#psmith pseptember

A style book I'm reading, inadvertently calling her out:

Dang it Rebekah you already know all my answers to these. 

Favorite Psmith momentHis encounter with the only adversary he never defeated, a yo-yo.

Favorite Mike momentI love when he and Psmith are on the tram and Psmith is just complaining and complaining about being seen on a tram and Mike is like “why don’t you just get off” 

Favorite thing about Psmith His whole speech pattern, obviously. I’m also just a huge sucker for the thing where a character comes off as kind of cold to everyone but then is deeply devoted to someone highly overlookable, okay. Love that. 

Favorite thing about MikeI love how Wodehouse uses him to explore social anxiety, particularly the frustrating gap between what you want to display and how you come off. It’s very poignant, personal stuff giving ballast to a strange comedy novel and it’s why I miss Mike’s presence later on. 

Favorite secondary characterMr. Smith <3 <3 <3 

Favorite minor characterI’ll go to my grave mad about the lack of Marjory Jackson. 

Favorite Mike and Psmith momentIt’s really, really hard to get back to Cricket Story Business as Usual after the increasingly bizarre aftermath of Grand Theft Spiller’s Study. 

Favorite Psmith in the City momentI always get a kick out of the Clapham Common riot. 

Favorite Psmith, Journalist momentThe “Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled” monologue is a masterpiece.

Favorite Leave It to Psmith momentI’m unwilling to nail down a favorite because something else will probably come to me later but I’m really just constantly laughing at the part where Eve finds out that Psmith was never Ralston McTodd and he immediately pitches a romance to her like, “look, literally the only thing wrong with me is that I’m not Ralston McTodd. Lots of people aren’t Ralston McTodd”

Favorite antagonistBickersdyke is Psmith’s natural enemy in the wild. I like Downing a lot too, he’s got Bickersdykian worthy-opponentness but he’s kind of a mensch. 

A favorite line“Never confuse the unusual and the impossible.” 

Favorite book in the seriesI have a major soft spot for Psmith in the City. 

Least favorite book in the seriesPsmith, Journalist is such an experiment and it’s great because you get stuff you don’t really see in other Wodehouse books, but at the same time I feel that Wodehouse didn’t have as deep of a sense of what he was doing in that book. I would have loved to see him revisit the theme and I really wish he hadn’t completely lost interest in doing anything similar. 

Any extra scenes you wish the books had included?I wanted to see what Psmith got up to at Cambridge. I think Wodehouse never having been there just didn’t know how to write it. 

Is there anything you’d change about any of the books?You can’t just throw me a premise like “Psmith at a poetry reading about to read a poem he only pretended he wrote” and then INTERRUPT IT. 

Any headcanons about the events/characters in the books?Too many. 

Any headcanons about what happens after the end of the series?I refuse to believe that Psmith and Eve didn’t at some point go on a nice vacation somewhere and get involved in an Agatha Christie-style country house murder mystery. 

Any ideas of what a [insert suggestion here] AU would look like?You must be new here. 

A favorite moment of character development?Psmith stuff aside, I really love the moment between Mike and his dad near the beginning of City where Mike goes from a dumb kid who wants to play cricket to someone ready to put his own desires aside and support his family. 

An underrated/easily overlooked moment/scene?Ah, I always thought the scene in M&P where Psmith pretty much tells Mike that he needs an audience to live (“Don’t interrupt too much”) was sweet. I like how Mike’s non-answer is actually an answer—no smile, no reaction of any kind other than to tilt his hat over his eyes and listen. It’s just one of those moments that illuminates a dynamic for a second and it makes you understand why Psmith is fond of the guy. 

What do you like best about the Psmith series?It’s weird to use the phrase “down to earth” in any Psmith-related capacity, but here I go—it’s a low-key world in which Psmith is the only weird element, vs. Wodehouse’s later books where everything and everyone was weird. Blandings Castle is always sunny but Psmith’s world has bad weather and boring office environments. I’m most drawn to this series when the world in which I find myself is at its most prosaic, because Wodehouse finds the potential for something else in those settings, whether it’s the hilarity of the boundaries being thrown into chaos by one person who won’t respect them or just a brief moment of comfort before you head back to the cubicle. It’s a series that understands that tea is better when you have it sitting on the floor because you haven’t unpacked your stuff and you’re scooping the tea leaves up with a postcard because you can’t find any spoons, and that there’s no situation that can’t be slightly improved by just sitting on the furniture a little wrong. 

He went into the waiting-room, and, having picked up a magazine from the table, settled down to read a story in The Girl’s Pet—the January number of the year 1919, for Employment Agencies, like dentists, prefer their literature of a matured vintage. He was absorbed in this when Eve came out of the private office.

And this is a joke, because it's not the sort of thing that one would expect him to read voluntarily. This is probably Cosy Moments-type nonsense. Perhaps he does initially pick it up out of boredom or irony, but he does truly get invested, because he asks about the next installment.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, pausing at the door, “there is one other thing before I go. While I was waiting for you to be disengaged, I chanced on an instalment of a serial story in The Girl’s Pet for January, 1919. My search for the remaining issues proved fruitless. The title was ‘Her Honour At Stake,’ by Jane Emmeline Moss. You don’t happen to know how it all came out in the end, do you? Did Lord Eustace ever learn that, when he found Clarice in Sir Jasper’s rooms at midnight, she had only gone there to recover some compromising letters for a girl friend? You don’t know? I feared as much. [...]"

The story is clearly a standard melodrama (the modern-day equivalent might be Psmith's getting absorbed in an isolated episode of a soap opera on the waiting room TV and being disappointed that he can't watch the next episode) with the typical tropes of the era. But it's significant that "Her Honour at Stake" is apparently about a protagonist who is willing to go to self-incriminating lengths to help a friend. If Psmith ever gets sentimental about anything, it's friendship, and it's likely that he sees himself and Mike in this tale. They've both put themselves in compromising situations to come to a friend's aid, and Psmith's about to do it again in this narrative. He, like Clarice, will have a love interest assume the worst of his unconventional but well-intentioned actions.

However, it's striking just how much of that book he spends voluntarily alone with his thoughts and actively looking for solitude. We're in his head a lot more with this book, but in most cases we're not in on what's on his mind during these times (besides that it often involves Eve). And once Eve and he start getting closer, the seeking of solitude becomes less frequent.

He does enjoy engaging with humanity in general, but it's an amusement for him, a game, a fun challenge. What he really wants is Quality Companionship. He can't get that from just anyone, and when he can't--when there's no Mike or Eve around--he retreats into his thoughts.

Psmith's description of Mike to Eve is quite simple and straightforward by his standards, and all the more poignant for it. No irony, no jokes, no playful verbosity, just a statement of fact with four books' worth of complete sincerity behind it.