P.G. Wodehouse and School Stories
The Early Boarding School Novels of the Comic Master
P.G. Wodehouse's early school stories provide a fascinating contrast to his later work.
Though P.G. Wodehouse is most famous for his tales of Jeeves and Wooster, or Blandings Castle, he started his career writing school stories. His first novel The Pothunters, was published in 1902, and he followed it with titles like A Prefect’s Uncle, Head of Kay’s and Tales of St. Austin’s. The latter is a collection of short stories he wrote for magazine publication.
On the whole these stories are more typical of school fiction than they are of the rest of P.G.Wodehouse’s work. Anyone going to Tales of St. Austin’s in expectation of the kind of wit and style found in the Mr. Mulliner short stories, or the golf tales, will be extremely disappointed. The stories are well-crafted, have the occasional neat turn of phrase, and some amusing plots, but they don’t provide the devastating verbal invention that makes a page of Jeeves and Wooster a delight to read irrespective of what is actually happening.
Another contrast with the later novels is the school stories’ focus on sport. This has always been a part of the conventions of the school story; Tom Brown’s Schooldays has a big match on the new boy’s first day, the title character in The Boy From The Blue proves his worth to his schoolmates by his almost superhuman prowess at rugby and athletics, Jennings is worried that his “name will be Mud” if he messes up in the housematches, just to take a few examples. Wodehouse’s school stories follow suit, with many plots revolving around success or failure at sport.
This is striking because nowhere (apart from the golf stories) in his later novels does Wodehouse show any interest in sport, and certainly not team sports. “Stinker” Pinker may have played rugger at Oxford, and Bingo Little might play the odd bit of tennis at a garden party, but generally the sporty types in Wodehouse’s novels are characters like “Stilton” Cheesewright. Cheesewright is a thick-necked bear of very little brain, who rowed at Oxford and is continually threatening to break Wooster’s neck if he lures away the affections of Madeleine Bassett. Hearty, sport-loving types do not generally come off well in Wodehouse’s more famous works.
The exception in Wodehouse’s school stories is Mike and Psmith, a fascinating hybrid novel in which the immaculate and witty Psmith is put in a school story with the cricket-mad Mike. Psmith’s adventures in later life are told in books like Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Leave It to Psmith, and his younger self behaves in exactly the same way as the later incarnation: the obsession with keeping his clothes just so, the ability to talk his way out of any situation with a joyously debonair stream of eloquence. He does so, however, in the midst of a typical school story, and the effect is odd, though not unpleasant.
Since Wodehouse didn’t return to the school story form after the first ten years of his long career, perhaps the school novels were simply potboilers, or written before he had found his own style. They are, however, a fascinating piece of literary history, and worth reading if only for the flashes which suggest what Wodehouse would later be capable of.
