Books: Wodehouse Aeternus

JEEVES AND THE TIE THAT BINDS by P.G. Wodehouse. 189 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

As usual, the plot begins to thicken no later than the top of page 2. Bertie Wooster has just escaped from the clutching hands of Madeline Bassett, Sir Watkyn's daughter, and is reflecting on the joys of freedom. "I've seldom had a sharper attack of euphoria," he tells Jeeves over the eggs and bacon. "I feel full to the brim of Vitamin B. Mind you, I don't know how long it will last. Too often it is when one feels fizziest that the storm clouds begin doing their stuff."

The inevitable thunderclap comes in the form of a telephone call from his Aunt Dahlia, who invites him down to her estate near Market Snodsbury. Who should be there but Madeline Bassett and her new fiancé, the seventh Earl of Sidcup, not to mention the beautiful but bossy Florence Craye, a millionaire businessman called L.P. Runkle, and a bounder by the name of Bingley. Add to that Bertie, a mobile magnet for disaster, and you have literary lunacy of a high order—P.G. Wodehouse in near-perfect form. In no time at all, the Earl of Sidcup has caught Bertie in an innocent but compromising position with his fiancée, Florence has threatened to marry him, and Runkle has promised to jail him for the theft of his 17th century silver porringer.

The Perfect Martini. Experienced Wodehouse readers will remain cheerfully secure in the knowledge that Jeeves will cleverly spring Bertie from these cataclysms. So unique is the Wodehouse brand of humor, however, that to describe it is as thankless and bootless as describing the taste of the perfect martini. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) can be compared to no other novelist, living or dead. His literary ancestor, instead, is the Roman dramatist Plautus, and, like Plautus, he is the manufacturer of a thousand comically crossed connections.

And what characters to cross them! Bertie and Jeeves; bumbling Lord Emsworth and the Empress of Blandings, his prize pig; the elegant sybarite Psmith, who believes that early rising leads to insanity; and that boozy American Biffen, who inspired one of the master's famous similes: "He quivered like a suet pudding in a high wind." Whatever it is, the Wodehouse formula is clearly simple—so simple that the secret will probably die with its creator.

That event, however, seems a remote calamity. As he celebrated his 90th birthday and the publication of his 90th-odd book last week, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse—known as "Plum" to his friends and "Plummie" to Ethel, his wife of 57 years—was still in good form, working on a new novel and surrounded by the inevitable dogs and cats in his house at Remsenburg, a serene little town on Long Island's south shore.