All posts tagged Psmith

Heavy Weather by P.G. Wodehouse (1933)

It is always embarrassing for a young man of sensibility to realize that he is making a priceless ass of himself.
(Poor Ronnie Fish, so oversensitive, so easily offended)

‘Has he shown any aptitude for journalism?’ This seemed to amuse Lady Julia. ‘My dear man,’ she said, tickled by the quaint conceit, ‘no member of my family has ever shown any aptitude for anything except eating and sleeping.’
(Lady Julia Fish displaying her superior aristocratic attitudes)

‘He tried to break my neck once,’ said Pilbeam, throwing out the information for what it was worth.
‘And of course that forms a bond, doesn’t it?’ said Lady Julia sympathetically.
(Nothing fazes the true aristocrat)

‘Wheels within wheels.’
(Monty Bodkin’s catchphrase)

‘Ha h’r’m’ph!’ said Sir Gregory, rather neatly summing up the sentiment of the meeting.

A sequel

‘Heavy Weather’ is the fifth novel in P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle series. It is a direct sequel to its predecessor ‘Summer Lightning’, following straight on from that work’s events, starting only about 5 days later, continuing the central storyline, and featuring most of the same characters in pretty much the same plights.

In their original editions, many of Wodehouse’s novels contained a brief synopsis. This is how the synoptic introduction to ‘Heavy Weather’ reads:

As a young man the Honourable Galahad Threepwood had earned the reputation for being wild and irresponsible, and the passing of thirty years had done little to diminish his piratical, die-hard spirit. Although he no longer organized bread-throwing contests within the gilded halls of Mayfair, he kept in close touch with his former days by compiling a book of reminiscences which, it was averred, contained more tales of the youthful escapades of Bishops and Cabinet Ministers than any book of its kind.

A deputation of his victims, headed by his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, did its utmost to suppress this book, but Gally was adamant. He would, he said, withdraw his manuscript only if his nephew, Ronnie Fish, were allowed to marry the charming chorus girl, Sue Brown. And so a bargain was struck.

All went well until Lady Julia Fish, Ronnie’s mother, arrived on the scene. She, good woman, did not appreciate the terms of the arrangement, and pointed out in no indefinite manner that it was not her intention to have her son’s future happiness sacrificed upon the altar of other people’s reputations, and straightway forbade the union.

Summary of Summer Lightning

To expand that a little, the previous novel, ‘Summer Lightning’, concluded, after a good deal of comic complication, with Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood using the threat of publishing his memoirs to blackmail 1) his sister, Lady Constance, into giving her permission for the marriage of her nephew Ronnie Fish, to the pretty chorus girl, Sue Brown, and 2) his brother, Lord Emsworth, into releasing Ronnie Fish’s trust fund money early so Ronnie has the wherewithall to marry.

The deal unravels

In the first pages of this novel that deal unravels ,for several reasons. 1) Ronnie’s mother, the redoubtable Julia Fish, returns from abroad and arrives at Blandings Castle telling all and sundry that the marriage is unacceptable.

‘Am I mad?’ [Lady Julia] cried. ‘Or is everybody else? You seriously mean that I am supposed to acquiesce in my son ruining his life simply in order to keep Galahad from publishing his Reminiscences?’

2) The publisher of the famous memoirs, Lord Tilbury, owner of the publishing conglomerate Mammoth Publishing, is infuriated to have been let down by Gally. He was hoping the memoirs would be a publishing sensation, and reckons he’s lost out on at least £20,000. So, also, sets off to Blandings in order to either talk Gally back into giving permission to publish them or, if pushed, to pay someone to steal them for him.

But most importantly 3) Ronnie himself loses heart. Despite all its superficially comic mannerisms, I found this a sad and rather dispiriting book, because at its core is the inability of Ronnie and his lady love, Sue, to be happy. Or their gift for being repeatedly unhappy. In fact Sue spends most of the book moping around and crying and, after a while, the reader feels like joining her.

Ronnie’s jealousy

The immediate cause of her unhappiness that short, pink-faced Ronnie can be insanely jealous, is, to quote Uncle Gally:

‘a blasted jealous half-wit, always ready to make heavy weather about nothing.’

In ‘Summer Lightning’ he was jealous of the private detective Percy Pilbeam who he foolishly thought was having an affair with Sue because he came across them at the same table in a nightclub, unaware that Pilbeam had been creepily stalking Sue and had only just sat down with her. Now he is going to have a new object of his jealousy….

Enter Monty Bodkin

In this book a new character is introduced whose function is to cause recurring breakups of the happy couple. This is the dimwitted, useless young man, Montague ‘Monty’ Bodkin, and it is this ‘popinjay’ that Ronnie foolishly comes to believe Sue is really in love with. It doesn’t help that Monty and Sue were actually engaged, years ago, when she was little more than a girl (aged 17).

Wodehouse contrives several scenes designed to give Ronnie the completely erroneous impression that they are still an item, with the result that Ronnie repeatedly switches from being passionately ardent for Sue, to being presented with yet another (erroneous) piece of evidence that she still loves Monty, and so switching his manner to being cold, formal and distant.

With the result that, with what comes to feel like monotonous regularity, Sue has scenes with kindly old Galahad where she tells her sorrows and bursts into tears.

Why Gally has a soft spot for Sue

Gally is so fervently for her union with Ronnie because thirty years earlier he, Gally, had a passion for Sue’s mother, the music hall performer Dolly Henderson. He recognises the features of his old flame in sweet young Sue and hence his warm avuncular support for her, standing up to the redoubtable aunts, Constance and Julia, and being there for Sue every time Ronnie goes off in a huff.

Monty loves Gertrude

Meanwhile, dim-witted Monty has an agenda of his own. He’s actually worth a fortune i.e. has a guaranteed annual income of £15,00 a year or so. But he is in love with a young lady called Gertrude Butterwick and, as the name suggests, she doesn’t come from posh aristocratic stock but is the daughter of a self-made businessman, J.G. Butterwick of Butterwick, Price, and Mandelbaum, export and import merchants.

So even though Monty has a guaranteed income, this Mr Butterwick has insisted that before he’ll hand over Gertrude in marriage, Monty must prove himself by managing one continuous year in gainful employment.

Monty had been hoping to achieve this by working at Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing Company, but this novel opens with him being given the sack for (stupidly) inserting some advice about how to win a bet about how much whiskey you can fit into Scotch bottles into a children’s magazine. Lord Tilbury had been wanting to fire the useless popinjay and this gives him the perfect excuse.

Monty becomes Lord Emsworth’s secretary

The pivot on which the narrative swivels is that, having been fired, Monty wanders down to the Drones Club (which also appears in all the Jeeves and Wooster stories) where he bumps into Hugo Carmody who was one of the young male leads in ‘Summer Lightning’. When Hugo explains that he has just resigned as Lord Emsworth’s personal secretary, Monty spots an opportunity and pulls family contacts to secure the now-vacant position.

So down to Blandings Castle goes Monty. Along with angry Aunt Julia Fish. And angry Lord Tilbury. To encounter Percy Pilbeam, the private detective, who’s still staying there after being invited down to steal the famous memoirs. And Sue Brown, who’s still staying there from the previous novel. Monty’s arrival triggers the series of misunderstandings which lead to Ronnie’s bouts of jealousy.

The Empress of Blandings

Oh and the pig. If you remember from the first novel, a major sub-plot was Lord Emsworth’s paranoia about his prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings which, in a crazy manoeuvre, Ronnie Fish kidnapped and hid in a remote cottage with the idea that, after a few days, he would be able to reveal the hiding place as the Discoverer and Rescuer of the pig and Lord Emsworth would be so grateful he would happily let him get married (to sweet Sue) and release his legacy.

Inevitably, it didn’t pan out like that with the other young male lead, Hugo Carmody, being the one who discovered the Empress, and then moving it to a temporary hiding place in the caravan of Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s former secretary who, through a series of unfortunate incidents, Lord Emsworthy had sacked in the novel before ‘Summer Lightning’.

This led Gally, Lord Emsworth’s much smarter brother, to decide that Baxter was just the front man for their neighbour, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, who also rears pigs and so is Lord Em’s main rival in the upcoming annual Shewsbury Agricultural Show Best Pig competition. In ‘Summer Lightning’, the pig is restored to its rightful stye, but Gally remains convinced that Sir Gregory is still out to either steal or nobble it, and gets Lord Emsworth to get his pig man, Jas Pirbright, to keep extra guard on it.

This explains why, having had an angry stand-off with Gally in his study at Blandings Castle, Lord Tilbury decides he needs to walk back to the pub in the village (the Emsworth Arms) but is distracted by the strong smell of pig and, when he comes up to the stye where the vast Empress of Blandings is feeding, and sees that she’s trying to get at a potato which has rolled under the metal gate, and picks it up with a view to giving it back to her – he finds himself literally collared, seized by the collar by big strong Pirbright, who leaps to the conclusion that Lord Tilbury is an agent of Sir Gregory sent to poison Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, and so locks him up in the gardeners shed. Which is where, an hour or so later, dim Monty strolling buy, hears his cries and sets him free.

The travelling manuscript

Lord Tilbury isn’t so pleased to be free from captivity by the very ‘popinjay’ he fired about three days earlier BUT he is very interested when Monty reveals that he is now employed as Lord Emsworth’s personal secretary. Ha. Maybe he can be paid to steal the famous manuscript of Gally’s memoirs. Monty drives a hard bargain because, as I’ve mentioned, he needs to be able to show Gertrude Butterwick’s father that he’s been employed for at least a year in one job – so he insists that Tilbury employs him for a full 12 months, which the latter reluctantly agrees to do.

What you have to know is that earlier on, the private investigator Percy Pilbeam had been commissioned by Lady Constance to get his hands on the manuscript as well. So now you have two young men vying to steal the manuscript.

What turns this into farce is that Gally realises various people are after it (realises as much when the Castle butler, Beach, tells him he discovered Pilbeam rifling about in his study) and so decides that, in order to be perfectly safe, he should give it to someone else. And after a bit of thought, settles on the irreproachable Beach, who should be a safe pair of hands.

And Beach is a safe pair of hands right up to the moment when Monty strolls round the corner and discovers Beach reading the famous manuscript in a garden. Monty tries to bribe him to hand it over but Beach backs towards the Castle. Except that on the way, he is spotted by Pilbeam who also tries to cut him off and offer money, but Beach dodges out the way of both of them and makes it back inside.

This is all proving very stressful for Beach, not least because it forces him to disobey direct orders from the master’s guests which goes against the grain and so he is relieved to hand the manuscript over to Ronnie Fish.

The storm breaks

Throughout the book much emphasis has been placed on how scorching hot the weather is. Finally the storm which has been gathering all day breaks in a great downpour. Monty is out walking the grounds and gets soaked. Ronnie sees him coming back to the castle, tells him to get changed and pops round to his room with some warming embrocation. Unfortunately, when he sees Monty with his wet shirt off, it reveals to Ronnie the fact he has a massive tattoo reading SUE on his chest, which of course another of Ronnie’s surly jealous moods. Monty makes a feeble attempt to explain it away as initials standing for ‘Sarah Ursula Ebbsmith’ but Ronnie isn’t having any of it.

Ronnie’s latest coldness is the last straw for poor Sue. He is so cold that she says maybe they better call the whole thing off.

They stared at one another. Ronnie’s eyes were hot and miserable. But they did not look hot and miserable to Sue. She read in them only dislike the sullen, trapped dislike of a man tied to a girl for whom he has ceased to feel any affection, so that merely to speak to her is an affliction to his nerves. She drew a deep breath, and walked to the window.
‘Sorry,’ said Ronnie gruffly. ‘Shouldn’t have said that.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ said Sue. ‘It’s better to come right out with these things.’
She traced little circles with her finger on the glass A heavy silence filled the room.
‘I think we might as well chuck it, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Just as you say,’ said Ronnie.
‘All right,’ said Sue.

At moments like this the book is not funny any more. It feels genuinely sad.

Anyway, still under the misapprehension that things are fine between Ronnie and Sue, Monty goes to find him on the pool room and explains that he needs Gally’s manuscript in order to give it to Lord Tilbury in order to get a job for a year in order to marry the woman that he loves. Like an imbecile, Ronnie thinks he is referring to Sue but, what the hell, he’ll show everyone what a gentleman he is, and so he hands over the famous manuscript to Monty who scampers off happy as Larry.

Sue comes in from the terrace and confides her sorrows to nice Galahad. Gally is infuriated and storms in on Ronnie to tell him what an idiot he’s being, how Sue loves nobody but him, and to stop being an infernal ass.

Well, you’d have thought that, with the central love story pretty much resolved, the novel would trickle to an end, but far from it. There’s 70 pages of complications still to go, which I’ll summarise briefly. They almost all concern the seemingly endless quest by four or five different players to get their hands on the wretched manuscript.

Bodkin had hired Pilbeam to find the book but, having been given it by Ronnie, tells the detective he is no longer needed, in the process revealing where he has hidden the manuscript (under his bed). Angered, Pilbeam steals it, planning to hold an auction for it between Tilbury and the Connie-Parsloe syndicate i.e. Sir Gregory and Lady Constance.

Bodkin plans to walk to the pub and hide the manuscript there but it almost immediately starts raining so he pops into a handy shed with good clean tiling. He stashes the manuscript in among some straw. Back in the Castle, Pilbeam tells Lord Emsworth that it was Bodkin who released Tilbury (from imprisonment in the potting shed, after Pirbright found him attempting to ‘poison’ the Empress) so Lord Em promptly fires Bodkin.

Pilbeam is summoned to see Lady Constance and fortifies himself with a few glasses of champagne on an empty stomach. After ten minutes he’s sloshed and so the interview goes badly. Connie becomes frankly insulting, and so a drunk and angry Pilbeam staggers out of the room determined to sell the book to Tilbury. He phones Tilbury at the Emsworth Arms and promises to deliver it but first heads to bed to sleep off the booze.

While Pilbeam is passed out, Lord Emsworth insists (against Pirbright’s advice) on moving the pig to a new location (to forestall any attempts to kidnap her) and it turns out to be none other than… the shed where Pilbeam had hidden the manuscript. As you might expect, the different characters then discover that the Empress has eaten the manuscript.

As with so many Wodehouse novels, the plot in the last 50 pages becomes increasingly clotted and I found it hard to take onboard the endless abrupt turns of events, and hard to care. When Pilbeam realises the manuscript he took such trouble to hide has been eaten, he hurries to meet Connie and Parsloe-Parsloe and extract money from them before they find out. He claims to have found and burned the manuscript and so, half disbelieving, they start to write him out a cheque for the job they wanted doing, at which point Lord Emsworth comes running in, panicking and telling Beach to phone the vet, because his beloved pig has just eaten a load of paper. When he hands over some of the said paper, everyone in the room realises it’s the famous manuscript and so Lady Constance and Sir Gregory promptly put their checkbooks away.

More or less kicked out, Pilbeam then has the bright idea of trying to sell his knowledge of the manuscript’s whereabouts to his original sponsor, Lord Tilbury, to he rushes down to the Emsworth Arms. Tilbury is just as sceptical as Constance and Gregory were but, when Pilbeam draws him a map of the potting shed’s location, he reluctantly writes Pilbeam a cheque for £1,000, then heads off into the night to find the shed and his precious manuscript.

However, angry Bodkin is standing right behind him, snatches the cheque out of his hand, and tears it up in front of him. Pilbeam is tempted to pop him except Monty is 8 inches taller than him and stronger so he stomps off into another room at the pub. Monty then phones up Lord Emsworth and warns him that someone (Lord Tilbury) is heading for the Empress’s hideout and to put Pirbright on double extra alert.

But then Monty has a few drinks and starts, under the influence of the pub’s strong beer, to feel a little sorry for Pilbeam. When he tore up the cheque it was purely performative, he imagined Pilbeam would simply get Tilbury to write out another one; he didn’t realise that was a one-off opportunity.

Then a chance remark of the barmaid gives him a brainwave. She is bragging to another customer that the oily Pilbeam is actually head of a huge detective agency with hundreds of experienced assistants. Monty runs into the snug where Pilbeam is nursing a drink and overcomes the other’s anger with a brilliant solution: he (Monty) has loads of money, what he doesn’t have is a job, a job he can hold down for a year and thus fulfil the requirement of Old Man Butterwick. So he makes Pilbeam a proposition: he, Monty, will pay Pilbeam to employ him. Suddenly Pilbeam is back in the money, £1,000 up, and hires him on the spot. Both men are sorted.

But there’s still more, as the plot drags on. Lord Emsworth is dragged into a room and is being harangued by his sisters when a mud-spattered Lord Tilbury is brought in. Tilbury had innocently followed Pilbeam’s directions to the new pig sty which was, of course, being super zealously guarded by big Pirbright who promptly jumped on him, squashing him into 4 inches of post-rainstorm mud, which is why he is barely recognisable when dragged into the Castle drawing room.

When Lord Tilbury finally makes himself known, he is shattered to be told that the manuscript he’s been through all these tribulations to get his hands on has been eaten. But Gally invites him to stay up at the castle, not just tonight but to come on an extended stay, and tells Beach to order his stuff brought up from the hotel, a room made ready, and a nice warm bath to be run.

Gally and Sue then appear. First of all Gally makes a spirited case that, contra Constance and Julia, Sue is a fine woman and any young man would be lucky to have her; before going on to inform the Emsworth siblings that Ronnie has the pig in his car and will drive off with it if Emsworth doesn’t consent to the marriage and cough up at least some of Ronnie’s legacy. So Lord Emsworth hurriedly writes a cheque to get his pig back, the pig is removed from Ronnie’s car, and the happy couple finally, at last, drive off towards London to get married.

The ending is sweet. Gally knows it was Beach who helped the young couple kidnap the Empress (for the second time; Ronnie stole her in the first book, if you remember, also with Beach’s reluctant help) and tells him he’s done a man’s work. Then reflects on how happy he is to have been able to help lovely Dolly Henderson’s daughter. And the last sentences go to the pig.

The Empress turned on her side and closed her eyes with a contented little sigh. The moon beamed down upon her noble form. It looked like a silver medal.

Thoughts

This novel felt like a slog. I was glad to get to the end. If you like brainless jollity I suppose it is very well done but I began to feel manipulated. The moment when Monty takes his shirt off and reveals a big tattoo SUE on his chest, in front of Ronnie, who he knows is quick to jealousy, is wildly improbable. Wodehouse tells us Monty sees it every day and so just forgot it was there. You buy that? Me neither. It’s neither plausible nor particularly funny.

There are plenty of funny moments in the story but, beneath them, the narrative started to feel contrived and manipulating; the last 50 pages felt like a real grind. And I began to feel really sorry for Sue. She seems to be in tears almost all the time. I began to feel that Wodehouse was bullying her.

The pig plot was hilarious the first time it appeared in the short story ‘Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!’ Now, stretched out to novel length for the second time, it begins to feel formulaic. It certainly no longer has the shock of the unexpected. Like the palavah around the controversial memoirs, it feels entirely predictable and very, very, long drawn-out. Hard not to find yourself muttering, ‘Oh just get on with it, already!’

Cast

  • Lord Emsworth, the ninth Earl of Blandings – ‘an elderly gentleman of quiet tastes’ he is, in fact, 60 – tall dim aristo, proud owner of the prize-winning pig, Empress of Blandings
  • Lady Constance Keeble – his sister, fierce
  • The Honourable Galahad Threepwood – 57, their brother, small and dapper, had a disreputable youth which he has written up in his memoirs, when a dashing young man about town in the nineties had wanted to marry Sue’s mother
  • George Alexander Pyke, first Viscount Tilbury aka Lord Tilbury – founder and proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company, publisher his nasty little scandal sheet, Society Spice, and its nasty little editor, Percy Pilbeam – a ‘stout, stumpy man’, ‘Napoleonic of aspect, being short and square and stumpy and about twenty-five pounds overweight’
  • Lady Julia Fish – sister of Lord Emsworth and Lady Constance Keeble, ‘a handsome middle-aged woman of the large blonde type, of a personality both breezy and commanding’
  • Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish – her only son, short and pink-faced and touchy, possessor of a real inferiority complex – ‘a bird of strong feelings and keen sensibilities, old Ronnie’, engaged to Sue Brown the chorus girl but keeps getting irrationally jealous and breaking it off
  • Montague ‘Monty’ Bodkin – a holiday acquaintance in Biarritz persuades Lord Tilbury to employ him on one of his papers but he turns out to be useless and is fired – ‘rather an attractive popinjay, as popinjays go. He was tall and slender and lissom, and many people considered him quite good-looking’ – also turns out to be the nephew of…
  • Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe – 52, neighbour of Lord Emsworth and rival in prize flower, vegetable and pig competitions, uncle of Monty Bodkin, owns a pig called Pride of Matchingham
  • Huge Carmody – young man, one of the two male leads in ‘Summer Lightning’ who only has a walk-on part here, telling recently fired Monty about the vacant position as Lord Emsworth’s secretary
  • Sue Brown – a very pretty, tiny girl, with an enchanting smile and big blue eyes
  • P. Frobisher Pilbeam – former editor of Lord Tilbury’s scandal sheet, Society Spice, and now a private detective, originally hired by Lord Emsworth to find his kidnapped pig
    • Beach – the butler, really big and fat, ‘mountainous’, ‘vast’, with a ‘moonlike face’
    • Voules – the chauffeur
    • Jas Pirbright – Lord Emsworth’s pig-man
  • Robinson – taxi-driver in Market Blandings
  • Mr Webber – the Blandings vet

Detectives

Given that the head of a detective agency is a fairly central character and that there’s a certain amount of cloak and dagger stuff (though not much, to be honest), it’s no surprise that Wodehouse slips various detective references into the text, not forgetting the obligatory reference to Sherlock Holmes. Just to amplify the theme, Wodehouse makes Beach the butler a big fan of detective books.

On his marriage to the daughter of Donaldson’s Dog-Biscuits, of Long Island City, N.Y., and his subsequent departure for America, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s younger son, who had assembled in the days of his bachelorhood what was pretty generally recognized as the finest collection of mystery thrillers in Shropshire, had bequeathed his library to Beach; and the latter in his hours of leisure had been making something of a study of the literature of Crime.

Like a lot of themes in Wodehouse, it’s surprising that this isn’t developed more or somehow taken to more farcical extremes. Instead there are just a few jokey references, which are interesting but not really tied in to the plot.

He [Beach] wished that life were as the writers of the detective stories which he had become so addicted portrayed it. In those, no matter what obstacles Fate might interpose in the shape of gangs, shots in the night, underground cellars, sinister Chinamen, poisoned asparagus and cobras down the chimney, the hero always got his girl.

Funny lines

‘I regard the entire personnel of the ensembles of our musical comedy theatres as—if you will forgive me being Victorian for a moment—painted hussies.’
‘They’ve got to paint.’
‘Well, they needn’t huss.’

The whole point of the Eton manner, as of a shotgun, is that you have to be at the right end of it.

‘Well, I will merely content myself with remarking that of all the young poops I ever met…’
‘He is not a poop!’ said Sue.
‘My dear,’ insisted the Hon. Galahad, ‘I was brought up among poops. I spent my formative years among poops. I have been a member of dubs which consisted exclusively of poops. You will allow me to recognize a poop when I see one.’

Beau Brummell himself could not have remained spruce after lying in four inches of mud with a six-foot pig-man on top of him.

‘I consider you a snob and a mischief maker, but may be quite sure I shall not dream of saying so.’

Aunts

Monty explains to Sue about posh aunts:

‘When you get to know that family better, you’ll realize that there are dozens of aunts you’ve not heard of yet—far-flung aunts scattered all over England, and each the leading blister of her particular county.’

Recurring comparisons…

It feels like Napoleon is referred to in pretty much every Wodehouse story…

Almost immediately Psmith saw what Napoleon would have done in this crisis.
(Leave It To Psmith)

‘Liz,’ said Mr. Cootes, and his voice was husky with such awe as some young officer of Napoleon’s staff might have felt on hearing the details of the latest plan of campaign,
(Leave It To Psmith)

From time to time, as he paced the tent devoted to the exhibition of vegetables, he might have been seen to bite his lip, and his eye had something of that brooding look which Napoleon’s must have worn at Waterloo.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

As a general rule, Lord Emsworth was an early and a sound sleeper, one of the few qualities which he shared with Napoleon Bonaparte being the ability to slumber the moment his head touched the pillow.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

He made his decision. Better to cease to be a Napoleon than be a Napoleon in exile.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

Mac had many admirable qualities, but not tact. He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.
(Summer Lightning)

And ‘Heavy Weather’ continues the habit:

[Lord Tilbury] rose from his chair and began to pace the room. Always Napoleonic of aspect, being short and square and stumpy and about twenty-five pounds overweight, he looked not unlike a Napoleon taking his morning walk at St. Helena.
(Heavy Weather)

Upon most men listening to this eloquent appeal there might have crept a certain impatience. Lord Tilbury, however, listened to it as though to some grand sweet song. Like Napoleon, he had had some lucky breaks in his time, but he could not recall one luckier than this…
(Heavy Weather)

Monty was plucking feebly at the lapel of his coat. This was new stuff to him. What with being invited to become a sort of Napoleon of Crime and hearing himself addressed as Lord Tilbury’s dear boy, his head was swimming.
(Heavy Weather)

Comparisons with Cleopatra tend to crop up regularly:

Though genial enough when she got her way, on the rare occasions when people attempted to thwart her she was apt to comport herself in a manner reminiscent of Cleopatra on one of the latter’s bad mornings.
(Leave It To Psmith)

Here is one [photo] of which my friends have been good enough to speak in terms of praise—as Cleopatra, the warrior-queen of Egypt, at the Pasadena Gas-Fitters’ Ball. It brings out what is generally considered my most effective feature, my nose.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

Lady Constance intervened. Her eye was aflame, and she spoke like Cleopatra telling an Ethiopian slave where he got off.
(Summer Lightning)

The sight of Lady Constance, staring haughtily from a high-backed chair like Cleopatra about to get down to brass tacks with an Ethiopian slave, merely entertained him.
(Heavy Weather)

And the Crusaders:

‘Fetch ’em!’ said Mr. Schnellenhamer in the voice a Crusader might have used in giving the signal to start against the Paynim.
(Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

Had that call been made, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, would have answered it with as prompt a ‘Bless my Soul! Of course. Certainly!’’ as any of his Crusader ancestors.
(Summer Lightning)

‘It’s wonderful to watch you in action I admit–one seems to hear the bugles blowing for the Crusades and the tramp of the mailed feet of a hundred steel-clad ancestors but there’s no getting away from it that you do put people’s back up.’
(Heavy Weather)

He is fond of the Mona Lisa:

Lady Constance sat rigid in her chair. Her fine eyes were now protruding slightly, and her face was drawn. This and not the Mona Lisa’s, you would have said, looking at her, was the head on which all the sorrows of the world had fallen.
(Summer Lightning)

There was an infinite sadness in Monty Bodkin’s gaze. He looked like a male Mona Lisa.
(Heavy Weather)

I doubt if there’s any wider significance or symbolism in any  these references. Rather the reverse: they are extremely obvious historical figures, clichés of history, and so can be safely used for comic effect in a popular entertainment.

… and phrases

As well as recurring figures from History, Wodehouse also has a few phrases which feel like they crop up in every book:

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.

Let the dead past bury its dead.

Paradise enow.

When Monty says:

‘Not long ago I became betrothed to a girl, and her ass of a father won’t let me marry her unless I get a job and hold it down for a year. And, dash it, my every effort to do so seems to prove null and void, if null and void is the expression I want.’

‘If it’s the expression I want’ – this wondering whether he’s using the right phrase is a really strong feature of Bertie Wooster’s speech. Coming across it in other people’s mouths, along with the same kind of cultural references, the same phrases and sometimes the same jokes, makes you realise how recycled and fundamentally samey Wodehouses’s text are.

The south of France

I’m fascinated by the way the South of France suddenly became fashionable in the early 1920s.

‘I’ve lost touch with Blandings a bit. It must be three years since I was there. Somehow, ever since this business of going to the South of France in the summer started. I’ve never seemed to be able to get down.’

Film

By 1929 cinema and the movies were, of course, a major part of the cultural landscape, everyone went to them, everyone knew the names of the stars, and so Wodehouse can confidently make casual cultural references to them.

An astonishing change had come over the demeanour of P. Frobisher Pilbeam. One has seen much the same thing, of course, in the film of Jekyll and Hyde, but on a much less impressive scale.

In fact within the Blandings Castle saga, Lord Emsworth’s second son, Freddie Threepwood, is made a complete slave to the movies, recognising movie scenarios in every situation and likely to quote movie dialogue whenever triggered, much to the irritation of his interlocutors.

Credit

‘Heavy Weather’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1933 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

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by Simon on December 17, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/heavy-weather-p-g-wodehouse/

Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse (1929)

She bent over the spaniel. A keen observer might have noted a defensiveness in her manner. She looked like a girl preparing to cope with an aunt.

He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.

From somewhere in his system he contrived to dig up and fasten on his face an ingratiating smile.

I sniffed the dog’s breath and it was like opening the kitchen door of a Soho chophouse on a summer night.

Few things have such a tonic effect on a young man accustomed to be a little heavy on waking in the morning as the discovery that he has stolen a prize pig overnight.

She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

Plot summary

Having sacked his capable secretary, the Efficient Rupert Baxter, Lord Emsworth has hired posh, drawling Hugo Carmody  to be his replacement. Lord Emsworth’s sister, Lady Constance Keeble, strongly disapproves of Hugo’s lazy, half-hearted approach (which Lord Emsworth actively welcomes) and would disapprove even more if she knew that Hugo is in love with her niece, Millicent (daughter of her and Lord Emsworth’s deceased brother, Lancelot Threepwood). Lady Constance wishes Millicent would accept her nephew, Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish, as a suitable suitor. And Millicent is herself jealous when she hears that Hugo had, until meeting her, been going round London with a chorus girl named Sue Brown.

Meanwhile, staying in Biarritz with his mother, Ronnie has met a charming American girl named Miss Schoonmaker. But although everyone thinks she’s very eligible (i.e. rich) Ronnie is in fact in love with the same chorus girl, Sue Brown, back in London. He and Hugo both took a shine to her when they were co-owners of a West End nightclub which (quickly) went bust. Trouble is that this Sue Brown has been attracting attention from other suitors, not least a hateful little man, a private investigator named P. Frobisher Pilbeam, making Ronnie very jealous.

Trouble crops up when, after going for a drive, Ronnie and Sue return to his apartment to discover Lady Constance on the doorstep. Knowing she’d go bananas if she found him gallivanting with a chorus girl, Ronnie improvises and introduces Sue as Miss Schoonmaker, the eligible American he met in Biarritz. Lady Constance is pleased he’s squiring a millionaire’s daughter and departs for tea at Claridge’s. At which point Sue points out that Ronnie’s really dug a hole for himself because this Miss Schoonmaker has been invited to stay at Blandings, at which point Lady Constance will discover that he lied!

Added into the mix is the fact that Constance and Lord Emsworth’s disreputable brother, The Honourable Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood, has also come to stay at Blandings to finish writing his memoirs. Since he has led a thoroughly scandalous life, these promise to be very entertaining apart from the fact that he appears to be setting down disreputable stories about just about everyone in his generation, including all Lord Emsworth’s and Lady Constance’s friends – when it’s published they’ll become social pariahs for giving him the facilities to finish the wretched thing.

Which is why Lady Constance secretly writes a letter to the super-efficient old secretary, Rupert Baxter, begging him to come back and resolve the situation. Not to put too fine a point on it, she wants him to steal Gally’s manuscript. ‘Mr Baxter, you are my only hope!’

Meanwhile Ronnie, having arrived at Blandings, is desperately seeking some way of extracting the money held for him in trust by his uncle, ahead of his 25th birthday. He wants the money so he can marry Sue. In desperation he comes up with a wizard wheeze: how about if he kidnaps his uncle’s pride and joy, the enormous prize-winning pig Empress of Blandings, made it disappear for a few days, driving his uncle frantic, and then discovered and returned it, thus securing his uncle’s eternal gratitude? What a great plan. What could possibly go wrong? Well for a start, what could go wrong is (once he’s carried out the plan) if Lord Emsworth proceeds to hire a detective from London to come down and find his missing pig! And not any old detective, but the very same P. Frobisher Pilbeam who carries a torch for Sue Brown.

When Hugo goes up to town to put the proposition of finding the missing pig to Pilbeam, he takes the opportunity to look up old Sue and invite her out dancing. She agrees but they both need to keep it hushed up from their respective partners, Ronnie who has become convinced Sue is seeing someone else, and Millicent who is sure Hugo is still in love with this Sue woman.

Hugo takes Sue to a club named Mario’s and they dance a bit. When he goes to make a phone call, his place is taken by the oily Pilbeam creep. He’s been tailing them and now wants to press his suit to Sue. But at the same moment, big strong Ronnie has arrived. He’d driven up to London to check up on Sue, the doorman at her apartment block told him Sue had gone out to this nightclub, and Ronnie arrived just in time to see her sharing a table with oily Pilbeam and draw completely the wrong conclusion, that he is her boyfriend. He makes to attack Pilbeam but a waiter, then two, then three, then a whole crowd of waiters get in the way and Ronnie tries to punch them all before an enormous doorman arrives, immobilises him and hands him over to the police.

Next morning he’s had up in front of a judge who very handily only fines him £5. Driving him back to his hotel, Hugo tries to tell him that Sue was at the club with him, Hugo, but Ronnie thinks he’s just doing the decent thing to protect her. When Hugo drops Ronnie the latter spies Sue and storms off. When Sue arrives Hugo tells her that Pilbeam had rung up Millicent at Blanding and told her that her fiancé was out dancing with another woman, with the result that she called him and called off their engagement.

So both couples (Ronnie-Sue, Hugo-Millicent) are in disarray. This is when Sue has her Big Plan. Lady Constance already thinks she’s this Miss Schoonmaker. Why doesn’t she announce she’s taking up the invitation and coming down to Blandings now, today? Once there she will be on the spot to set Ronnie straight and regain his heart. And Millicent, once she sees Ronnie engaged to her, Sue, will realise that Hugo really was only friends with her (Sue) and will let Hugo off. What could go wrong? Hugo objects that the real Miss Schoonmaker might turn up at any moment, but Sue points out that Ronnie had already sent her a few telegrams telling her scarlet fever had broken out at Blandings and she must keep away. So she heads off to Blandings to arrive as an honoured guest.

Meanwhile, on the pig front, Gally has become irrationally convinced that the pig thief must be Lord Emsworth’s rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parslow of Matchingham Hall. They confront him about it which he, of course, vehemently denies and they eventually leave, with Gally threatening to include every disreputable story he can think of about Sir Gregory in his book.

Cut to Sir Gregory turning up on the doorstep of the Argus Enquiry Agency and telling Pilbeam he is terrified about what Gally is going to write about him and asking him to get his hands on the manuscript and destroy it. Pilbeam is hesitant because how is he going to get into Blandings? But Sir Gregory makes him think again when he rather rashly offers him £500 to destroy the manuscript and Pilbeam has a brainwave. He checks that this is the same Blandings where the pig has been stolen, and then explains that Hugo Carmody had been to see him to ask him to look for the missing pig. At the time he turned the job down with some scorn but now he realises that if he accepts the pig job, it will be his entrée to the castle. And once in and pretending to investigate the pig thing, in reality he can take the first opportunity to get into Gally’s study and pinch the manuscript.

Going along with this, Sir Gregory suggests that he invite Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth and Gally over to his for a reconciliation dinner. That will get Gally out of the house for Pilbeam to find and pinch the manuscript.

So now there are two young men on a mission to nick it, Baxter and Pilbeam.

When Lady Constance announces to a startled Lord Emsworth that Sir Gregory has invited them to dinner, he refuses, but is surprised when Gally of all people says that, on the contrary, they should go.  As soon as Lady Constance has left, Gally explains why. They will go to dinner with Sir Gregory, pretend to accept his olive branch, but then steal his pig in revenge!

So you get the picture. It’s a country house farce, combining a pair of love stories featuring fake identities, jealousies and misunderstandings; along with not one but two pig kidnappings fraught with comic complications; and then the cack-handed attempts to steal the notorious manuscript by not one but two notoriously inept young men. Enjoy!

Cast

  • Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth – ‘a long, lean, stringy man of about sixty’, in Sue’s eyes ‘a long, stringy man of mild and benevolent aspect’
    • Beach – his butler
    • James – a footman
    • Thomas – another footman
  • Hugo Carmody – Lord Emsworth’s secretary, tall, languid, expert on the saxophone and in love with…
  • Miss Millicent – Lord Emsworth’s niece, daughter of his late brother, Lancelot Threepwood – ‘a tall, fair girl with soft blue eyes and a face like the Soul’s Awakening. Her whole appearance radiated wholesome innocence’
  • Lady Constance Keeble – Lord Emsworth’s sister, ‘a woman of still remarkable beauty, with features cast in a commanding mould and fine eyes’
  • The Honourable Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood – brother of the Earl of Emsworth and Lady Constance – come to Blandings to write his memoirs – ‘a short, trim, dapper little man of the type one associates automatically in one’s mind with checked suits, tight trousers, white bowler hats, pink carnations and race-glasses bumping against the left hip’ – Number One in the Thriftless Aristocrats series written about by Pilbeam in his Society Spice days
  • Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish – self-consciously short, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, Eton and Cambridge – he and Hugo ran a nightclub called the Hot Spot, just off Bond Street – now going out with Sue Brown, see below (Miles Fish, Ronnie’s father, had been the biggest fool in the Brigade of Guards)
  • Lady Julia Fish – Ronald’s mother, doesn’t appear in the book (‘In this chronicle the Lady Julia Fish, relict of the late Major-General Sir Miles Fish, C.B.O. of the Brigade of Guards, has made no appearance’)
  • Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parslow of Matchingham Hall – 52, neighbouring landowner and rival in prize flower, vegetable and pig competitions – fat, terrified of being exposed in Gally’s memoirs, especially the notorious story about him and the prawns!
  • Mr Mortimer Mason – stout senior partner in the firm of Mason and Saxby, Theatrical Enterprises, Ltd – employer of…
  • Sue Brown – chorus girl – ‘a tiny thing, mostly large eyes and a wide, happy smile. She had a dancer’s figure and in every movement of her there was Youth’ – who Ronnie Fish is desperately in love with – her mother was a chorus girl
  • Mac, the guardian of the stage door at the Regal Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, weighs 17 stone (!)
  • Rupert Baxter – also know as The Efficient Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s former secretary, ‘a swarthy complexioned young man with a supercilious expression’
  • P. Frobisher Pilbeam – owner of the Argus Enquiry Agency, one-time editor of the society gossip magazine Society Spice – his ‘eyes were too small and too close together and he marcelled his hair in a manner distressing to right-thinking people’ – in Ronnie’s eyes, a ‘reptilian looking squirt with narrow eyes and his hair done in ridges’
  • Pirbright – Lord Emsworth’s new pig man

Thoughts

It’s long and farcically complicated, with many funny moments, but I didn’t like ‘Summer Lightning’ as much as any of the Jeeves and Wooster novels or as much as ‘Leave It To Psmith’. The Psmith book took a while to get started, bumbling around with the three young women who’d been at school together but once Psmith himself entered the story, he galvanised it with his distinct kind of carefree upper class behaviour and absurdist flights of fantasy. He really stands out as a character as do, in their ways, Jeeves and Wooster.

By contrast none of the characters in this novel stand out so vividly. Hugo Carmody is a watered-down version of posh twit Bertie Wooster just as the butler Beach is on the way to but doesn’t have the omnicompetence of Jeeves. Addle-brained Lord Emsworth is always funny but his sister Constance doesn’t have the vivid presence of either of Bertie’s terrible aunts, loud Aunt Dahlia or the feared Aunt Agatha.

Credit

‘Summer Lightning’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1929 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

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by Simon on December 15, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Novel
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Posted by Simon on December 15, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/summer-lightning-p-g-wodehouse/

Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse (1923)

‘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

Related reviews

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

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by Simon on December 10, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 10, 2025

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