Comedy Book Club: Leave It To PSmith
Comedy Book Club begins! We discuss Chapters 1-7 of Leave It To Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
Welcome to the first meeting of Comedy Book Club!
Today, we’re talking about the first half of Leave It To PSmith by P.G. Wodehouse.
Before we get into it, two quick announcements about the book club.
I’ve created a special section, within Comedy Bizarre, for the book club. You can always find all Comedy Book Club posts archived in the new Comedy Book Club section.
Second, this post is free, but future book club meetings will be for paid subscribers.
If you’re not a paid supporter, you can upgrade here:
Also, if you’re just learning of the book club, it’s not too late. Grab a copy of Leave It To PSmith (The Kindle version is only $3 last I checked), and dive in. It’s a pretty quick read. And you can see future book club selections here.
Alright, let’s get into Wodehouse.
Today we’re talking about Chapters 1-7—roughly the first half—of PSmith.
For starters, let me tell you some things I loved, and some things I noticed, about PSmith.
Leave It To PSmith was first published in 1923. The book is now more than 100 years old. It’d be easy to think a 100-year-old British novel would read as a bit dense and alien to modern eyes, especially eyes that mainly read newer books written in American English. And yet I didn’t find this to be true at all. Wodehouse is a breezy joy to read.
It always strikes me just how smooth and modern Wodehouse’s prose sounds. It doesn’t take hours and chapters to get sucked in. I was fully-invested in PSmith within the first ten pages.
In fact, much of PSmith sounds nearly like a modern sitcom, albeit a hyper-articulate and very British one. I think this is part of Wodehouse’s genius: As a humorist, he understands how to make his prose land at the nexus of smart and accessible.
The way Wodehouse plays with his words is a marvel. He always gives me the re-assuring sense that I’m in the hands of a master storyteller. We hear a lot about the importance of “showing, not telling,” which is good advice to a point. But I find Wodehouse is often funniest when he’s both showing and telling, simultaneously, in ways that are hilariously inventive.
Some favorite quotations from PSmith
Let’s start with how Wodehouse describes characters.
There are just so many funny and well-pitched character descriptions in PSmith, but to pick a few highlights:
On Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s right hand man:
“It was his spectacles that struck you first as you saw the man. They gleamed efficiently at you. If you had a guilty conscience, they pierced you through and through; and even if your conscience was 100 percent pure you could not ignore them.”
(I especially enjoy the heightening of the subjunctive: “And even if your conscience was not 100 percent…”)
More on Baxter:
“Rupert Baxter was one of those men whose chief characteristic is a disposition to suspect their fellows. Hid did not suspect them of this or that definite crime: He simply suspected them.”
On Lady Constance’s effect on Lord Emsworth:
“Oh—hallo, Connie!” he said guiltily, like a small boy caught in the jam cupboard. Somehow his sister always had this effect on him.”
On Lady Constance’s necklace and her husband’s attitude towards it:
“That necklace cost nearly twenty thousand pounds,” said Mr. Keeble, in the reverent voice in which men of business traditions speak of large sums.
(20,000 pounds in 1923 would be equivalent to $1.5 million dollars today.)
On Lord Emsworth’s feelings about the poet Miss Peavey:
“Blandings was sheltering a certain Miss Aileen Peavey, the mere thought of whom was enough to turn the sunshine off as with a tap.”
On Ava Clarkson’s conversation style:
“Why?” said Eve with quiet intensity. She knew from experience that miss Clarkson, unless firmly checked, would pirouette round and round the point for minutes without ever touching it.”
PSmith on his uncle, the fish monger:
“He is a hard man, and he judges his fellows solely by their devotion to fish. I never in my life met a man so wrapped up in a subject. For years he has been monomaniac on the subject of fish. So much so that he actually looks like one. It is as if he had taken one of this auto-suggestion courses and had kept saying to himself, ‘Every day, in every way, I grow more and more like a fish.’ His closest friends can hardly tell now whether he more resembles a halibut or a cod.”
On PSmith’s fear of the fish business:
“Weeks of toil among the herrings of Billingsgate had left him with a sort of haunting fear that even in private life there clung to him the miasma of the fish market.”
On Baxter’s ability to give a stare down:
“It was not a protracted glance, but while it lasted it was just like the ray from an oxy-acetylene blowpipe.”
Turning from character description to dialogue, Wodehouse excels at letting his characters be either witty or stupid, or sometimes a little of both. Here are a few favorite bits of dialogue.
Joseph Keeble chatting with Freddie Threepwood about their scheme to steal Lady Constance’s necklace
“If you mean that you wish me not to repeat to your father anything you may tell me in confidence, naturally I should not dream of doing such a thing.”
Freddie looked puzzled. His was no lightning brain.
“Can’t quite work that one out,” he confessed. “Do you mean you will tell him or you won’t?”
Phyllis Jackson talking to Eve Halliday bout leaving her ex fiancé Rollo:
“I’m awfully ashamed about that, Eve. I suppose I treated Rollo awfully badly.”
“Never mind. A man with a name like that was made for suffering.”
“I never really cared for him. He had horrid swimmy eyes…”
Phyllis Jackson’s description of Baxter:
“I don’t like him at all. He’s sort of a spectacled caveman.”
PSmith’s dialogue with Walderwick—which takes the entirety of the short Chapter 4—is a riot. PSmith here justifies stealing Walderwick’s umbrella and giving it to Eve Halliday:
“What could any man worthy of the name do but go down to the cloak room and pinch the best umbrella in sight and take it to her? Your was easily the best. There was absolutely no comparison… You have lost your umbrella, Comrade Walderwick, but in what a cause! …You are now entitled to rank with Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh. The latter is perhaps the closest historical parallel.
(The entire dialogue with Walderwick is a masterclass in showing how the silver-tongued rogue PSmith can bowl people over with his verbal chicanery, so much so that poor Walderwick gives up entirely, and PSmith faces no real consequences for his umbrella thievery.)
PSmith justifying to Eve why he stole the umbrella for her:
“Merely practical socialism. Other people are content to talk about the Redistribution of Property. I go out and do it.”
The characters and what they want
Since those dialogue bits bring us well into the colorful cast of characters, I think it’ll help to review them all. In the first chapter we encounter:
Lord Emsworth (aka Clarence Threepwood) - The master of Blandings castle. A rather absent-minded man—perhaps in his late 50s or somewhere in older middle-age. Tediously obsessed with his flower garden at Blandings.
Baxter - Lord Emsworth’s very efficient bespectacled secretary who runs Blandings like a tight ship. Suspicious of everything and everyone.
Sebastian Beach - Head butler of Blandings Castle.
Freddie Threepwood - Lord Emsworth’s dull-witted son. Has gathered some considerable gambling debts that need paying off quickly.
Lady Constance Keeble - Lord Emsworth’s imperious and impressively-aristocratic sister. Intimidates everyone. Loves the arts and has a habit of inviting poets to Blandings Castle, much to Lord Emsworth’s annoyance.
Joseph Keeble - Lady’s Constance’s doting husband. He would do anything for her. His affection for her is second only, perhaps, to his fatherly affection for his stepdaughter, Phyllis Jackson.
Phyllis Jackson - Lady Constance’s daughter and Joseph Keeble's stepdaughter. Lady Constance strongly disapproves of her because she broke off her engagement to the apparently acceptable Rollo Mountford to elope with the much less acceptable Mike Jackson. Old friend of Eve Halliday’s.
Michael "Mike" Jackson - Phyllis’s husband. Old friend of PSmith. Lady Constance does not approve of him.
Aileen Peavey - A daydreamy and starry-eyed poet who’s staying at Blandings at Lady Constance’s invitation. Annoys the hell out of Lord Emsworth.
Ralston McTodd - A famous Canadian poet who has accepted Lady Constance’s invitation to Blandings Castle, again to Lord Emsworth’s annoyance. McTodd later backs out of staying at Blandings after being unintentionally insulted by Lord Emsworth.
Angus McAllister - The gardener of Blandings Castle who mainly serves as a horticultural foil to Lord Emsworth. Seems to disagree with Lord Emsworth on many important gardening matters.
Whew. And that’s just within the first, long 40-page chapter! Already we have a Shakespearean cast of strange and delightful characters who work—quite often—at cross-purposes. Within a few more chapters, Wodehouse rounds out the cast:
Ada Clarkson - An old teacher of Eve and Phyllis, now running an employment agency in London.
Eve Halliday - Hired to catalogue the library at Blandings. An old friend of Phyllis. A smart woman who has not yet met her equal in a man.
Ronald PSmith - An idealistic, mischievous adventurer of a young man. Well-dressed and well-spoken, he’s never at a loss for words or for a new scheme. His main goal is to find a new line of employment that has nothing to do with the fishing business, which he detests.
That’s every major character and the minor ones worth mentioning. Did I miss anyone? (Other than Edward Cootes, the card sharp who appears later in the novel.)
Wodehouse’s characters, with all their quirks and cross-motivations, remind me of something I learned about comedic characters early in my improv and sketch comedy days.
The lesson went something like this: A comedic character is fundamentally a desire. The most important fact about a character is the answer to this question: “What do they want?”
Another improv teacher of mine Joe Bill, used to say something a little different about creating characters: “How you do what you do is who you are.”
I think both of these perspectives are wise, and if we combine them we get this idea: The most important question that defines a character is, “What do they want, and how do they try to get it?”
When we watch how these characters’ incompatible desires bang up against each other, we get comedic drama. The conflicts in PSmith abound:
Lord Emsworth just wants to enjoy his garden in peace and quiet. (Wodehouse often describes Emsworth as “pottering” around the garden, a perfect word for that guy’s ambulation.)
Many of Lord Emsworth’s relatives—especially his sister Lady Constance and his son Freddie—want to bother Lord Emsworth with distractions and requests.
Lady Constance wants to live the good life of a British aristocrat, and she wants to fill her world with poets, much to Lord Emsworth’s chagrin.
Mr. Keeble wants to make his lovely wife, Lady Constance, happy. But he also wants to help his stepdaughter Phyllis Jackson to get the life she deserves.
Lady Constance doesn’t want to help Phyllis at all; she’s still furious at her daughter for leaving Rollo and eloping with Mike Jackson.
Freddie Threepwood wants to pay off his gambling debts. Hence, the necklace-stealing scheme. He also wants Eve Halliday to take his marriage proposals seriously.
Eve Halliday wants nothing to do with Freddie Threepwood. She just wants to do her job in peace: catalog the Blandings Castle library. And Eve would prefer to meet a man who’s on her intellectual level while avoiding tiresome marriage proposals from men who aren’t.
Baxter wants figure out who the hell is pretending to be the Canadian boy wonder, Ralston McTodd, and what this interloper’s angle is.
PSmith wants to evade Baxter, convince everyone that he’s McTodd, win the heart of Eve Halliday, and secure gainful employment—in anything other than fish.
The first half of PSmith is really just 124 pages of Wodehouse gloriously winding the coil tighter and tighter, showing us these characters setting up their ruses.
This setup turns on a few key plot points, all of them major character decisions:
Freddie Threepwood’s idea to steal Lady Constance’s necklace, and Joseph Keeble’s decision to go along with Freddie’s scheme.
Freddie Threepwood’s idea to hire a rogue to help them snatch Lady Constance’s necklace, and PSmith’s decision to answer Freddie’s advertisement.
PSmith’s decision to steal Walderwick’s umbrella at the Drones Club, to give to Eve Halliday, which leads to their fateful and romantic meeting.
Ralston McTodd’s decision to walk out on Lord Emsworth in response to Lord Emsworth being a tedious and insufferable ass. This opens the door for PSmith to stand in for McTodd.
PSmith’s decision to impersonate Ralston McTodd. And his even bolder decision to board the train to Blandings and take Ralston McTodd’s place indefinitely, as poet-in-residence.
PSmith’s and Freddie’s decision to join forces and move forward with the necklace-snatching scheme.
By the time these decisions are made, we’re left at the gate of Blandings Castle, PSmith pretending to be McTodd and Freddie sweating bullets about their scheme.
Eve, of course, is thoroughly intrigued by PSmith but unsure whether they’ll ever meet again. PSmith now knows they will.
And Baxter is suspicious as hell, in that special bespectacled caveman way of his.
The gates of Blandings is great place to end this post.
We’ll return to Blandings and discuss the second half of PSmith (chapters 8-14) tentatively on Thursday, January 23rd.
Now, let me know your thoughts on PSmith in the comments: Anything you especially liked, or didn't like, or anything that occurred to you while reading it.
p.s. Last thought: Aside form his wizardry with prose, can we mention what a freakin’ logophile our boy Wodehouse is? A few flagged favorites: poltroonery, ebullition, changeling, excrescence, circumambient, lalapaloosa, rannygazoo, brilliantined. ‘Poltroonery’ and ‘rannygazoo’ are especially funny-sounding words.
What I Liked...
I agree that Wodehouse's descriptions are masterful, in particular his abundant use of juicy, exaggerated visual similes/metaphors (e.g. "A sound like two or three pigs feeding rather noisily in the middle of a thunderstorm" to describe a snore).
I also love the feeling of mounting anticipation as Wodehouse expertly lays the groundwork of all the possible plot twists in the first half of the book. Somehow we know we're in for a good time without knowing exactly what we're in for... Pitch-perfect comedic tone is an elusive quarry, and yet Wodehouse hits it everytime! 😱
What I Liked Less...
I'm not a fan of the shifting third person narration. The writing is funny and engaging enough to carry us through the detours and perspective jumps, but overall I find the choice of POV slows down the madcap action and lacks cohesiveness.
This might not be fair as I've always had a soft-spot for Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster books, and I found myself consciously missing Bertie's first person narration while reading Leave It To Psmith. However, to me, the first person feels like it would've been a better choice for reinforcing the impression of an endless cascade of comic complications. (Perhaps because there's less dramatic irony as a result?)
A couple of quotes I enjoyed enough to dog-ear their pages:
"Lady Constance conveyed the impression that anybody who had the choice between stealing anything from her and stirring up a nest of hornets with a short walking-stick would do well to choose the hornets."
"He (Baxter) placed the letter on the pile beside his plate; and, having decapitated an egg, peered sharply into its interior as if hoping to surprise guilty secrets."
I'm thoroughly enjoying visiting Wodehouse's world, which has just as little connection to reality as a land of elves and fairies. And why not? It's pure, light, enjoyment, done at the highest level, like world-class pastry.
Douglas Adams wrote about Wodehouse (the piece is collected in his book The Salmon of Doubt) and describes how he'd write a story or a chapter, and pin each page of the draft around the walls of his office. He'd remove a page, revise it, and then pin it higher depending on his assessment of its quality. The story/chapter wasn't finished until every page had been pinned to the highest position on the wall. I love this as an illustration of the value of rewriting, as well as the humble craft of patiently and systematically looking for more and better jokes, cleaner expression, and tighter storytelling.