Jeeves. Intertwined with his romantic escapades, Bingo is always doing things to cause his uncle to cut off his allowance, thus necessitating that most degrading of activities, getting a job. The jobs in question are almost always tutoring jobs, in which Bingo goes out to some country estate or other to teach some gentry stripling to pass his exams, and then he falls in love with the stripling’s older sister or the local parson’s daughter or whatever suitably aged girl is around, and then Bertie and Jeeves have to go visit and push someone into the lake, or what have you.
Not all of these escapades, in town or in the country, involve Bingo’s love life, however. Some of them involve Bertie’s frightful younger cousins Claude and Eustace, who go to Oxford, or at least they go to Oxford until they get expelled for pouring a beverage (there is disagreement about what kind) on one of the higher-ranking teachers (there is disagreement about which one) and get themselves shipped off to South Africa. All the country stories also seem to involve a man called Steggles, an unscrupulous bookie who induces all the gents to bet on the outcomes of various dramas of village life and then interferes shamelessly with the unwitting contestants. The fearsome Aunt Agatha makes a few appearances, one of which goes so poorly that Bertie has to visit New York for several weeks to avoid her.
As always, the adventures themselves are fairly light and silly–and certainly entertaining–but the real comic joy here is Bertie’s voice, an unfiltered torrent of extremely time-and-space-and-class-specific slang from a man with no capacity or inclination to code-switch and not a whole lot of brains. Bertie is a delightfully dim bulb who manages to express his emotions effectively, if not eloquently, with a lot of “What, what?” and “I say” and the occasional petulant “bit rummy.” For some reason I was especially tickled by his referring to London on occasion as “the old metrop” and I intend to become insufferable and start referring to Boston the same way.
Anyway, whether or not I had read this before, I’m certainly glad I read it now, and I need to not wait so many years before getting to the next one. I could probably find them all in a box set, if I looked, and then they’d be sitting on the shelf instead of on Kindle and it might remind me to read them more than one every ten years.