It is
nonsense
to talk of “Fascist
tendencies” in his books.
tendencies” in his books.
Orwell
There is a
good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep
up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a
long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the
safe side. ”
“In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman,
but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I
am not so sure. . . The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of
bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves
the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my
books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer
holds good till Wednesday week. ”
The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for
using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase “whether Britain wins the war or not,”
and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of
some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this
broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very
lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment
but to remark that “the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will
eventually win. ” The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill
treated and bore no malice.
These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in
Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-
authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be
better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise
what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B. B. C. carried an extremely
violent Postscript by “Cassandra” of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse of
“selling his country. ” This postscript made free use of such expressions as “Quisling” and
“worshipping the Fihrer”. The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do
Gennan propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.
“Cassandra’s” Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to
have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous
lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse ’s books from circulation. Here is a typical news
item:
“Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the DAILY
MIRROR columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council banned P. G.
Wodehouse’s books from their public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra’s
broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer. ” (DAILY
MIRROR. )
In addition the B. B. C. banned Wodehouse’s lyrics from the air and was still doing so a
couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there were demands in Parliament that
Wodehouse should be put on trial as a traitor.
There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick, and the mud
has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that
Wodehouse’s talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not
merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time
several letters to the press claimed that “Fascist tendencies” could be detected in his
books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental
atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of
1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting
question is how and why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse
(released, but still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he
was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their broadcast
interview he had to warn him against making some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one
of which was by implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase “whether
England wins or not” did get through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that
he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this action
had any special significance. Flannery comments [ASSIGNMENT TO BERLIN by Harry
W. Flannery. ]:
“By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi publicity
stunts of the war, the first with a human angle. . . . Plack (Goebbels’s assistant) had gone to
the camp near Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without
political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being
released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his experiences; there
would be no censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making that
proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the
English in all his stories and that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still
living in the period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it
meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster. ”
The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be merely
Flannery’s own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a much less definite
kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse’s main idea in making
them was to keep in touch with his public and — the comedian’s ruling passion — to get
a laugh. Obviously they are not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or
John Amery, nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of
Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be unwise to
broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse (though in one broadcast he
refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He
had contemplated naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even
used, to Flannery, the phrase, “We’re not at war with Germany. ”
I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse’s works. It names round about fifty
books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by
admitting that there are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the
total — which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular
writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly
closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its peculiar
mental atmosphere — an atmosphere which has not, of course, remained completely
unchanged, but shows little alteration since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery’s
book which I quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike any
attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that Wodehouse “was still living in
the period about which he wrote,” and the other that the Nazi Propaganda Ministry made
use of him because he “made fun of the English. ” The second statement is based on a
misconception to which I will return presently. But Flannery’s other comment is quite
true and contains in it part of the clue to Wodehouse’s behaviour.
A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse’s novels is how long ago the
better-known of them were written. We think of him as in some sense typifying the
silliness of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and
characters by which he is best remembered had all made their appearance before 1925.
Psmith first appeared in 1909, having been foreshadowed by other characters in early
school stories. Blandings Castle, with Baxter and the Earl of Emsworth both in residence,
was introduced in 1915. The Jeeves-Wooster cycle began in 1919, both Jeeves and
Wooster having made brief appearances earlier. Ukridge appeared in 1924. When one
looks through the list of Wodehouse’s books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three
fairly well-marked periods. The first is the school-story period. It includes such books as
THE GOLD BAT, THE POTHUNTERS, etc and has its high-spot in MIKE (1909).
PSMITH IN THE CITY, published in the following year, belongs in this category,
though it is not directly concerned with school life. The next is the American period.
Wodehouse seems to have lived in the United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a
while showed signs of becoming americanised in idiom and outlook. Some of the stories
in THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET (1917) appear to have been influenced by 0.
Henry, and other books written about this time contain Americanisms (e. g. “highball” for
“whisky and soda”) which an Englishman would not normally use IN PROPRIA
PERSONA. Nevertheless, almost all the books of this period — PSMITH, JOURNALIST;
THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE; PICCADILLY JIM and
various others-depend for their effect on the CONTRAST between English and American
manners. English characters appear in an American setting, or vice versa: there is a
certain number of purely English stories, but hardly any purely American ones. The third
period might fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties
Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social status of his
characters moved upwards accordingly, though the Ukridge stories form a partial
exception. The typical setting is now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an
expensive golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades out, cricket and
football giving way to golf, and the element of farce and burlesque becomes more
marked. No doubt many of the later books, such as SUMMER LIGHTNING, are light
comedy rather than pure farce, but the occasional attempts at moral earnestness which
can be found in PSMITH, JOURNALIST; THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE COMING OF
BILL, THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET and some of the school stories, no longer
appear. Mike Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not a very
startling metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is his
LACK of development. Books like THE GOLD BAT and TALES OF ST AUSTIN’S,
written in the opening years of this century, already have the familiar atmosphere. How
much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can see from the fact
that he continued to write stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years
before his internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.
MIKE, which is now a difficult book to obtain in an unabridged form, must be one of the
best “light” school stories in English. But though its incidents are largely farcical, it is by
no means a satire on the publicschool system, and THE GOLD BAT, THE
POTHUNTERS, etc are even less so. Wodehouse was educated at Dulwich, and then
worked in a bank and graduated into novel writing by way of very cheap journalism. It is
clear that for many years he remained “fixated” on his old school and loathed the
unromantic job and the lower-middle-class surroundings in which he found himself. In
the early stories the “glamour” of publicschool life (house matches, fagging, teas round
the study fire, etc) is laid on fairly thick, and the “play the game” code of morals is
accepted with not many reservations. Wrykyn, Wodehouse’s imaginary public school, is
a school of a more fashionable type than Dulwich, and one gets the impression that
between THE GOLD BAT (1904) and MIKE (1908) Wrykyn itself has become more
expensive and moved farther from London. Psychologically the most revealing book of
Wodehouse’s early period is PSMITH IN THE CITY. Mike Jackson’s father has
suddenly lost his money, and Mike, like Wodehouse himself, is thrust at the age of about
eighteen into an ill-paid subordinate job in a bank. Psmith is similarly employed, though
not from financial necessity. Both this book and PSMITH, JOURNALIST (1915) are
unusual in that they display a certain amount of political consciousness. Psmith at this
stage chooses to call himself a Socialist-in his mind, and no doubt in Wodehouse’s, this
means no more than ignoring class distinctions-and on one occasion the two boys attend
an open-air meeting on Clapham Common and go home to tea with an elderly Socialist
orator, whose shabby-genteel home is described with some accuracy. But the most
striking feature of the book is Mike’s inability to wean himself from the atmosphere of
school. He enters upon his job without any pretence of enthusiasm, and his main desire is
not, as one might expect, to find a more interesting and useful job, but simply to be
playing cricket. When he has to find himself lodgings he chooses to settle at Dulwich,
because there he will be near a school and will be able to hear the agreeable sound of the
ball striking against the bat. The climax of the book comes when Mike gets the chance to
play in a county match and simply walks out of his job in order to do so. The point is that
Wodehouse here sympathises with Mike: indeed he identified himself with him, for it is
clear enough that Mike bears the same relation to Wodehouse as Julien Sorel to Stendhal.
But he created many other heroes essentially similar. Through the books of this and the
next period there passes a whole series of young men to whom playing games and
“keeping fit” are a sufficient life-work. Wodehouse is almost incapable of imagining a
desirable job. The great thing is to have money of your own, or, failing that, to find a
sinecure. The hero of SOMETHING FRESH (1915) escapes from low-class journalism
by becoming physical-training instructor to a dyspeptic millionaire: this is regarded as a
step up, morally as well as financially.
In the books of the third period there is no narcissism and no serious interludes, but the
implied moral and social background has changed much less than might appear at first
sight. If one compares Bertie Wooster with Mike, or even with the rugger-playing
prefects of the earliest school stories, one sees that the only real difference between them
is that Bertie is richer and lazier. His ideals would be almost the same as theirs, but he
fails to live up to them. Archie Moffam, in THE INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE (1921),
is a type intermediate between Bertie and the earlier heroes: he is an ass, but he is also
honest, kind-hearted, athletic and courageous. From first to last Wodehouse takes the
public-school code of behaviour for granted, with the difference that in his later, more
sophisticated period he prefers to show his characters violating it or living up to it against
their will:
“Bertie! You wouldn’t let down a pal? ” “Yes, 1 would. ” “But we were at school together,
Bertie. ” “I don’t care. ” “The old school, Bertie, the old school! ” “Oh, well — dash it! ”
Bertie, a sluggish Don Quixote, has no wish to tilt at windmills, but he would hardly
think of refusing to do so when honour calls. Most of the people whom Wodehouse
intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but
very few of them could be described as immoral. Even Ukridge is a visionary rather than
a plain crook. The most immoral, or rather un-moral, of Wodehouse ’s characters is
Jeeves, who acts as a foil to Bertie Wooster’s comparative high-mindedness and perhaps
symbolises the widespread English belief that intelligence and unscrupulousness are
much the same thing. How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be
seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke.
This is an enonnous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make. Not only are there no dirty
jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations: the horns-on-the-forehead motif
is almost completely avoided. Most of the full-length books, of course, contain a “love
interest”, but it is always at the light-comedy level: the love affair, with its complications
and its idyllic scenes, goes on and on, but, as the saying goes “nothing happens”. It is
significant that Wodehouse, by nature a writer of farces, was able to collaborate more
than once with lan Hay, a serio-comic writer and an exponent (VIDE PIP, etc) of the
“clean-living Englishman” tradition at its silliest.
In SOMETHING FRESH Wodehouse had discovered the comic possibilities of the
English aristocracy, and a succession of ridiculous but, save in a very few instances, not
actually contemptible barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This had the
rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded, outside England, as a
penetrating satirist of English society. Hence Flannery’s statement that Wodehouse
“made fun of the English,” which is the impression he would probably make on a
Gennan or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I was
discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended Wodehouse warmly. He
took it for granted that Wodehouse HAD gone over to the enemy, which from his own
point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find that he
regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up
the British aristocracy in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be very
difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of the way in which books,
especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience.
For it is clear enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either.
On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his
work. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or
James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an English reader can
see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John
Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking
the social hierarchy. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so
much. Wodehouse’s attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude
towards the public-school moral code — a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking
acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity,
and Bertie Wooster’s helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant
ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and
others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already
and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie
Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any
English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and
Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people
than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost
without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious:
their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges
the social gap by addressing everyone as “Comrade”.
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived
in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the
“knut” of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as “Gilbert the Filbert” or
“Reckless Reggie of the Regent’s Palace”. The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about
by preference, the life of the “clubman” or “man about town”, the elegant young man
who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in
his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen- twenties. It is significant that
Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. For who
was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But
the traditional “knut”, the “Piccadilly Johnny”, OUGHT to wear spats, just as the
pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up
to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them
with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England
during the sixteen years that preceded his intermnent. His picture of English society had
been formed before 1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture.
Nor did he ever become genuinely americanised. As I have pointed out, spontaneous
Americanisms do occur in the books of the middle period, but Wodehouse remained
English enough to find American slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He
loves to thrust a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English (“With a
hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me and went out into the night”), and
expressions like “a piece of cheese” or “bust him on the noggin” lend themselves to this
purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any American contacts, and
his use of garbled quotations is a common device of English writers running back to
Fielding. As Mr John Hayward has pointed out, * Wodehouse owes a good deal to his
knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare. His books are aimed, not,
obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines.
When, for instance, he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus
might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his
readers will know something of Greek mythology. In his early days the writers he
admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F.
Anstey, and he has remained closer to them than to the quickmoving American comic
writers such as Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon. In his radio interview with Flannery,
Wodehouse wondered whether “the kind of people and the kind of England I write about
will live after the war”, not realising that they were ghosts already. “He was still living in
the period about which he wrote,” says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-
twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever
existed, was killed round about 1915.
* “P. G. Wodehouse” by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942. ) I believe this is the
only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse. (Author’s footnote. )
If my analysis of Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously
aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He MAY
have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for
release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised
that what he did would be damaging to British interests. As I have tried to show, his
moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-
school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins. But how
could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans
and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must
take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse’s complete lack — so far as one can
judge from his printed works — of political awareness.
It is nonsense to talk of “Fascist
tendencies” in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work
there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered
through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to
Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a
Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging
in the U. S. S. R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and,
considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s
political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I
know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism. ” In left-wing circles,
indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any
truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the
war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a
decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought
to remember, remained anjsthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain,
China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply
slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners
and “not our business. ” One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the
ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was
bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in
Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better infonned, or more interested in
politics, than the general run of his readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at
just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now,
but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any
fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting
that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour
Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of
course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France
collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that
Britain was to be “reduced to degradation and poverty”. By the middle of 1941 the
British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far
fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his
captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the
war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On
several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the
microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They
attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was
afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have
provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty
requirements of propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant —
the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U. S. S. R. ,
and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion
was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as
possible, and in fact, about this time, the Gennan attitude towards the U. S. A. did become
more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat
Russia, Britain and the U. S. A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly
— and presumably they expected to do so — the Americans might never intervene. The
release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the
American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the
Gennans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made
fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he
could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release
would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their
enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that
Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to
expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two
years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was
not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their
own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the
disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism
and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able
journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and
“Cassandra’s” articles in the DAILY MIRROR, were good examples of the demagogic
propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal
whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse —
as “Cassandra” vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the
kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to
the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say,
Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not OF
the possessing class. Even if his income touches £50,000 a year he has only the outward
semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only
time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was
sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-
European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a
European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit
betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited
whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the
football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering
yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me
when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests
were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of
them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my
mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got
out of it the better. Theoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese
and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it
more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work
of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of
the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks
of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an
intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and
ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British
Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger
empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my
hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who
tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British
Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saecutorum,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy
in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like
these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you
can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a
tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the
real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which despotic governments act.
Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town
rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would
I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I
wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my
rifle, an old . 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the
noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told
me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame
one which had gone "must. " It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are
when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain
and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that
state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in
the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against
it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some
fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and,
when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and
inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We
began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual,
failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of
events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in
one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to
have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud,
scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant! " and an old woman with a
switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of
naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming;
evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded
the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black
Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The
people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the
hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms
crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the
eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable
agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I
have seen looked devilish. ) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the
skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I
sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already
sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the
elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the
paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically
the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They
had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the
elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely
ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a
bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the
meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always
unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and
feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across,
not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took
not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass,
beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery--and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully
eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I
think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would
merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him.
Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him
for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the
road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the
garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the
elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a
conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in
my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to
do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it
was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped
the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the
white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly
the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that
when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes
a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the
condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and
so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a
mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed
myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has
got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that
way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh
at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle
not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It
seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not
squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted
to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal. ) Besides, there was the
beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred
pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.
But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving.
They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot;
if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back.
But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle
and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the
elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad
under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin,
only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd
watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had
been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in
general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went
wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and
reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was
quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay
down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low,
happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from
innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was
a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting
an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-
hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at
his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would
be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one never does
when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the
crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the
bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He
neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly
stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time--it
might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second
shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was
the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock
the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to
rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a
huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the
first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up.
good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep
up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a
long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the
safe side. ”
“In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman,
but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I
am not so sure. . . The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of
bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves
the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my
books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer
holds good till Wednesday week. ”
The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for
using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase “whether Britain wins the war or not,”
and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of
some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this
broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very
lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment
but to remark that “the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will
eventually win. ” The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill
treated and bore no malice.
These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in
Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-
authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be
better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise
what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B. B. C. carried an extremely
violent Postscript by “Cassandra” of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse of
“selling his country. ” This postscript made free use of such expressions as “Quisling” and
“worshipping the Fihrer”. The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do
Gennan propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.
“Cassandra’s” Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to
have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous
lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse ’s books from circulation. Here is a typical news
item:
“Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the DAILY
MIRROR columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council banned P. G.
Wodehouse’s books from their public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra’s
broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer. ” (DAILY
MIRROR. )
In addition the B. B. C. banned Wodehouse’s lyrics from the air and was still doing so a
couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there were demands in Parliament that
Wodehouse should be put on trial as a traitor.
There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick, and the mud
has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that
Wodehouse’s talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not
merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time
several letters to the press claimed that “Fascist tendencies” could be detected in his
books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental
atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of
1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting
question is how and why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse
(released, but still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he
was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their broadcast
interview he had to warn him against making some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one
of which was by implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase “whether
England wins or not” did get through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that
he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this action
had any special significance. Flannery comments [ASSIGNMENT TO BERLIN by Harry
W. Flannery. ]:
“By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi publicity
stunts of the war, the first with a human angle. . . . Plack (Goebbels’s assistant) had gone to
the camp near Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without
political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being
released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his experiences; there
would be no censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making that
proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the
English in all his stories and that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still
living in the period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it
meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster. ”
The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be merely
Flannery’s own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a much less definite
kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse’s main idea in making
them was to keep in touch with his public and — the comedian’s ruling passion — to get
a laugh. Obviously they are not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or
John Amery, nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of
Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be unwise to
broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse (though in one broadcast he
refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He
had contemplated naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even
used, to Flannery, the phrase, “We’re not at war with Germany. ”
I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse’s works. It names round about fifty
books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by
admitting that there are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the
total — which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular
writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly
closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its peculiar
mental atmosphere — an atmosphere which has not, of course, remained completely
unchanged, but shows little alteration since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery’s
book which I quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike any
attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that Wodehouse “was still living in
the period about which he wrote,” and the other that the Nazi Propaganda Ministry made
use of him because he “made fun of the English. ” The second statement is based on a
misconception to which I will return presently. But Flannery’s other comment is quite
true and contains in it part of the clue to Wodehouse’s behaviour.
A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse’s novels is how long ago the
better-known of them were written. We think of him as in some sense typifying the
silliness of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and
characters by which he is best remembered had all made their appearance before 1925.
Psmith first appeared in 1909, having been foreshadowed by other characters in early
school stories. Blandings Castle, with Baxter and the Earl of Emsworth both in residence,
was introduced in 1915. The Jeeves-Wooster cycle began in 1919, both Jeeves and
Wooster having made brief appearances earlier. Ukridge appeared in 1924. When one
looks through the list of Wodehouse’s books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three
fairly well-marked periods. The first is the school-story period. It includes such books as
THE GOLD BAT, THE POTHUNTERS, etc and has its high-spot in MIKE (1909).
PSMITH IN THE CITY, published in the following year, belongs in this category,
though it is not directly concerned with school life. The next is the American period.
Wodehouse seems to have lived in the United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a
while showed signs of becoming americanised in idiom and outlook. Some of the stories
in THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET (1917) appear to have been influenced by 0.
Henry, and other books written about this time contain Americanisms (e. g. “highball” for
“whisky and soda”) which an Englishman would not normally use IN PROPRIA
PERSONA. Nevertheless, almost all the books of this period — PSMITH, JOURNALIST;
THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE; PICCADILLY JIM and
various others-depend for their effect on the CONTRAST between English and American
manners. English characters appear in an American setting, or vice versa: there is a
certain number of purely English stories, but hardly any purely American ones. The third
period might fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties
Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social status of his
characters moved upwards accordingly, though the Ukridge stories form a partial
exception. The typical setting is now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an
expensive golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades out, cricket and
football giving way to golf, and the element of farce and burlesque becomes more
marked. No doubt many of the later books, such as SUMMER LIGHTNING, are light
comedy rather than pure farce, but the occasional attempts at moral earnestness which
can be found in PSMITH, JOURNALIST; THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE COMING OF
BILL, THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET and some of the school stories, no longer
appear. Mike Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not a very
startling metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is his
LACK of development. Books like THE GOLD BAT and TALES OF ST AUSTIN’S,
written in the opening years of this century, already have the familiar atmosphere. How
much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can see from the fact
that he continued to write stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years
before his internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.
MIKE, which is now a difficult book to obtain in an unabridged form, must be one of the
best “light” school stories in English. But though its incidents are largely farcical, it is by
no means a satire on the publicschool system, and THE GOLD BAT, THE
POTHUNTERS, etc are even less so. Wodehouse was educated at Dulwich, and then
worked in a bank and graduated into novel writing by way of very cheap journalism. It is
clear that for many years he remained “fixated” on his old school and loathed the
unromantic job and the lower-middle-class surroundings in which he found himself. In
the early stories the “glamour” of publicschool life (house matches, fagging, teas round
the study fire, etc) is laid on fairly thick, and the “play the game” code of morals is
accepted with not many reservations. Wrykyn, Wodehouse’s imaginary public school, is
a school of a more fashionable type than Dulwich, and one gets the impression that
between THE GOLD BAT (1904) and MIKE (1908) Wrykyn itself has become more
expensive and moved farther from London. Psychologically the most revealing book of
Wodehouse’s early period is PSMITH IN THE CITY. Mike Jackson’s father has
suddenly lost his money, and Mike, like Wodehouse himself, is thrust at the age of about
eighteen into an ill-paid subordinate job in a bank. Psmith is similarly employed, though
not from financial necessity. Both this book and PSMITH, JOURNALIST (1915) are
unusual in that they display a certain amount of political consciousness. Psmith at this
stage chooses to call himself a Socialist-in his mind, and no doubt in Wodehouse’s, this
means no more than ignoring class distinctions-and on one occasion the two boys attend
an open-air meeting on Clapham Common and go home to tea with an elderly Socialist
orator, whose shabby-genteel home is described with some accuracy. But the most
striking feature of the book is Mike’s inability to wean himself from the atmosphere of
school. He enters upon his job without any pretence of enthusiasm, and his main desire is
not, as one might expect, to find a more interesting and useful job, but simply to be
playing cricket. When he has to find himself lodgings he chooses to settle at Dulwich,
because there he will be near a school and will be able to hear the agreeable sound of the
ball striking against the bat. The climax of the book comes when Mike gets the chance to
play in a county match and simply walks out of his job in order to do so. The point is that
Wodehouse here sympathises with Mike: indeed he identified himself with him, for it is
clear enough that Mike bears the same relation to Wodehouse as Julien Sorel to Stendhal.
But he created many other heroes essentially similar. Through the books of this and the
next period there passes a whole series of young men to whom playing games and
“keeping fit” are a sufficient life-work. Wodehouse is almost incapable of imagining a
desirable job. The great thing is to have money of your own, or, failing that, to find a
sinecure. The hero of SOMETHING FRESH (1915) escapes from low-class journalism
by becoming physical-training instructor to a dyspeptic millionaire: this is regarded as a
step up, morally as well as financially.
In the books of the third period there is no narcissism and no serious interludes, but the
implied moral and social background has changed much less than might appear at first
sight. If one compares Bertie Wooster with Mike, or even with the rugger-playing
prefects of the earliest school stories, one sees that the only real difference between them
is that Bertie is richer and lazier. His ideals would be almost the same as theirs, but he
fails to live up to them. Archie Moffam, in THE INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE (1921),
is a type intermediate between Bertie and the earlier heroes: he is an ass, but he is also
honest, kind-hearted, athletic and courageous. From first to last Wodehouse takes the
public-school code of behaviour for granted, with the difference that in his later, more
sophisticated period he prefers to show his characters violating it or living up to it against
their will:
“Bertie! You wouldn’t let down a pal? ” “Yes, 1 would. ” “But we were at school together,
Bertie. ” “I don’t care. ” “The old school, Bertie, the old school! ” “Oh, well — dash it! ”
Bertie, a sluggish Don Quixote, has no wish to tilt at windmills, but he would hardly
think of refusing to do so when honour calls. Most of the people whom Wodehouse
intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but
very few of them could be described as immoral. Even Ukridge is a visionary rather than
a plain crook. The most immoral, or rather un-moral, of Wodehouse ’s characters is
Jeeves, who acts as a foil to Bertie Wooster’s comparative high-mindedness and perhaps
symbolises the widespread English belief that intelligence and unscrupulousness are
much the same thing. How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be
seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke.
This is an enonnous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make. Not only are there no dirty
jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations: the horns-on-the-forehead motif
is almost completely avoided. Most of the full-length books, of course, contain a “love
interest”, but it is always at the light-comedy level: the love affair, with its complications
and its idyllic scenes, goes on and on, but, as the saying goes “nothing happens”. It is
significant that Wodehouse, by nature a writer of farces, was able to collaborate more
than once with lan Hay, a serio-comic writer and an exponent (VIDE PIP, etc) of the
“clean-living Englishman” tradition at its silliest.
In SOMETHING FRESH Wodehouse had discovered the comic possibilities of the
English aristocracy, and a succession of ridiculous but, save in a very few instances, not
actually contemptible barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This had the
rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded, outside England, as a
penetrating satirist of English society. Hence Flannery’s statement that Wodehouse
“made fun of the English,” which is the impression he would probably make on a
Gennan or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I was
discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended Wodehouse warmly. He
took it for granted that Wodehouse HAD gone over to the enemy, which from his own
point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find that he
regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up
the British aristocracy in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be very
difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of the way in which books,
especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience.
For it is clear enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either.
On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his
work. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or
James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an English reader can
see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John
Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking
the social hierarchy. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so
much. Wodehouse’s attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude
towards the public-school moral code — a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking
acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity,
and Bertie Wooster’s helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant
ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and
others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already
and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie
Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any
English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and
Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people
than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost
without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious:
their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges
the social gap by addressing everyone as “Comrade”.
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived
in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the
“knut” of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as “Gilbert the Filbert” or
“Reckless Reggie of the Regent’s Palace”. The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about
by preference, the life of the “clubman” or “man about town”, the elegant young man
who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in
his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen- twenties. It is significant that
Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. For who
was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But
the traditional “knut”, the “Piccadilly Johnny”, OUGHT to wear spats, just as the
pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up
to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them
with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England
during the sixteen years that preceded his intermnent. His picture of English society had
been formed before 1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture.
Nor did he ever become genuinely americanised. As I have pointed out, spontaneous
Americanisms do occur in the books of the middle period, but Wodehouse remained
English enough to find American slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He
loves to thrust a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English (“With a
hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me and went out into the night”), and
expressions like “a piece of cheese” or “bust him on the noggin” lend themselves to this
purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any American contacts, and
his use of garbled quotations is a common device of English writers running back to
Fielding. As Mr John Hayward has pointed out, * Wodehouse owes a good deal to his
knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare. His books are aimed, not,
obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines.
When, for instance, he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus
might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his
readers will know something of Greek mythology. In his early days the writers he
admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F.
Anstey, and he has remained closer to them than to the quickmoving American comic
writers such as Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon. In his radio interview with Flannery,
Wodehouse wondered whether “the kind of people and the kind of England I write about
will live after the war”, not realising that they were ghosts already. “He was still living in
the period about which he wrote,” says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-
twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever
existed, was killed round about 1915.
* “P. G. Wodehouse” by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942. ) I believe this is the
only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse. (Author’s footnote. )
If my analysis of Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously
aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He MAY
have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for
release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised
that what he did would be damaging to British interests. As I have tried to show, his
moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-
school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins. But how
could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans
and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must
take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse’s complete lack — so far as one can
judge from his printed works — of political awareness.
It is nonsense to talk of “Fascist
tendencies” in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work
there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered
through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to
Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a
Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging
in the U. S. S. R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and,
considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s
political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I
know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism. ” In left-wing circles,
indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any
truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the
war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a
decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought
to remember, remained anjsthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain,
China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply
slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners
and “not our business. ” One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the
ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was
bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in
Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better infonned, or more interested in
politics, than the general run of his readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at
just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now,
but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any
fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting
that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour
Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of
course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France
collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that
Britain was to be “reduced to degradation and poverty”. By the middle of 1941 the
British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far
fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his
captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the
war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On
several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the
microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They
attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was
afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have
provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty
requirements of propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant —
the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U. S. S. R. ,
and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion
was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as
possible, and in fact, about this time, the Gennan attitude towards the U. S. A. did become
more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat
Russia, Britain and the U. S. A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly
— and presumably they expected to do so — the Americans might never intervene. The
release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the
American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the
Gennans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made
fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he
could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release
would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their
enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that
Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to
expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two
years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was
not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their
own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the
disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism
and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able
journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and
“Cassandra’s” articles in the DAILY MIRROR, were good examples of the demagogic
propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal
whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse —
as “Cassandra” vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the
kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to
the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say,
Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not OF
the possessing class. Even if his income touches £50,000 a year he has only the outward
semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only
time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was
sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-
European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a
European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit
betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited
whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the
football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering
yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me
when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests
were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of
them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my
mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got
out of it the better. Theoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese
and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it
more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work
of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of
the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks
of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an
intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and
ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British
Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger
empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my
hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who
tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British
Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saecutorum,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy
in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like
these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you
can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a
tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the
real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which despotic governments act.
Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town
rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would
I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I
wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my
rifle, an old . 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the
noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told
me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame
one which had gone "must. " It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are
when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain
and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that
state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in
the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against
it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some
fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and,
when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and
inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We
began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual,
failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of
events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in
one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to
have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud,
scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant! " and an old woman with a
switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of
naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming;
evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded
the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black
Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The
people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the
hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms
crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the
eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable
agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I
have seen looked devilish. ) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the
skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I
sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already
sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the
elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the
paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically
the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They
had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the
elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely
ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a
bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the
meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always
unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and
feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across,
not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took
not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass,
beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery--and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully
eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I
think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would
merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him.
Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him
for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the
road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the
garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the
elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a
conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in
my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to
do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it
was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped
the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the
white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly
the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that
when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes
a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the
condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and
so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a
mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed
myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has
got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that
way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh
at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle
not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It
seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not
squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted
to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal. ) Besides, there was the
beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred
pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.
But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving.
They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot;
if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back.
But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle
and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the
elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad
under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin,
only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd
watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had
been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in
general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went
wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and
reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was
quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay
down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low,
happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from
innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was
a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting
an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-
hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at
his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would
be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one never does
when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the
crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the
bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He
neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly
stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time--it
might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second
shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was
the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock
the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to
rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a
huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the
first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up.
