Disco, discere, didici

Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers . . . had introduced three lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson. 

- P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith 

I'm taking a composition class at college, which feels like a waste of time to me. If there's one thing I truly believe I can do decently, it's slap a paper together. But there's a word the teacher likes to repeat, and I apply it here: kairos, the supreme moment. 

About one week into college, when I was walking around on the grounds, eyeing a metal statue, I realized something, which was that I no longer wished I'd saved the Psmith series for when I was a new student. It wouldn't have been the moment for it. 

I have a weird way of relating books to whatever I do, and I wanted, at college, to find a friend like Psmith. I spent the whole summer in happy daydreams of gaining the sort of companion who would help me toss interlopers out the back windows of studies. Granted, that type died with the English school, but there's always hope.

But the main reason I wanted a Psmith was that Psmith exists to ease a person into Sedleigh, and I was certain that my school would be a Sedleigh--pleasantly, decently dull. (I guess it is, though more on the pleasantly side at the moment. And if wearing loafers around the school grounds doesn't drive that home, nothing does, really.)

Scratch that. I thought the school would start out a Sedleigh and morph, as the nights lengthened, into that bank in Psmith in the City, just an endless drudgery and coldness. It never did. I like it still. Maybe I forgot that Mike, the main character, adjusts quite quickly to such settings, and it's only Psmith who turns his discontent into a disco and dances in it. (No, not really. Disco is deader than Psmith, but you know.)

So college, if you enjoy it, is not necessarily the time to be reading Psmith. I read it exactly when I should have read it, because the time to be reading Psmith is the spring and summer before, when you're anticipating college with a Mike-like groan, not super into the idea and worried it will cut into your cricket-playing time. Or, in my case, my reader time.

I feel almost like I'm violating a certain readerly privacy, writing this post. I love my Kindle, admittedly, and when mine broke again this past week I cradled it like Clara with her injured nutcracker, but I hate all this stuff with the Amazon company tracking your bookmarks and plastering your screen with ads. Used to be you'd duck behind a book and flip the pages if you wanted to go unseen, and now look at me, writing posts about what I read. I was going to do a series of posts detailing my short-lived love affair with the college library. I might even do it now, and have this be the first. 

But even if it isn't the moment for Psmith, and even if I should be putting him aside and studying, I find myself thinking of him and his antics in the middle of my classes and having to stifle a smile. He's the lively grass snakes in my Latin lesson.

Links of the moment

Finish Your Novel. I'd been searching for a site like this for some time, but they all fell flat and told me things I already knew. This is practical, motivating stuff that gave me more than a few epiphanies. If I ever meet this man I'll thank him personally for my most recent scene, which is, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, undeniably the goods.

Watercolor Moods, the YA book blog of a friend of a friend. I appreciate good YA, but it's hard to find, and I'll definitely be looking at a few of these.

After My Hat, the illustration blog of the friend who showed me the above blog. Hope she won't mind me linking. I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.

Um...that fantastic Psmith commentary I mentioned in my last post. I suppose I should delete that post, since other than the link it's just me fangirling over how great Psmith is, but a blog is really just life served up hastily as it comes, so I'll keep it as it is.

The Definitive Psmith

Sounds like a name for a book collection, doesn't it? But no, there is really no "definitive" set of P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith series out there. If you're fond of Psmith, you have to pseek him out for yourself. (The "p" is psilent.)

Technically I am now finished with the series, as it stands. Still left to read: the magazine version of Leave it to Psmith (somewhat different, I'm told), the stage version of Leave it to Psmith (which would have to be different, unless you had some kind of crazy elaborate set), the US version of The Prince and Betty (which apparently combines Psmith, Journalist with a previous Wodehouse book in an unholy blend), and a few stories featuring Psmith's sidekick Mike Jackson in his schoolboy days. When I'm obsessed I do the thing thoroughly.

But I'm still squealing over Leave it to Psmith, which I just finished; the series, if it had to end, couldn't have ended much better. Surprisingly satisfying stuff. I'm not going to write a review of it until I can be more objective. So on that note I leave you with this fantastic set of posts on the series, which makes observations that never would have occurred to me and increases my enjoyment considerably.

Premature Review: Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

I haven't quite finished this book yet, so any opinion stated herein is subject to change. A few spoilers for those who may be reading the series.

You know, up until now I confess I had been a bit resentful of Wodehouse for writing only four Psmith books. His reason, apparently--which didn't suffice for me--was that he thought Psmith didn't work as an adult, and that what was charming in a mere lad bluffing his way through the work force ceased to be funny as soon as he came of age. There's certainly something in that, but now I think the problem lay more in Wodehouse's changing clime. Psmith belonged, by nature, to an atmosphere of dull care--dull care that he could banish with his mere presence, but still, dull care. Stick him down in an Eden like Blandings Castle (complete with his very own Eve), and, even if snakes should enter in the form of impostors with vile intent, he simply won't work the way he should. Psmith's comedy comes from the fact that he's generally in school or the workplace, blackmailing the boss, talking his peers to death, and treating everything as a sort of picnic. At Blandings Castle, everything--even the plotting--actually is a sort of picnic, and it's hard for Psmith's "the cry goes round" to have the same audacious ring.

The only thing that was ever odd about Psmith's accustomed setting was the fact that scarcely anyone found Psmith odd--or, if they did, they declined to comment. His boss found him annoying and his headmaster found him unsettling, but no one ever went to the length of suggesting that he was out of the ordinary. Now here's irony, if you like it; now that he's hightailed it out of the mundane corner of the Wodehouse world and headed into the "musical comedy without music" section--where he would seem to fit like a hand in a glove--people are finally acknowledging how weird he is. (I guess it makes sense, really. If anyone was more insane than Bertie Wooster, it was Sir Roderick Glossop, the mental health specialist who wanted to book him his rightful room at the loony-bin.) A pity, since giggling behind your hand at Psmith--unless you're the reader and safely outside the story--breaks his power in a subtle way.

Of course, it's equally possible that the death of Psmith's father and the subsequent loss of all his doubloons put a bit of a damper on his usual spirits. (That's the only way someone can die in a Wodehouse book--to instigate a plot.) Scheme though Psmith might, his problems in the last two books were solved by his family having a fair amount of the ready, so right away his effectiveness is diminished. Having fallen out with his wealthy uncle, he has nothing left to his name but a smart set of dress clothes and a sense of adventure. The latter drives him to place an advertisement in the newspaper offering his services to anyone with a buck and a bad idea. It's the kind of thing you'd see on Craigslist nowadays, and most readers take it in that spirit--the exception being Freddie Threepwood of Blandings, who really needs someone to steal his aunt's necklace so a few important debts can be paid. (Presumably, the events of the first Blandings book made Freddie wary of his own powers as a thief. He's also paranoid that one of the servants might turn out to be a detective, hinting that the influence of Ashe Marson is still felt.)

Psmith relishes the assignment because it's much the most unlikely thing on the menu. We're told that his closeness with Mike Jackson, ordinary guy extraordinaire, is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to his friendships: "He liked his humanity eccentric." Funny, because if you had asked me I would have said that Psmith liked being the strangest thing in the room at all times, and used the plainclothes presence of Mike to further offset his own oddity. He called himself Psmith in the first place so that he wouldn't be a Smith, not because he wanted anyone else to be called Psmith. (Or did he? Come to think of it, he did say he was going to found his own dynasty...)

Maybe it's because this is a meeting of worlds, but the plot, despite being as complex and knotted together as you'd expect a Blandings plot to be, seems to eschew the usual tightness in favor of multilayeredness. On last count, Psmith coincidentally had three distinct and separate reasons for going to Blandings Castle. Or was that four reasons? Why does he even need one? He could have just showed up and no reader would ever have questioned his right to be there. He's Psmith.

This book also puts Psmith in the oddest of roles--that of the ardent lover. You wouldn't think he'd go in for that sort of thing, but just let one pretty blonde come along and he's trailing her like the Phantom of the Opera. This becomes easier to account for once one takes his previous settings into consideration. After attending an all-boy's school, working at a bank in male-dominated London, and hitting the mean streets of New York City without so much as confronting one lady gangster, it's natural that he'd appreciate feminine beauty. Sadly, Eve, his target, isn't the deepest of Wodehouse's ladies; she reads as Joan from Something New all over again, and she's even less vital to the plot. It's adorable to watch Psmith scramble after her, but I can't help wishing he'd picked a more enterprising mate, or at least someone who could dish the dirt on something like his own level.

Mike, peripheral but still somewhat significant, is now a married man himself. We're told he eloped with the girl in question, and I'm extremely sad that the best part of the story didn't make it into the plot. In my opinion, there's no way Psmith wasn't in on that one. I seem to see him slithering by with the getaway car while Mike hitches the rope up to her window. Good times.

Edit: I'm now a bit ashamed of this post, because I turned out to be utterly wrong about Eve. I doubt if Psmith could have found himself a better match...but maybe I'll explain why another time. In the meantime here's a sketch of Eve pulling on her gloves and looking all determined, which more or less sums up the second half.

"The sixth of July. Your loving friend Benedick."

My sister Clair and I like to read books together. It seems strange to be telling that to a blog as if it's some new thing. At any rate, she and I somehow managed to finish the entire Sherlock Holmes canon in about two months, and not wanting to carelessly bolt the Jeeves and Wooster series down in a similar way, I got her on to the Psmith books.

Unlike Jeeves and Wooster, which is one of those things you love right away or not at all, the lesser-known Psmith series is definitely an acquired taste. If you wish to go about the business of acquiring it, I highly recommend securing a listener and reading the thing aloud. Psmith's monologues are that much more audacious when they're actually audible. (The jokes on Psmith's name are trickier when you can't see them in print, though; he says it's pronounced with a silent 'P', "as in pshrimp.")

For private reading, I've been tackling the rest of the Lord Peter Wimsey books. I like these books, but I can't put my finger on their appeal. Is it the mysteries themselves, the offbeat main character, the darkness lurking behind the humor, or merely the fact that I grin involuntarily every time Lord Peter uses the phrase "uncommonly awkward"?

Wimsey and Psmith accompany each other well; they have noticeably similar character traits and mannerisms. Also, I've had it spoiled that (SPOILERS! TURN BACK TURN BACK) each eventually acquires a wife, something you really wouldn't expect of either of them. Psmith has Eve Halliday, and Wimsey has Harriet Vane. Coincidentally, I happen to be one book away from meeting the love interest in both cases. I do hope those crazy boys are in good hands.

(OKAY YOU MAY LOOK AGAIN NOW)

And all this goes without even mentioning any of the Shakespeare. There's always Shakespeare. If I elaborated, this blog post would start to sound like one of those newsletter Christmas cards with a column for every member of the family, so I'll cut it short.

It's Summer, after all. This season's twenty times too short as it is.

Below: a Wimsey book basking among the beetles

Review: Psmith in the City by P.G. Wodehouse

I just read an article on what modern writers call the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl". You know the character type--the crazy, impulsive, imaginative young lady who charges into the male main character's life, shakes it up, changes it forever, and then makes ready to go on her merry way. (Whether she actually does so or not depends on the story; she can also take a third option by dying unexpectedly but remaining forever in his heart.) The article asked the following question: Is there such a thing as a Manic Pixie Dream Guy?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the Manic Pixie Dream Guy. I submit to you P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith (self-invented surname, silent P, first name varies between books)--a character created to fill, not the need for an interesting romance, but the equally-pressing need for an interesting ally. In Mike and Psmith, Psmith is a young man at a boy's school; in this installment, Psmith in the City, he's aged a bit and begun to grapple with the adult business world. Book three, Psmith, Journalist, sees him ditching dull responsibility and having a battle of the wills with gangsters in New York City, just because he can. He's a man's man (not a gentleman's gentleman, though--that'd be Jeeves) in a slowly widening man's world. In the fourth and final book, Leave it to Psmith, his universe finally expands enough to include a love interest. It's like an extreme version of the masculine coming-of-age process.

The reader stand-in is Mike, a nice enough guy whose entire purpose in the series is to not be Psmith. The first two books follow a fairly winning pattern--a) Mike is stuck somewhere he doesn't want to be, b) Psmith shows up and it's not so bad. But interestingly, it's not Psmith's tendency toward bizarreness and anarchy that improves things for Mike (though that helps)--it's simply and solely the fact that Psmith is in it with him. Mike, like most of us, is an uncomplicated character at heart, and all he really wants is someone who can agree that, yes, this is a grim situation, but it doesn't have to be that bad, now let's go get something to eat. And honestly, can't we all relate? If I ever wash up in a new and lonely place, my prayer is that someone like Psmith will be hanging around saying, "You too?"

This time, Mike's parents have lost a lot of their money, and Mike has to drop out of Sedleigh and work at a bank in London. (Poor Mike--it seems it's his lot in life to clear out of a place as soon as he's gotten used to it.) It turns out Psmith is there, too, for a reason which escapes me but which is, frankly, completely irrelevant. There's not much of a plot--it's really more a series of scenes--but Psmith's commentary is always hilarious. You may find yourself tempted to apply his methods while on the job.

The problem with characters under the Manic Pixie category is that, by definition, they hold all the personality, and their poor partners get the short end of the stick. I always prefer my literary duos--whether they be couples or comedy teams--to have equally developed, but conflicting, personalities. (Wodehouse later mastered this dynamic when he wrote the Jeeves and Wooster series.) Mike is a human springboard for Psmith's dialogue, which is fine, but occasionally I get aggravated by his unimaginative responses. If I had a buddy who talked like Psmith, I'd spend all my free time thinking of witty comebacks.

Review: Mike by P.G. Wodehouse

Somewhat early in his career, P.G. Wodehouse decided to spice up the sleepy school serial he was writing by introducing "Psmith", a character based on the son of Richard D'Oyly Carte, whom his cousin had met at Winchester College. Rupert D'Oyle Carte, according to Wodehouse's cousin, was always impeccably dressed, wore a monocle, and was known for replying to questions about his health with a tragic "Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah."

I know all this because I read Wodehouse's introduction to Mike and Psmith, which is technically only the second half of this book repackaged. (The book comprises two separate stories, the first of which was republished as Mike at Wrykyn.) I read several chapters into Mike and Psmith, liked it in a half-hearted way (mostly was disappointed that it wasn't more Jeeves and Wooster), then realized that it was only the second half of a complete book and, being a purist, decided to begin at the beginning. And I think it's only through reading the entire volume that the reader can truly appreciate what a literary crapshoot Wodehouse is taking--intentionally or not--by letting Psmith invade the second act.

So, from the beginning: Young Michael Jackson (really!), better known as "Mike", is shipped off to Wrykyn, the school attended by his older brothers, all of whom are renowned cricket enthusiasts. Mike himself, who lives and breathes cricket, is a natural. He ends up subbing for absent players a lot, and eventually gains some kind of position on the team. Along the way, characters engage in various schoolboy stunts. Hushed meetings are held in dormitories, a young upstart convinces the entire school to go on strike, and certain of the student body sneak out at risk of expulsion and haunt the grounds after-hours.

In other words, it's the quintessential British school story. If it reads like Harry Potter without the magic, that's because Harry Potter was written as a magical take on books like Mike. (To the modern reader, cricket may prove more mysterious even than Quidditch.) Wodehouse's literary ability is in evidence, though not in full bloom--he comes off as a lesser Mark Twain, commenting wryly on the politics of schoolboyism. Reason is very much on its throne--nothing happens that wouldn't happen in reality, and no one's allowed to engage in the kind of Blandings Castle-esque hijinks that would become the author's forte later on. Then, too, the stakes never get much higher or more poetic than the occasional "caning" or "writing lines". A few boys teeter on the brink of being expelled, and one likable chap goes over, but you never really care, at least not in the way you do when Bertie Wooster is in panic mode and it's vital for Jeeves to intervene.

In attempting to analyze Mike himself, I can only say that he is what he is. Wodehouse didn't want to create a saint or a scholar, or even a comedian; he wanted a boy who could play a good game of cricket, because in a school story that's all that really matters. "Except on the cricket field, where he was a natural genius, he was just ordinary", the narration in the second half remarks, and rightly. "He resembled ninety percent of other members of English public schools."

But curiously, as the same passage takes care to point out, he does have one standout quality: "He was always ready to help people. And when he set himself to do this, he was never put off by discomfort or risk." Then there's the incident in which he throws a carry-on bag out a window at a train station, assuming someone left it when he got off the train--only to be accosted by the owner, who's still on board after all. Perhaps Bertie Wooster really is in development, hidden under the habit of a sullen, and by all accounts ordinary, cricket ace.

Be that as it may, it's not until the second half--a separate story entirely--that things get fun. Several years have passed and Mike, now clothed in glory as a veteran of Wrykyn cricket, is forced, to his horror, to switch to a small private school on account of his failing grades. Enter Psmith. And cue Reason, if not totally being dethroned, at least taking a beating and being declared unfit for service.

As the only character Wodehouse ever drew directly from real life, Psmith represents the perfect transitional figure between the realistic school stories and the far-fetched comedy stories for which he became famous. My theory is that before Psmith Wodehouse still found himself hampered by the reigns of reality, and hearing his cousin's story gave him permission to unleash the absurdity of which he was capable on the world. Later he would cheerily admit that he didn't give a hang for realism in his writing, but in Mike he implies that it still had a hold on him. What right had any reader to call a nutcase like Psmith unrealistic if he was based on a real person? "The advice I give to every young man starting life is 'never confuse the unusual with the impossible'," says Psmith--and the subtext whispers, Unlikely though I seem, I really could exist.

Dicken's Mrs. Fezziwig was one vast substantial smile; Psmith is one vast substantial wink. He and his author seem to have an understanding. Eerily enough, he's divined that he's in a school story, and sees somewhat dissatisfied with his lot. (Meeting Mike for the first time: "Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?") But more subtle (psubtle?) is the use of the silent P he's affixed to his name. He humbly requests that everyone spell it this way in writing. It's rarely brought up again, but the issue persists: everyone else, including Mike, refers to him as "Smith" in dialogue, but he himself always uses the "P"--and so does Wodehouse. See? The author understands.

Another aspect of the wink--that monocle. What starts as a stereotypical bit of eccentricity becomes a trademark aspect of Psmith's character: he makes a point of digging it out of his pocket to inspect people, establishing over and over that he's not a part of the story, but is merely there to enjoy the view. Pippi Longstocking, as I wrote in my review of that book, was the only character in her story--everyone else was an audience member. Psmith is equally out-there, his schoolmates as unremarkable as Pippi's friends, and yet it's Psmith who plays the audience to all the other characters. He regards everyone and everything with a condescending smile and a barrage of commentary. But no one ever comments on him--beyond a few stray acknowledgements of the oddness ("You are a chap!" a giggling boy named Jellicoe reiterates, and one feels that it takes far less than Psmith to impress him), he merely coexists. Neither a figure of awe nor an outcast, he is comfortably and casually mad, and his schoolmates treat him in the same way they treat Mike. While delighted to have a friend at his new school, Mike himself scarcely gives a moment's thought to Psmith's quirks. It's as if a character from a sitcom moved into a slice-of-life series without making waves. This is a refreshing approach to the whole concept of the outlandish outsider, in my opinion--after all, do we really need to be told how to react to Psmith? It's the reader's job to gape, laugh and cheer, not Mike's.

The rest can be guessed at, but it has to be read to be enjoyed. Much cricket is played, a study is stolen, a small mystery is set afoot, and, in a delightfully quiet running gag, a mantlepiece is leaned on. (Some moments, without being laugh-out-loud funny, are just little gems--as Mike and another boy poise on the brink of a fight, Psmith stares at the mirror and eloquently laments the state of his health.) And, without spoiling anything, our commentator does eventually break out of his glass box and get his hands messy with the story, with enjoyable results.

This relates to aspect three of the wink: Psmith, oddly enough, is the ultimate ally. Many Wodehouse fans on the internet mourn the absence of a Jeeves in their lives, and I don't doubt that he'd be useful--he's usefulness incarnate. But when you're in a new place, when things look gray and boring, when reality is reality and when you want, not omniscient intervention, but merely someone in the same situation as yourself--someone who likes you and is on your side--Psmith is your man. Psmith in the City elaborates on this, and I might review it another time.

In the meantime, I think I'll lean on a mantlepiece. Talk to you later.