Fandom: Blandings Castle

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Evidence below the cut!

Illustrations by May Wilson Preston from Leave It to Psmith by P. G. Wodehouse, Saturday Evening Post, March 17-24, 1923.

PPS: If you are fond of chess and would care for a game after dinner, I am a good player. 

Illustrations for Leave It to Psmith, Chapter Eleven, by Paul Cox. (There's also one more for this chapter, but I couldn't fit it in this post and thus put it in the next.)

Baxter and Susan Simmons

Eve knocking over the table

Baxter prowling around

Baxter's dramatic fall down the staircase

Eve obtaining the flower-pot

Baxter kicking the front door

Baxter digging through the flower-pots

Baxter winding up for the flower-pot throwing event

Lord Emsworth, oblivious as usual

Psmith tells Eve that Walderwick has “a very C3 intelligence.” He is of course borrowing the draft board system of classification established during WWI.

A Lewis gun (a kind of machine gun used during WWI) is referenced in a simile by the narrator.

Baxter worked for his former employer, Horace Jevons, beginning in December 1918, which suggests that he took the position not long after leaving military service when the war ended. If we can infer that Baxter was indeed in the war, this might explain some things about his character. Furthermore, it’s befitting that he of all the characters in this book would have been in the military—he’s representative of everything adult and cynical and responsible that doesn’t fit into the world Wodehouse portrayed.

The passage in which Psmith has been exposed and rejected by Eve and the imagery makes it sound as if he’s having war flashbacks.

Psmith’s attitude toward the gun he has taken from Cootes: “In that case, I will park this revolver on the mantelpiece while we chat. I have taken a curious dislike to the thing. It makes me feel like Dangerous Dan McGrew.”

Psmith’s expert gunplay and fighting off Cootes could be interpreted as his having a background in war, though we do know from previous books that he already possesses these skills.

The military imagery used in Cootes’s concession to Psmith: “…As far as Mr. Cootes was concerned, the war was over.”

The narrator refers to Lord Emsworth’s insistence that he doesn’t like Baxter as “retreating to his last line of trenches.”

However:

Psmith rants to Miss Clarkson about his job: “I like to be surrounded by joy and life, and I know nothing more joyless and deader than a dead fish. Multiply that dead fish by a million, and you have an environment which only a Dante could contemplate with equanimity.” This does not sound like a statement that could plausibly come from a veteran of a horrific war.

Psmith claims he’s a child in matters of gunplay, though we know from previous stories that this isn’t true: he’s encountered armed thugs before. His calling himself a poor shot seems not so accurate  either, since one of the out-of-bounds activities he excitedly suggests to Mike the day they meet is shooting, and another time he mentions going shooting with his father. He at least has experience, if not skill, but there’s no indication that this is necessarily from military service.

There are likely other arguments, too, which I might add at a later date. As far as I can tell, the evidence points more to Psmith’s not being in the war than otherwise, and the same goes for Mike and Freddie. Baxter seems the only character that the text supports as a plausible candidate for military service. There’s too much of a carefree outlook about Psmith for me to imagine him as someone who’s been through what a veteran of the trenches would have endured—unless one chooses to see his persona as a bizarre coping mechanism.

I have a strange affection for The Efficient Baxter, even though he so frequently comes up against my other Wodehouse favourites. I feel like he's one of those people who, in real life, you might be irritated by but would probably side with instead of the loonies who go around throwing eggs and slipping him Mickey Finns that I usually root for within the books. And there's no mention of his schooling or other early life, so I get the feeling he's worked his way up into a position of trust.