The World of Psmith

As a long-time fan of Wodehouse who’d never dipped out of the Jeeves series, it was for the good that I picked up the Psmith omnibus, the first of which was written nearly a decade before Jeeves’ first published appearance.

The usual Wodehouse wit and charm is there right from the start, though perhaps rawer and with a little less polish than later works. We are introduced to Psmith, a rather more eloquent and chatty protagonist than Bertie Wooster, who in the first book takes up a job in a London bank, in the second endeavours to forge a New York newspaper into a success, and in the third, poses as a poet to pursue love.

In Psmith in the City, he and comrade Jackson - his life-long friend - take up jobs at a bank with a cantankerous manager, and Psmith endeavours to win him over and make their position more comfortable. This more workaday, industrious setting lets Wodehouse explore cricket, football, socialism and parliament, which is a nice change from the Jeeves stories that usually take place around the engagements of the upper classes. There will be more on that later.

The second is an even further departure that reads more like a crime caper than a farce, Psmith agrees to help the editor of Cozy Moments in New York City to give the paper a bit of a leg-up, and in doing so becomes involved in organised crime and unscrupulous property management. There’s underhand dealings, gunfights and intimidation, not something I’d read much of in Wodehouse’s work. I believe it might have been the weaker of the three, but certainly an interesting diversion from the norm.

The third is a rather more emblematic example of a Wodehouse farce, even as I was reading it I was considering it the prototype for some of the later Jeeves books, the heist of an expensive necklace, mistaken identities, engagements and proposals and stuffy, bumbling Earls. There’s a little bit of crime in here too, with necklace thieves abound amongst misunderstandings and even some solid tension towards the end of the book.

I enjoyed all three of these volumes. Psmith is a little hard to separate from Wooster, but certainly is more of a talker, and possibly more confident, witty and wise. Perhaps he’s Jeeves and Wooster combined, without Jeeves’ mystical power to be at the right place at the right time with the right solution.

I will read more Wodehouse certainly, but I’d still be a Jeeves man at heart.