Leave It to Psmith by P. G. Wodehouse

First published: 1923

Type of work: Comic melodrama

Time of work: The late Edwardian era

Locale: Primarily Blandings Castle

Principal Characters:

• Psmith, the protagonist, an aristocrat with plenty of charm and little means
• Eve Halliday, the heroine, who eventually marries Psmith
• Lord Emsworth, the owner of Blandings Castle, a large country estate
• The Honorable Freddie Threepwood, his son
• Rupert Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s private secretary
• Edward Cootes, an American gangster
• Liz (Miss Peavey), a poetess and partner of Cootes

The Novel

From the moment Lord Emsworth sticks his head out the window of his library in Blandings Castle in the opening scene, the plot of Leave It to Psmith proceeds as surely and inevitably as the rows of plantings in the manicured garden which is Emsworth’s only preoccupation.

Broke and inept, Freddie Threepwood approaches his uncle, Mr. Keeble, hoping to wheedle from him a thousand pounds to offset his losses at the track and to invest in a bookmaking operation. A good-hearted soul, Keeble is distressed by his inability to help his stepdaughter and her husband buy a small house in the country: Keeble’s wife, Lady Constance, is as tightfisted and inflexible as her husband is generous; she has never forgiven the young girl for marrying for love rather than money and has forbidden Keeble to send the young couple a check.

Always the opportunist when borrowing money is at stake, Freddie offers a simplemindedly melodramatic solution to the problem: Arrange to steal Lady Constance’s famous necklace, replacing it with a new one and meanwhile selling the stolen one and sending the money to Keeble’s stepdaughter. Freddie will keep a thousand pounds as a reward for his management of the affair. Keeble agrees and Freddie proceeds.

He answers a strange “position wanted” advertisement in a London newspaper. A person named Psmith the “p” is silent has offered his services for any job, in any capacity, “provided it has nothing to do with fish,” and has urged his reader in all the self-assurance of bold type to “Leave It to Psmith!”

As instructed, Psmith meets Freddie in the lobby of a London hotel, and the deal to steal the necklace is struck. While in London, Psmith goes to his club, The Drones, where Lord Emsworth, also a member, wrongly takes him to be the fashionable poet Ralston McTodd, whom Lady Constance has invited to Blandings.

Far from disabusing Emsworth of his mistake, Psmith quietly listens to the old gentleman rhapsodize on his garden. While listening, he sees from the window pretty Eve Halliday running among the shops as she gets caught in a sudden downpour. Leaving Emsworth, who never notices, Psmith steals an umbrella, gives it to Eve, and strikes up an acquaintance with her. She has been hired by Emsworth to catalog the great library at Blandings. Psmith’s attraction to Eve is even further inducement to his accepting Freddie’s proposition.

At Blandings, Psmith assumes his role as poet with becoming ease, though he is immediately suspected by Rupert Baxter, Emsworth’s efficient, officious private secretary, who awaits his chance to expose the impostor. Suspicious of him, too, is Miss Peavey, a female poet also invited as a houseguest.

Miss Peavey is really Liz, an American and a petty criminal who has made her way to Blandings solely to steal Lady Constance’s famous necklace. Her accomplice is Edward Cootes, an inept crook who relies on his partner’s female wit to redeem his incompetence. Liz’s scheme is to snatch the necklace during a poetry reading scheduled by Lady Constance. When Psmith, alias Ralston McTodd, is called upon to read from his collected works, Cootes is to cut the electricity and run to the terrace where Liz, taking advantage of the confusion, plans to seize the jewels and throw them through the window into the waiting hands of Cootes.

Freddie, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Eve and doltishly proposes. Eve forcefully declines, preferring instead the immaculate self-possession of Psmith, who woos her with evening boat rides on the lake. In a last attempt to win her love, Freddie assures Eve of his impending wealth and blunderingly alludes to the scheme. Eve goes to Keeble, who reveals the details of the entire arrangement.

The climax occurs on the night of the poetry reading. Things go according to plan for Liz except for the incompetence of Cootes, who arrives too late to catch the jewels. Eve, who had been strolling on the terrace, sees the necklace fly through the window and fall to her feet. Picking it up, she quickly hides it in one of the flowerpots bordering the lawn.

In the confusion that evening, Rupert Baxter, burning with suspicion, runs into the garden in his pajamas, searching for the necklace which he is convinced has been hidden nearby. Finding himself locked out of the house, he attempts to wake someone by flinging a flowerpot through a window. The window belongs to Lord Emsworth, who is awakened, sees Baxter in his pajamas and dirty hands, and immediately concludes that his secretary is mad. The next day, he fires him.

The next day, too, Eve returns for the jewels but finds them missing. A search begins, and as in true musical comedy all the characters involved in the action come together in a final scene to a woodman’s cottage on the estate, whither Psmith has retired. Psmith gives Eve the flowerpot which he had picked up on the terrace as a present for her. Liz and Cootes arrive and hold up the couple but are thwarted when Freddie, who has been searching upstairs, crashes through the rotten floorboards and allows Psmith to take advantage of the distraction to disarm the gangsters.

In the end, all is restored. Eve learns Psmith’s true identity, and Psmith takes over as Emsworth’s private secretary. He and Eve agree to be married, and Blandings subsides into a mindless tranquillity.

The Characters

The characters of Leave It to Psmith are deliberate stereotypes, but they are drawn with such precision and clarity, with such comic whimsy, that they are memorable in their own right. Psmith himself, for example, is the perfect embodiment of the Edwardian gentleman. He dresses impeccably, speaks with grammatical precision, and conducts himself with irreproachable panache. There is, in fact, something of the decadent in him, a distaste for the disagreeable in life that makes him at first glance merely superficial and brings him dangerously close to being irrelevant. Yet at the same time, he is resourceful. He survives by being always unperturbed: nothing irritates him, no turmoil ever ruffles his clothes or his grammar. Psmith’s self-assurance is his hallmark. It is applied even to validate his most trivial accomplishments, making him truly incomparable. In proposing to Eve, for example, he recommends himself to her by listing among his fine points his ability to perform card tricks and, what he believes to be an irresistible asset, his skill at reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din.”

As for Eve Halliday, she is bright, clever, and as honest as Psmith is self-assured. She is one of those classic heroines who enjoy their independent minds, who can see things clearly yet feel deeply. She is attracted to the irritating charm of Psmith and is repelled by the dull, the commonplace, the unfeeling shallowness of Freddie Threepwood and his kind.

Too stupid and lazy to be malicious, and dependent on the Emsworth estate, Freddie has no social graces and no imagination; the bulk of his working knowledge, the sum of his vocabulary, and the essence of his behavior are all derived from the numerous movies he has seen, the plots of which he resorts to when in need of negotiating some of life’s more troublesome turns.

His father, Lord Emsworth, negotiates nothing. Stolid and serene, he is locked in his own world, bounded by The Drones Club in London and his flower garden on the estate. He bovinely grazes among the safe opinions of his friends, and the only conflict in his life is the interminable argument he sustains with his gardener over the disposition of his hollyhocks.

Finally, the team of Liz and Cootes is more suitable for a vaudeville show than a life of crime. Cootes is sufficiently brainless as to be handled easily by Psmith, and though Liz Peavey is more cunning, she is not vicious, and her attraction to Cootes dooms any enterprise to failure.

Critical Context

Leave It to Psmith is the perfect introduction to classic Wodehouse. As a transition book, it looks back to the humorous magazine sketches of the author’s earlier days, and it anticipates in style and character the famous novels featuring Jeeves, the butler, polished, clever, equably good-humored.

There is something of the butler in Psmith, in fact, a man’s man who could serve with dignity and loyalty but with unmistakable independence. Additionally, the heroine is the typical Wodehouse female young, bright, and fond of mayhem though in this novel she is still the more traditional romantic figure.

Finally, Leave It to Psmith is characterized by the well-planned, complex plot and the curious blend of classical English and slang that are the hallmarks of the Wodehouse style.

Bibliography

Orwell, George. Critical Essays, 1946.

Usborne, Richard. Wodehouse at Work, 1961.

Wodehouse, P. G. Author, Author!, 1962.