Hot Water: Summary & Reading Guide

Château Blissac is not Mr Gedge’s idea of paradise

J. Wellington Gedge lives with his wealthy wife in a château above the south of France. He might be expected to count himself fortunate. Instead he dreams of California, while Mrs Gedge intends to make him the American ambassador to Paris. She has the money and the will to advance the plan; he has a marked distaste for the ceremonial life it promises. Wodehouse turns this domestic difference into a point of entry for crooks, aristocrats, a novelist and Senator Opal’s daughter Jane. The book’s title feels entirely fair to a man whose apparent comfort is becoming alarmingly warm.

Château Blissac is an excellent setting for the mixture. Its attractive view and social standing encourage guests and schemes to converge. A château can contain the rich host, the visiting politician, a suspicious stranger and a young woman with ideas of her own without forcing an explanation for every encounter. The resort atmosphere adds a sense that people can reinvent themselves away from home. Some use that freedom to pursue romance; others see an opportunity for a crime. The comic tension rises as each visitor understands only part of the reason the others have come.

Mrs Gedge’s proposed ambassadorship is funny because it is a splendid honour for someone who wants absolutely none of it. Her argument rests on status and public achievement, while her husband imagines California and a simpler routine. A reader need not decide who is right about a diplomatic career to see how little space his own wish has been given. Senator Opal’s support makes the social pressure more official. The senator’s daughter Jane, however, is not simply another instrument in her father’s arrangements. She has her own romantic judgment to exercise amid the people crowding the house.

The criminal visitors give the book a different rhythm from an exclusively domestic quarrel. Safe-blowers, confidence tricksters and jewel thieves can agree with the respectable guests about wanting an object while disagreeing profoundly about how to obtain it. An English novelist is also caught up in the traffic. Wodehouse enjoys placing unlike professions and motives in one setting, then allowing a mistaken assumption to travel from one group to another. A crook’s seemingly practical plan can be disturbed by a social misunderstanding, while a host’s invitation can be interpreted as a chance to get near valuables.

Hot Water appeared in book form in Britain and America on the same date, 17 August 1932, from Herbert Jenkins and Doubleday, Doran respectively. It had been serialised in Collier’s during the preceding months. Those are the edition facts, as distinct from the dates of the later stage version. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton adapted the novel as The Inside Stand; it was staged in Glasgow and then opened at the Saville Theatre in London on 21 November 1935. That is a later adaptation of this novel, rather than the source of the 1932 prose.

The south of France is more than a postcard background. People come to Château Blissac from different national and social worlds, and the distance from home makes an American political ambition look both grander and sillier. Mr Gedge’s California is an imagined refuge from these obligations. Jane’s choices and the intrigues around the château make the holiday setting feel busy even when a guest is merely being polite. I like the way every conversation can carry a second purpose: someone is testing a disguise, concealing a desire or trying to keep the ambassadorial campaign alive.

A book with so many groups could become a catalogue of eccentricity. Wodehouse holds it together through the Gedges’ sharply opposed intentions and the multiple uses of their home. Their marriage supplies a continuing comic question while the other plots arrive and collide. The supposed prize of diplomatic office makes a fine counterweight to the less respectable prizes sought by the crooks. No one can pursue a private end without entering the space of another scheme. The best moments are those when a character believes a situation has finally become clear just as the reader sees how incomplete that clarity is.

Read Hot Water when you want an ensemble farce with sunlit scenery, American and European visitors, and a host who would rather return to a filling station in California than ascend to a prestigious post. Jane and the visiting conspirators give him more to contend with than Mrs Gedge’s determination alone. The Inside Stand is an intriguing next branch for theatre enthusiasts, but the novel has its own expansive pleasure. I come back for the idea that one person’s paradise may be another person’s trap, particularly when everybody else regards the trap as a splendid promotion.

I also enjoy the difference between an official story and a private wish. The public story is a wealthy couple advancing toward a prestigious appointment in Paris. Mr Gedge’s private wish is to leave the entire scene and go west. The visitors bring their own equally divided accounts of themselves. Much of the comedy comes from the effort to keep those incompatible versions straight while the château fills with people asking questions.