A Wodehouse a Week #15: Psmith in the City

Consider this when you want to mull the length of P. G. Wodehouse's writing career: he published his first book a year before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk. He published his final book during his lifetime five years after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. This fact may simultaneously delight you and depress you...so what have you done with your life so far?

That first book in 1902, The Pothunters (which I'll get around to reviewing one of these fine days) is a collection of English boarding school stories originally published in magazine form much in the vein of Tom Brown's Schooldays. If you're looking for fast-moving and breezy "Boy's Own" type tales, or have been intrigued by the idea of the British boarding school system after your bajillionth reading of Harry Potter and the Magical Tuck Shop, The Pothunters and its follow-ups set at the schools of St. Austin's, Sedleigh, and Wrykyn are all great reads, spotlighting various gung-ho boys keen on sport, jam, and practical jokes. These books mark the first phase of Wodehouse's literary career fairly distinctively, and had he written nothing else past 1910 he probably would still be known by a small but faithful fan following of British school stories. But somewhere in the teens, as Wodehouse's following grew beyond just schoolboys and he himself grew into his thirties, his writing evolved and changed and developed into the elaborate and multi-leveled musical comedy without music that he's best known for today and in the books I've been reviewing over the past quarter of a year. One of the lynchpin turning points between the young Wodehouse and the later Wodehouse is today's novel, Psmith in the City (1910), the second (or third, depending on how you count the first novel, Mike and Psmith, which was actually the second half of a longer school novel which is now better known as two separately republished novels) featuring debonair dandy Rupert Psmith. The "P" is silent as in "pshrimp"; don't pronounce it as "Pee-smith," even though some Wodehouse books seem to have a space between the P and the S in the title on the cover (like my Penguin edition of this book). We met him first in the second half of the previous book (Mike) as an 18-year-old public school boy, but dashing and suave beyond his years: he already affects a monocle and though his family name is just plain Smith, he adds the distinctive P himself because no such mundane name can adequately describe him. He becomes close friends with schoolmate Mike Jackson, a keen cricketer, and much of the book follows their adventures at Sedleigh School.

As Psmith in the City opens, however, the boys are eighteen or nineteen and matriculated from public school. While both had planned to attend University at Cambridge, neither does (Mike because of family money problems, Psmith because his father wants him to learn a trade) and both wind up working as junior clerks at The New Asiatic Bank, a thinly disguised City of London financial institution not unlike the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in London Wodehouse himself toiled at for two years in the early twentieth-century. Ah, isn't that a name that takes you back? "The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank." It seems to suggest romance and adventure and far away places. It's a pity there aren't any such banks these days, isn't it? Well, actually, stand on a street corner and look around. Can you spot a HSBC bank anywhere near you? Same company. Had I known this when I was looking for a new bank in Manhattan, I would have trotted into the lobby of the HSBC on Fifth and Thirty-Ninth, placed my clinking bag of dimes on the counter, fixed the teller with a stern stare and declared "I would like to deposit my money in a bank that Mister P. G. Wodehouse once worked in." And if they knew what I was talking about, then boy howdy, that's the bank for me.

But I digress. Psmith in the City is a series of fairly unrelated, quite gentle adventures of Mike and Psmith at work and at play in London, mostly concerned with outwitting their bosses. There's a lovely "fish out of water" feel to Mike's arrival in London at the beginning of the novel which surely must mirror Wodehouse's own feelings when he first went to work in a large monument of a bank:

Arriving at Paddington, Mike stood on the platform, waiting fro his box to emerge from the luggage-van, with mixed feelings of gloom of excitement. The gloom was in the larger quantities, perhaps, but the excitement was there, too. It was the first time in his life that he had been entirely dependent on himself. He had crossed the Rubicon. The occasion was too serious for him to feel the same helplessly furious feeling with which he had embarked on life at Sedleigh. It was possible to look on Sedleigh with quite a personal enmity. London was too big to be angry with. It took no notice of him. It did not care whether he was glad to be there or sorry, and there was no means of making it care. That is the peculiarity of London. There is a sort of cold unfriendliness about it. A city like New York makes the new arrival feel at home in half an hour; but London is a specialist in what Psmith in his letter had called the Distant Stare. You have to buy London's good-will.

Quite a difference, eh, from the laugh or two on every page you get in a later Wodehouse novel, right? It's definitely a much different P. G. we're dealing with here; Wodehouse's prose is still polished and lyrical, but it lacks the whimsy and wonder of his later works. Don't get me wrong: it's still wonderfully fun, but it's a very different beast. Aside from Psmith coming to work at the same bank as Mike, there's no string of wild coincidences, no elaborate and detailed scheme (Psmith keeps Mike from being unjustly fired by calmly threatening to expose the boss's socialist past, but that's about it), and there's no love story here. There's barely even any women in the book, aside from a grumpy landlady and the non-speaking role of a wife at a dinner party. In fact, there's no a speck of romance in Psmith in the City at all, where the closest we come to an idyllic spree is an all-bachelor weekend:

Psmith's manner became fatherly.

'You're all right,' he said. 'The hot weather has given you that tired feeling. What you want is a change of air. We will pop down together hand in hand this week-end to some seaside resort. You shall build sand castles, while I lie on the beach and read the paper. In the evening we will listen to the band, or stroll on the esplanade, not so much because we want to, as to give the natives a treat. Possibly, if the weather continues warm, we may even paddle. A vastly exhilarating pastime, I am led to believe, and so strengthening for the ankles. And on Monday morning we will return, bronzed and bursting with health, to our toil once more.'

Go ahead, make the jokes if you want! ("Not that there's anything wrong with that.") But this early world of Wodehouse is a bachelor world, and like his school stories, romance doesn't even come into it: boys and men play cricket and drink and attend the theater and have a jolly good time of it without need for any nudge-nudge-wink-wink. It's one of the very last of the non-romances for Wodehouse: by two books later (following another Psmith novel) Wodehouse is dipping his toes into love subplots with The Prince and Betty and The Little Nugget, and his work would never be the same again. But Psmith and Mike are more along the veins of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (minus the cocaine and the gigantic, glowing hound): two friendly bachelor companions enjoying the prime of their lives. Wouldn't you?

It's a turning-point book in that, at heart, he's still writing about schoolboys, but the action has moved from the schools and their cricket and rugby grounds to the setting that, along with the manor-housed countryside, would provide Wodehouse with so much fodder for his later works: London. Psmith, later a member of the Drones Club, is the not-so-missing-link between the boy's adventure stories and the clever drawing room comedies of later Wodehouse. You can point to Psmith in the City as a gateway novel for Wodehouse and his readers of the time to the Jeeves and Blandings stories: sure, it features schoolboys who aren't even in the twenties yet, but they're out and about in the big city, indulging the same sort of clever schemes that Bertie will later find himself entangled in (if not necessarily on the same complicated level).

There's also the germination of Wodehouse's later gentle pokery at political groups and causes in here: Psmith is a socialist, casually calling all and sundry "Comrade," but he's much more of a humanist than a political animal, more interested in fair play and gentle living for all than in rising up against the titled masses. A Socialist Party dinner scene in City anticipates the one Bingo Little hosts in The Inimitable Jeeves, and though the book is bookended with an opening and closing cricket match the action highlight is a fisticuff riot at a political rally where Mike and Psmith go to hear a co-worker rabble-rouse in the best Socialist manner. Mike would rather have nothing to do with it; Psmith is genially amused by it. Wodehouse would develop the theme more concretely later on, keenly sets out his view that political parties and the obsessive actions of their most rabid followers are rather decent comedy fodder: nothing to be taken seriously. It's a view that one might argue later got him into the biggest trouble of his life when he genially broadcast for the Nazis while a P.O.W. during World War II. I haven't re-read enough of Wodehouse's post-War output to prove this hypothesis, but to the best of my memory he steers more widely away from poking fun at political parties after his liberation. Once bitten, twice shy.

While Psmith would not become one of Wodehouse's longest-lasting creations (he would go on to star in two more novels, the final one in 1923), he's understandably a favorite of many readers. Despite his posh airs and affected manner and grace, he's genial, open, and helpful, and maintains the Old School tradition of never leaving a chum in the lurch. He's resourceful and witty, talkative but never boring. Wodehouse surely must have been paid by the word for the early magazine stories this book was originally published as. I like to think he chuckled rather gleefully on filing an entire page with a prolonged and elaborate, but never pointless, monologue by Psmith. Flip open to any page in the book and simply eyeball the blocks of text rather than read them: chances are you'll find a long, half-to-three-quarter-page paragraph (Psmith is speaking), followed by a one or two line paragraph (Mike answers) and then another paragraph of nearly a page (Psmith responds):

'I wonder why they call this porridge,' he observed with mild interest. 'It would be far more manly and straightforward of them to give it its real name. To resume. I have gleaned, from casual chit-chat with my father, that Comrade Bickersdyke also infests the Senior Conservative. You might think that that would make me, seeing how particular I am about whom I mix with, avoid the club. Error. I shall go there every day. If Comrade Bickersdyke wishes to emend any little traits in my character of which he may disapprove, he shall never say that I did not give him the opportunity. I shall mix freely with Comrade Bickersdyke at the Senior Conservative Club. I shall be his constant companion. I shall, in short, haunt the man. By these strenuous means I shall, as it were, get a bit of my own back. And now,' said Psmith, rising, 'it might be as well, perhaps, to return to the bank and resume our commercial duties. I don't know how long you are supposed to be allowed for your little trips to and from the post-office, but, seeing that the distance is about thirty yards, I should say at a venture not more than half an hour. Which is exactly the space of time which has flitted by since we started out on this important expedition. Your devotion to porridge, Comrade Jackson, has led to our spending about twenty-five minutes in this hostelry.'

'Great Scott,' said Mike, 'there'll be a row.'

'Some slight temporary breeze, perhaps,' said Psmith. 'Annoying to men of culture and refinement, but not lasting. My only fear is lest we may have worried Comrade Rossiter at all. I regard Comrade Rossiter as an elder brother, and would not cause him a moment's heart-burning for worlds. However, we shall soon know,' he added, as they passed into the bank and walked up the aisle, 'for there is Comrade Rossiter waiting to receive us in person.'

Lovely.

I have two more very favorite sections of Psmith in the City that I'll force excerpts upon you, however. Do you remember the rather dull and grey mood Mike was drowning in on his arrival in London earlier in this post? Take another glimpse at it if you don't. Back now? Good. Contrast that with this cheerful and offhand announcement by Psmith about half-way through the novel, after Mike has left his dreary sad boarding house and come to live with Psmith in the heart of the bustling city:

...'Rumours have reached me,' said Psmith, 'that a very decent little supper may be obtained at a quaint, old-world eating-house called the Savoy. Will you accompany me thither on a tissue-restoring expedition? It would be rash not to probe these rumours to their foundation, and ascertain their exact truth.'

I like this...not only because I have had a meal once at the Savoy, and it's a very cheering thing...but because in the space of half a book, Psmith has opened Mike's eyes to the wonders of the world in general and London in particular. This is not a time for moping around a sitting room feeling sorry for oneself; this is a time for stepping out into the lights of the London night and indulging in a hearty chop and some fried onions. It's the same comfortable and warming feeling I get when, at the end of some Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes cheerfully whisks Watson out to dinner and wine or the opera or a concert, and all is right with the world again.

Speaking of all being right with the world: even in these early novels, there's no such thing as a sour or sad ending for Wodehouse. Good triumphs and adventure is on the horizon as the pair break their bonds as working men in the bank and set off at last for Cambridge, or, as Psmith opines:

...'The bank was no place for us. An excellent career in many respects, but unsuitable for you and me. It is hard on Comrade Bickersdyke, especially as he took such trouble to get me into it, but I think we may say that we are well out of the place.'

Mike's mind roamed into the future. Cambridge first, and then an open-air life of the sort he had always dreamed of. The Problem of Life seemed to him to be solved. He looked on down the years, and he could see no troubles there of any kind whatsoever. Reason suggested that there were probably one or two knocking about somewhere, but this was no time to think of them. He examined the future, and found it good.

'I should jolly well think,' he said simply, 'that we might.'

All is well with the world. Grand times are on the horizon and wonderful adventures await in the future...not merely for Mike and Psmith, but for P. G. Wodehouse as well as he moves into the second stage of his writing career.



Much to my surprised when I surveyed the old Wodehouse bookshelf, I find I've got three editions of Psmith in the City, including two I didn't even know I had because I'd never marked them down on my big master list of PGW books. (It's like find buried treasure, it is!) I re-read it in the usual Penguin paperback edition, with a wonderful Ionicus cover of Psmith and Mike working at the bank, Mike looking a bit like a chubby Michael J. Fox. (Come to think of it, if they had made a movie version of this in the 1980s, Michael J. Fox woulda been pitch-perfect for Mike Jackson.) I've also got a very nice Hutchinson UK hardcover reprint edition featuring a cover illustration of a very pointy-nosed and pointy-chinned Psmith (seriously; guy looks like Tim Sale's Riddler in that picture), and a fairly dour-visaged (but still pointy-chinned) Psmith on the cover of the Everyman Wodehouse/Overlook Wodehouse hardcover reissue. You guessed it, it's that time again: you can pick up the Overlook edition by clicking on the Amazon.com banner to the right, or, as I like to clue you in as I'm a frugal bull myself, shop about and you may find a cheaper paperback edition. I wouldn't recommend Psmith in the City as your first or "starter" Wodehouse, but once you get to know the guy and his work, it's a wonderful and cheery look at his early evolution. And just wait until we get into the Wrykyn and Sedleigh stories that precede this. I'll give you this warning now: bone up on your cricket!