‘A straightforward narrative of the simple home-life of the English upper classes.’

Who is Psmith?
He was essentially a young man who took life as it came, and the more inconsequently it came the better he liked it.

It was Psmith’s guiding rule in life always to avoid explanations.
(Psmith’s philosophy)

‘If,’ said Psmith, regarding him patiently through his eyeglass, ‘I do not seem to be immediately infected by your joyous enthusiasm, put it down to the fact that I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about.’
(Psmith’s studied inconsequentiality)

‘I have never gone in largely for crime hitherto, but something tells me I shall be rather good at it.’
(Psmith’s cheerful insouciance)

‘If this moribund plant fancies that I am going to spend my time racing to and fro with refreshments, it is vastly mistaken. To-morrow it goes into the dustbin.’
(Psmith’s sense of humour)

What is Blandings like?
If Market Blandings had seemed a place in which one might dwell happily, Blandings Castle was a paradise.

Wodehouse wisdom
Of all indoor sports the one which offers the minimum of pleasure to the participant is that of roaming in pitch darkness through the hall of a country house.

This Ronald Psmith character is an odd fish and it took me a while to get oriented in this novel and understand what it was trying to do. You don’t have this problem with the Jeeves and Wooster stories where the characters, their relationships and their comic plights are obvious from the start. By contrast, I found it quite a challenge making out what Psmith’s racket is and how, exactly, we’re meant to find him funny.

Wodehouse is aware of this, in fact it’s part of Psmith’s schtick that he spreads puzzlement and bewilderment wherever he goes, leaving them ‘somewhat bewildered by this eloquence’ (as Wodehouse describes Freddie, early on), their minds ‘in a whirl’. All the other characters in the book don’t know quite how to take him. It’s partly his language and partly his behaviour.

1. Psmith’s language

First language; this is how Psmith sounds:

‘Your generous heat, Comrade Threepwood, is not unjustified. It was undoubtedly an error of judgment. If I have a fault—which I am not prepared to admit—it is a perhaps ungentlemanly desire to pull that curious female’s leg. A stronger man than myself might well find it hard to battle against the temptation. However, now that you have called it to my notice, it shall not occur again. In future I will moderate the persiflage. Cheer up, therefore, Comrade Threepwood, and let us see that merry smile of yours, of which I hear such good reports.’

How would you describe this? An odd combination of extreme formality (‘now that you have called it to my notice, it shall not occur again’) with mock-hearty facetiousness (‘Cheer up, therefore… and let us see that merry smile of yours’), topped off with the humorous use of ‘Comrade’.

The ‘comrade’ (which he uses to address more or less everyone, throughout the book) is all the more jocular because Psmith is phenomenally upper class. He is tall and prides himself on his immaculate attire and wears a monocle. He is a caricature of an upper-class toff, but not a dim one like Bertie Wooster, an extremely intelligent, archly self-aware one.

‘I recollect having a refreshing chat with Miss Peavey yesterday afternoon,’ said Psmith, ‘but I cannot recall saying anything calculated to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty. What observation of mine was it that meets with your censure?’

And it’s this archfulness which baffles everyone who meets him. From his appearance they expect him to be a standard issue posh man right up until he opens his mouth and begins to utter his unexpected, oblique and sometimes almost surreal observations, in the elaborately facetious tone that completely throws his listeners. He is ‘all debonair chumminess’, ‘a connoisseur of light persiflage’.

A typical example is the scene where Psmith, having been at Blandings for all of a day and knowing absolutely nothing about it, takes newly-arrived Eve for a tour of the grounds, offering increasingly absurd remarks – ‘the newts were introduced by Queen Elizabeth, the dandelions were imported from Egypt – with such a straight face that Eve doesn’t even realise what twaddle he’s talking.

At other moments he has extended flights of fantasy, as when he lets loose on a bewildered Freddie, telling him that although he risks being caught and imprisoned for stealing the necklace, he is more than happy to do it for his pal Mike, and then goes on:

‘The reflection that I did my best for the young couple will be a great consolation to me when I am serving my bit of time in Wormwood Scrubs. It will cheer me up. The jailers will cluster outside the door to listen to me singing in my cell. My pet rat, as he creeps out to share the crumbs of my breakfast, will wonder why I whistle as I pick the morning’s oakum. I shall join in the hymns on Sundays in a way that will electrify the chaplain.’

So you can see why ordinary characters are puzzled by Psmith who looks like a monocled bright young thing but talks like a man on drugs.

2. Psmith’s behaviour

The mixing up of names, the confusion of identities, turns out to be a Psmith forte and lies at the heart of the plot. He’s a chancer but not in the sense of a hard-boiled criminal or confidence trickster. He’s just so posh and confident that if odd opportunities crop up he’s ready to give them a go without any concern for bourgeois morality or timidity.

Psmith had never been one of those who hang back diffidently when Adventure calls, and he did not hang back now.

And because he’s so posh most people assume it’s alright and let him get away with it. In this respect he reminds me a bit of Raffles, the gentleman thief, the same kind of insouciant attitude. So to give another example, at the end of giving Eve a tour of the grounds, she insists that she needs to report to Baxter, Psmith says he’s probably hard at work in the library, whose french windows were just nearby on the terrace, and when Eve says it would be embarrassing just to walk in without an introduction, Psmith picks up a nearby flowerpot and hucks it through the french windows triggering a smash and an oath from within. Baxter’s head emerges seconds later and he demands to know whether Psmith chucked the flowerpot in but Psmith refuses to answer three times, before strolling off without a care in the world, leaving:

Eve remained where she stood, struggling between laughter and embarrassment.

And it’s these mixed feelings and confused responses which Psmith triggers, wherever he goes.

Examples of Psmith’s flights of fancy

1. Freddie moans to Psmith that Eve doesn’t take him seriously. Possibly because he is constantly proposing to her. Psmith mildly suggests that maybe he should stop proposing so often, but then develops this already silly notion into the realms of fantastical exaggeration.

‘Laughs at me, don’t you know, when I propose. What would you do?’
‘I should stop proposing,’ said Psmith, having given the matter thought.
‘But I can’t.’
‘Tut, tut!’ said Psmith severely. ‘And, in case the expression is new to you, what I mean is ‘Pooh, pooh!’ Just say to yourself, ‘From now on I will not start proposing until after lunch.’ That done, it will be an easy step to do no proposing during the afternoon. And by degrees you will find that you can give it up altogether. Once you have conquered the impulse for the after-breakfast proposal, the rest will be easy. The first one of the day is always the hardest to drop.’

2. Exactly the same structure is used when Lord Emsworth sends Psmith out to stop Baxter chucking flowerpots through his window.

‘If I were you,’ said Psmith, ‘and I offer the suggestion in the most cordial spirit of goodwill, I would use every effort to prevent this passion for flinging flower-pots from growing upon me. I know you will say that you can take it or leave it alone; that just one more pot won’t hurt you; but can you stop at one? Isn’t it just that first insidious flower-pot that does all the mischief? Be a man, Comrade Baxter!” He laid his hand appealingly on the secretary’s shoulder. “The next time the craving comes on you, fight it. Fight it! Are you, the heir of the ages, going to become a slave to a habit? Tush! You know and I know that there is better stuff in you than that. Use your will-power, man, use your will-power.’

3. There’s a very funny sequence towards the end, where Psmith proposes to Eve who is angry and exasperated with him. But he insists that he has many good qualities which will grow on her and insists on listing them, the more ridiculous and inconsequential the better. Thus he insists that he is good at card tricks;

‘And also a passable imitation of a cat calling to her young. Has this no weight with you? Think! These things come in very handy in the long winter evenings.’

And then after she’s left and is walking back to the castle he runs all the way after her to add that he can also recite the poem Gunga Din. In its entirety! So will she think it over, his proposal?

The plot

‘Leave It To Psmith’ has, as usual with Wodehouse, a farcical plot in the sense that there are 7 or 8 characters, each with agendas of their own, which get mixed up in scenes of ever-more byzantine comic confusion. But the basic idea is simple: Psmith impersonates a famous Canadian poet Ralston McTodd who’s been invited to stay at Blandings Castle, home of the absent-minded Lord Emsworth. As 1) there’s already a lady poet, Miss Aileen Peavey, staying there and 2) McTodd is a keen personal favourite of his hostess, Lady Constance ‘Connie’ Keeble, this impersonation is going to be challenging. Throw in the fact that Lord Emsworth’s personal assistant, Rupert Baxter, is no fool and suspects Psmith is an impersonator from the moment he arrives, and you have a recipe for countless comic complications.

But an extra layer of farce is created because while keeping up the impersonation, Psmith has also been tasked with stealing a grand diamond necklace belonging to Connie by her stepson, Freddie Threepwood. This isn’t as criminal as it sounds because Freddie will hand the purloined necklace straight over to Connie’s husband, Joseph ‘Joe’ Keeble, who will have the diamonds reset and a new necklace handed back to her. Why? Because this will allow him to pretend he had to fork out £20,000 for the new necklace. Why? Because his wife monitors their joint bank account and this subterfuge is by way of extracting a big wodge of cash from the account with a transparently good excuse.

Why does he need the cash? In order to do a couple of things. The most prominent one is it will allow Joe to give his beloved step-daughter, Phyllis, the £3,000 she needs to enable her lovely husband, Mike Jackson, to start up a pig farm. An incidental one is that this Freddie Threepwood needs cash, say about £1,000, to pay off his gambling debts, and he’s hoping Joe Keeble will pay him this as a sort of arranger’s fee.

But this aspect of the plot develops further when a pretty young lady, Eve Halliday, arrives at Blandings Castle, ostensibly to catalogue the big rambling library which hasn’t been catalogued since 1885. The thing is, Freddie has known Eve for several months and is desperately in love with her, though she thinks he’s a pest. In fact, the reader has seen how, earlier on the day when the identity swap occurred, Psmith had seen Eve taking shelter from a rainshower under the awning of a shop opposite his club (the (fictional) Senior Conservative Club in Dover Street), and had promptly stolen an umbrella from the hall and run out to give it to her. Half the reason he went to Blandings pretending to be McTodd is because Lord Emsworth let slip that she (Eve) was engaged to start working there, and Psmith wanted to be near her. When she turns up at Blandings, Psmith goes out of his way to be charming and humorous for her, thus setting himself up as a rival to Freddie.

Back to the necklace storyline, you might expect Psmith to expect to get something out of his risky heist but at least to begin with, he doesn’t. He’s doing everything for the lolz. He didn’t plan to impersonate this Canadian poet, he just happened to come into the dining room at his club at a moment when Lord Emsworth had been entertaining the poet to lunch (as instructed to do by his bossy sister, Connie) but, as usual, Lord Emsworth was without his glasses and so had a very shaky grasp on McTodd’s appearance and in any case delivered an unending monologue about his beloved flowers.

McTodd is angered by Lord Emsworth’s complete indifference to his work and gets up and leaves having said hardly a word. This is why, when Psmith enters the lounge of the same club (of which he is a member) and sees an empty chair at Lord Emsworth’s table, and drops into it, Emsworth keeps rambling on about his garden and doesn’t notice the substitution. And here’s the very Psmith thing about the whole situation: Psmith doesn’t mind. He isn’t fazed. It doesn’t seriously occur to him to set Lord Emsworth straight. As he lets Emsworth ramble on and picks up the idea that he’s sat down in the chair of a chap who was invited to go and stay at Blandings Castle for a few weeks, Psmith thinks, ‘OK, alright, sounds like fun, I won’t disillusion the old boy, I’ll play along and see what comes of it’. Which is very much the Psmith Spirit.

Oh and there’s yet another layer of complexity which is that, just as Eve is starting to find Psmith amusing, she is told that he is the Canadian poet Ralston McTodd and it turns out that her old schoolfriend Cynthia is married to this McTodd and that Eve learned, just before getting the train down to Blandings that, just a few days ago, after arriving in London, they had had a big row and Ralston stormed out, abandoning her. So at a stroke, Eve’s attitude goes from indulging Psmith’s flights of fancies to despising him. And that’s just the start of the mayhem. There are another 150 pages of complicated twists and turns still to go…

Psmith’s advert

I’m not telling this in quite the right order because although the mistaken identity and the invitation to Blandings are the start of the real plot, there had been 50 or so pages of buildup before it.

The fundamental thing is that Psmith is skint. He has been working in the fish company run by his wealthy uncle (it’s always uncles and aunts in these stories, so much easier to defy than fathers and mothers) but has had enough and has just resigned.

‘I must explain,’ said Psmith, ‘that until recently I was earning a difficult livelihood by slinging fish about in Billingsgate Market.’

As a result, at the start of the story, Psmith pays for an advert in the papers which (as you can see) gives the book its title:

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle 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!

Two things: in the context of the plot, he is disappointed by the small number of replies he gets. It’s only the last (of seven) letters or replies which contains anything interesting, asking him to meet an unnamed respondent in the foyer of the Piccadilly Hotel. This turns out to be Freddie Threepwood who, as I’ve mentioned, had seen the ad and had the brainwave about paying someone to steal his aunt’s necklace. Freddie gives a very brief outline of his plan to Psmith before he has to run off and catch his train.

It is typical of the farcically improbable nature of the whole thing that it’s later the same day that Psmith finds himself by accident not only 1) taking the place of the Canadian poet, and 2) catching the train to Blandings with Lord Emsworth – but 3) discovering that Freddie is on the same train (because he missed the one he rushed off for and spent the afternoon at the movies); and 4) then discovering that Freddie is Lord Emsworth’s stepson and so they are all going to the same house! And 5) then realising that the person Freddie wants him to steal the necklace from is Connie, the sister of the very man who’s mistaken him for the Canadian poet! And who, a few hours later, he finds himself on the steps of Blandings Castle being introduced to as the Canadian poet.

This is what I mean by farce. Among other aspects such as crude characterisation and physical horseplay, farce differs from comedy by virtue of its ‘ludicrously improbable situations’. Are these ludicrously improbable enough for you? And this is only the start. The plot then moves though a score of increasingly complicated misunderstandings and cross-purposes into a world of endless confusion.

Psmith and Agatha Christie

Notice anything else about that advert? Quite possibly many people down on their luck during the post-Great War slump did indeed post such adverts in the press. But from a bookish point of view, it reminded me of the very similar advert posted by Agatha Christie’s pair of unemployed posh people, Tommy and Tuppence, in her first novel about them, The Secret Adversary. This was published in 1922, the year before ‘Leave It To Psmith’ was written, and I wonder how much influence there was between Christie and Wodehouse. Or was (and is) it just a common trope of detective/mystery stories? Or a bit of both?

Wodehouse seems to be indicating the influence when, towards the end of the story, he tells Eve that if they get married:

‘We shall get into that series of “Husbands and Wives Who Work Together”.’

How to pronounce Psmith

‘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 that 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 phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan. You follow me?’

Blandings versus Bertie

Having just spent two or three weeks immersed in Jeeves and Wooster stories – which means being immersed in the narrative style of their narrator, the posh dimwit Bertie Wooster – it’s a surprise and a bit of a shock to emerge into the much calmer, staider air of the Blandings Castle stories. The (dozen) Blandings short stories and (eleven) novels mostly have a third-person narrator – who is still posh and echoes the tone of his titled characters – but is much, much more restrained and sensible than the hilariously idiotic and slag-infested Bertie.

Appropriately enough, then, the Blandings stories are stylistically blander. Still freighted with comic phraseology. Just not as madly slangy as Bertie.

A third-person narrator also has to spend a lot of time setting the scene, describing the location and the weather and the general mood, whereas a first-person narrator is generally more concerned with describing their own thoughts or how they feel. Here’s the difference in practice. First here’s Bertie Wooster opening a chapter in ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’:

You couldn’t have told it from my manner, but I was feeling more than a bit nonplussed. The spectacle before me was enough to nonplus anyone. I mean to say, this Fink-Nottle, as I remembered him, was the sort of shy, shrinking goop who might have been expected to shake like an aspen if invited to so much as a social Saturday afternoon at the vicarage. And yet here he was, if one could credit one’s senses, about to take part in a fancy-dress ball, a form of entertainment notoriously a testing experience for the toughest.

This takes you straight into Bertie’s permanently puzzled, dimwit mind, combined with some colourful slang (‘goop’) and equally colourful metaphor (a shy person shaking like an aspen). Compare and contrast with the opening to Chapter 3 of ‘Leave it to Psmith’ – see how much more sober, sensible and descriptive it is:

The rain had stopped when Psmith stepped out into the street, and the sun was shining again in that half blustering, half apologetic manner which it affects on its reappearance after a summer shower. The pavements glistened cheerfully, and the air had a welcome freshness. Pausing at the corner, he pondered for a moment as to the best method of passing the hour and twenty minutes which must elapse before he could reasonably think of lunching.

It’s still got a mate cheeriness but a lot, lot less colourful, interesting or grabby.

Psmith and Blandings

In this novel Wodehouse’s series of stories about Psmith intersect with the series of stories about Blandings Castle. Psmith had already appeared in three novels (the others being ‘Mike’ (1909), ‘Psmith in the City’ (1910) and ‘Psmith, Journalist’ (1915)). When asked, Wodehouse said he never wrote any more Psmith texts for the very good reason that he couldn’t think of any more stories.

But if this novel was the end of the line for Psmith, it was just an early stop for the great Blandings juggernaut. It’s the second novel in the Blandings series (the first being ‘Something Fresh’ (1915)) which would go on to comprise 11 novels and nine short stories.

Cast

• The Earl of Emsworth – ‘that amiable and boneheaded peer’, ‘a fluffy-minded man with excellent health and a large income’ – tall and lean and scraggy
• Lady Constance Keeble, ‘Connie’ – his sister, ‘a strikingly handsome woman in the middle forties. She had a fair, broad brow, teeth of a perfect even whiteness, and the carriage of an empress’
• the Right Honourable Freddie Threepwood – his dimwit son – ‘a dude with blond hair slicked back’ – ‘The Hon. Frederick Threepwood was a young man who was used to hearing people say “Well, Freddie?” resignedly when he appeared. His father said it; his Aunt Constance said it; all his other aunts and uncles said it’ ‘ known for ‘his feebleness of intellect’
• Rupert Baxter, his secretary – ‘Technically but a salaried subordinate, he had become by degrees, owing to the limp amiability of his employer, the real master of the house. He was the Brains of Blandings, the man at the switch, the person in charge’ – ‘thick-set and handicapped by that vaguely grubby appearance which is presented by swarthy young men of bad complexion’ – ‘a sort of spectacled cave-man’
• Joseph ‘Joe’ Keeble – Lady Constance’s husband – elderly widower, made a fortune in South African diamond mines – ‘Uncle Joe’ to Lord Emsworth’s son, Freddie – ‘short with a red face’
• Phyllis Jackson – Joe Keeble’s stepdaughter – had been engaged to a rich and suitable young man (Rollo Mountford) as arranged by Lady Constance, but chucked him to run off and marry ‘a far from rich and quite unsuitable person’ named Jackson – ‘small and fragile, with great brown eyes under a cloud of dark hair. She had a wistful look, and most people who knew her wanted to pet her’
• Mike Jackson – Phyllis’s husband, best pals with Psmith, needs £3,000 to set up a pig farm in Lincolnshire
  • Jane – her maid
  • Beach – the Emsworth family butler
  • Thomas – the footman
  • Stokes – another footman, ‘a serious-looking man with a bald forehead’
  • Susan – the new parlourmaid (who turns out to be more than she seems)
• Ronald Psmith – star of then novel, a very tall, very thin, very solemn young man, best friend of Mike Jackson – ‘a striking-looking young man, very tall, very thin, and very well dressed. In his right eye there was a monocle’
• Eve Halliday – schoolfriend of Phyllis’s – ‘ the daughter of a very clever but erratic writer, who died some years ago’ – librarian just been employed to catalogue the Blandings library – ‘strong and adventurous, and revelled in the perpetual excitement of trying to make both ends meet’ –
• Miss Clarkson aka ‘Clarkie’ – formerly Eve and Phyllis’s teacher, now owner of the Ada Clarkson Employment Bureau – ‘exudes motherliness. She was large, wholesome, and soft’
• Miss Aileen Peavey – author, one of Connie’s enthusiasms, ‘one of the leading poetesses of the younger school’ – later revealed to be a con-artist
• Ralston McTodd – the well-known Canadian poet – ‘A gloomy-looking young man with long and disordered hair’
• Cynthia McTodd – Eve’s best friend at school, who went off to Canada, met and married Ralston, years later has accompanied him on a trip to England where, in their London hotel, they hand a standup row and he walked out – all of which Eve duly discovers which puts a damper on Psmith’s efforts to chat her up in the guise of this McTodd
• Edward Cootes – American con-man, lately retired from working transatlantic liners after an angry punter bit the tip of his forefinger off, tries it on at Blandings by pretending to be McTodd but Psmith sees right through him; wants in the necklace heist and Psmith persuades him a good way to infiltrate the caste would be as his (Psmith’s) valet, which he does grudgingly

Starting points

Within the first ten pages we learn that all the characters have issues or problems or needs, mostly to do with money, which we know from this type of novel will go on to be the main subject of the narrative.

Freddie Threepwood has lost over £500 betting on the horses so he asks first his father, then Uncle Joe to lend him £1,000.

Joe Keeble’s step-daughter Phyllis has asked him for the mighty sum of £3,000 to help her husband Jackson set up a pig farm.

Connie owns a beautiful necklace which is worth at least £20,000 but refuses her husband’s wise advice to put it in a safe.

Connie has arranged for Ralston McTodd, ‘the well-known Canadian poet’, to come and stay at Blandings, and asks Lord Emsworth to drive up to London to collect her.

She has also arranged for a Miss Eve Halliday to come to Blandings to catalogue the library, which hasn’t been done since 1885.

Contemporary culture

Movies

The enormous growth in popularity of cinema in the 1920s is one of the great cultural divides between the 1920s and the Edwardian era. There was not only a boom in cinemas and the numbers of movies produced but also in the cultural means of promoting and publicising them, from posters and billboard hoardings, through reviews in newspapers and feature articles in magazines.

In my Agatha Christie reviews I mentioned how many times characters joked that they felt like they were caught in a crime movie but none of them compare to the character in this novel, Freddie Threepwood. Freddie is a movie addict, dropping everything to pop along to the pictures either in London or Blandings. But more importantly he is a kind of movie victim (in the sense of ‘fashion victim) in that he relates absolutely everything in his life to some scene or plot from the latest movie he’s seen. He has a ‘motion-picture-trained mind’ and so will believe any absurdity.

The Hon. Freddie was a great student of the movies. He could tell a super-film from a super-super-film at a glance, and what he did not know about erring wives and licentious clubmen could have been written in a sub-title.

A well-displayed advertisement, and one that had caught the eye of many other readers of the paper that morning. It was worded to attract attention, and it had achieved its object. But where others who read it had merely smiled and marvelled idly how anybody could spend good money putting nonsense like this in the paper, to Freddie its import was wholly serious. It read to him like the Real Thing. His motion-picture-trained mind accepted this advertisement at its face-value.

Said Freddie, ‘Saw much the same thing in a movie once. Only there the fellow, if I remember, wanted to do down an insurance company, and it wasn’t a necklace that he pinched but bonds. Still, the principle’s the same.’

‘When you chuck your head up like that you remind me a bit of What’s-her-name, the Famous Players star—you know, girl who was in ‘Wed To A Satyr’.’

It’s like that picture I saw once, ‘A Modern Cinderella.’ Only there the girl nipped off to the dance—disguised, you know—and had a most topping time. I wish life was a bit more like the movies.’

And it’s not just the plots, movies infect his speech. He quotes entire lines of movie dialogue, generally to the immense annoyance of his interlocutors.

“I just wanted to help Phyllis. She’s my friend.’
‘Pals, pardner, pals! Pals till hell freezes!’ cried Freddie, deeply moved.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Sorry. That was a sub-title from a thing called ‘Prairie Nell,’ you know. Just happened to cross my mind. It was in the second reel where the two fellows are…’
‘Yes, yes; never mind.’
‘Thought I’d mention it.’
‘Tell me…’
‘It seemed to fit in.’
‘Do stop, Freddie!’

The most comprehensive example of a movie victim or movie pest that I know of in fiction.

Freud

‘Between ourselves, I dropped about five hundred of the best. And I just want to ask you one simple question. Why did I drop it?’
‘Because you were an infernal young ass.’
‘Well, yes,’ agreed Freddie, having considered the point, ‘you might put it that way, of course. But why was I an ass?’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed the exasperated Mr Keeble. ‘Am I a psycho-analyst?’

The modern girl

Thinks Joe Keeble about Eve:

What nonsense, he reflected, these newspapers and people talked about the modern girl. It was this very broad-mindedness of hers, to which they objected so absurdly, that made her a creature of such charm. She might behave in certain ways in a fashion that would have shocked her grandmother, but how comforting it was to find her calm and unmoved in the contemplation of another’s crime.

It’s not what Joe does or doesn’t think, I’m interested in the obvious fact that ‘the modern girl’ was, in 1923, enough of a newspaper cliché to be cited in a popular entertainment like this.

Say it with flowers

Ditto ‘say it with flowers’. According to Google AI:

The famous slogan ‘Say it with Flowers’ was popularized by the Florists’ Telegraph Delivery (FTD) association in 1918 for their Mother’s Day campaigns, building on the Victorian-era concept of floriography (the language of flowers) to convey emotions, but the exact coiner is often attributed to advertising man Major Patrick O’Keefe, inspired by florist Henry Penn’s idea that flowers say everything.

1918 – so the phrase was pretty new when Wodehouse spoofed it. Why am I mentioning it? Because late in the story, after getting locked out of the castle in the middle of the night, and spending some time chucking pebbles at windows hoping to wake someone up who can let him in, becoming slightly delirious, Baxter progresses to bigger things:

It seemed to Rupert Baxter that he had been standing there throwing pebbles through a nightmare eternity. The whole universe had now become concentrated in his efforts to rouse that log-like sleeper; and for a brief instant fatigue left him, driven away by a sort of Berserk fury… This was no time for pebbles. Pebbles were feeble and inadequate. With one voice the birds, the breezes, the grasshoppers, the whole chorus of Nature waking to another day seemed to shout to him, ‘Say it with flower-pots!’

Psmith’s funny lines

It may be purely subjective, I may be as dim as Bertie Wooster, but my impression is that Psmith gets funnier as the novel proceeds, and almost all the final scenes are hilarious, existing almost entirely to give him a stream of very funny lines:

‘I take it, then, that you would prefer to dispense with the usual formalities. In that case, I will park this revolver on the mantelpiece while we chat. I have taken a curious dislike to the thing. It makes me feel like Dangerous Dan McGrew.’

And:

‘This,’ said Psmith, ‘is becoming more and more gratifying every moment. It seems to me that you and I were made for each other. I am your best friend’s best friend and we both have a taste for stealing other people’s jewellery. I cannot see how you can very well resist the conclusion that we are twin-souls.’

And:

‘If you attempt to edge out through that door I shall immediately proceed to plug Comrade Cootes in the leg. At least, I shall try. I am a poor shot and may hit him in some more vital spot, but at least he will have the consolation of knowing that I did my best and meant well.’

Audiobook

There’s an excellent audiobook, read by the lovely character actor Jonathan Cecil.

Fin

‘So that’s that!’ she said.
Psmith looked up with a bright and friendly smile.
‘You have a very happy gift of phrase,’ he said. ‘That, as you sensibly say, is that.’

Credit

‘Leave it to Psmith’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1923 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related links

• Leave it to Psmith online
• P.G. Wodehouse website
• P.G. Wodehouse Society

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• P.G. Wodehouse reviews

Life for whatever girl might eventually decide to risk it in Psmith’s company would never be dull.