Mike and Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
An Early School Story by the Great English Comic Novelist
Sep 5, 2007
P.G.Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith was first published in 1909, alongside Mike at Wrykyn, under the title Mike. It is certainly a school story, but a rather unusual one, and in it the reader can almost see Wodehouse’s style being drawn away from the traditional school stories he had previously written for magazines like Captain and towards the urbane comedy of his Jeeves and Wooster novels. It provides both the hearty high spirits of the former, and the man-about-town wit of the latter.
The Characters
Psmith is the same character who appears in Psmith Journalist and Psmith in the City – monocled, debonair, verbose – and much of the book’s most entertaining moments come from the fact that he seems decidedly out of place in a school story. When Mike first meets him in the common room, he is leaning on the mantelpiece, since as he explains, “I don’t see any prospect of sitting down in this place. It looks to me as if they meant to use these chairs as mustard-and-cress beds.” In the dining hall, “his demeanour throughout the meal was that of some whimsical monarch condescending for a freak to revel with his humble subjects.”
Mike, in contrast, is a cricketing genius with no interest in anything else, who has been removed from his last school and sent to Sedleigh unwillingly because of his appalling school reports, but has sworn to himself not to play cricket whilst there. As Wodehouse comments “There is a certain fascination about making the very worst of a bad job. Achilles knew his business when he sat in his tent.” Of course he is eventually persuaded to play, and manages to make his startling debut in Sedleigh cricket against the bowling of a hated house master, in a typical school story device.
Plot and Style
The plot itself contains several fairly familiar school story episodes: a master who favours his own house, a trick with a clockwork mouse, the fight between two boys who become friends afterwards. The style, however, varies between the more straightforward tone of Wodehouse’s previous school tales (“When a fellow tells you he has left school unexpectedly, it is not always tactful to inquire the reason”, or “Mike, on the cricket field, could not have looked like anything but cricketer if he had turned out wearing a tweed suit and hobnail boots.”) and the expansive metaphors of his later works (“Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The sort of nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812, and said, “So you’re back from Moscow, eh?”) The incongruities are so much fun that, as with almost any other work by Wodehouse, one is left wishing he had done more in this vein.
