Finished two short books.
Psmith Iin the City (1910) by P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse began writing fiction while still a student at Dulwich College. His first stories were tales of British school life in the vein of Tom Brown’s School Days: rivalries and warfare-by-pranking amongst the students, collisions with authority, just squeaking through examinations by skullduggery, and so on. One of his earliest characters was Mike Jackson, a gifted cricketeer, reasonably level-headed, with notions of noblesse oblige and a determination to keep up one’s side. He was less attentive at his studies, and at one point his pater takes him out of the school he loves, Wyrkyn (based on Dulwich) and into the barely-acceptable Sedleigh, with no strong cricketeering cohort. There he meets Rupert Psmith, and the two form a more improbable friendship than that of Holmes and Watson.
At the beginning of Psmith in the City, the boys have just left school and are looking forward to careers at Cambridge. Alas, the Jacksons face a decline in fortunes and Jackson, Sr, finds Mike a place at the bottom layer of the New Asiatic Bank. Psmith, who regards Mike as his personal consultant and executive secretary, joins the firm a few days later. From there on they reenact many scenarios from the school tales, outwitting the executives and Psmith bamboozling everyone in a grandiloquent manner, placidly bulldozing any opposition:
The bank manager assumed the posture of a bosun, cat o'nine in hand, about to deliver nine of the best. “Really, Smith, I must strongly—”
“Tut, Comrade Bikersdyke, tut! You need not wax fulsome regarding my je ne sais quoi, my how to put it succinctly, my agreeing absolutely with the brilliant principles you have so insightfully espoused. We are in complete agreement, moi et toi, my dear fellow. Thank you for settling the question. Comrade Jackson and I will be pleased, as you suggest, to terminate our work hours early this PM and leg it, as you intimated, to Lord’s.”
Through the episodic plot, Mike and Psmith are in and out of trouble, with Psmith always self-dramatizing; “Hark! Do you hear the susurrus of awed voices? ‘Rejoice, all! For Psmith has entered in to the lists of Commerce! Henceforth he shall take charge of the New Asiatic Bank’s Department of Stamps, and shortly afterward the British economy shall dominate the globe!’ A patriotic cheer arises from a million British throats, and you, Comrade Jackson, shall have your share of the glory that is Psmith!”
Neither young man is pleased with working for the bank. The hours are far too long (ten AM to five-thirty PM, with four hours off for tea, lunch, and informal conferences). And their chief does not appreciate the supreme value of cricket. Eventually, Psmith masterminds a plot to free them both.
Mike Jackson is closely modeled on Wodehouse himself, whose father worked for the Indian branch of a British bank. His pension was paid in rupees, and a downturn in the value of rupees led to Wodehouse’s being forced from his beloved Dulwich College and into the bank without the prospect of a university education. As to Psmith, Wodehouse said his character was inspired by the dandified, affected son of Richard D’Oyly Carte, who paraded around London in evening dress and sporting a monocle.
This and the other Psmith novels and stories offer amusement and cleverness but lack the verbal grace and the laugh-out-loud humor of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I’d still recommend them.
The Art of Coarse Acting (1964, revised edition 2014), by Michael Green. Thanks to Jay Utah for mentioning this! My wife gave me a copy for Christmas, and I read through it grinning and occasionally laughing out loud. From a notably British perspective, Michael Green surveys the plight and the position of amateur actors in the am-dram scene.
The book’s conceit is that it is a manual of how to be a coarse actor—defined as one who wishes to tread the boards and gain a reputation as a thespian, while avoiding the complications of having to actually attend rehearsals. Topics covered incluce how to break away from the theater between scenes in order to hoist a few at the pub around the corner and how to leave for home as soon as one’s last line has been spoken. The proper emotive process is made clear, resolved into six basic emotions, with all the others created through combinations of two or more basics (Rage + Fear +Joy=Insanity). Green offers a plethora of examples of what can go wrong and how, along with how to recover in such a way as to cast blame for minor annoyances (the ceiling falling in) on the leading lady, the director, or the lighting master.
It’s a funny, funny book for anyone like me who has participated in amateur and college theatrics. I learned early and on my own one of Green’s most important )lessons: Never take a major role.
Small parts (my favorites were Dr. Pinch in A Comedy of Errors and the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof) shine in my memory. Nice bit parts they are—the Rabbi has about six lines of dialogue, but he’s the center of attention whenever he’s onstage, and the audience thinks the part’s much bigger, while Dr. Pinch is a slapstick character who gets belly laughs by being the butt monkey in the final act). By treachery, I once was cast as Inspector Rough in Angel Street (“He’s only in the first part of the first act and the last part of the second act,” the director assured me, leaving out the fact that those sections were three-quarters of the whole show} and once as Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. I had my heart set on playing Mr Doolittle, a lovely small role, but it turned out I was better at dialects than the other male actors, so I was cast as ’Iggins AND as the dialect coach AND was on stage for literally all but seven minutes of the whole show. It was fun, but exhausting fun.
I’m with Green—get the little roles where you can attract attention, ignore almost everything going on around you, and overlook minor speedbumps like forgetting to enter or exit on cue, or one’s trousers falling down mid-soliloquy, or a blackout cue being missed by the light crew, leading to an extended course in How To Jimmy Open a Stuck and Locked Desk Drawer, supposed to take seven seconds but extended to about nine minutes until someone in the light booth finally woke upl
Anyway, it's a short, fun, lead illustrated with photos of all-purpose emotions for the actor, positions in which NOT to die onstage, and so on. Recommended.