Blandings book 3 – Blandings Castle

Blanding Castle is the third book in the Blandings saga chronologically but was actually published after the fifth book, Heavy Weather. Subtitled “And Elsewhere” it is a collection of short stories that was first published in 1935, and consists of six stories about Blandings, one Bobby Wickham story and five Mr Mulliner stories about Hollywood. As good as the second half of the book is, my interest here is with that esteemed Shropshire establishment and thus this blog will be about those first six stories.

Well, mainly about those stories! Before getting into them, the preface to the book is worthy of note because famously it’s where Wodehouse discusses what he calls “the Saga habit”.

(The author) writes a story. Another story dealing with the same characters occurs to him, and he writes that. He feels that one more won’t hurt him and he writes a third. And before he knows where he is, he is down with a Saga and no cure in sight.

He then talks about his saga habit in regard to both the Jeeves books and the Blandings ones, and refers to the habit leading to ever decreasing intervals between one book and the next. And it’s the preface that allows me accurately to place these stories within the story line, because, and I quote: “these stories come after Leave it to Psmith and before Summer Lightning“.

So to the stories.

The first one, Custody of the Pumpkin, is when Lord Emsworth is in what proves to be a short lived phase of pumpkin growing, and trying for the prize for pumpkins at the Shropshire Show. It involves Freddie eloping with a relative of McAllister the head gardener, his Lordship being almost arrested for picking flowers in Kensington Gardens, and then Freddie’s new father-in-law turning out to be an American millionaire manufacturer of dog biscuits who offers Freddie a job in the company in New York. The latter prompting one of those Wodehouse laugh-out-loud moments that occur from time to time:

Lord Emsworth could conceive of no way in which Freddie could be of value to a dog-biscuit firm, except possibly as a taster; but he refrained from damping the other’s enthusiasm by saying so.

Three of the next stories are concerning Freddie, his new bride and his new job promoting the dog biscuits, Donaldson’s Dog-Joy. We also meet another of Emsworth’s sisters, Lady Georgiana Alcester, and these stories being set around Blandings there is, naturally, an imposter; Popjoy, in reality the Rev Rupert (Beefy) Bingham, in the story Company for Gertrude.

There are two stories that particularly stand out in the canon and in the saga. Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey is the first appearance of the Empress of Blandings, the prize black Berkshire sow who features in almost all of the subsequent books; and the pigman George Cyril Wellbeloved. As I mentioned above, this volume was published in 1935 but Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey was clearly written (or at least planned) far earlier because it is mentioned in the preface to Summer Lightning, the fourth volume in the saga.

The other brilliant story is Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend which is always one of the contenders in discussions of the funniest short stories that the Master ever wrote. The description of the tea tent at the annual Blandings Parva School Treat is wonderful:

All civilised laws had obviously gone by the board and Anarchy reigned in the marquee. The curate was doing his best to form a provisional government consisting of himself and two school-teachers, but there was only one man who could have coped adequately  with the situation and that was King Herod, who – regrettably – was not among those present.

Lord Emsworth spends most of his time being harrassed by his sisters, but every now and then he rebels and this story is one of those. It’s great to see him facing down both McAllister and Connie – we’re cheering him on.