The Coming of Psmith

The first Wodehouse book I ever read was Psmith, Journalist, a lively early effort, set in pre WWI New York.

This week I've been reading the one that came right before, Psmith in the City, which is set in London and draws heavily on the author's brief stint with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (on Project Gutenberg, here).  Both books were compiled from a series of stories that appeared in The Captain magazine in 1908, when Wodehouse 27.

The age of 27 is sort of a magic one, by the way.  I certainly mark it as the first year of my life in which I displayed something resembling sentience.  I believe Bill James was the first to notice the effect, but numerous studies have shown that athletes tend to peak around the age of 27.  And mental athletics as well:  Einstein came up with E=mc2 when he was 26.

Whether it was age or inspiration, the emergence of the smartly-dressed, logorrheic Psmith marked a watershed in Wodehouse's career.  It is the moment when he begins to give in to his inner lunatic.  Psmith (the initial "p" is silent he says, as in "pshrimp") first appears as a secondary character in Mike.  But in Psmith in the City he - Urkel-like - takes over the show and relegates the likable Mike to the role of straight man:

Between ourselves,' confided Psmith, 'I'm dashed if I know what's going to happen to me. I am the thingummy of what's-its-name.' 

'You look it,' said Mike, brushing his hair. 

'Don't stand there cracking the glass,' said Psmith. 'I tell you I am practically a human three-shies-a-penny ball. My father is poising me lightly in his hand, preparatory to flinging me at one of the milky cocos of Life. Which one he'll aim at I don't know. The least thing fills him with a whirl of new views as to my future. Last week we were out shooting together, and he said that the life of the gentleman-farmer was the most manly and independent on earth, and that he had a good mind to start me on that. I pointed out that lack of early training had rendered me unable to distinguish between a threshing-machine and a mangel-wurzel, so he chucked that. 

Everything before this is competent, everything after it is Wodehouse.  In a later Preface to the Psmith stories, the Master said it was some of the easiest writing of his career:

Psmith has the distinction of being the only one of my numerous characters to be drawn from a living model.  A cousin of mine was at Eton with the son of D'Oyly Carte, the man who produced the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and one night he told me about this peculiar schoolboy who dressed fastidiously and wore a monocle and who, when one of the masters inquired after his health, replied “Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah.” It was all the information I required in order to start building him in a star part.

Rupert D'Oyly Carte

Young Rupert was not known for his rhetorical excesses, but his brother (also an Etonian) did have that reputation, so Wodehouse may have conflated or coagulated the two.  In any case he said it was "the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it."

The resulting character is rich, upper-class, socialist, verbose, fastidious, long-limbed, big-hearted, and surprisingly serviceable in a riot (in Psmith in the City he emerges from two of them - one of which he started - requiring only minor repairs).

As drawn for Mike

Psmith is more than a wacky character, though.  For Young Me, and for Old Me, he is also a role model. He is kind and values friendships, and lives by a peculiar but unbreakable code.  Frances Donaldson, in P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography, says Evelyn Waugh was particularly taken with Psmith because of that code:

Psmith is the only Wodehouse character possessed of the aristocratic virtues. Evelyn adored the aristocratic virtues, which for him were the only thing (apart from piety) which separated mankind from the lower forms of life, and in consequence he was considered a snob. Yet it is dull to confuse people who like the qualities which, because of their upbringing, background, and circumstances, are more likely to be found in dukes than in those less materially fortunate, with those who simply like dukes. All the aristocratic virtues are based on self-confidence, an equipment which makes for quick-wittedness, moral fearlessness, unconformity, and lack of envy, although sometimes for less attractive qualities. 

Psmith is certainly confident, and while not extravagant, does insist on the civility of small luxuries:

Do you mean to tell me, Comrade Jackson, that your appearance belied you, that you were not interested? Well, well. How we misread our fellow creatures.' 

'I think you might have come and lent a hand with Prebble. It was a bit thick.' 

'I was too absorbed with Comrade Waller. We were talking of things of vital moment. However, the night is yet young. We will take this cab, wend our way to the West, seek a cafe, and cheer ourselves with light refreshments.'

When reading this to a young relative he pressed the pause button, looked at me, and said - with the certainty of youth - "that's you."

Well, maybe...but who doesn't like light refreshments?

(link)

Psmith also shares my distaste for public transportation, which I come by honestly and held strongly even during my straitened formative years:

'The first thing to do,' said Psmith, 'is to ascertain that such a place as Clapham Common really exists. One has heard of it, of course, but has its existence ever been proved? I think not. Having accomplished that, we must then try to find out how to get to it. I should say at a venture that it would necessitate a sea-voyage. On the other hand, Comrade Waller, who is a native of the spot, seems to find no difficulty in rolling to the office every morning. Therefore--you follow me, Jackson?--it must be in England. In that case, we will take a taximeter cab, and go out into the unknown, hand in hand, trusting to luck.' 

'I expect you could get there by tram,' said Mike. 

Psmith suppressed a slight shudder. 'I fear, Comrade Jackson,' he said, 'that the old noblesse oblige traditions of the Psmiths would not allow me to do that. No. We will stroll gently, after a light lunch, to Trafalgar Square, and hail a taxi.'

Mike's complaint that this will be "beastly expensive" does not even register.

But Psmith is not a hedonist or narcissist.  The Psmith stories are in fact unusual for their sense of social responsibility.  Psmith repeatedly intervenes in various ways to aid Mike in his efforts to be kind to people, and to protect him from the consequences that ensue.  But not without a bit of protest:

'This habit of taking on to your shoulders the harvest of other people's bloomers,' he said meditatively, 'is growing upon you, Comrade Jackson. You must check it. It is like dram-drinking...  When you were free and without ties, it did not so much matter. But now that you are confidential secretary and adviser to a Shropshire Psmith, the thing must stop. Your secretarial duties must be paramount. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with them. Yes. The thing must stop before it goes too far.'

But it never does.  In Psmith, Journalist Mike, Psmith, and an underemployed American reporter take on tenement landlords and the mob, and (barely) live to tell the tale.

All of this ante both bellums, of course.  I never put much stock in Orwell's line that "Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915," but Mike could well have been.  He was true to his school, and he did the right thing, and in early 20th century England those fellows were fed into the proverbial wood chipper.  Psmith, one suspects, might have gotten through - perhaps working in signals or intelligence, as Wodehouse's older brother Armine did (after getting shot at the Battle of the Somme).

At that moment Wodehouse was having a wildly successful time in New York.  George Simmers, a thoughtful critic in the UK, has written an essay on Wodehouse and the Great War, which notes that

Keeping the Atlantic between himself and the war zone let Wodehouse in for some adverse comment, and he fell out briefly with publishing firm A. and C. Black over his seemingly unpatriotic absence in America. It is unclear how much this disturbed Wodehouse, who had good reasons for staying in America, besides being medically unfit for the army. He had recently married, and from Miss Springtime of 1916 onwards was consolidating his reputation as a witty and original Broadway lyricist, helping to produce confections of light escapist entertainment, whose concerns were very distant from the harshness of battle.

Armine Wodehouse wrote moving poetry about the war, Simmers explains, and "if we judge [P.G.] by the standards appropriate to Armine’s introspective honesty about how he is being changed by the experience of war, then Wodehouse’s work must seem trivial, even repugnant..."  But Wodehouse knew this.  Simmons reminds us of this passage from Wodehouse on Wodehouse:

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn. The ones that fail are the ones where the writer loses his nerve and says:  “‘My God! I can’t write this, I must tone it down”’.

But this is a bit too diplomatic.  Wodehouse hated politicians, hated war, hated militarism and dictatorship in all its forms.  And he hated the other kind of novel, too.  In 1922 he saw off that school in The Clicking of Cuthbert, when a romancing young golfer encounters a Russian novelist at a local literary society.  A sycophantic Englishman tries to ingratiate himself with the Great Man by professing admiration for those well-known titans of Russian literature, Sovietski and Nastikoff.  But he gets the cold shoulder:

No novelists any good except me.  Sovietski--yah!  Nastikoff--bah!  I spit me of zem all.  No novelists anywhere any good except me.  P.G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad.  Not good, but not bad.  No novelists any good except me.

The Wodehouse I love was made by war.  After the Great War he understood that he could never again try, as he had in the Psmith stories, to set his farces in real places.  He created an imaginary England, untouched by war, and populated it with imaginary estates like Blandings and Totleigh Towers.

As if it never happened

He allowed Psmith to appear once more (to be married) in the second Blandings novel, Leave it to Psmith.  After toiling in The City and the rough streets of New York, Psmith had ascended to a better place.  As Waugh put it, "it is a world that cannot become dated because it has never existed."


Serious students should consult The Annotated Psmith project, here.