SOURCE: “P. G. Wodehouse's ‘Noo Yawk’,” in Encounter, Vol. 62, No. 3, March, 1984, pp. 71-4.

[In the following essay, Lasky explores the American adventures of another Wodehouse character, Psmith.]

Is humour good for anything else but a laugh? Nothing appears to be more pernicious among critics than to try to be serious about a joke. Koestler once tried it in a book and got the punch-lines regularly wrong. Freud wrote a psychopathology of everyday wit, and was in turn forever subjected to analysis-in-depth himself. Max Eastman explored the enjoyment of laughter, and the most memorable thing about it was the infectious dust-jacket featuring the handsome silver-haired author in twinkle-eyed open-mouthed hilarity. No, if the interpretation of dreams is a nightmare, the discussion of humour is no laughing matter. A recent “structural analysis” of Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags and a scholarly screed on Three Men in a Boat provoked the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph into grim polemics. Critics were excommunicated, the whole genre interdicted.

There must be humourless idiots who are waiting for an annotated P. G. Wodehouse which will give the source of every quotation that he uses or bends for his own purposes. …

(David Holloway)

Well, there is a lot of source-spotting in Frances Donaldson's new biography of P. G. Wodehouse, and she too gets her wrists slapped by yet another proctor.

… [she] tells you all you need to know about Plum. Too much perhaps, for the discussion of his techniques of writing, and the reasons for finding his work funny, for example, almost leave the reader wondering whether it can be funny after all.

(Christopher Warman, The Times)

And yet I must confess that when the other day, I was chuckling through the Wodehouse Penguin of Psmith Journalist (first published in 1915), I was overwhelmed by just this humourless affliction: the longing for an explanation, a bit of esoteric research, for a footnote or two. Those Psmith stories were always something special in the Wodehouse oeuvre, and fans often regretted their early abandonment in his writing career. Lady Donaldson notes certain qualities of “intellect … unWodehousian toughness … a kind of ferocity” which are quite unlike anything found in the later books. Psmith in America is especially problematical, for Wodehouse was fascinated by New York, and spent his first Fleet Street pay-cheques on getting to Manhattan. There he tapped a rich vein of social (and verbal) detail which almost made him a documentary or even a “committed” writer, practically disorienting his light-hearted and light-minded strengths as a fiction writer.

Before his entrancing decision to take on a manner “more English” than any other writer, he was perhaps tempted in his room in Manhattan's old Brevoort Hotel on 5th Avenue to try his hand at being “very Noo Yawk.” His biographer feels certain that “by now (1915) Wodehouse knew where his real talents lay”, and that “Psmith was a bridge … between the youthful period … and the humorous books, with their established castes [casts?] of characters and unchanging format.”¹

All the more reason, then, to know more about Psmith's American adventures, which revolved around a journalistic crusade against intolerable slum conditions being maintained by crooked property speculators. No sign of Jeeves here.

So, without the crack of a smile, I found myself forced to wonder what Wodehouse's New York was really like. For some it evidently makes no difference, for novels are supposed to capture a truer, or higher, or deeper reality. Who knows, or cares, whether Proust got that evening exactly right at the Duchesse de Guermantes', or whether Joyce in Zurich kept up with Dublin argot? How could Thomas Mann, writing his Doktor Faustus in Californian exile, know how wartime Germans spoke when making their pact with the devil?

Does it matter? Aesthetically, surely not. Literal truth is what we demand only from our historians, not from our novelists. Still, who is there with mind so dulled as not, on occasion, to entertain a certain curiosity about the knowledge of the external world as it interweaves itself through the plots of our story-tellers? An impassioned reader of Balzac like Professor Georg Lukács was absolutely convinced—without ever having looked at any other evidence (documents, statistics, financial records)—that the pageant of a “declining peasantry” and a “rising bourgeoisie” was so accurate as to dovetail scientifically with all the theorems of Marxism-Leninism. No such luck with Wodehouse. And yet on almost every page of the New York adventures of the journalist Psmith in 1915 one is tantalised by the question of how things really were: in the plodding German historian's phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. Is the young Wodehouse, “yearning for America” (as he writes in his Over Seventy), telling it like it is?

I was stopped on the very first page where the Preface explains that very little was “invented”, that “most of the incidents in this story are based on actual happenings.” Perhaps. But surely what we need for that scholarly annotated edition of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, full of fine footnotes and ample appendices, are some comparative statistics.

There are several million inhabitants of New York. Not all of them eke out a precarious livelihood by murdering one another. …

How true. And still one wants to know how many, and how often: for that alarmed sense of mass mayhem which one gets nowadays in New York could not really be (or could it?) an invariable constant. “The conditions of life in New York are so different from those of London”, and indeed they have so remained: more murders are committed in N.Y.C. per annum than in the whole of the U.K. Does nothing change throughout a century? Why do we hear so little about “murderous Manhattan” in Henry James' otherwise marvellously perceptive pages about New York in his American Scene? There are social observers who are persuaded that whatever is actually happening is constantly reflected in the same preconceived emotions of an intellectual class who attend to the register of urban sins (and virtues), and who see to it that it always adds up to something unprecedented and outrageous. Irving Kristol once scandalised his New York Times readers by arguing that 50 or 75 years ago the liberals were protesting as vociferously against racist tensions, traffic jams, urban decay, and street-corner violence as they do today. Are things always the same, the more they change? Does nothing get better, nothing worse? Wodehouse is writing of a pre-World War I America:

In New York one may find every class of paper which the imagination can conceive. Every grade of society is catered for. If an Esquimau came to New York, the first thing he would find on the bookstalls in all probability would be the Blubber Magazine, or some similar production written by Esquimaux for Esquimaux. Everybody reads in New York, and reads all the time. The New Yorker peruses his favourite newspaper while he is being jammed into a crowded compartment on the subway or leaping like an antelope into a moving street car.

I suppose the US Publishers Association could provide us with a table of comparative statistics, breaking down American sales, reading habits, and specialist publications. For my own part I found on my visit to New York last month an announcement from a Queens' publishing house which caters to “Jewish homosexual subscribers”, that a new magazine would be appearing, to appeal to “gay Black converts.” Cool, man; cool like an Esquimau.

Taken altogether, Wodehouse's vignettes of New York around 1914-15 are vivid and incisive, and the language of the day (I take it, on faith, to be such) rendered with a keen ear and a careful pen. This, and a curious socio-political element (those slummy crime-controlled tenements), quite belies the later Wodehouse formula which, as he put it, was: “I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn. …” But the point of Psmith Journalist is that the Old Etonian Psmith learned, while still retaining his monocle, to care a damn—that “deep down” there was “something worth fighting for.”

Psmith was one of those people who are content to accept most of the happenings of life in an airy spirit of tolerance. Life had been more or less of a game with him up till now. In his previous encounters with those with whom fate had brought him in contact there had been little at stake. The prize of victory had been merely a comfortable feeling of having had the best of a battle of wits; the penalty of defeat nothing worse than the discomfort of having failed to score. But this tenement business was different. Here he had touched the realities. There was something worth fighting for. His lot had been cast in pleasant places, and the sight of actual raw misery had come home to him with an added force from that circumstance. He was fully aware of the risks that he must run. …

If this sounds not unlike the young affluent publisher of the Village Voice finding a cause in the radical idealism of the 1960s, it was because P. G. somehow got it all uncannily right. Here is Psmith's credo when he first takes over his New York paper and decides to change its editorial course:

… briefly, my idea is that Cosy Moments should become red hot stuff. I could wish its tone to be such that the public will wonder why we do not print it on asbestos. We must chronicle all the live events of the day, murders, fires, and the like, in a manner which will make our readers' spines thrill. Above all, we must be the guardians of the People's rights. We must be a searchlight, showing up the dark spot in the souls of those who would endeavour in any way to do the People in the eye. We must detect the wrongdoer, and deliver him such a series of resentful biffs that he will abandon his little games and become a model citizen. …

There are at least two daily newspapers in New York which in the past year or two have remodelled their editorial course along lines which would have pleased Psmith; (The P is silent: “Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis.”)

Had he gone on, Psmith would have become the Joseph Pulitzer of the day, which is only to say that Wodehouse some 70 years ago managed to sense in Manhattan that paradoxical mix of civic alarm and metropolitan pride which is recognisable even today in the “Big Apple” of Mayor Ed Koch. Here is Wodehouse's vignette of the Subway (that fearful underground which is currently being “improved” so that graffiti on trains and stations can in future be easily washed off):

Conversation on the Subway is impossible. The ingenious gentlemen who constructed it started with the object of making it noisy. Not ordinarily noisy, like a ton of coal falling on to a sheet of tin, but really noisy. So they fashioned the pillars of thin steel, and the sleepers of thin wood, and loosened all the nuts, and now a Subway train in motion suggests a prolonged dynamite explosion blended with the voice of some great catastrophe.

Evidently he never lost his affectionate tone (it is there in his late letters), although in his final emigration he hardly ever ventured forth from his ocean-side house on Long Island. Unlike the hard local men of angry protest literature he knew that there were “two New Yorks.”

… One is a modern, well-policed city, through which one may walk from end to end without encountering adventure. The other is a city as full of sinister intrigue, of whisperings and conspiracies, of battle, murder, and sudden death in dark by-ways, as any town of medieval Italy. Given certain conditions, anything may happen to any one in New York.

How “well-policed” New York may have been then, or now, one has to leave to the annotations of the scholarly sociologists. They will also have to record whether police strategy and tactics have changed much when caught up in the altercations of gangland wars or ethnic riots of more recent days.

The behaviour of the New York policeman in affairs of this kind is based on principles of the soundest practical wisdom. The unthinking man would rush in and attempt to crush the combat in its earliest and fiercest stages. The New York policeman, knowing the importance of his own safety, and the insignificance of the gangsman's, permits the opposing forces to hammer each other into a certain distaste for battle, and then, when both sides have begun to have enough of it, rushes in himself and clubs everything in sight. It is an admirable process in its results, but is sure rather than swift.

“Gangsman”? The dictionary (Webster; Random House; Partridge) lists gangster as common 20th-c. usage, and one finds it of course in the Manhattan pages of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Mark Hellinger.² One wonders whether young Plum always got the word, phrase, inflection, slangy innovation quite right. Here were stranger characters than, dash it, the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster to come.

I suspect that his unusually good ear just missed the off-colour double-entendre in words like lay and hump (pp. 65, 100). Would a New York landlord refer to the eviction or dispossession of a rent-due tenant by saying, “Then it's outside for theirs” (p. 114)? I take his word for it that getting drunk was “to get gay” (pp. 148, 154) and that “a real skiddoo” (p. 146) was something different from its more familiar “23-skiddoo” usage. But would a N.Y. boxer praise a newspaper's muckracking articles by saying “They're to the good”? Wodehouse hesitates sometimes, and uncertainly puts quote marks around drawing a good “gate” in a reference to box-office receipts; and he takes refuge in the recondite in explaining what a sitz-redacteur was (and I may well have learned it in the same sort of German émigré printing-plant that he did). But he is soon again his confident self with gats, coons, dagoes, jeans (as early as that), simoleons and the like. He confidently lets Psmith say “this act is going to be a scream”; and, having learned fast, Psmith ventures the remark that crooked politicians were finished because “the right plan would be to put the complete kybosh (if I may use the expression)” on their chances.

“Why America? I have often wondered about that.” So Wodehouse wrote in his memoir Over Seventy (1957), and offered the touching explanation, for whatever it's worth: “This yearning I had to visit America … was due principally, I think, to the fact that I was an enthusiastic boxer in those days and had a boyish reverence for America's pugilists—James J. Corbett, James J. Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, Kid McCoy and the rest of them.” At any rate “Kid Brady” became an heroic figure in Psmith's crusade against “raw actual misery” and, consequently, we often find ourselves at the ringside of adolescent longing.

The contest was short but energetic. At intervals the combatants would cling affectionately to one another, and on these occasions the red-jerseyed man, still chewing gum and still wearing the same air of being lost in abstract thought, would split up the mass by the simple method of ploughing his way between the pair. Towards the end of the first round Thomas, eluding a left swing, put Patrick neatly to the floor, where the latter remained for the necessary ten seconds.

This he could have seen, and could have written, in London. But if he longed for something more and different, for “the realities”, he found some of them in the bars and gyms of the New York sporting underworld. Here is Pugsy Maloney explaining the cat in his arms (“It's a kitty what I got in de street”) to Billy Windsor (who, combining “the toughest of muscle with the softest of hearts”, was “always ready at any moment to become the champion of the oppressed on the slightest provocation”):

I wasn't hoitin' her. … Dere was two fellers in de street sickin' a dawg on to her. An' I come up an' says, ‘G'wan! What do youse t'ink you're doin', fussin' de poor dumb animal!?’ An' one of de guys, he says, ‘G'wan! Who do youse t'ink youse is?’ An' I says, ‘I'm de guy what's goin' to swat youse on de coco if youse don't quit fussin' de poor dumb animal.’ So wit dat he makes a break at swattin' me one, an' den I swats dem bote some more, an' I gets de kitty, an' I brings her in here, cos I t'inks, maybe you'll look after her.

Was this the way the Pugsy Maloneys spoke in New York in 1915? I don't know, and I can't imagine who does. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee apparatus might catch the voices on a bygone wavelength, and today we have archives of “oral history”, with a tape for every conceivable accent, inflection, and ethnic lilt. But the history of the language “as spoken by common men” depends necessarily on contrived fictions, artfully recorded, and confidently defended on the theory that the truth is in the poetry. Yet there is, and historians have unfailingly insisted on it, also a poetry in the truth. It may well be that the ephemeral “spirit of the age”, or Zeitgeist, is impossible to recapture: temps perdu. But at least we ought to be able to sense or imagine the difference.

Wodehouse commentators often miss the point. J. B. Priestley once wrote:

In the matter of wildly metaphorical slang he has beaten the Americans at their own game. Meet a New York crook of Mr. Wodehouse's invention and you find he talks not as such crooks actually do talk, but as they would like to talk.

This drives us into a roundabout, indeed a vicious circle, for how could Jolly Jack have had the faintest notion of how New York crooks “would like to talk”? Or is it the wild fate of all social reality, its words and deeds, to find an ultimate existence, a final form, in the related fantasies of fiction? The actual Père Goriots are all dead, but Balzac remains our living source.

For a book or two young P. G. Wodehouse became a poet of “million-footed Manhattan.” The Pugsy Maloneys are gone, but Plum's “little old Noo Yawk” lives.

Notes

1. Frances Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse: The Authorized Biography (1982), p. 91. See also the books on PGW by Benny Green (1981), and David A. Jasen (rev. ed., 1981).

   All in all, he understood New York better than, say, Berlin. On the famous “Berlin broadcasts” (first published in Encounter, October and November 1954), see the controversial articles by George Orwell (in Dickens, Dali & Others); Malcolm Muggeridge (in Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes); and in Encounter recently by M and Ian Sproat (June-July and September-October 1982).

2. The Burchfield Supplement (1972) to the Oxford English Dictionary cites first American newspaper usages of 1896 and 1911. Wodehouse is quoted for “gangster” from his Blandings Castle of 1935. “Gangsman” the O.E.D. records as “a dock porter” (1793) and as “one who has charge of a gang of workmen” (1863). Evidently Wodehouse brought a lot of verbal baggage with him across the Atlantic.