When I decided to write today about Wodehouse, I thought I might repeat myself, because I have read a great many of his works in the last six months and I thought I must have written about him both in this series and in the series on Hospital / Convalescent Reading that appears on my personal Facebook page and then, a few years later, on this blog on Sundays.
But thought I have referred to him often, principally with reference to Lord David Cecil’s characterization of him as an entertainer through laughter, I find that I have only once devoted a post to his books, and that was seven weeks ago in this series, when I dwelt on a couple of books I had enjoyed hugely.
What I was sure, wrongly, that I had talked about was his early work, three examples of which I read in my first week in hospital, which began exactly six months ago tomorrow. I had not realized before they were brought to me in a job lot my sister supplied me with, from books that had been donated to her daughter’s Community Library next door to Lakmahal, that Wodehouse had begun by writing school stories. The first of these appeared in 1902, though this was not amongst the three I read.
The second, published in 1903, was, and it is a tribute to what must count amongst the least memorable books that I still remember it. Perhaps this was not difficult, for it was called A Prefect’s Uncle and dealt with the problem a perfectly straight down the wicket English schoolboy faced when his father’s step-brother, who was in fact younger than him, turned up at his school, and in his house.
The second book in my lot, The Head of Kay’s, which appeared two years later, was about a boy moved to take charge of another house, which was not a popular move because he was not a sportsman and the boy he replaced was. But they are both essentially decent as heroes of school stories should be, and in time they reconcile and the house does well – which the principal villains, a nasty boy and the housemaster who had resented the first captain’s sportsmanship, both leave.
Two years after that, in 1907, appeared the third I read in hospital, The White Feather, about a boy who did something that seemed cowardly and then had to redeem himself, which he did by taking boxing lessons and turning out a master of the art after good coaching.
The three books were all quite short, and entertaining reading, though had those been all Wodehouse wrote he would certainly have been forgotten. There P were three other school stories, and a couple of collections of short stories, but after Mike in 1909 there were no more school stories’
The book I finished this week is called Mike and Psmith, under which title it was first published in 1935. But what is not clear is whether this is in fact the same as the 1909 or an extension. That first book dealt with Mike Jackson’s career at a school called Wrykyn which had features in previous Wodehouse school stories. The second part moves to a school called Sedleigh, where Mike was sent when his father withdrew him from Wrykyn and Psmith when he was withdrawn from Eton.
I read just the second part, which obviously stands alone. Psmith had also appeared in novels about the adult world earlier. But whether he developed out of the schoolboy character, or whether the character was created as a suitable embryo I have to discover.
And an account of the more obviously zany Mike and Psmith, very different from the other three books, has to be left, as I said about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, to be discussed another day.