1915 was a landmark year for P.G. Wodehouse. Already a experienced comedy writer for various magazines and journals, he published a short story called "Extricating Young Gussie" in the Saturday Evening Post, little knowing that its ditzy first-person narrator and his valet, Jeeves, would soon become his most recognizable characters. In a similarly unconscious way he let loose a serial called Something New; it wasn't until years later that he got the idea of giving it a sequel, and then another…and then another. In his own words, he developed a "Blandings Castle craving"; he was "down with a Saga, and no cure in sight."
Maybe it was Lord Emsworth that drew Wodehouse back to Blandings; he would later name Emsworth as his favorite among his own characters. Emsworth, it should be mentioned, is not a particularly funny character in and of himself; picture an elderly Bertie Wooster with Alzheimer's. He's out of touch with reality, utterly absorbed in a few quirky hobbies, and generally the subject of a string of gags about lethal forgetfulness. But if he doesn't have brains, he certainly has inner peace, and an author struggling to fill multiple deadlines might well find balm in writing about that amiable old homebody. (Although it was some time before Emsworth made another appearance, Wodehouse's fondness for him was evident in that he couldn't resist name-dropping him in a Jeeves and Wooster story one year later: "A most respectable old Johnnie, don't you know. Doesn't do a thing nowadays but dig in the garden with a spud.")
Or maybe the castle itself was attractive, for Emsworth is useful as a character precisely because he's useless as a landowner. He inhabits a gorgeous estate full of rambling gardens, weird nooks and priceless treasures, and though he loves it with all his soul and can't imagine being any place else, he's utterly unaware of what's happening in it at any given time. Thieves, detectives and (worse) young lovers are constantly snooping about the grounds in disguise, each with a complicated scheme in tow. Dumbledore always has an eagle-eyed watch over Hogwarts, but never acts on his knowledge because it would spoil the plot; Emsworth avoids plot holes by simply being as dense as a brick. His foil is The Efficient Baxter, the bespectacled and ever-suspicious secretary, who always gets hold of the truth but never succeeds in exposing it, nor in incriminating anyone involved.
Something New is a prototype in several senses. It's a prototype for the edited, "official" U.K. edition, Something Fresh, and it's a prototype for the Blandings series as a whole. Wodehouse wrote these things as serials for magazines and characters came second to plot; in his theatrical way he would map out a complicated comedy in his notebook, full of twists, coincidences and misunderstandings, referring to the protagonists simply as "hero" and "heroine". The only trait required for the roles is a breezy boldness; it's as if you could hold auditions and find someone to sing the parts.
In fact, this happens in-story when one Ashe Marson answers an irresistible advertisement: "WANTED: Young Man of good appearance, who is poor and reckless, to undertake a delicate and dangerous enterprise." That's really all that's wanted for a plot like this--good looks and recklessness. So Ashe, after a slapdash job interview, becomes the hero, the fellow to fill a hero's place in the plot from start to finish. The girl who goaded him to make "something new" of his life in the first place turns out to be on the same mission, and it's a mission of theft. Her name is technically Joan Valentine, but since she's blonde, blue-eyed and quite the feminist, she has "heroine" written all over her.
What follows might have been a blueprint for the more character-driven Leave it to Psmith. As "hero", Ashe isn't a distinctive comic creation, but in his music-hall manner he shows "some sparks that are like wit", and it's clear that he owes a bit to Psmith, who was already popular among English schoolboys. In the American edition an entire scene was stolen nearly word-for-word from a Psmith story with Ashe delivering his lines. It was edited out in the U.K. version because the English were already acquainted with Psmith, but although I wasn't familiar with Psmith myself when I read Something New, the scene felt wrong to me; it was out-of-character for Ashe to think so quickly (he being only the hero and not necessarily the invincible wonder; in this he perhaps owes more to Psmith's friend Mike Jackson).
What sort of stories Wodehouse served you depended on which side of the Atlantic you were on; the Psmith stories were for a British audience, and one novel even landed Psmith in America, proceeding to explain New York and its oddities for the benefit of the reader. Since Something New was written for an American audience, Ashe and Joan are American by birth, and the more-experienced Joan has to explain English etiquette to Ashe so he can survive below-stairs as he impersonates a valet. When the book was republished in England, Wodehouse made Ashe and Joan English and thus was able to cut several pages of dull exposition. He was a trans-atlantic interpreter of the most practical order.
Something New is far from a polished final product, but it marks an epoch in Wodehouse's career, and it also features one of his most beautifully-written romances. Ashe and Joan may not be distinctive as characters, but as vehicles for observations on love they manage, as per their intentions, to make something of themselves.
