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
public school 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 public school 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 a
greeable 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, I 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 enormous 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 Ian 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 German
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 publi
sh 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 internment. 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, [Note, below] 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 quick moving 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.
[Note: "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
Fifty Orwell Essays Page 48