But Enough About You: Essays (38 page)

Among those who howled for his head on a pike were A. A. Milne, creator of Pooh and Tigger, and somewhat more consequentially, Winston Churchill. Among his defenders were Dorothy Sayers, Compton MacKenzie, George Orwell, and Malcolm Muggeridge, the young British intelligence officer sent by MI6 after liberation to debrief Wodehouse and decide if he should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Muggeridge became a great and true friend. On one visit, he brought along a writer named George Orwell, who took up Wodehouse’s case. Orwell pointed the finger of shame at the British left for making a whipping boy out of Wodehouse for the crime of being identified with aristocratic nincompoops. The irony there was rich indeed, for Wodehouse was singularly devoid of English snobbism and class-consciousness, a trait that made him such a natural adopted American. As Ratcliffe asserts, he was the first truly Anglo-American author.

The broadcasts scandal cast a pall over much of the remainder of his life. Mutatis mutandis, it was to Wodehouse what the Queensbury libel suit was to Oscar Wilde—ruinous and life-altering. He never again set foot on British soil for fear of prosecution; but unlike the self-doomed Wilde, he pulled up his socks, spat on both palms,
and went back to work—not that he’d ever stopped. He wrote three novels and countless short stories while a guest of the Reich.

He was cleared of treason by MI5 and MI6, both of which had swiftly concluded that he was simply a political naïf whose only crime was deplorable judgment. But—damningly—the document attesting to his innocence remained under seal until 1965; and was made public only in 1980, five years after his death. Shame, Britannia!

Once his usefulness as a tool had ended, the Nazis moved him in 1943 from Berlin to occupied Paris, along with Ethel and Wonder the Peke. Paree was rather less than gay. In a letter written after the city’s liberation, during which 1,500 resistance fighters were killed, he wrote: “It was all very exciting, but no good to me from a writing point of view.” His aloofness can at times be frustrating.

In 1921, during the national emergency in Britain, he wrote, “This darned coal-strike is a nuisance.” But as Ratcliffe avers, “Political events were marginal to his imaginative life—the imperative was to avoid disturbance of any kind.” Plum. Just. Didn’t. Get. It. But the twentieth century could be insistent and hard to ignore.

After liberation, he was arrested by the suspicious French, who were now in a froth of Jacobinical
épuration
(purification), rounding up and shooting collaborators and shaving the heads of women who’d dallied with
les Boches
. He was sent to a harsh transit camp outside Paris that the previous Vichy government had used to process French Jewry on their way to Auschwitz and other charnel houses. They were,
ça va sans dire
, unperturbed by this inconvenient historical detail.

They put him in detention in a—maternity ward. Thus the great comic writer began World War II in a lunatic asylum and ended it amid squalling French newborns. You can’t make this stuff up. His treatment there was harsh enough that even his old nemesis Churchill was moved to suggest that “the French are overdoing things about P. G. Wodehouse.”

Eventually the French did what they do so well, which is to say, shrug, and released him. He and Ethel found digs two doors down from the ghastly, celebrated Nazi sympathizers the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor. Wodehouse wrote to a friend with bemusement, “no doubt [they’ll] be dropping in all the time.” They didn’t; too bad—it might have made for a good letter or two.

His name might stink back in Old Blighty, but he was still P. G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Bertie, Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings, Ukridge and Psmith, and he was still beloved. Friends and admirers from all over sent letters and packages, among them Plum’s old collaborator Ira Gershwin. Wodehouse wrote to a friend:

There is a mysterious Arab gentleman who calls from time to time with offerings. He has just come and fixed us up with a great chunk of mutton. And a rabbit! Also a Dane (unknown to me) has sent us an enormous parcel, the only trouble being that all the contents are labeled in Danish, so we don’t know what they are. There are three large tins which I hold contain bacon, but Ethel, who is in a pessimistic mood today owing to a bad night, says that they are stuff for cleaning floors. But surely even the most erratic Dane wouldn’t send us stuff for cleaning floors.

He and Ethel eventually found their way out of France to America, a process so complicated and prolonged that it makes Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid’s escape from Casablanca seem like a whiz through the EZ Pass lane. They arrived in New York on the SS
America
, along with fellow passenger Mary Martin of future
Peter Pan
fame.

Wodehouse had fallen in in love with America on his first visit in 1904, an experience he described as “like being in heaven without having to go to all the bother and expense of dying.” He became a citizen in 1955 and spent the balance of his formerly hectic life in relative peace and quiet in Remsenburg, Long Island, where he banged out novel after novel, did his Daily Dozen exercises and six-mile walk, cuddled with his Pekes, quietly despaired of the coarseness of modern culture (while writing for
Playboy
), and became addicted to
soap operas. His special favorites were
The Edge of Night
and
The Secret Storm
. He declared
The Dick Van Dyke Show
“the best thing on TV.”

In his final years, he received two great honors: a wax likeness in Madame Tussaud’s and a knighthood from the queen, who as a young girl had steeped in his novels. The knighthood was bestowed
in absentia
. It came too late. Not that he wasn’t tickled by this
vernissage
—or perhaps more bemused—but for the most part he was really past caring.

To his publisher, a chap with the—as the Hitch would surely put it—unimprovable name of J. D. Grimsdick, he wrote:

I am trying to decide whether I would advise a young man to become a knight. The warm feeling it gives one in the pit of the stomach is fine, but oh God those interviewers. They came round like flies, and practically all of them half-wits. I was asked by one of them what my latest book was about. “It’s a Jeeves novel,” I said. “And what is a Jeeves novel?” he enquired. Thank goodness they have left me now, including the one who printed, “I don’t understand why authors receive knighthoods,” when I said refuse knighthoods. Alters the sense a bit, what?

Walk into any bookstore these days and one finds yard upon yard of Wodehouse, much of it in fresh editions. Why is he so imperishable, fresh as a Wooster boutonnière, when so many other writers of his generation have vanished, long since past their sell-by date? A writer with an eye to literary immortality would do well to consider the Wodehousean oeuvre.

It’s not rocket science. The Master revealed the secret himself in a 1935 letter to Bill Townend, his old Dulwich school chum and the recipient of most of the letters here. It was a question, he said, of “making the thing frankly a fairy story and ignoring real life altogether.” Wodehouse’s admirer and defender Evelyn Waugh framed it perfectly; or as Jeeves might say, quoting Plautus,
Rem acu tetigisti
. (“You have hit the nail on the head.”)

In an appreciation of Wodehouse in 1939—a year before the fateful arrival of the German army in Le Touquet—Waugh observed of Wodehouse’s characters:

We do not concern ourselves with the economic implications of their position; we are not skeptical about their quite astonishing celibacy. We do not expect them to grow any older, like the Three Musketeers or the Forsytes. We are not interested in how they would ‘react to changing social conditions’ as publishers’ blurbs invite us to be interested in other sagas. They are untroubled by wars [. . .] They all live, year after year, in their robust middle twenties; their only sickness is an occasional hangover. It is a world that cannot become dated because it has never existed.

That last sentence nails it: Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Psmith, and the rest inhabit an alternative universe, Platonically apart from any real one. In Bertie’s world, the most formidable menace is an inheritance-controlling, match-making aunt. (Not, mind you, that this species
isn’t
terrifying.)

“I sometimes feel,” Wodehouse wrote Townend in 1933, “as if I were a case of infantilism. I seem mentally so exactly as I was then [at school]. All my ideas and ideals are the same. I still think the Bedford [cricket] match is the most important thing in the world.”

A decade later, he was writing to Townend after his release from the internment camp, where he had lost sixty pounds and where conditions were such that some of the other internees committed suicide: “Camp was really great fun.” Such blitheness might just be unique in the annals of internment camp literature. And Wodehouse might just be the only English writer who appears to have enjoyed every single moment of boarding school.
That’s
aloofness.

But as Ratcliffe notes, the tone of the letter, and indeed of the five fatal broadcasts, was “typically Wodehousian. From Dulwich days onwards, the notion of mentioning hardship was, for him, the ultimate in ‘bad form.’ In times of crisis, cheerfulness was seen as a vital, even patriotic, virtue.”

That insight is well on display today on this side of the herring pond, in the recent profusion of refrigerator magnets embossed with the British war slogan:
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.
Wodehouse certainly did that. One of his greatest literary heroes—along with Kipling and Conan Doyle—was W. S. Gilbert, author of the refrain, “For he is an Englishman.”

In 1960, on the occasion of Wodehouse’s eightieth year, tributes poured in from the high priests of English literature: W. H. Auden, Nancy Mitford, James Thurber, Lionel Trilling, John Updike. Waugh laid a garland eloquent of Wodehouse’s immortality: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”

What fun, then, in light of that aperçu, to find Wodehouse in these pages writing in 1946 to Compton MacKenzie (author of
Whisky Galore
) from glum, postwar Paree, fretting over the reception of his next Jeeves novels in America: “I think they’re all pretty funny, but, my gosh, how obsolete!” As Jeeves might respond after softly clearing his throat,
With all respect, sir, I might incline to an alternative view?

In the final pages of this narrative hybrid of letters and biography, Wodehouse himself seems not entirely unaware of his future durability. One letter contains a lovely rumination on the subject of “the knut.” What on earth, you ask, is a “knut”? Well, Bertie Wooster was a knut, par excellence: a second son of an earl or other nobleman, equipped with a monthly allowance providing a perfectly happy, if somewhat pointless existence.

“Like the lilies of the field,” Wodehouse writes of the knut and his ilk, “they toiled not neither did they spin, they just existed beautifully . . . Then the economic factor reared its ugly head. Income tax and super tax shot up like rocketing pheasants, and . . . Algy had to go to work.”

And so ended a nifty, golden era. “It is sad to reflect,” he adds, “that a generation has arisen which does not know what spats were.” There is not one speck, not one nanogram of irony in that statement.

He closes that letter on a hopeful, which is to say, quintessentially Wodehousian note:

But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival of knuttery . . . the heart of Young England is sound. Dangle a consignment of spats before his eyes, and the old fires will be renewed. The knut is not dead, but sleepeth. When that happens, I shall look my critics in the eye and say, “Edwardian? Where do you get that Edwardian stuff? I write about life as it is lived today.”

Couldn’t have put it so well myself, sir. Will there be anything else?

—
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
, December 2012

According to the
The Washington Post
, about sixteen thousand books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, whose two hundredth birthday we celebrate this week. Several thousand more are coming out this week, among them:

Team of Weevils
, by Samantha Ort. Ort, author of several revisionist books, including
Churchill the Tyrant
and
Hitler, Peacemaker
, posits that Lincoln’s cabinet was actually a hotbed of back-stabbing, name-calling, and even, on one occasion, a shoving match that left Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase with a bloodied nose after he called War Secretary Edwin Stanton a “hemorrhoid-faced poltroon.” Navy Secretary Gideon Welles broke up the fight by threatening to dispatch an ironclad to bombard Stanton’s house. Ort writes: “The real civil war was taking
place not on the killing fields of Virginia, but on the ground floor of the White House.” Her assertion that Lincoln was “passed out drunk” during cabinet meetings may cause some grumbling in certain quarters.

Mary Quite Contrary
, by Herbert Donald David. David, author of twenty-seven books of Lincolniana, now says that there is “persuasive evidence” that Mary Todd Lincoln was in fact a man. “If you look closely at the photographs,” David writes, “it’s
way
obvious. The face, the hands, they couldn’t possibly have been those of a woman. The intriguing part is how she was able to conceal the fact from her husband all those years.” Intriguing, indeed. David asserts that the Lincoln children, Tad and Willie, were actually born to a Danish housekeeper named Hagnar, whom “Mary”—whose birth name was allegedly Obadiah—was at pains to keep out of sight.

Dream of the Father
, by William Smuntz. Smuntz, who was physically ejected from the American Genealogical Society in 2002 for his monograph proposing that George W. Bush is related to Albert Einstein, now says there is “overwhelming” evidence that President Barack Obama is a direct lineal descendant of Abraham Lincoln. Citing the conveniently only-recently unearthed memoirs of a White House gardener, he claims that Lincoln had an affair with “a fetching and willing” upstairs housemaid named Merrie Christmas. In this telling, Lincoln was “at a low point, both in the progress of the war and in his personal life, having just discovered that his wife was in fact a man,” and thus “sought solace in the arms of the comely and willing Merrie.” When Merrie became pregnant, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay quietly arranged for her to be sent to Kenya, but said presciently, “I suspect this will not be the last of it.”