Talking of books
Enter Psmith
Benny Green
Two years ago I was taken to task by friends and readers for suggesting in these columns that there may have been moments in his life when P. G. Wodehouse drew on reality for the genesis of a few of his more famous characters. Having remained impenitent ever since, secure in the knowledge that nothing comes out of nothing, and that even Kenneth Grahame must have come across one or two braggart toads in his years at the Bank of England, I now discover that if I was wrong in attributing one of Wodehouse's sources, I am at least right in assuming that some sort of source had existed. In my ninetieth birthday tribute to Wodehouse (his ninetieth birthday, not mine), I suggested that perhaps the resemblances between Psmith and a certain famous utopian Socialist pioneer might be too close for coincidence, in support of which claim I quoted the following words from Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower:
friends who said that Hyndman, a cricketer, had adopted Socialism out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge
eleven. _
If you remember, Psmith, a gifted leg-break bowler, is removed from Eton by an irate pater and is thus deprived of the chance to bowl out Harrow at Lord's, from which point he embraces the kind of Marxist philosophy which makes it imperative to address everyone as "Comrade". It now turns out that it was not Hyndman at all who inspired Psmith:
... The character of Psmith . .. is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it. Rupert D'Oyly Carte, son of the Savoy opera's D'Oyly Carte, was long, slender, always beautifully dressed and very dignified. His speeth was what is known as orotund, and he wore a monocle. He habitually addressed his fellow Wykehamists as "Comrade," and if one of the masters chanced to enquire as to his health, would reply, "I grow thinnah and thinnah."
The confessional comes from the introduction to The World of Psmith (Barrie and Jenkins 0.50), a priceless publication beyond all criticism, which contains the tests of the four Psmith adventures, those triumphant fables which are, for a very interesting reason the most revealing of WodehouSe's entire output.
At the time Psmith first emerged, in Enter Psmith, or Mike and Psmith as it has since been retitled, Wodehouse was exclusively a spinner of school tales whose nuances were never intended for an adult readership at all. The transition from juvenilia to the maturer moonshine of vintage Wodehouse appears to have been a most delicate and totally unconscious process, and you can see it happening in Mike and Psmith. Mike, the cricketing genius of a cricketing family perhaps inspired by 'the famous Fosters of Worcestershire, had been the hero of an earlier book, Mike. Psmith arrives on the scene as a supporting player, begins to run off with the show in Mike and Psmith, and by the end of that book has disappeared and his place taken by Wodehouse the comic man of the world.
Of course Mike hangs on for a while. In Psmith in the City, he just about retains jointtop billing with his monocled friend, but long before the end, after Psmith has conquered New York in Psmith, Journalist, and then gone on to vanquish the odious Baxter, captured Blandings singlehanded and won the heart of the lovable Eve Halliday in Leave it to Psmith, Mike has retired to the wings, an off-stage character who is occasionally heard of, scoring another century for England. In other words, Psmith was the character VIM marked the move away from Big Side into the Drones, out of the form room and into the Green Room. The other point worth mentioning abollt the new omnibus edition is that in Psmith the City, Wodehouse gives us a rare glimPe! of his own early background. If the novel I' '•-• not autobiographical, it does at least give 80 approximation of the life Wodehouse tralsAt have lived as a clerk at the Hongkong et!" Shanghai Bank for two years. In Psmith in lne City, the two friends work as clerks in the New Asiatic Bank, and when Mike goes looking for 'digs' he finds a landlady "wh,° resembled a pantomime Dame, inclininb towards the restrained melancholy of Mr Wilkie Bard rather than the joyous abandon of Mr George Robey."
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