Psmith, Journalist
The trouble with this book is that one always feels it's not quite as good as it could have been. I mean, after one reads the first two books and then gets wind of the fact that Psmith is going toe-to-toe with gangsters in the third, one's mind runs wild. The very premise evokes scary noir music and opening titles chalked on the walls of shady alleyways. "Psmith in the City" or some snappy title like that. (Ironic, since the book actually called "Psmith in the City" was merely about Psmith being cooped up in a London bank and making light of it.) And the stakes seem so much higher than usual that you might as well just call it "Psmith: the movie". (Subtitle: "Psmith just got real".)
But this is still P.G. Wodehouse, and you don't need to borrow Psmith's monocle to see that the stakes are fake stakes--just there for show. Psmith, Journalist has been said to have more of a "social consciousness" than Wodehouse's usual fare, and Neil Gaiman praised it for being "about something" rather than about itself--but the bottom line is that the falling tenements on Pleasant Street are a plot device, not a focal point. All these guys with guns may add a bit of adrenaline, but at heart they're no more dangerous than the uptight housemaster in Mike and Psmith or the nasty manager in City.
I imagine that Psmith owes his continued success to the fact that he's well aware of this, and it's worth the price of admission to see him reveling in his divine immunity among guys who could gun him down at any second. He's a little like a cartoon cat who realizes that the dog is on a chain and starts slapping its face and hitting it with pies. The few glimpses into his head we get reveal that he's improvising most of this, which just makes it even better. It's spur-of-the-moment midsummer madness.
The setup here is that Psmith, who's staying in New York for a spell, gets bored and takes it into his head to commandeer a family journal called "Cosy Moments" (why the British spelling in a New York paper?) while its owner is on vacation. His idea of improvement entails nixing the entire staff of sentimental kiddy-writers and ushering in some muckrakers to pen scathing exposés of tenement housing in New York. This arouses the ire of certain higher-ups with gangsters at their beck and call, who are determined to put Psmith "out of business" (permanently); however, he's equally determined not to give in. It's not clear whether this is more because he wants to improve things for the tenement-dwellers or because he finds all this amusing, or maybe because he knows this story needs a plot. Regardless, in a truly classic touch, no one ever bothers to rename the paper, leading to spit-take catchphrases like "Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!"
Mike, the milk-and-water chaser to Psmith's crazy cocktail, is off on a cricket tour for most of this. He's ceased to be a consistent sidekick and become a device to drop Psmith in New York and abandon him there for thirty chapters. The empty space is filled by reporter Billy Windsor, a fellow who mostly made me resent his presence and get sentimental about Mike. I think he was invented so Wodehouse could have a classic American hero, the type of guy who'd chase gangsters down dark alleyways regardless of reason. An English kid with a craving for cricket wouldn't have really fit the role. Still, Windsor, while handy enough--as all Americans should be--when it comes to beaning gangsters with big sticks, doesn't provide that comfort-food, we're-thrown-together-so-let's-be-allies companionship that Mike offers.
Fortunately for readers, Windsor isn't a permanent fixture, and it's Mike and Psmith's offhanded camaraderie that provides here, as always, the real "cosy moments".
On an irrelevant note, the part in Chapter 3 where Psmith quotes Coleridge made me fall in love with "Kubla Khan" all over again.
Love Among The Chickens
I suppose I'd better give Ukridge more of a chance before I knock him, but the man doesn't really get to me in the way others of Wodehouse's comic creations have done. He's believable enough--and therein, perhaps, lies the problem. What we want from Wodehouse is someone unbelievable like Psmith, or shrouded in shadow like Jeeves, or a frame-story narrator like Mr. Mulliner, whose stories we don't really buy but are all too happy to listen in on anyway. A mere annoying fellow with a flawed, but not unusual, get-rich-quick scheme seems almost too sane. Then, too, the narrator, so far from being a zany observer of the absurd a la Bertie Wooster, is a straightforward, normal guy, several shades duller than Holmes's Watson and barely able to wring wry commentary out of being along for the ride.
Still, this is P.G. Wodehouse, and not even this early work, in which he's finding his footing as a comedy writer, is without merit. Garnet, the narrator, soon shows he's got both a soul and a sense of humor, as a girl catches his eye and makes him rethink his writing and his life. Pretty soon he indulges in an idiotic plot to win her hand that seems more like a Wooster impulse than anything else, and while it's far from being Wodehouse's finest, at least it gives us a break from Ukridge's chicken-wrangling and lets us in for some sly observations about writing and love.
Even the chicken plot eventually pays off, coming to a conclusion that's unexpectedly hilarious and foreshadows the epic climaxes in Jeeves or Psmith. Definitely worth the read--especially if, like me, you discovered it while your dad was trying to prevent the neighbor behind you from setting up a chicken coop practically in your backyard. But that's another story.
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