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Leave It to Psmith (Psmith, #4)

P.G. Wodehouse

Start date: April 1, 2020

Finish date: April 30, 2020

Discussion: Lesser Know/Wilderness Classics

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Nov 21, 2015 Antonomasia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: british, 2015, humour, decade-1920s, el

Like quite a few second instalments of crime series - or perhaps any type of popular series I'm less acquainted with - Leave It To Psmith has distinct similarities, in plot, in certain scenes, in paragraphs describing recurring characters, to its predecessor among the Blandings books. Sheer momentum, pithy phrases of dry wit, and the curious loveability of characters who might actually be hard work if we had to deal with them IRL carry it along regardless. However, it does occasionally pale by c Like quite a few second instalments of crime series - or perhaps any type of popular series I'm less acquainted with - Leave It To Psmith has distinct similarities, in plot, in certain scenes, in paragraphs describing recurring characters, to its predecessor among the Blandings books. Sheer momentum, pithy phrases of dry wit, and the curious loveability of characters who might actually be hard work if we had to deal with them IRL carry it along regardless. However, it does occasionally pale by comparison: the high farce scene of multiple fallings over and china-smashing in the hall at night in Something Fresh has merely a whimpering echo here.

Unlike several GR friends, I'm not previously acquainted with Psmith. But his curious and vague form of what might now be called champagne socialism, narrated without a hint of critique - including redistributing other people's property, and at that only to the marginally distressed gentry - I think makes more understandable the political pickle his creator got into during the war, and especially the way that others defended him as naive. I can't recall a character about whom my feelings so often swung between affection and a level of irritation near snapping point. Some of it because, as for the last few months, I'm still set on edge by people who talk excessively without being funny. Much of the rest is Psmith's being a man of his time - more so than the surprisingly modern Ashe Marson, his counterpart in Something Fresh, whose one occasion of resenting being bested by a girl is rounded on as unreasonable by the narrative. But Psmith's over-persistence with Eve, and his feeling that she ought to be around whenever he feels like a chat, gel into a still recognisable personality type along with all that verbosity, apparently vastly demanding of attention. Yet he is kinder and more generous than plenty of those around him, and we are told he strikes everyone as being very nice. His talkativeness seems positively nerdy and boring. Clearly in a minority opinion, I feel he suffers from show-not-tell, the tell contradicting the show; yet he is believable because I've met a handful of people who had great presence and charm whilst saying too much in a way that would be tedious from most others - not to mention a leftwinger who, like Psmith, and to my mind inexplicably, amended their name in a way that made it sound posher. (Incidentally, a conversation with a friend yesterday led to agreement that too many leftwingers now, especially in local level politics, are disorganised and poorly turned out - the dapper Psmith, at least, is neither.) His apparently contradictory traits would probably fit together better on screen, given the right actor, than I felt they did on the page.

Having found via this calculator that £500 in 1923 - the sum about which Freddie is in bother at the beginning of the book - is now around £25 000, I multiplied all other amounts mentioned by 500, which makes everything far more weighty: messing about with a £20 000 necklace becomes a matter of far greater nerve if it's £10 million; I was also surprised that buying a farm cost as much as it did, and I'm afraid I uncharitably wondered if Mike and Phyllis could have managed with rather less - albeit this neglects the now barely relatable importance of fitting one's station.

Note: must read up on 'the submerged tenth', as mentioned in this & Something Fresh - seems to have been a sociopolitical buzzword of its time defining something like what we might call the underclass or the precariat; not yet clear which. Very interesting: the dilemma of being an upper middle class person fallen on hard times, and trying not to fall further (in a pre-welfare state era) - a sense of belonging to one class culturally but quite another financially - is a theme I had not expected to find in Wodehouse, one which is welcome and surprisingly pertinent (even if these stories do more or less end like fairytales). ...more

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