Psmith

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!

Psmith Will Help You

Psmith Is Ready For Anything

DO YOU WANT

Someone To Manage Your Affairs?

Someone To Handle Your Business?

Some To Take The Dog For A Run?

Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt

PSMITH WILL DO IT

CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO

Whatever Job You Have To Offer

(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!  

(Leave It To Psmith)

Boredom is anathema to Psmith and he will do anything to avoid it.

This comes out in his language where he will take a cliché and make it more colourful: so he is ‘not in the soup’ but ‘knee-deep in the bouillon’. And he will not use an everyday word like tea, when he can use ‘cup of the steaming’ instead.

It is also shown by events, whether at school, heckling his boss in the City, taking on New York gangsters or stealing necklaces at Blandings.

Psmith is in four books. Later, when Wodehouse thought of Psmith he said, slightly regretfully, that he could not think of anything else for Psmith to do – he just could not imagine him staying on as Lord Emsworth’s secretary. But Psmith is too much in control of events and needs to provoke incidents to make his life more interesting. Wodehouse prefers to have characters at the centre who are struggling with circumstance and constantly worried about what might go wrong. Wodehouse himself suggests Lord Ickenham was a sort of elderly Psmith. But his excesses are viewed through the eyes of his nerve-ridden nephew.

By the time Psmith finished Wodehouse’s career had taken flight. Psmith is significant for showing the way Wodehouse developed. He starts in a school book, but is already trying to escape its confines to the extent that he comments on events as if they were in a book. He wonders what to do with his life while he is in the City, flirts with being in a thriller (Psmith Journalist) and finishes at Blandings.

It is also worth underlining how Psmith did not start as a major character, but took over. He was then himself succeeded by one of Wodehouse’s longest running series, Blandings. Wodehouse would always extend his material as far as he could.