One result of it was that numerous
lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse ’s books from circulation.
lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse ’s books from circulation.
Orwell
What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the
assumption in the writer’s mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it. “Since I know that
antisemitism is irrational,” he argues, “it follows that I do not share it. ” He thus fails to
start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable
evidence — that is, in his own mind.
It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now
almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not
everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be
antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned
upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in
an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in
modem civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of
believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy
any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming
upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can
feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are,
that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point
for any investigation of antisemitism should not be “Why does this obviously irrational
belief appeal to other people? ” but “Why does antisemitism appeal TO ME? What is
there about it that I feel to be true? ” If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s
own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them.
Antisemitism should be investigated — and I will not say by antisemites, but at any rate by
people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has
disappeared a real enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best
to start not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that
can be found, in one’s own mind or anybody else’s. In that way one might get some clues
that would lead to its psychological roots. But that antisemitism will be definitively
CURED, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.
FREEDOM OF THE PARK (1945)
A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park were arrested
by the police for obstruction. When taken before the magistartes, they were all found
guilty, four of them being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty
shillings fine or a month’s imprisonments. He preferred to serve his tenn.
The papers these people were selling were PEACE NEWS, FORWARD and FREEDOM,
besides other kindred literature. PEACE NEWS is the organ of the Peace Pledge Union,
FREEDOM (till recently called WAR COMMENTARY) is that of the Anarchists; as for
FORWARD, its politics defy definition, but at any rate it is violently Left. The
magistrate, in passing sentence, stated that he was not influenced by the nature of the
literature that was being sold; he was concerned merely with the fact of obstruction, and
that this offence had technically been committed.
This raises several important points. To begin with, how does the law stand on the
subject? As far as I can discover, selling newspapers in the street is technically an
obstruction, at any rate if you fail to move when the police tell you to. So it would be
legally possible for any policeman who felt like it to arrest any newsboy for selling the
EVENING NEWS. Obviously this doesn’t happen, so that the enforcement of the law
depends on the discretion of the police.
And what makes the police decide to arrest one man rather than another? However it may
be with the magistrate, I find it hard to believe that in this case the police were not
influenced by political considerations. It is a bit too much of a coincidence that they
should have picked on people selling just those papers.
If they had also arrested someone selling TRUTH, or the TABLET, or the SPECTATOR,
or even the CHURCH TIMES, their impartiality would be easier to believe in.
The British police are not like the continental GENDARMERIE or Gestapo, but I do not
think [sic] one maligns them in saying that, in the past, they have been unfriendly to Left-
wing activities. They have generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they
regarded as the defenders of private property. Till quite recently “red” and “illegal” were
almost synonymous, and it was always the seller of, say the DAILY WORKER, never the
seller of say, the DAILY TELEGRAPH, who was moved on and generally harassed.
Apparently it can be the same, at any rate at moments, under a Labour Government.
A thing I would like to know — it is a thing we hear very little about — is what changes
are made in the administrative personnel when there has been a change of government. .
Does a police officer who has a vague notion that “Socialism” means something against
the law carry on just the same when the government itself is Socialist?
When a Labour government takes over, I wonder what happens to Scotland Yard Special
Branch? To Military Intelligence? We are not told, but such symptoms as there are do not
suggest that any very extensive shuffling is going on.
However, the main point of this episode is that the sellers of newspapers and pamphlets
should be interfered with at all. Which particular minority is singled out — whether
Pacifists, Communists, Anarchists, Jehovah’s Witness of the Legion of Christian
Reformers who recently declared Hitler to be Jesus Christ — is a secondary matter. It is of
symptomatic importance that these people should have been arrested at that particular
spot. You are not allowed to sell literature inside Hyde Park, but for many years past it
has been usual for the paper-sellers to station themselves outside the gates and distribute
literature connected with the open air meetings a hundred yards away. Every kind of
publication has been sold there without interference.
The degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is often over-rated.
Technically there is great freedom, but the fact that most of the press is owned by a few
people operates in much the same way as State censorship. On the other hand, freedom of
speech is real. On a platform, or in certain recognised open air spaces like Hyde Park,
you can say almost anything, and, what is perhaps more significant, no one is frightened
to utter his true opinions in pubs, on the tops of busses, and so forth.
The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law
is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the
police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people
are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law
forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even
if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual liberty has not been
so sharp as I would have predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still
there has been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a
hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the issue by not
distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion, and it is reflected in
our growing indifference to tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare
themselves to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is
their own adversaries who are being prosecutued.
I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling hannless newspapers is a
major calamity. When you see what is happening in the world today, it hardly seems
worth squeeling about such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good syptom that such
things should happen when the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the
long series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine
popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority press.
FUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANY (1945)
As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought
by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every
observer finds himself making. The first is: ‘The people at home have no conception of
this. ’ The second is, ‘It’s a miracle that they’ve gone on fighting. ’ And the third is, ‘Just
think of the work of building this all up again! ’
It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of Germany is even now not realised in
this country, and its share in the breaking-down of German resistance is probably much
underrated. It is difficult to give actuality to reports of air warfare and the man in the
street can be forgiven if he imagines that what we have done to Gennany over the past
four years is merely the same kind of thing they did to us in 1940.
But this error, which must be even commoner in the United States, has in it a potential
danger, and the many protests against indiscriminate bombing which have been uttered
by pacifists and humanitarians have merely confused the issue.
Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane,
which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon.
‘Normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and
enormously so of human lives.
Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population, whereas the men killed
in battle are exactly the ones that the community can least afford to lose. The people of
Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be
ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them; but what
they still have not grasped — thanks to their own comparative immunity — is the frightful
destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies
ahead of the world as a whole.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the
continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has
been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the
way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the
destruction is even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Mame and the
Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.
Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that the chances of
getting them within measurable time seem rather slender. But how many houses will
Gennany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy? When one thinks of the stupendous task
of rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realises that a long period must elapse
before even the standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.
We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to Germany but
judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is difficult to believe in the
power of the Germans to pay any kind of reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply
to re -house the German people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep
German agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been liberated, will
use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to dispose of.
If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for reconstruction work, the
recovery of Germany itself will be all the slower. After the last war, the impossibility of
obtaining substantial money reparations was finally grasped, but it was less generally
realised that the impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as
a whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural slum.
GOOD BAD BOOKS (1945)
Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a reprint of a
novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears, is going to reissue a long
series of minor and partly-forgotten novels of the twentieth century. It is a valuable
service in these bookless days, and I rather envy the person whose job it will be to scout
round the threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with
great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton
called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but
which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously
outstanding books in this line are RAFFLES and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which
have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and
“terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion. (Who has worn
better, Conan Doyle or Meredith? ) Almost in the same class as these I put R. Austin
Freeman’s earlier stories — “The Singing Bone” “The Eye of Osiris” and others — Ernest
Bramah’s MAX CARRADOS, and, dropping the standard a bit, Guy Boothby’s Tibetan
thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue’s TRAVELS IN TART ARY,
which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a dismal anticlimax.
But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the period. For
example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length books no longer seem readable — E.
Nesbit (THE TREASURE SEEKERS), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he
kept off politics, the pornographic Binstead (“Pitcher” of the PINK ‘UN), and, if
American books can be included, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. A cut above most
of these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain’s humorous writings are, I suppose, still in print,
but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must now be a very rare book —
THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in the macabre. Somewhat later in
time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote in the W. W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern
seaport towns, and who seems to be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having
been praised in print by H. G. Wells.
However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly “escape” literature. They
form pleasant patches in one’s memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd
moments, but they hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life. There is another
kind of good bad book which is more seriously intended, and which tells us, I think,
something about the nature of the novel and the reasons for its present decadence. During
the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers — some of them are still
writing — whom it is quite impossible to call “good” by any strictly literary standard, but
who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not
inhibited by good taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W. L. George, J. D.
Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and — at a lower level than the others but still
essentially similar — A. S. M. Hutchinson.
Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally varied in quality. I
am thinking in each case of one or two outstanding books: for example, Merrick’s
CYNTHIA, J. D. Beresford’s A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH, W. L. George’s CALIBAN,
May Sinclair’s THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED.
In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself with his imagined
characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of
abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the
fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a
music-hall comedian.
Take, for example, Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED — a peculiarly sordid and
convincing murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think it gains a great deal
from the fact that the author only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is
writing about, and therefore does not despise them. Perhaps it even — like Theodore
Dreiser’s An AMERICAN TRAGEDY — gains something from the clumsy long-winded
manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection,
and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up. So also with A
CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH. Here there is not the same clumsiness, but there is the same
ability to take seriously the problems of commonplace people. So also with CYNTHIA
and at any rate the earlier part of Caliban. The greater part of what W. L. George wrote
was shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of Northcliffe, he
achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of lower-middle-class London life. Parts
of this book are probably autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers
is their lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane
of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative gift may suffer.
The existence of good bad literature — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even
moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that
art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised,
Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has
remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to
write in plain straightforward English. In novelists, almost as much as in poets, the
connection between intelligence and creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist
may be a prodigy of self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like
Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into
Wyndham Lewis’s so-called novels, such as TARR or SNOOTY BARONET. Yet it
would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable
quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES,
is absent from them.
Perhaps the supreme example of the “good bad” book is UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. It is an
unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also
deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other.
But UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real
world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and “light”
humour? How about SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN’S
BABIES or KING SOLOMON’S MINES? All of these are definitely absurd books,
books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken
seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do
so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction from
time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as
sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or
intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters
of the stuff that gets into the anthologies:
Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!
Or again:
Two lovely black eyes
Oh, what a surprise!
Only for calling another man wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!
I would far rather have written either of those than, say, “The Blessed Damozel” or
“Love in the Valley”. And by the same token I would back UNCLE TOM’S CABIN to
outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no
strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies.
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)
When the Gennans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of
1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living
throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have
realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into
captivity, he is said to have remarked, “Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book. ” He
was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it
appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the
neighbourhood frequently “dropping in for a bath or a party”.
Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released
from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the
public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a “non-
political” nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to
obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June
and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th
June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry
Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its
correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING
POST an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.
The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse’ s experiences in internment,
but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:
“I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent
feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of
chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings. ”
“A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they
sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. 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.
assumption in the writer’s mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it. “Since I know that
antisemitism is irrational,” he argues, “it follows that I do not share it. ” He thus fails to
start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable
evidence — that is, in his own mind.
It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now
almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not
everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be
antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned
upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in
an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in
modem civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of
believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy
any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming
upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can
feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are,
that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point
for any investigation of antisemitism should not be “Why does this obviously irrational
belief appeal to other people? ” but “Why does antisemitism appeal TO ME? What is
there about it that I feel to be true? ” If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s
own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them.
Antisemitism should be investigated — and I will not say by antisemites, but at any rate by
people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has
disappeared a real enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best
to start not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that
can be found, in one’s own mind or anybody else’s. In that way one might get some clues
that would lead to its psychological roots. But that antisemitism will be definitively
CURED, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.
FREEDOM OF THE PARK (1945)
A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park were arrested
by the police for obstruction. When taken before the magistartes, they were all found
guilty, four of them being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty
shillings fine or a month’s imprisonments. He preferred to serve his tenn.
The papers these people were selling were PEACE NEWS, FORWARD and FREEDOM,
besides other kindred literature. PEACE NEWS is the organ of the Peace Pledge Union,
FREEDOM (till recently called WAR COMMENTARY) is that of the Anarchists; as for
FORWARD, its politics defy definition, but at any rate it is violently Left. The
magistrate, in passing sentence, stated that he was not influenced by the nature of the
literature that was being sold; he was concerned merely with the fact of obstruction, and
that this offence had technically been committed.
This raises several important points. To begin with, how does the law stand on the
subject? As far as I can discover, selling newspapers in the street is technically an
obstruction, at any rate if you fail to move when the police tell you to. So it would be
legally possible for any policeman who felt like it to arrest any newsboy for selling the
EVENING NEWS. Obviously this doesn’t happen, so that the enforcement of the law
depends on the discretion of the police.
And what makes the police decide to arrest one man rather than another? However it may
be with the magistrate, I find it hard to believe that in this case the police were not
influenced by political considerations. It is a bit too much of a coincidence that they
should have picked on people selling just those papers.
If they had also arrested someone selling TRUTH, or the TABLET, or the SPECTATOR,
or even the CHURCH TIMES, their impartiality would be easier to believe in.
The British police are not like the continental GENDARMERIE or Gestapo, but I do not
think [sic] one maligns them in saying that, in the past, they have been unfriendly to Left-
wing activities. They have generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they
regarded as the defenders of private property. Till quite recently “red” and “illegal” were
almost synonymous, and it was always the seller of, say the DAILY WORKER, never the
seller of say, the DAILY TELEGRAPH, who was moved on and generally harassed.
Apparently it can be the same, at any rate at moments, under a Labour Government.
A thing I would like to know — it is a thing we hear very little about — is what changes
are made in the administrative personnel when there has been a change of government. .
Does a police officer who has a vague notion that “Socialism” means something against
the law carry on just the same when the government itself is Socialist?
When a Labour government takes over, I wonder what happens to Scotland Yard Special
Branch? To Military Intelligence? We are not told, but such symptoms as there are do not
suggest that any very extensive shuffling is going on.
However, the main point of this episode is that the sellers of newspapers and pamphlets
should be interfered with at all. Which particular minority is singled out — whether
Pacifists, Communists, Anarchists, Jehovah’s Witness of the Legion of Christian
Reformers who recently declared Hitler to be Jesus Christ — is a secondary matter. It is of
symptomatic importance that these people should have been arrested at that particular
spot. You are not allowed to sell literature inside Hyde Park, but for many years past it
has been usual for the paper-sellers to station themselves outside the gates and distribute
literature connected with the open air meetings a hundred yards away. Every kind of
publication has been sold there without interference.
The degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is often over-rated.
Technically there is great freedom, but the fact that most of the press is owned by a few
people operates in much the same way as State censorship. On the other hand, freedom of
speech is real. On a platform, or in certain recognised open air spaces like Hyde Park,
you can say almost anything, and, what is perhaps more significant, no one is frightened
to utter his true opinions in pubs, on the tops of busses, and so forth.
The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law
is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the
police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people
are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law
forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even
if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual liberty has not been
so sharp as I would have predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still
there has been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a
hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the issue by not
distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion, and it is reflected in
our growing indifference to tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare
themselves to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is
their own adversaries who are being prosecutued.
I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling hannless newspapers is a
major calamity. When you see what is happening in the world today, it hardly seems
worth squeeling about such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good syptom that such
things should happen when the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the
long series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine
popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority press.
FUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANY (1945)
As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought
by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every
observer finds himself making. The first is: ‘The people at home have no conception of
this. ’ The second is, ‘It’s a miracle that they’ve gone on fighting. ’ And the third is, ‘Just
think of the work of building this all up again! ’
It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of Germany is even now not realised in
this country, and its share in the breaking-down of German resistance is probably much
underrated. It is difficult to give actuality to reports of air warfare and the man in the
street can be forgiven if he imagines that what we have done to Gennany over the past
four years is merely the same kind of thing they did to us in 1940.
But this error, which must be even commoner in the United States, has in it a potential
danger, and the many protests against indiscriminate bombing which have been uttered
by pacifists and humanitarians have merely confused the issue.
Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane,
which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon.
‘Normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and
enormously so of human lives.
Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population, whereas the men killed
in battle are exactly the ones that the community can least afford to lose. The people of
Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be
ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them; but what
they still have not grasped — thanks to their own comparative immunity — is the frightful
destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies
ahead of the world as a whole.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the
continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has
been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the
way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the
destruction is even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Mame and the
Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.
Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that the chances of
getting them within measurable time seem rather slender. But how many houses will
Gennany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy? When one thinks of the stupendous task
of rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realises that a long period must elapse
before even the standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.
We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to Germany but
judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is difficult to believe in the
power of the Germans to pay any kind of reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply
to re -house the German people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep
German agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been liberated, will
use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to dispose of.
If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for reconstruction work, the
recovery of Germany itself will be all the slower. After the last war, the impossibility of
obtaining substantial money reparations was finally grasped, but it was less generally
realised that the impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as
a whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural slum.
GOOD BAD BOOKS (1945)
Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a reprint of a
novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears, is going to reissue a long
series of minor and partly-forgotten novels of the twentieth century. It is a valuable
service in these bookless days, and I rather envy the person whose job it will be to scout
round the threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with
great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton
called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but
which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously
outstanding books in this line are RAFFLES and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which
have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and
“terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion. (Who has worn
better, Conan Doyle or Meredith? ) Almost in the same class as these I put R. Austin
Freeman’s earlier stories — “The Singing Bone” “The Eye of Osiris” and others — Ernest
Bramah’s MAX CARRADOS, and, dropping the standard a bit, Guy Boothby’s Tibetan
thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue’s TRAVELS IN TART ARY,
which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a dismal anticlimax.
But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the period. For
example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length books no longer seem readable — E.
Nesbit (THE TREASURE SEEKERS), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he
kept off politics, the pornographic Binstead (“Pitcher” of the PINK ‘UN), and, if
American books can be included, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. A cut above most
of these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain’s humorous writings are, I suppose, still in print,
but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must now be a very rare book —
THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in the macabre. Somewhat later in
time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote in the W. W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern
seaport towns, and who seems to be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having
been praised in print by H. G. Wells.
However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly “escape” literature. They
form pleasant patches in one’s memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd
moments, but they hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life. There is another
kind of good bad book which is more seriously intended, and which tells us, I think,
something about the nature of the novel and the reasons for its present decadence. During
the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers — some of them are still
writing — whom it is quite impossible to call “good” by any strictly literary standard, but
who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not
inhibited by good taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W. L. George, J. D.
Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and — at a lower level than the others but still
essentially similar — A. S. M. Hutchinson.
Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally varied in quality. I
am thinking in each case of one or two outstanding books: for example, Merrick’s
CYNTHIA, J. D. Beresford’s A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH, W. L. George’s CALIBAN,
May Sinclair’s THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED.
In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself with his imagined
characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of
abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the
fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a
music-hall comedian.
Take, for example, Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED — a peculiarly sordid and
convincing murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think it gains a great deal
from the fact that the author only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is
writing about, and therefore does not despise them. Perhaps it even — like Theodore
Dreiser’s An AMERICAN TRAGEDY — gains something from the clumsy long-winded
manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection,
and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up. So also with A
CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH. Here there is not the same clumsiness, but there is the same
ability to take seriously the problems of commonplace people. So also with CYNTHIA
and at any rate the earlier part of Caliban. The greater part of what W. L. George wrote
was shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of Northcliffe, he
achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of lower-middle-class London life. Parts
of this book are probably autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers
is their lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane
of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative gift may suffer.
The existence of good bad literature — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even
moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that
art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised,
Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has
remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to
write in plain straightforward English. In novelists, almost as much as in poets, the
connection between intelligence and creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist
may be a prodigy of self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like
Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into
Wyndham Lewis’s so-called novels, such as TARR or SNOOTY BARONET. Yet it
would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable
quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES,
is absent from them.
Perhaps the supreme example of the “good bad” book is UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. It is an
unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also
deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other.
But UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real
world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and “light”
humour? How about SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN’S
BABIES or KING SOLOMON’S MINES? All of these are definitely absurd books,
books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken
seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do
so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction from
time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as
sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or
intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters
of the stuff that gets into the anthologies:
Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!
Or again:
Two lovely black eyes
Oh, what a surprise!
Only for calling another man wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!
I would far rather have written either of those than, say, “The Blessed Damozel” or
“Love in the Valley”. And by the same token I would back UNCLE TOM’S CABIN to
outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no
strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies.
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)
When the Gennans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of
1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living
throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have
realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into
captivity, he is said to have remarked, “Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book. ” He
was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it
appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the
neighbourhood frequently “dropping in for a bath or a party”.
Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released
from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the
public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a “non-
political” nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to
obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June
and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th
June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry
Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its
correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING
POST an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.
The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse’ s experiences in internment,
but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:
“I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent
feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of
chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings. ”
“A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they
sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. 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.
