Best of Before 2022: Books Edition

Dames Nation! Glad Tidings of The Year In Review Season To You All! Dame Karen is back in the (keyboard) saddle and we are here to wax rhapsodic about some century-old books that we loved this year. We’ll talk about movies & tunes (and maybe TV?) in next week’s issue.

Your Dames, To Our Favorite Books

Dame Sophie: Good day to you, my darling Dame Karen! How goes it? 

Dame Karen: Good morning, dear Dame Sophie! I’m feeling much better. The ‘Vid, as we’re apparently nicknaming it these days, finally got me! 

Dame Sophie: I hate that she had you in her wicked, exhausting clutches, and am so relieved that you’re fully on the mend. When you texted me about being sick my heart fell down into my toes!

Dame Karen: Aw! My friend! It was pretty anxiety-producing for me to finally see that second line, I won’t lie, and I still can’t smell or taste, which…the hell?!?! I smell things, it’s my main hobby! If I start being a gratitude journal person in the new year, which, I might, Smelling Things is going to top the list regularly.

Dame Sophie: Absolutely! Very very much worth celebrating and expressing gratitude for. I hope both smell and taste are restored to you ASAP. Being sick is for the birds!

Dame Karen: The worst birds! The ones that scream you awake in the morning, for example. But we have some “bests” to discuss this week -- things we enjoyed in 2022 that are not FROM 2022. 

Dame Sophie: Indeed we do! As much as I love being in on some cool new thing, I have a special affection for looking through my [cultural] back pages. We’ve talked about how important physical media is to us and how much we love reprints & reissues of long-lost books & tunes; I feel like a more retrospective look at the past things that delight us even now is a very on-brand exercise for us.

Dame Karen: Yes, I am literally NEVER in on any cool new things so I panicked a little at the thought of a best of 2022, but I always have some bests of Several Years or Even Decades or Why Not, A Freakin’ Century ago that I’m just now finding out about and enjoying. 

Dame Sophie: Something is always new to someone and there’s never a wrong time to fall under the delightful spell of something put into the world some time prior to now. Is it cool for me to kick off our annual listing of our specific vintage faves?

Dame Karen: Please do! I’m very interested in your book selection in particular!

Dame Sophie: I’m so pleased to hear it because I have been preaching the gospel of Psmith to anyone who will listen for nearly six months now, and there can never be enough admirers of these near-perfect, silly, warm-hearted books. Ok, so! You are probably already familiar with the Jeeves & Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse; there’s a delightful TV adaptation of a bunch of them starring the Woosterest and Jeevesiest acting duo of all time, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. And let us not forget, there was the Ask Jeeves search engine way way back in the days of the early aughts. 

Dame Karen: This could be apocryphal, but I’m pretty sure you introduced me to Jeeves & Wooster back in the Bust message board days of the very late ‘90s! 

Dame Sophie: Even if it is apocryphal, it has the ring of canonicity. I adopt it! Ok, so Wodehouse’s other — and to my mind, even more charming — comic creation is Psmith (the p is silent; a distinguishing flourish made necessary to Psmith due to how many regular old Smiths there are). Psmith is a very wealthy socialist (obviously) who addresses everyone as Comrade [Surname], even the teachers at his boarding school. He is tall and reed-like, is always immaculately dressed, and sports a monocle. Please note that when we meet him, this Psmith is a literal child of 17, but boy does he know himself! 

Dame Karen: I’m assuming there are shades of Psmith in Rushmore’s Max Fischer? Sounds like a real Wes Anderson before Wes Anderson situation…

Dame Sophie: oh, lord, I hadn’t thought of that before but I do believe you’ve got me and good ol’ PG and Wes Anderson dead to rights! Like Max Fischer, Psmith is relentlessly idiosyncratic and a man of many interests. Unlike Max Fischer, Psmith is actually successful in pursuing his interests. He got kicked out of Eton (as Max was expelled from Rushmore) for reasons that are never spelled out, but they weren’t due to academic failure. So in Mike and Psmith, he’s sent down to this inferior, much smaller boarding school, Sedleigh, where he meets the laconic, stalwart Mike. Theirs is a classic odd couple situation, and a fruitful one – their very first adventure is snaking a very desirable private study away from some other student. The whole thing gets way over-complicated (catnip) and very silly (I am high already) and ends with them victorious, having defended their claim by punching (Mike) and expert defensive wielding of a bathrobe tie/belt (Psmith) (I am deceased).

Dame Karen: Actual lols just reading this description. GIMME! 

Dame Sophie: all of these stories are in the public domain now, and available via the Gutenberg Project. I went…a little nuts? This summer? And bought used copies of all the Psmith books I could find. They are forever threatening to fall into Too Clever By Half territory, and might be annoying but for the ways Wodehouse finds to make clear what good eggs Psmith and Mike are. Due to reasons, they wind up having to work at some awful bank in London after leaving Sedleigh, where Psmith successfully supports a socialist candidate running for local office, counsels Mike to be extra-gentle with Comrade Waller, a coworker whose son is gravely ill, and uses his superior understanding of human behavior to ensure Mike doesn’t lose his job after stepping forward to take the blame for an error of Comrade Waller’s made when his boy was in the throes of pneumonia. Psmith is always saying a kajillion words per minute, with total confidence, and acting as if he pays attention to nothing so serious as life itself, but behind that is a very soft and capable heart full of quick-witted and kind schemes. My favorite is when he forces a slumlord to mend his wicked ways on the Lower East Side while he & Mike spend a summer in the US so Mike can play exhibition cricket in Psmith, Journalist (there is a LOT of cricket in these books; all you really need to know is that Mike, the youngest son in a family whose two older sons play for the English national team, is almost supernaturally good at cricket, and Psmith is pretty good, himself). So: exquisite tailoring and posh accents galore, in the service of being an unexpected mensch. What’s not to love?

Dame Karen: I am CHARMED! 

Dame Sophie: The charm IS indeed relentless. I frequently had to stop every few pages and clutch the books to my bosom in affection. There’s one lone Psmith novel (sadly, not enough Mike in it, but nothing in this fallen world is perfect), Leave It To Psmith, and I dream of the day I will wake up to the news that it’s being adapted for TV. (I should note that these books take place in a pre-WWI world, with no hint at all of the horrors to come. This makes them as poignant as they are sparkling, which, of course, I love. These stories are Of Their Time, for better and for worse. There’s a single use of the N-word towards the end of Mike and Psmith, and a variety of less-intense ethnic slurs that appear in Psmith, Journalist.)

Dame Karen: There does appear to be a radio drama from 1981 of Leave It To Psmith available on YouTube.

Dame Sophie: Oho!! Well, isn’t that a treat!

Dame Karen: THE HAPPIEST OF HOLIDAYS TO ONE AND ALL! My book selection is also old and British, although the books take place in Ireland among the early- to mid- twentieth century wealthy and, at least as depicted by Molly Keane, extremely, quietly, violently dysfunctional Anglo-Irish, of which Keane herself was a member.

Dame Sophie: I AM IN ITS THRALL ALREADY DO GO ON.

Dame Karen: Like the Mitford sisters, Molly Keane was primarily, sloppily educated at home, although in her case it was because she refused to leave Ireland to go to British boarding schools like her older siblings. Her mother was a poet who wrote drippy, idyllic odes to the natural beauty of Ireland, but Molly herself was apparently discouraged from writing and only wrote her first book, a romance called The Knight of Cheerful Countenance, when she was bored out of her mind during a teenage bout of tuberculosis. It sounds like fighting against being bored out of her mind was the main purpose behind her writing in general. Her main passions were horses and hunting because she found them fun, and she later wrote “I was so starved of fun when I was young, and I loved fun so much.” She went on to write several satirical, gossipy, extremely, well, fun novels under the pen name M.K. Farrell, because, per Molly herself, “For a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm, I would have been banned from every respectable house in Co. Carlow.” The books are full of cold, negligent parents all being incredibly sharp and snobby with one another, children getting up to all sorts of creative and often weirdly dark mischief, and extremely rich, detailed, and obviously loving descriptions of hunts, which take place on horseback and are often incredibly political and seething with intrigue under the rarified surface, and are then followed by hunt balls which are more of the same but with exquisite gowns and long descriptions of sumptuous banquets which most attendees are incapable of enjoying, because they’re too mean and weird. If you need likable characters in your stories, you might not love Molly Keane, but if you like a pitch black comedy of manners, get in there.

Dame Sophie: Ugh, I love prickly, nasty characters almost as much as I love tenderhearted little sunshine babies! These books sound great, and I look forward to feeling very uncomfortable while I read them and think about how these people juuuust might could be responsible for inflicting god knows what cruelties upon the Irish people they were so busy colonizing and subjugating. I get the sense that Keane’s characters richly deserve to be kicked out of Ireland, with extreme prejudice.

Dame Karen: Yes! And several of their real-life counterparts WERE eventually kicked out of Ireland and Molly Keane herself has discussed this and been like “Well, we deserved it. Yes, they burned down our houses and who could blame them, really, look at us.” The best part of her trajectory, to me, is that after a break of nearly THIRTY entire years, she came roaring back at the age of 77 with 1981’s Good Behaviour, which her friend, the actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft, found in a drawer and encouraged Keane to pursue publishing it. It was the first book she published under her real name -- it went on to be nominated for the Booker Prize and was followed by two more gems, Time After Time and Loving and Giving, which are all much deeper, meaner, more considered, funnier, and more fully realized than her earlier books and the “great houses” featured in her earlier books are often literally AND figuratively crumbling around their inhabitants. In fact, I recommend starting with them, which I did, and then going back to her earlier books, if you’re a fan. [There’s also an amazing 1986 television adaptation of Time After Time available on YouTube, for now, which I’ve watched a few times despite the poor image quality.] By that point, she was very much reckoning with the history of the Anglo-Irish and all the harm they did as well as her own life among them, in which most of her education, fun, and development of a moral compass as well as an emotionally stable inner life was entirely her own responsibility despite (or because of??? hmmm???) growing up with wealth and privilege. It’s very much the opposite of a “poor little rich girl” situation, though -- there is no self-pity and no nostalgia, perhaps because she was, sort of, raised by people who were obsessed with a kind of nostalgia and maintaining a way of life that both ultimately meant nothing of any import at all. 

Dame Sophie: So, Downton Abbey, but with better insights and conclusions. I’m in!!

Thank you for joining us! We hope that your To Be Read piles are newly fortified, and we’ll be enthusing retrospectively again next week.

Ah! Literal heaven!