Previous sections:
1.—Introduction. Writing and production
2.—Reception
3.—Ruth Gordon's memoirs. Afterlife
4.—Reconstruction of the plot
In this last section, dedicated to the connections between the play the three novels related to it—The Little Nugget, Piccadilly Jim and Leave It to Psmith—, I will assume a certain degree of familiarity on the part of the reader with the plot of the novels, only recalling to memory those details that are pertinent to the point under discussion. The reasoning is that anyone interested in this study will have read the novels anyway; and if they haven't, they are encouraged to do so at the earliest opportunity.
The Little Nugget, Piccadilly Jim and the play
The play clearly follows the Piccadilly Jim novel in its essentials: Jimmy Crocker, a young wastrel overcome with remorse at his latest escapades, decides to remove himself to America and stop being a hindrance to the social aspirations of his stepmother. In New York he ends up as a member of a high class house-party, and is engaged to kidnap Ogden, the spoiled child of the family. He has fallen in love with Ann Chester, living in the same house and bent on the same purpose, and they becomes partners in crime. At the same time, crooks are after a new invention by another resident of the household, a dangerous explosive, but Jimmy manages to thwart them. The net result of both criminal plots is that the hero wins the girl's love and establishes himself on the path to a new life, no longer a source of embarrassment for his parents.
The first notable difference is how much of the characters' background story is removed in the play's scenario. In the novel, Jimmy and Ann go back a long way even if they are not aware of it at first. Jimmy had made himself hateful to Ann by writing a derisive review of a book of poems published by her younger self. Most of the characters have preexisting ties: Jimmy's stepmother is the sister of Ann's aunt Nesta, mother of Ogden, so that he gains entrance to the house as nephew of the family, but to Ann he has to pretend he is the butler's son passing as Jimmy—with the added difficulty that the butler is really his father in disguise. Thus the novel's main conflict lies not so much in the kidnapping and the theft, but in the final revelation of Jimmy's identity to Ann and the challenge of turning her hatred into love.
This complexity is done away with in the play: Jimmy, Ann and Ogden's family are perfect strangers to each other at the beginning. The amount of deceit and impersonation necessitated by the circumstances is reduced drastically. At the same time, the American family is split: Ogden's parents, the Fords, are estranged and fighting over the custody of the child, who is residing with his aun and uncle, the Petts. So in the novel Jimmy stays at the Fords' place, and in the play he is at the Pett's, with Mr. and Mrs. Ford acting as external forces.
This is where the earlier novel, The Little Nugget, comes in: there Ogden and the Fords were introduced, and at first first the couple were equally estranged, disputing the custody and worrying over the risk of the child being kidnapped. In the end, it is the attempts of two competing sets of criminals that reunites the couple. Similarly, at the end of the play the Fords are reconciled over their shared fear of losing Ogden, whom they jointly decide to send to a boarding school, to the relief of Mr. and Mrs. Pett.
The two novels, then, are conflated into one in the play as far as the Ford domestic situation is concerned. This kind of continuity between novels, with Piccadilly Jim as a sort of sequel of The Little Nugget even though the two can be read independently, is a technique that Wodehouse would use often in his career (and had already done so in some of his school stories), especially in the Jeeves and Blandings "sagas." It is highly effective because the background details that add depth to the characters are not illusory but actual narratives that the reader can recall or learn more about, and so each novel enriches the other. And from the point of view of the author's own interests, it acts as an incentive to seek out those earlier stories involving the same characters.
The play, in contrast, is much more self-contained. It cannot expect its audience to have read and recall a novel published years earlier, and it definitely cannot make its appeal or chance of success dependent on such external factors. Thus, as already said, the plot is simplified with respect to Piccadilly Jim (the novel) in such a way that any additional complexities that are incorporated, like the estrangement of the Fords and the setting of the action in a new household, are presented and resolved within the compass of the play itself.
In the reconstruction of the plot and quotations cited in the previous section there are a number of details that can be traced directly to the novel, such as the conversation where Dave Mitchell reads to Jimmy a passage from a law book concerning the penalties for kidnapping. This is a clever elaboration of a scene in chapter 18, except that in the novel it is Ann who is about to read from a law encyclopedia and is interrupted by the arrival of Ogden.
Jimmy's initial fight with Lord Whipple is still present is very similar terms, but the unexpected outcome in the novel (Mrs. Crockers appears at the end and reveals that Lord Whipple, far from being enraged at Jimmy, has actually advanced her social aspirations for her husband) is not mentioned in the reviews, even though we learn that they do reappear and may assume a similar development in this regard. The theft of the perambulator, on the other hand, is entirely new.
The explosive subplot serves a similar role in both works, since Jimmy's role in foiling the crook that is trying to steal it helps bring the couple together. There is, however, a difference. In the novel it was an unfinished invention by the late Dwight Partridge, used by his incompetent son Willie as an excuse for sponging on his house Nesta, but it fails to kill everyone and destroy half of New York when the crook accidentally drops it. In the play it is the creation of Mr. Pett, is apparently handled carelessly at some point, but presumably is never dropped, or else everyone would have died since the experiment was not a failure. We know this because we learn that what makes Jimmy's fortune at the end is the fact that the grateful inventor has given him a partnership in the explosive business. So, in one case the danger was nonexistent, and in the other it was real and averted.
The kidnapping of Ogden also has a very different setting. In the novel, the plan is conceived by Ann as an act of kindness toward her uncle and Ogden himself, because she proposes to send him to a dogs' training school to get some education. Jimmy is dragged into it by the fortuitous circumstance of Jerry Mitchell's dismissal. In the play, Jimmy and Ann are symmetrically engaged by Mr. and Mrs. Ford at an employment agency to do the deed, so that they start out as unconscious competitors and only later become associates.
This is a plot point that Wodehouse had actually visited not so long before, in his 1915 novel Something New/Something Fresh, where the two sides of the main romantic plot, Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine, embark on separate attempts to steal back Mr. Peters' scarab, and on finding out decide to team up and take turns. Not really present in the novel Piccadilly Jim, it reappeared in the play, and after its failure it was recovered years later for the plot of Leave It to Psmith. Next we will take a look at the various novelties introduced in the play that in one way or another made their way into the 1923 novel.
The play and Leave It to Psmith
We saw in the third installment of this series that in mid-1921 Wodehouse was still trying to revive the play in London, and that by the end of the year he was already developing ideas for a new novel, "on the lines of Something New and Piccadilly Jim." In isolation, this could imply no more than similarities in tone and overall structure: all three novels revolve around a more or less excentric male character who, assuming a personality other than his own, enters a household with the double purpose of commiting a crime that is not really a crime and winning a girl's affection.
The details of the plot presented in the fourth installment show that the connection between the lost play and LItP is much stronger, as much of the new material introduced in it can be recognized without much effort in the later novel.
Many years later Wodehouse wrote to Bolton (13 July, 1946, found in Donaldson p. 151):
To refresh the old memory, I wrote Leave It to Psmith in 1924 and you let me incorporate a good bit of your stuff from the dramatization of Piccadilly Jim (Greg. Kelly and Ruth Gordon, tried out in Des Moines but never reached NY). There was a scene in an employment agency where I drew very largely on the Bolton genius.
W. is incorrect in the details: we have no news of a Des Moines appearance, and there doesn't seem to be room to fit it in the December 1919 schedule (see end of part 1); and LItP was not written in 1924, but first conceived at the end of 1921 and finished in early 1923. The wording clearly implies that at least one of the fragments that chance has preserved of the script was Bolton's contribution, and it may be wondered to what extent the whole adaptation shoud be considered Bolton's work rather than a collaboration. E. McIlvaine in her Bibliography gives him all the credit: "Guy Bolton dramatized the play in 1918" (p. 31). The notices and adverts, in contrast, always mention both W. and W. as co-authors, but this has very little force. We may reasonably assume that every line of the text was agreed upon by both, but beyond that it's impossible to attribute a particular innovation to either.
The first point that brings the play closer to LItP is the explanation of the sobriquet bestowed on Jimmy by the American gossip press, "Piccadilly Jim." In the novel, this had only alluded to his "disgusting behaviour in London" (ch. 8), Piccadilly being the scene of the playboy's escapades.
[Side note: the original "Piccadilly Jim" was Lt.-Col. James Ross Farquharson of Invercauld (9 January 1834 – 7 March 1888), "so called on account of his particularly extravagant habits" (H. Cantlie, Ancestral Castles of Scotland, 1992); "for his raucous London social life" (C. Young, The Fabulous Frances Farquharson, 2023). See a portrait and notice published in Vanity Fair at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]
In the play, all the reviews agree that Jimmy earned the nickname by being "rather fastidious and sensitive about his dress and his immaculate appearance." This is a trait immediately associated with R. Psmith, established in 1908 in The Lost Lambs (later second half of Mike) and continued in its two sequels in 1908-10. Before writing LItP Wodehouse had most likely regarded the Psmith "saga" as concluded: in a blurb for the American edition he confessed that he only undertook the enterprise at the insistence of his daughter Leonora (see. D. A. Jasen, Portrait of a Master pp. 98-9). But in 1917-9 he may have thought that he was done with the character and was at liberty to pass the trait on to a new hero. Then, when the play was finally shelved, Jimmy faded into oblivion and Psmith recovered his defining sartorial elegance for a last appearance.
The scene at the employment agency, the first substantial quotation from the script that we possess, would be recognizable as the interview between Psmith and Mrs. Clarckson in chapter 5 of the novel, even if we didn't have Wodehouse's acknowledgement of its debt to "the Bolton genius." A phrase is reproduced almost to the letter: "This faultless crease was obtained with the aid of the mattress upon which I tossed feverishly in my attic room," and the character of Mrs. Clarkson and her reaction to Psmith's application are the same in both works. (The novel develops her further in her maternal attitude toward her former pupils.)
The composition of the house-party is another step in the direction of LItP. Whereas in the novel Nesta Ford Pett surrounded herself not only with "novelists who had not yet started and poets who were about to begin" but also "futurist painters, esoteric Buddhists, vers libre poets, interior decorators, and stage reformers," including of course her own scientific nephew, in the play Mrs. Pett has formed "a salon of high-brow literary types," that is, there is no mention of non-writers. Similarly, Lady Constance in the later novel is seen "collecting literary celebrities and dumping them down in the home for indeterminate visits." Mr. Ford suggests that Jimmy poses as an English nobleman who writes vers libre to fit in this company.
The fragment of dialogue preserved between Jimmy Mrs. Barnes and Miss Pegrim was reused in different encounters between Psmith an Miss Peavey. The first part, about the dangers of the literary profession, matches part of ch 9.5:
"I wanted so much to discuss your wonderful poetry with you. You haven't so much as mentioned your work since you came here. Have you!"
"Ah, but, you see, I am trying to keep my mind off it."
"Really? Why?"
"My medical adviser warned me that I had been concentrating a trifle too much. He offered me the choice, in fact, between a complete rest and the loony-bin."
"The what, Mr. McTodd?"
"The lunatic asylum, he meant. These medical men express themselves oddly."
While the second is found in ch. 7.3:
"There are several of your more mystic passages that I meant to ask you to explain, but particularly 'Across the pale parabola of Joy' . . ."
"You find it difficult to understand?"
"A little, I confess."
"Well, well," said Psmith indulgently, "perhaps I did put a bit of top-spin on that one."
We don't learn the name of the aristocratic English poet Jimmy is impersonating (the Canadian Ralston McTodd in LItP). We can be certain that he did not make an appearance in the play. The much-discussed line "Across the pale parabola of joy," pivotal to LItP, seems to have been equelly memorable in the play, because it will reappear in the dialogue with Cootes below.
Mrs. Peavey's case is interesting. She is probably an evolution of Miss Pegrim, based on the slight similarity of names, but we know too little about her theatrical counterpart. Her most striking character trait is the contrast between the mushy poetess and her "Smooth Lizzie" true personality, but the novel tells us that the former was not a mere façade, since she is a real poet with six published volumes to her name.
A detail in the history of the composition may suggest that at first, in Wodehouse's mind, her only crime was writing poetry. When the novel was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, her introduction (ch. 7.3) included the sentence "When she came into the breakfast room of a country house—and most of her time was spent in paying rounds of country-house visits—brave men who had been up a bit late the night before quailed and tried to hide behind newspapers." The phrase between dashes was deleted in later versions, most likely because it contradicts the later statement (ch. 9.4) that she only started mixing in high society after her encounter with Lady Constance, and this is in fact her first country-house visit. It would appear that she started out as a much more Pegrim-like character, and only later did Wodehouse discover the advantanges of making her yet another impostor.
The early Alan Cootes, described as "nervy" by one reviewer, tries to pass himself as the same poet, and Jimmy uncovers the imposture by asking him to explain the parabola line. This is repeated in ch. 9.2 of the novel (his name being now Edward Cootes):
"You say that you are Ralston McTodd, the author of these poems?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then what," said Psmith incisively, “is a pale parabola of Joy?"
"Er—what?" said the new-comer in an enfeebled voice. There was manifest in his demeanour now a marked nervousness.
There is a difference: in the play Jimmy was probably ascertaining the crook's identity, because he would have had no way of knowing whether this was the real poet. In the novel Psmith cannot have any doubt: he has already met McTodd. So he is just having a bit of fun before sending Cootes on his way.
It will be remembered that, according to some of the reviews, in the play Jimmy "snatched" Cootes' revolver at the crucial moment. The choice of verb might indicate that the action was closer to chapter 22 of the original novel that to the trick Psmith used in LItP. But in PJ the success of Jimmy's ruse was limited, because he got hold of Gentleman Jack's pistol only to lose it again almost immediately in a scuffle. In contrast, in chapter 9.5 of the new novel Psmith in an consummate exhibition of finesse simply asks Beach to retrieve the weapon his manservant has brought for him, without violence or threats of any kind.
I have already mentioned that the coincidence of the two leading characters competing to commit the same crime is indirectly inherited from Something Fresh, added to the PJ play and continued in LItP. The last scene of the play, where Jimmy presses his suit by pointing out the coincidence of both him and Ann taking an interest in crime (kidnapping), and anticipating that they could even get their pictures in "that magazine series of 'Husbands and Wives Who Work Together'," also has an echo in ch. 13.3:
"I am your best friend's best friend and we both have a taste for stealing other people's jewellery. I cannot see how you can very well resist the conclusion that we are twin-souls."
"Don’t be silly."
"We shall get into that series of 'Husbands and Wives Who Work Together.'"
(I haven't been able to find any such series in magazines up to 1919, so it was probably an invention for the play. A mention in a 1924 play must be derived from the novel.)
Another link between the two works that requires discussion is of course the housemaid-detective, Susan Trimble. She was only "Miss Trimble" in the first Piccadilly Jim, and acquired a first name for the play. Her counterpart is Miss Simmons, also called "Susan" in her role as parlourmaid; it may or may not have been her real name. Hers is another case of incomplete development. O. D. Edwards has made a very cogent observation concerning the part she plays in LItP:
Miss Simmons, whose power is indicated by her uniqueness in relation to two dominant major protagonists. She is perhaps the only person in the Psmith saga to show a tactical superiority to Psmith's worldly wisdom (by doing what he said a housemaid, and not what a detective, would do when kissed by the Hon. Freddie), and the only person in the Blandings series to bully the Efficient Baxter on her own merits [...] Yet after shocking the reader by proving herself a match for Psmith and a ruthless deflater of Baxter, both revelations being made at the commencement of the chapter 'Almost Entirely About Flower-Pots', she never reappears. It seems probable that Wodehouse intended much more use for her but found his large cast too cumbersome; moreover, she would have naturally introduced unmanageable complexities by inevitably winning some exchanges in the multitude of intricate duels with which the work climaxes.
In contrast, Miss Trimble in PJ was instrumental in bringing the Crockers together: she had a real impact on the narrative. This uncharacteristic lack of balance in the structure of LItP, where a strong character is introduced without corresponding payback, may be better understood now if Miss Simmons is no longer a new creation designed from the start to serve a purpose in the overall structure of the narrative, but a remnant of the old play that Wodehouse deemed too good to leave out and that he couldn't quite integrate in the overall plot.
Conclusion
I hope that this long exposition of all that I was able to gather of the history and substance of the lost play, and particularly the discussion of its connections with the novels in the last section, can contribute if only a little to our ourderstanding of the creative processes behind some of the works Wodehouse produced at that early stage of his literary career. Archaeology is at its best when it is not limited to digging out bones but helps us gain a better appreciation of the living beings to whom they belonged.
When dealing with fragmentary works, one should always keep in mind that we may be missing essential parts of the whole, and that the significance of what we do have could change completely if we could only see the context where they belong. I am quite confident that the picture drawn in the fourth installment was essentially correct, and that the links with other works were more or less as outlined in the fifth; but if ever a complete script of the play comes to light I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the deductions made here were wrong or required major adjustments. Needless to say, I'd be the first to celebrate the fact.
In this regard, one last thought occurs to me: while it is always something to regret that a work has been lost, even assuming there were good reasons for it to fail as a production, there is consolation in the knowledge that Wodehouse (who clearly appreciated the play despite its faults, and was still willing to give it a try in England after the American fiasco) decided to salvage what he thought was worth keeping, and built a new novel around it which became a lasting classic.
