Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

Psmith was one of the first and now probably the least-known of P.G. Wodehouse's series characters [1]: he appeared in four novels, and is part of Wodehouse's transition from his original style of school stories into the wider comedic novels of his mature period.

Leave It to Psmith is the fourth, last, and best of those novels: it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1923 as a serial and then soon afterward in book form. It is also a Blandings Castle novel; even this early, Wodehouse was mixing and matching his series, as if they all lived in the same, consistent world. It's actually only the second Blandings novel, after the 1915 Something Fresh; it's early enough that Lord Emsworth is still obsessed with flowers rather than pigs.

We originally met Psmith in school, where he quickly overshadowed the supposed hero, Mike Jackson. He's tall, thin, well-dressed, and gifted with both an unstoppable flow of patter and an unassailable belief in his ability to handle anything at all. (The reader can see why Wodehouse dropped him so early: a character who can accomplish anything can become difficult to handle in the main role, and works better as a supporting act, as with Jeeves or Uncle Fred.) The two middle Psmith books - Psmith in the City and Psmith, Journalist - were transitional books, mixing comedy and thriller plots. Leave It is basically mature Wodehouse, with some guns and criminals but treating them in a comic way.

Psmith is a young man looking out for his next adventure here; he has been working for a relative in a business involving fish - actual, cold, dead fish, which Psmith has come to realize he does not like at all - and is now ready to do just about anything else:

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?
Someone 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!

That's the advertisement he places in a major London newspaper. It draws the attention of Lord Emsworth's dim son Freddie, who - as so often is the case in Wodehouse - desires to help his uncle steal his (the uncle's) wife's necklace and use that to support his (still the uncle's) stepdaughter. The stepdaughter, to make it even more complex, is married to Mike Jackson, Psmith's old school chum.

Freddie travels to London, to meet Psmith, at the same time Emsworth is heading up to meet a famous Canadian poet and bring that poet to stay at Blandings for an extended visit - Lady Constance, Emsworth's sister and the current owner of the necklace to be stolen, is very fond of literary figures and have been inflicting a series on them on Blandings for several years.

Of course this all leads to Psmith coming to Blandings as an impostor, pretending to be that Canadian poet. And he has fallen in love with the young woman just hired to catalog the Blandings library. And there are other, more sinister figures, looking to steal the necklace as well.

This is mature-period Wodehouse, so it's complex and witty and full of wonderful writing - his later books were still fun and wonderfully written, but the plots tended to thin down a bit. Here Wodehouse is still on the way up, adding in complication after complication and delighting in the chaos it creates.

Wodehouse's books are not serious in any way, and are wonderful precisely because of that. They create their own world, and explore all the permutations of that stranger, sillier, more entertaining and lovely world - this is one of the earliest of his best books, and a good place to start for readers who haven't discovered Wodehouse yet. It's also a good place to dive in for people who have only read Jeeves and Wooster - Blandings has another half-dozen novels basically as good as this, even if the prior Psmith books are odder and quirkier.

[1] With an asterisk on both counts for Ukridge, who was slightly earlier and even more obscure now.

Beat It, Rufus by Noah Van Sciver

Noah Van Sciver has a muse of cringe and self-obsession; that can't be easy. His characters often have boundless and unsupported faith in their own meagre abilities, a disinclination to look solidly at the world that actually exists, and a pugnacious optimism untethered by any kind of sense or reason. Fante Bukowski is his most famous example.

Rufus Baxter is another in that mold. He was the guitarist and asshole driving force of the hair metal band Funky Cool, almost forty years ago, when they got a deal with an exploitative minor-league label to record a cassette-only release before a plane crash killed the other two-thirds of the band. Since then, apparently, he's been gigging constantly, with no actual success. He has an agent...who books him for things like weddings two states away on one day's notice, because that's all Rufus is good for.

Rufus, of course, believes he's the last great rocker, a titan of the industry, a man who's had a few bad breaks (ancient car on the verge of death, living in a storage unit because he has no money, no friends or family or support structure of any kind). He's wrong. Comprehensively wrong, in almost every possibly way. But he's a Van Sciver main character, so realizing that will never happen.

Beat It, Rufus is the story of Rufus's cross-country odyssey over a few days. It follows the usual pattern: he loses what little he has, and goes on an epic journey to reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his (the expected massive royalties from that cassette), having various adventures and losing even more along the way. He reconnects with the girlfriend he had just before he "hit big," is repeatedly visited by the devil (and, much later and to less effect, the angel) on his shoulder, plays a random show with a random band, tracks down the office of that (long-failed) record label, and learns that one of his two bandmates actually survived the crash.

That bandmate, "Doing it to the Max" Eckhart, is an actually successful musician, with a big house and a home studio and a bestselling "how I recovered" memoir and a thriving career writing jingles - all the things Rufus reflexively loathes, but takes advantage of at the end of his draining and self-destructive odyssey.

It all ends in a "Lady and the Tiger" ending - Rufus is scheming to steal from and take advantage of Max, even as Max is willing to help out Rufus in ways that we readers think would actually be more productive and useful.

But that's the point of characters like Rufus: they don't learn, they can't learn. The humor is because they always do the wrong thing. I find that kind of humor wearying, especially when, as with Van Sciver, it's pitched in a relatively realistic mode - Rufus isn't a cartoon to bounce back up from any hardship, but a real person in a real world, getting older and hurtling headlong toward the kind of death that will leave people vaguely happy but uneasy about it.

This is funny, and realistic: it moves well, Rufus is entirely believable, and the various scenes are all told well. But he's so self-delusional, such an asshole, that I felt like I needed a bath when I was done reading it. How any reader responds to it will largely depend on how much they like cringe comedy: this is all cringe, all the time.

Better Things: The Mermaid Parade

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This week is something almost random. As always, it's a song I love, and think I might have something to say about. But it's not famous - it's just a song I found, and that spoke to me, and that I've kept listening to for years.

It's The Mermaid Parade by Phosphorescent, a 2010 song that, as is so common for this series, is yet another song about a breakup.

No, I wound up walking
out by the ocean today
and there were naked women
dancing in the Mermaid Parade.

It's a story-song, but the story is short and specific: the singer is in NYC, soon after a Mexican vacation with his wife Amanda. She's in LA - we don't know if that's where they both live, or she's there for some other reason, just that's where she is. And he buys a ticket to go see her, but ends up missing his flight, and we think giving up on the marriage, to instead watch the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.(Which is still going strong; this year's version just happened a week ago.)

Like so many of the best break-up songs, we don't know why. We don't know whose "fault" it is. We just get the emotion, the moment, the brokenness.

but god damn it, Amanda;
oh, god damn it all.

It's a song about how things can break, irrevocably, in a short time. It doesn't say why or how it broke...but I have to wonder if "those naked women dancing" had something to do with it....

Quote of the Hour: Late-Night Excursions

To find oneself locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-colored pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience, and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity than most men. His was a fiery and an arrogant soul, and he seethed in furious rebellion against the intolerable position into which Fate had manoeuvred him. He even went so far as to give the front door a petulant kick. Finding, however, that this hurt his toes and accomplished no useful end, he addressed himself to the task of ascertaining whether there was any way of getting in - short of banging the knocker and rousing the house, a line of action which did not recommend itself to him.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith, pp.253-4

Quote of the Hour: Visitor's Seat

He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.

 - Raymond Chandler, The High Window, pp.1005 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Succession

It was such a relief that they [her parents] were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.

 - Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p.12

Quote of the Hour: Courage!

Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.114

Quote of the Hour: Not Quite a Credo

 "....Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."

 - The Continental Op, speaking in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, p.342 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: There Was Only One Catch

Corky was one of the artists. A portrait-painter, he called himself, but he hadn't painted any portraits. He was sitting on the side-lines with a blanket over his shoulders, waiting for a chance to get into the game. You see, the catch about portrait-painting - I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start painting portraits trill people come along and ask you to, and they won't come along and ask you to until you've painted a lot first. That makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Leave It to Jeeves," pp.11-12 in My Man Jeeves

Quote of the Hour: Gossip

In this rich African setting were jumbled together, for a few days, people of every race and temper, all involved in one way or another in that complex of hysteria and apathy, majesty and farce; a company shot through with every degree of animosity and suspicion. There were continual rumors born of the general uncertainty; rumors about the date and place of every ceremony; rumors of dissention in high places; rumors that, in the absence at Addis Ababa of all the responsible officials, the interior was seething with brigandage; rumors that Sir Percival Phillips had used the legation wireless; that the Ethiopian Minister to Paris had been refused admittance to Addis Ababa; that the royal coachman had not had his wages for two months and had given in his notice; that the airmen from Aden were secretly prospecting for a service between the capital and the coast; that one of the legations had refused to receive the empress's first lady-in-waiting; above all, there was the great Flea Sandal and the Indiscretion about the Duke of Gloucester's Cook.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Remote People, pp.228-229 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: In Which a Narrator Denies Being Scared

But it was very quiet in the house. I had never noticed all the noises when there were people. I was not scared, of course, but it was a little spooky. More spooky yet were the noises that interrupted the silence. House noises. The house itself made sounds. Some of them I could figure out, like the refrigerator, apparently there is a motor in refrigerators, and it goes on and off. I had never noticed it before. Then, there were sounds that the house itself seemed to make. Creaks, and thumps, and clicks. This did not scare me, but I could imagine a person not as brave as I am, a person around my age, someone who has never been alone in their house at night, possibly being a little nervous.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, pp.74-75

Quote of the Hour: The Divide

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn't see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.854 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Non-Conformists

Only two girls in my grade came from there - the Raybern sisters, twins - and though they were impeccably neat, they wore homemade calf-length skirts, pleated button-down blouses and belted cardigans as if they were already spinsters. If they had been smart we would have understood them, but they were C students, and therefore weird for no real reason.

 -Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels, p.62

Quote of the Hour: A Flock of Newsmen

Reporters in large groups are ill at ease, and they try to make up for it by acting too easy. Each is preoccupied with his own time situation - his paper's deadlines and the accessibility of telephones. Each, before a public conference, shapes in his mind what would make a good story if the principal said it, and how he can trap him into saying it. If the principal delays his appearance, the reporter begins to wonder whether he will have time to write the story, Then, with further delay, he begins to wonder if he will have time to telephone. Next he gets angry, He resents his subjection to the whims of his inferiors, and he vents his resentment by a show of elaborate contempt.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.315 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Commercial Premises

My rubber heels slithered on the sidewalk as I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building. A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilt elevator. There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth. Numbers with names and numbers without names. Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer - if the postal inspectors didn't catch up with them first. A nasty building. A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, pp. 717-718 in Stories & Early Novels