Jeeves Resumes Charge (A Contribution to the Literature on Reading Nietzsche)

The following is a sequel to the narrative "Jeeves Takes Charge," first published in the Saturday Evening Post of November 1916, in which Lady Florence Craye is reported to have plans for getting Bertie Wooster to read Nietzsche. The threat, in the present account, is executed. While it is not clear if the provenance of this sequel can actually be traced back to P. G. Wodehouse, the submitter has expressed the strong belief that the piece stands an excellent chance of turning out, at the least, to be a genuine forgery.

I

Correct me if I am wrong, but I have the distinct impression that I have mentioned the name Florence Craye before in these reminiscences of mine, if "reminiscences" is indeed the word I want for the sort of stuff that blokes record when they recall their life, as is so often the practice with the world's greatest writers, of whom two examples that readily come to mind are Marcel Proust and Bertram Wooster. Not, mind you, that there is any real comparison between the two. I have it on the expert advice of two distinguished literary connoisseurs, Boko Fittleworth and Bingo Little, that if they absolutely had to choose between Proust's books and mine in the event that they should be condemned to spend the rest of their lives on an abandoned island, they'd choose mine. (Never mind why. But if you insist on knowing, the reason dished out by the two crassly materialistic young blighters is that—by virtue of my having written thirty or forty times as many books as Proust—my oeuvre, taken as a whole, would make for better and longer-lasting bonfires on chilly nights than the other fellow's. They said this, and followed it up with uncouth laughter. Such coarseness makes the artistic soul quiver to the foundations, but as one that is true to his calling I try to record life as it is, in all its grim and unsavory starkness.) Speaking of the grim starkness of life guides the distracted attention back to the unpleasant subject I started out with.

Not that this Craye was displeasing to the eye. Far from it. Tall and elegant and willowy and endowed with shining hazel eyes and blonde hair of a particularly vivid shade of platinum, not to mention a profile that no critic, however exacting his standards of perfection, could possibly cavil at, the wench was an eyeful. It was impossible for any normally constituted male heart not to be susceptible to such an ensemble. And that is where the trouble lay. Before he knew it, a bloke had laid his heart at her feet, and become engaged to her, only to regret bitterly the error of his ways. For Florence Craye, apart from possessing a stinker—the Earl of Worplesdon—for a father, was no mean stinker in her own right. She read books such as Types of Ethical Theory and had a dashed cold, imperious way of looking down on you if you preferred Edgar Wallace—which, you will grant, could be particularly hard on you if you had plighted your troth to her.

You will have some conception of the sheer horror of it all when I tell you, with sober deference to the truth, that Florence Craye was the ghastliest of all the women I have been engaged to—a list that includes such contenders for the top slot as Stiffy Byng, Honoria Glossop, and Madeline Bassett. Like the others, she was always handing me the mitten but also changing her mind so that, at any given moment, you were never quite sure if you were engaged to her or rid of bondage to Simon Legree.

It was during one of those mitten-unhanding interludes that she fished out a book from her shelf, and said, "I want you to read this, Bertie. It's called The Birth of Tragedy."

"Ha!" I said, rubbing the old palms together. "One of those jolly stories about a corpse in the library by Agatha Christie?"

"Don't...