Wodehouse’s Best

At least according to some

Mike by P. G. Wodehouse

This is, like most of P. G. Wodehouse’s early works, a novel about school. About public school, more specifically. And it is also a book about cricket. About playing cricket, about being kept away from cricket through injury or truculence or personal failings; about being prevented for playing cricket by misunderstandings, by parental authority; about the loyalties of the game and its demands on those who play. And it is about forswearing something a character loves for reasons of pride, or more accurately, for no reason at all.

Mike Jackson, our protagonist, is the latest and last of a prodigious cricketing family. His three eldest brothers have already played for England. They all went to a school, Wrykyn, where Mike is, as of the first chapter, soon to go. His nearest brother, Robert, is working his way through the school now, just about to leave, just about to be honoured, Bob hopes, with his place in the school’s cricketing first eleven. But Mike, although young, is their superior. He is more gifted than all his brothers. The old cricket pro whom the family pays to keep the children in training believes Mike is a great natural. He has science and poise. He is big for his age, but all Mike wants for is a little natural strength. And of course, that will come in time. If all is well.

As Mike arrives at Wrykyn for the first time, he discovers what all children learn at school. Some people they like, some they do not like — some of the latter so eager to take issue with them it seems beyond reason. That much of studying is dull and pure performance. That many teachers do not care; that they use their authority for reasons of their own. That those few things which make education worthwhile are easier to hunt for and to seize wherever they are than to pursue education itself. Like breaking out of the dormitory overnight, moving the iron bars on the windows if need be, for a little wandering at one’s own pleasure. Like going out of bounds for a little harmless fun. Like throwing some local townies into muddy water, even if it means a policeman is dragged along with them into the mire.

And that some boys just want to have fun — whatever the cost.

This is an above averagely long Wodehouse novel and it is intricate. (Wodehouse thought, to the end of his life, it seems, both that it was his plotting and not his prose writing that made his work so loved, and that Mike was his best novel. Upon reading this, I am at least partly minded to agree to both.) Mike is as much embroiled in trouble big and small as other Wodehouse characters are in those school stories he wrote before — for instance The White Feather and The Prefect’s Uncle and The Gold Bat. But this one is different. There is, despite this book being funnier and more effortfully comic than its predecessors, a little more psychological subtlety at play.

It could have been anything, not only cricket, that made Mike act as he did. Not working all that hard. Cricket is the only thing he cares about; the only thing he wants to spend his entire education doing; the thing that makes his family unique; the thing that makes his school great and respected, and gives him pride.

And cricket is also something that has an element of moral compromise about it — and forces him to make strange decisions he cannot explain to other people when asked ‘Why did you do it?’ Mute silence, stolid, granite-like denial, being a hallmark of boys of that age. They are not willing to explain themselves. They’ll talk exuberantly among themselves, but when asked by Authority to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, collective tongues are tied, and tied tightly.

The book is so long we get an entire secondary cast in the final part. In the latter half of the book we are introduced to Psmith (his name was Smith just before he encountered by Mike), who is a kind of dandy captured in amber. Someone who talks so breezily that the affectation laden in every phrase seems charming and even decent.

A boy who can make the following speech seem companionable, even friendly:

‘“Don’t dream of moving,” said Psmith. “I have several rather profound observations on life to make and I can’t make them without an audience. Soliloquy is a knack. Hamlet had got it, but probably only after years of patient practice. Personally, I need someone to listen when I talk. I like to feel that I am doing good. You stay where you are⁠—don’t interrupt too much.”’

In later Wodehouse the atmosphere became a deliberate, even daring, anachronism: as if time stopped at the close of the Edwardian Age, the First World War never desolated Europe for the century that followed, and the long summer evenings of the early twentieth century never concluded.

But in this setting, all the talk of ‘ragging’ (misbehaving) and ‘an awful funk’ (fear) seem authentic and real. They are like the strange language that any school, even if it is a state secondary, like mine, necessarily creates as a barrier to outsiders. Language as ever-changing shibboleths used by those who are in to divide themselves from those who are out.

Wodehouse seems to understand so well how children talk to each other: the things they consider important that any objective (by which we always mean grown-up) analysis would think trivial, what they would do for their friends, what upsets them, how they react to authority, to adults they consider vindictive or sarcastic or mean-spirited or fraudulent.

Time moves on. Their uniforms change, their setting might change, their slang certainly changes. But children are always as they once were. Difficult for any who is not among them to understand, no matter how hard one tries. Difficult even to understand if you are one of them, among them, trying very hard to fit in.