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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Psmith, Journalist is history; and it is crusade. But it also has its place as the best novel Wodehouse had written to date. Psmith was the god from the machine; but he was also the god who made the machine. Instead of leaving a good idea to rot in the background of the failure which The Prince and Betty in the American edition is (and there is even less to be said for it in the English one), Wodehouse had hacked his material into shape, introduced his god to bring it to life, and maintained a splendid pace alternating excitement and humour. He had simultaneously been working on another social document, appropriately named Something Fresh, analysing the almost Byzantine absurdities of English country-house drones and the snobbery of their servants which helped to maintain them. It it important to stress that this, the first view of Blandings Castle, is in fact an extremely hostile one. We must view Wodehouse as the disciple of Conan Doyle in social attitudes to some degree; and just as Holmes is frequently employed to show up the effete aristocrats and immoral millionaires, Wodehouse time and again returns to the theme of resolute and hardworking young men and women as a foil to aristocratic drones. In both cases, it is the bourgeois attack on the privilege and non-productivity of the aristocracy. In this sense Wodehouse, both in relation to Britain and to America, was in 1915 very much a figure of that eminently bourgeois phenomenon which the Americans have termed Progressivism. Wodehouse was seldom quite so pointedly hard-hitting as he was in Something Fresh. But the argument continues to be made, pleasantly, yet firmly.
1 The English edition was reissued in 1921 but is now defunct.
2 Apart from Lady Vera Mace, who gossip‐writes and chaperones and finally marries Mr Frisby. The last, at least, looks like work.
3 Wodehouse at Work, 67‐68.
4 ‘Jeeves and the Old School Chum’, World of Jeeves, ch. 29.
5 Published 1924. There is also an interesting reference to him in Sam the Sudden, which appeared next year. See P, 152‐53.
6 Published 1947. See J, 59: ‘I could not see him as a member of the Big Four. Far more likely he would end up as one of those Scotland Yard bunglers who used, if you remember, always to be getting into Sherlock Holmes's hair’.
7 By the way, was there an origin for something in M. Bodkin: contemplating the many dinner courses ‘Monty did not take them all, but he took enough of them to send him to the boat deck greatly refreshed and in a mood of extreme sentimentality. He felt like a loving python’. (Luck of the Bodkins, P, 126.)
8 Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (published 1954), although by the end of Much Obliged, Jeeves Florence is on the loose again.
9 ‘Jeeves and the Song of Songs’, ‘The Ordeal of Young Tuppy’ and Right Ho, Jeeves.
10 Thank You, Jeeves. Pauline has but one sibling, Dwight, here, but a sister Emerald is rather pointlessly ascribed to her in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. Emerald is all right, but not as a Stoker, either Washburn or Pauline variety.
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