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George Orwell in Defence of PG Wodehouse
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Buy Books by PG Wodehouse
When the Germans 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 F�hrer." The main charge
was that Wodehouse had agreed to do German 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:
"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. ... 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. ... 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. ... 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 ...
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. ... 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. ... 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.
...
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. ... 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 na�ve,
traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. ... His books are aimed, not,
obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional
lines. ... 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.
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
anaesthetic 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 informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his
readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be
taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We
forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had been
noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was
unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise
peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over the
country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of course, things
changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed,
Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain
was to be "reduced to degradation and poverty." By the middle of 1941
the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy
were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in
internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had
missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms
of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the
Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them
made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted no attention,
however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was afterwards to arouse
much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an
elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable
answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost
certainly significant -- the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days
before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the
Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally
necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about
this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory
than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain
and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly --
and presumably they expected to do so -- the Americans might never intervene.
The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to
throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and
he was -- or so the Germans calculated -- popular with the Anglophobe public as
a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his
monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one
way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good
fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was
the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about
a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were
at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely
upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the
common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were
discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a
social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing
sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists
were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and
"Cassandra's" articles in the Daily Mirror, were good
examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time. In this
atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that
the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse -- as "Cassandra" vigorously
pointed out in his broadcast -- was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man
who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the
structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say,
Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is
not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches £350,000 a
year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider
who has fluked into a fortune -- usually a very temporary fortune -- like the
winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave
a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to "expose" a wealthy
parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.
In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be
angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years
later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious
treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally
disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is
largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of
petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept
with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big
rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by
Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were
advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just
because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the
Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and
I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is
caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of
establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the
case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce
his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.
Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale
at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better
worth chasing.
Copyright George Orwell Esq 1946 |