Some Psmith trivia...

[derien.livejournal.com]

Psmith was based on a real person, who Wodehouse didn't actually know, a flamboyant schoolmate of a friend who he heard stories about. 

Psmith enters wearing lavender gloves on his first day working at the New Asiatic Bank in "Psmith in the City."  Lavender gloves?  This guy gets married, later?  On the other hand, I guess getting married was just the thing one did, back then.  No, no, I shouldn't jump to conclusions.  Perhaps many straight men wore lavender gloves back in the day.

"Mike and Psmith" turned out to be the second half of the story I had already read under the title "Mike."  I was kind of bummed, as I'd been looking forward to it being the second half of their year at Sedleigh, which I think would have been their last year at school.  "Psmith in the City" begins with them discussing which "'Varsity" they're going to, but those plans are derailed by Mike's father running out of money and Psmith's father being capricious.

So far it's from Mike's point of view, and the poor thing is so depressed when he first goes to London to work at the bank all alone.  He misses Psmith!  Okay, it doesn't say so in so many words, but he misses everything about being a kid, tossed into being an adult much sooner than he'd expected he would be, and wishes he could be telling his troubles to Psmith in person instead of having to write, because Psmith has a way of making all life's little vicissitudes seem like amusements.  And then Psmith shows up to work with him!  Wearing lavender gloves!  Joy! 

Comments

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

I can't read Psmith in the City as anything but the story of Psmith's hopeless love for the terribly decent Mike. It makes me sad that there's no real Psmith/Mike after that...

[derien.livejournal.com]

Why do you think there can't be? I mean, yeah, Wodehouse wouldn't write it in, but the way Psmith comes in and swoops Mike up out of this horrible hole of a boarding house he'd landed in and makes him move in with him, and it's made quite clear that he won't let Mike pay any rent because he wants him around to be a listener... I mean, I'm only that far, yet, but Mike seems totally delighted. I'm not at all sure it's a love of the ages and they'll never love anybody else type of thing, but then again I'm not the sort of person who needs a love to be exclusive and never ending in order to be quite real. It doesn't look to me as though Psmith's love is unreciprocated at this point.

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

Why do you think there can't be?

~shrug~ Because Mike goes on with his life, and Psmith, Journalist and Leave it to Psmith don't even have any real active friendship left between them, just a kind of lukewarm remembrance of past affections?

Don't agree with you about Mike, either. He was delighted because all his dreadful problems were solved so beautiful, and grateful under his natural embarassment, but any kind of romantic interest seems to be decidedly onesided.

but then again I'm not the sort of person who needs a love to be exclusive and never ending in order to be quite real.

But Mike, I would suggest, is, and what kind of person Mike is is rather more relevant to the question of Mike/Psmith than the kind you are. ~grin~ He's a fundamentally decent, single-minded and rather intense young man under his inarticulateness, and heart once given, it would with honour remain with the object of his affections until death did them part. Anything else simply wouldn't be cricket, and definitely wouldn't be Mike.

Psmith is an entirely different variety of tea.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Ah, then I'd better write all my slash now, while I don't know the future! Knowing the future is bittersweet.

Yes, Mike is decent, single-minded and intense, but I don't think that precludes him from having a rather less intense involvement. Again, I may be completely wrong, given that I AM a prisoner of my own culture, but I've gotten the impression that sex between boys at boarding school was fairly commonplace and not considered 'real' - that people ignored it so long as they didn't continue those relationships later, to the exclusion of doing the proper thing; getting married (to a woman).

Like I said, I might be completely wrong, but for the purposes of writing slash I'm going to pretend I'm right, because otherwise I won't write any. ;)

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

I've gotten the impression that sex between boys at boarding school was fairly commonplace and not considered 'real' - that people ignored it so long as they didn't continue those relationships later, to the exclusion of doing the proper thing; getting married (to a woman).

Ok, this is based on way out-of-period knowledge, but it seems throughout history that homosexual affairs were often considered "temporary" by default, no matter how intense. Eventually you had to grow up and do the marriage thing -- sometimes you held on to your old attachments, sometimes not. I'm thinking of Greek/Roman culture here, and some things I've read from the Victorian era of people describing their extremely passionate friendships with people of the same gender in their youth (descriptions that could very easily suggest some kind of sexual connection, I think). It's entirely possible that Mike might view a relationship with Psmith in the same manner. Mike always struck me as rather a traditionalist at heart...I could see him simply giving up on his relationship with Psmith, no matter how intense, because it's the proper thing to do (Psmith I'm a little less able to account for in that case, but hey). Going by the "friendship" accounts, they might not even be viewing their relationship as a "romantic" one in the same way as a sexual relationship with a woman would be. That would account for the rather wistful tone with which they both seem to look back on their old friendship -- they had to grow out of all that. Maybe they wanted to, maybe they didn't.

Man, that's sort of depressing.

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

I've gotten the impression that sex between boys at boarding school was fairly commonplace and not considered 'real'

Have you read Stephen Fry's autobiography "Moab Is My Washpot"? A *lot* of it is devoted to this. Much of his autobio is set during boarding school and deals with those kind of things. *wink wink nudge nudge*

[derien.livejournal.com]

And maybe I should have emphasized I don't need a love to be exclusive and never ending in a story that I'm reading. I do tend to be the sort of person who gives my heart completely, if not exclusively, and I don't generally fall out of love, just out of touch.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I believe lavender gloves were what men wore with certain types of suits. It wasn't a Big Gay Thing.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Okay, thanks.:) I know I'm trapped in my own culture, with my own cultural expectations. (Still, everything about Psmith screams 'gay' at me, even though I know I might be imposing my own cultural expectations it's hard to ignore.)

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

Wodehouse can be really trippy that way. Much of what he wrote was anachronistic even in his lifetime. For example, many of the poems Bertie recites from childhood memory would have been part of the canon of a much older person. It's not by any means a flaw, but sometimes it can make your brain go flooey for a second.

[derien.livejournal.com]

True, and that probably throws me off about the business of boarding school boys and what they might have got up to in private - I might be thinking of an earlier time period. (Still, in 'Mike' they didn't seem to have any supervision after lockdown.)

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

The fact that Psmith is based on a real person reaffirms my suspicion that the world is actually a wonderful place.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it, though? And I've got this suspicion that, no matter what Wodehouse had to do with the character in order to be published (or without giving itmuch thought) the original person he was referencing may very well have been a little less straight than an arrow.

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

Not to dispute the notion at all, but are you really getting such a strong gay vibe from Psmith? I didn't get any more of a vibe than from any other Wodehouse character.

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

Psmith has always come across as pretty gay to me. He's a bit of a wit and he's got a bit of that lightness of the stereotypical gay intelligentsia. (Bit of a demonic blend of Wilde and Fry, in my head... with the Wodehouse touch of course).

But then again, to my perverted mind all is slash, so perhaps better to just forget what I said.

[derien.livejournal.com]

I spoke too soon - 'languid' is used to describe Psmith in the very next chapter I read.: Mr. Bickersdyke received him with the ominous restraint of a tiger crouching for it's spring. Psmith stood beside the table with languid grace, suggestive of some favoured confidential secretary waiting for instructions.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, totally. Stereotypically so, as peak_in_darien says. I'm not up on my Victorian keywords (which were intended to let the savvey reader understand that the character was supposed to be gay since they couldn't publish stories about openly gay characters). The only one I can ever remember is 'languid,' yet somehow Wodehouse has avoided using that by using every other descriptor in the dictionary - graceful and gentle get used a lot. ("He sank gracefully into a chair," at the club, while annoying Bickersdyke.) Not that I expect Wodehouse to have been using those keywords and descriptors, since he wasn't Victorian and might not have known about them, but it's possible that he could have.

I wonder if anyone has kindly done us up a page on homosexuals as portrayed in Victorian literature? *goes looking*

[tootsiemuppet.livejournal.com]

Psmith is based on a real person? This just made my day. First Jeeves, now Psmith.

<3

[derien.livejournal.com]

Jeeves was based on a real person? Very loosely based, one must assume, since he's quite superhuman.

[tootsiemuppet.livejournal.com]

Heh, well the spark must've been there. He mentioned it in Over Seventy, I think. Something about him for a very short time having had a butler or a valet who was just immensely knowledgeable on every possible subject. ^_^

The idea of a real live Jeeves amuses me. I want one! *covets*

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

You know, if Wodehouse only had him for a short time, I wonder where he went.

Hope he found a Bertie to take care of.

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

Ha, I've always found it amusing that Psmith was based on someone Wodehouse had heard of. I live in hope of meeting someone like Psmith.

And YAY in agreement to all the slashy goodness that is Psmith/Mike. :D

[derien.livejournal.com]

He reminds me of someone I work with, actually. Who is married and has a kid, but always jokes about being attracted to guys or having experimented when he was younger. (He says "everyone experiments when they're in school" and such.) Only, when it's just you and him, one on one, he can drop his whole flighty facade and talk about things that are real, which Psmith doesn't seem to do... and that makes me sad. I just think that Mike ought to be getting the real deal, in private. (My co-worker, Mainertoo, is not young and pretty anymore, but he's still attractive because of that sparkle.)

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

You think Psmith is putting up a facade? One can never tell what parts of Psmith's behaviour are sincere or not, I suppose (watch him with Mr. Bickersdyke, for instance), but I was under the impression that Psmith is just honestly like that. I'm not sure how to describe my impression of Psmith...sort of that he's so in control all the time that he doesn't NEED to have his perceptions intersect with actual reality most of the time *L* Psmith seems to have his own little world -- not in a crazy or detatched sense, but in that he seems to have this fundamental belief that the world works a lot differently than most people would say it does. Which is why he will do things like, say, take out a want ad in the paper blatantly offering do to anything for anyone (crime not objected to) -- totally ridiculous from our point of view, but sensible from Psmith's. Actually, the fact that he's exactly the same way with Mike and later Eve in private was what made me think that maybe that IS the real Psmith, and his way of showing honest feeling is just very, very weird.

[peak-in-darien.livejournal.com]

Actually, the fact that he's exactly the same way with Mike and later Eve in private was what made me think that maybe that IS the real Psmith, and his way of showing honest feeling is just very, very weird.
I agree. Or at least: I think Wodehouse intended that to be the real Psmith. His smooth-talking exists in perpetuity and therefore intelligent suavity = Psmith, IMO.