"More lovable than Ukridge, more self-confident than Bertie Wooster, at times more potent even than Jeeves, Psmith is the most eloquent and commanding of all Wodehouse's creations." Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: a Life, Norton, 2004.
How often have we heard the question, "Can we ever repay members of the P.G. Wodehouse clubs for keeping the flame alive?" Not often enough, I venture. Thoughtful and witty discussions at meetings, learned papers disrupted every two minutes by gales of laughter, all concluding with generous toasts to the Master and lifelong friendships formed, that's what we expect of them. Then, one assumes, they return home, still laughing, to labor some more - in over 90 books, produced during 93 years, added to triumphs in musical theatre, there are always new discoveries. Even I, rankest of amateurs, have just made one. Pity is, it adds not a whit or a jot to our understanding of the great one, and tells us more than any reasonable person might want to know about me.
A half-forgotten volume, a treasure of my youth, behaving like a bottle of champagne in the winners' locker room, has just spilled off the shelf, drenching me in a flood of nostalgia and revelation. Bertie Wooster is, of course, as immortal as Huckleberry Finn. But I never wanted to be Bertie, or Jeeves, or Ukridge, or Pongo Twistleton-Twistleton, or Gussie Fink-Nottle. Reading in the sort of light Caravaggio chose for St. Paul at his moment of epiphany, I recalled, as I turned the yellowing pages, who I did want to be, in that hazy, distant past. At sixteen, I wished heartily, for at least a good week or two, to be Psmith.
Capital P,-s-m-i-t-h.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one.
When Leave it to Psmith was published in 1923, after being serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, it was viewed as an Edwardian fairyland world, the reality of which had perished on the battlefields of France. The charm of that imagined world would linger, floating somehow above the horror of the next war, and the dotty ambience of Blandings Castle had been an escape for millions by the time I discovered it in 1945, prompting me to assume an attitude on the floor more commonly spotted as delirium tremens. It says something about my home, or possibly about me, that this was not remarked upon. Now, in what I wistfully call the unrecognizable present, re-reading Leave It To P. has inspired me to renew my adolescent vows, seek out fellow worshippers, and once more trumpet the joys of its inspired lunacy from the treetops. This time, my fanfare is not for the author, already laden down with kudos, but for that paragon of persiflage, the inimitable, indomitable, vaguely unpronounceable Psmith (the "p" is silent, as in pshrimp).
First time around, I had skated over the artfully tangled plot, pausing only to attend, under a deep spell, to the dizzying but elegant, fancifully decorated language of Psmith himself. Coming back to Psmith is like meeting in a dream an eccentric old friend from one's youth, and realizing that, surpassing the worthy, tireless efforts of parents and teachers, this fictional figure left real traces on one's soul, distinctive, indelible marks that color one's thought and speech and help form the self that one presents to the world.
The word "cool," to describe the condition of being one step ahead of everyone else in manners, dress, art, aplomb, or the game of life, goes in and out of fashion, but clings to Psmith like a wet glove. His nonchalant air of superiority is hurtful only to mean, villainous types, since he is the kindest of creatures, ever ready to see all sides of every question, and spring to the defense of the right-intentioned even when they're wrong-headed. Evelyn Waugh said he embodied aristocratic values more than any other Wodehouse character. He is loyal and courageous, and a romantic of the most dedicated kind. When he falls for Eve Halliday, the Fall of Rome a gentle tilt in comparison, we know the breathless but eloquent courtship will dismantle and shred all obstacles. This could not help but be heartening to the adolescent spirit, accustomed to frustration and rebuff. Had I the means to bring him to life in Arlington, Massachusetts, I would have hired him like a shot as my Cyrano.
And he was, very publicly, for hire. When one is young and directionless, unable to conjure up a vision of oneself as employable, nothing could be more appealing than Psmith's notice in the press, with its generous offering to the world:
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready for Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Manage Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Address Applications To 'R. Psmith, Box 365'
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
It was also appealing to the young and stupid (or, as Wodehouse prophetically pinned them, "motion-picture-trained"). Enter Freddie Threepwood, who right off hires our hero, freshly bathed after a hasty withdrawal from his uncle's malodorous fish enterprise, and draws him into the comic opera doings at Blandings Castle.
If life has been bitterly cruel and readers have not met this spectacular person, I must advise that Psmith's mode of speech may strike the unsuspecting plain speaker as quaint, frothy, artificial, mannered, verbose and overwritten. And certainly inefficient, if we contemplate the number of trains and buses missed by friends on the run, forced to wait on one foot as he rounds off an exquisite sentence. But how much charm has mankind heartlessly discarded in its zealous worship of the great god Efficiency? Oodles of the stuff, I'd say.
Here, for example, is his first appearance in the book. Responding to a knock on the door, a housemaid discovers a tall, thin, monocled young man.
" 'A warm afternoon,' he said cordially.
'Yes, sir.'
'But pleasant," urged the young man. 'Tell me, is Mrs. Jackson at home?"
'No, sir.'
'Not at home?'
'No, sir.'
The young man sighed.
'Ah well,' he said, 'we must always remember that these disappointments are sent to us for some good purpose. No doubt they make us more spiritual. Will you inform her that I called? The name is Psmith. P-smith.'
'Peasmith,sir?'
'No, no. P-s-m-i-t-h. I should explain to you that I started life without the initial letter, and my father always clung ruggedly to the plain Smith. But it seemed to me there were so many Smiths in the world that a little variety might well be introduced. Smythe I look on as a cowardly evasion, nor do I approve of the too prevalent custom of tacking another name on in front by means of a hyphen. So I decided to adopt the Psmith. The p, I should add for your guidance, is silent, as in psithis, psychic, and ptarmigan. You follow me?'
'Y-yes, sir.'
'You don't think,' he said anxiously, 'that I did wrong in pursuing this course!'
'N-no, sir.'
'Splendid!' said the young man, flicking a speck of dust from his coat-sleeve. 'Splendid! Splendid!'
And with a courteous bow he descended the steps and made his way down the street."
The hero of Leave it to Psmith was considered the first flowering of the mature Wodehouse style, and the book was his most successful ever in England. Ironically, it was not Psmith's first appearance, but his last - considering his popularity, and the Master's eye for a ready buck, a cause for puzzlement. Along these lines, I have ventured a spot of research, with results that are, perhaps inevitably, spotty. One astonishing estimate of his sublime farewell performance as a "pale echo of his former self," stirred me to trace my hero's birth and growth in the early work of the Master.
Plum (after all, what might one call Pelham Grenville Wodehouse? "Pelly?") first made his mark as a writer of stories for boys, based on life in England's public schools, appearing in periodicals like Chums and The Captain. Psmith ("an old Etonian") first appeared as a rich, sophisticated classmate of the hero, Mike Jackson, in The Lost Lambs of 1908. Here was a character who appealed to adults as well as schoolboys. In 1910, in Psmith and the City, based on the author's two years' employment in a bank, he and Mike contend with and triumph over management. In Psmith Journalist, 1915 we find him jousting with an American gangland culture that attracted Wodehouse ever since he began his frequent New York visits in 1904.
Robert McCrum, in his admirable "Wodehouse: A Life" assigns Psmith to
a literary and dramatic tradition, a role going back to the fops and dandies of Restoration comedy and the plays of Sheridan. He describes him as as a progenitor of Bertie, who has some of his innocence, and Jeeves, who has much of his culture, without explaining why the author abandoned his brilliant original and stayed with his offspring for sixty years.
A simple explanation is that Wodehouse, urgently wanting to establish himself as a writer of hard-cover adult fiction, thought he must leave behind a figure so indelibly linked for the English public with his school-boy stories in magazines.
It seems just as likely that Psmith was for him and for readers an unattainable ideal. He needed a hero that readers could like but feel superior to - in joining Bertie with Jeeves he not only continued another theatrical tradition of simple-minded master and wily servant -he made a playground for the two sides of his own character. In life the incredibly productive, money- conscious, woman-shy Wodehouse would often present himself as a sort of helpless Bertie, while the superior Jeeves in him watched the store. But his essential kindness comes through in the stories, just as his essential innocence would get him in trouble while interned by the Germans in World War II, making what now seem harmless broadcasts, ending his career in England and forcing him to begin anew in the U.S.
Around the same time I had also to abandon an unattainable ideal and begin anew. The girls in Arlington High School seemed to find my dash and savoir-faire as a faux-Psmith unconvincing, or, more likely, incomprehensible. Something has lingered, however. Over the years I have grown used to the sight of friends standing on one foot, glancing wistfully at a passing bus, as I try to finish a sentence in an interesting way. Of course, Psmith had the wisdom to recognize our problem: "I endeavor always in my conversation to instruct, elevate, and entertain, but there is no gainsaying the fact that a purist might consider enough of my chit-chat to be sufficient."
© Russell Connor, 2005
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