McCrum’s Wodehouse Owen Dudley Edwards ‘By a singular coincidence, ours is a golf story.’ ‘Ha! say you so?’ said the editor, a flicker of interest passing over his finely-chiselled features. ‘Then you may let me see it.’ He kicked us in the face, and we withdrew. Thus the immortal Wodehouse on the code governing writers’ approaches to editors, opening ‘The Coming of Gowf’ originally published in The Strand (May, 1921) and subsequently in The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922). But in our case the editor is Glaswegian. Concerning Glasgow, that great commercial and manufacturing city in the county of Lanarkshire in Scotland, much has been written. So lyrically does the Encyclopaedia Britannica deal with the place that it covers twenty-seven pages before it can tear itself away and go on to Glass, Glastonbury, Glatz and Glauber. The only aspect of it, however, which immediately concerns the present historian is the fact that the citizens it breeds are apt to be grim, dour, persevering, tenacious men; men with red whiskers who know what they want and mean to get it. That introduces the topic of the head gardener of Blandings Castle, Angus McAllister, to the reader of ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend’ (Strand, November 1928; Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935)).
After we had sent in our card and waited for a few hours in the marbled anteroom, a bell rang and the major-domo, parting the priceless curtains, ushered us in to where the editor sat writing at his desk. We advanced on all fours, knocking our head reverently on the Aubusson carpet. ‘Well?’ he said at length, laying down his jewelled pen. We just looked in,’ we said humbly, ‘to ask if it would be all right if we sent you an historical story.’ The public does not want historical stories,’ he said, frowning coldly. ‘Ah, but the public hasn’t seen one of ours!’ we replied. The editor placed a cigarette in a holder presented to him by a reigning monarch, and lit it with a match from a golden box, the gift of the millionaire president of the Amalgamated League of Working Plumbers. ‘What this magazine requires’, he said, ‘is redblooded, one-hundred-per-cent dynamic stuff, palpitating with warm human interest and containing a strong, poignant love-motive.’ That,’ we replied, ‘is us all over Mabel.’ What I need at the moment, however, is a golf story.’
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Our business today is with Wodehouse – a Life by Robert McCrum (Viking, £20). McCrum fulfils the clearest specifications of a Wodehouse reader as laid down in The Girl on the Boat (1922), chapter XVII (and last), opening lines: If there is one thing more than another which weighs upon the mind of a story-teller as he chronicles the events which he has set out to describe, it is the thought that the reader may be growing impatient with him for straying from the main channel of his tale and devoting himself to what are, after all, minor developments. This story, for instance, opened with Mrs Horace Hignett, the world-famous writer on Theosophy, going over to America to begin a lecturing-tour; and no one realises more keenly than I do that I have left Mrs Hignett flat. I have thrust that great thinker into the background and concentrated my attention on the affairs of one who is both her mental and her moral inferior, Samuel Marlowe. I seem at this point to see the reader – a great brute of a fellow with beetling eyebrows and a jaw like the ram of a battleship, the sort of fellow who is full of determination and will stand no nonsense – rising to remark that he doesn’t care what happened to Samuel Marlowe and that what he
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wants to know is, how Mrs Hignett made out on her lecturing-tour. Did she go big in Buffalo? Did she have ‘em tearing up the seats at Schenectady? Was she a riot in Chicago and a cyclone in St Louis? Those are the points on which he desires information, or give him his money back. I cannot supply the information. And, before you condemn me, let me hastily add that the fault is not mine but that of Mrs Hignett herself. The fact is, she never went to Buffalo. Schenectady saw nothing of her. She did not get within a thousand miles of Chicago, nor did she penetrate to St Louis. For the very morning after her son Eustace sailed for England in the liner ‘Atlantic’, she happened to read in the paper one of those abridged passenger-lists which the journals of New York are in the habit of printing, and got a nasty shock when she saw that, among those whose society Eustace would enjoy during the voyage, was ‘Miss Wilhemina Bennett, daughter of J. Rufus Bennett of Bennett, Mandelbaum and Co.‘. And within five minutes of digesting this information, she was at her desk writing out telegrams cancelling all her engagements. Ironsouled as this woman was, her fingers trembled as she wrote. She had a vision of Eustace and the daughter of J. Rufus Bennett strolling together on moonlit decks, leaning over rails damp with sea-spray and, in short, generally starting the whole trouble all over again.
thought it not uninteresting, and the Times Literary Supplement told its readers that it was published by Alfred Tomkins Ltd. and contained 243 pp ... Then the novel is denounced by a Bishop and its name is made: to those (including himself) who declared Wodehouse a nostalgist for a long-dead world, we may point out that Cocktail Time if anything, appeared in 1958 a date if anything somewhat preceding the annual yearnings of Edinburgh Festival Fringe companies that somewhere, somehow they might get their production condemned by the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland preferably in the words in Cocktail Time which the Bishop uses to condemn Cocktail Time (‘obscene, immoral, shocking, impure, corrupt, shameless, graceless and depraved’). Nor was anachronism visibly shaking its few last grey hairs in treatment of the news value: In these days when practically anything from Guildford undertaker bitten in leg by Pekinese to Ronald Plumtree (11) falling off his bicycle in Walthamstow High Street can make the front page of the popular press as a big feature story with headlines of a size formerly reserved for announcing the opening of a world war, it was not to be expected that such an event would pass unnoticed.
The passage itself may inform the critic why Wodehouse survives so effortlessly into the postmodern age. To put it in his own terms, can one not see Derrida hissing to Haydon White out of the corner of his mouth that this is the sort of stuff to give the troops when they want to know why the reader is more worthy of investigation that the writer? Wodehouse was certainly the man to pass the postmodern before the race began: even in his youth he would have had Derrida suitably garnished in Gilbertian lyrics (‘If this be so, why Derridaderry’ &c). More immediately, he would have welcomed a demand for concealment of the author: he did not want to be written about, although he was too generous in spirit to complain about a good notice. Few writers, indeed, more aptly reported on reviewing conventions, as when in Cocktail Time he summarised the initial reception of a novel entitled Cocktail Time by Don Marquis, author of archy and mehitabel, speaking of poems: It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo. The Peebles Courier called it not unpromising, The Basingstoke Journal
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[Wodehouse was born in Guidlford and kept Pekinese.] The Bishop is not of course, the reader in a pure or Derrida sense: the reader is in fact the Bishop’s daughter whom the Bishop had found engrossed in what he presumed to be a work of devotion but which proved on closer inspection to be a novel entitled Cocktail Time. Peeping over her shoulder, he was able to read a paragraph or two. She had got, it should be mentioned, to the middle of Chapter 13. At 5-5 sharp be was wrenching the volume from her grasp, at 5-6 tottering from the room, at 5-10 in his study scrutinizing Chapter 13 to see if he had really seen what be had thought he had seen. He had. The Bishop not as Reader but as protagonist draws us back to Mrs Horace Hignett whose epiphany had been in 1922, and to the reader with whom Wodehouse equipped her. Despite the comparabilty of reactions the postmodernism of their situations varies: the Bishop is in a novel called Cocktail Time for the purpose of denouncing (ie. best-selling) another of the same name, indeed since his effect on the sales of the Cocktail Time he attacks will be that of Wodehouse’s name on the sales of the Cocktail Time he has written – that of transforming the sale from a trickle to a torrent – the Reader will (rightly if subconsciously) identify Wodehouse with Bishop status and sanctity. But the Reader of Wodehouse (not being the Bishop’s daughter invented by Wodehouse) remains effectively conjured on Chapter XVII of The Girl on the Boat. It is thus gratifying for the reader of McCrum’s Wodehouse to find from his picture that McCrum’s eyebrows beetle second to none, and that his jaw might make any battleship look to its laurels. His two sentences of autobiography beneath have a terseness in keeping with the Wodehouse specifications: ‘Robert McCrum is the author of several novels and two works of non-fiction. He is literary editor of the Observer and lives in London.’ As on a previous occasion McCrum presented as his credentials introducer to a new Penguin edition of Hot Water ([1932] 2000] that he was a Wodehouse ‘fan’ – the Reader, in fact, if in terms too human to be sufficiently Derrida. This was credential enough. If introduction was needed, McCrum’s faith alone made him a good choice: but no introduction is needed for a Wodehouse, and be the M. C. ever so fantastic, the Reader is left complaining about the delay, as Wodehouse implied about his own introduction to the short stories of his friend Bill Townend (who in fact badly needed the selling-pitch from his P. G.). The choice of novel was unwise in any case. Hot Water is one of the few Wodehouse novels which really turns on a last-minute unmasking (to the chagrin of the detective almost as much as that of the criminal), and so McCrum had to whisper – even to conceal – the denouement. As though in revenge, Hot Water produced a series of pitfalls for this biographer in his own text. Mrs Gedge is not ‘A fairly typical Wodehouse woman’ (pp. 198-99): she is in fact a crook in brilliant disguise crossed with a ruthless social climber probably inspired by Edith Wharton’s The
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Custom of the Country, whose equivalent figure ends the novel with her only regret being her divorce’s prevention of her becoming an American ambassador’s wife, also the burning ambition of Mrs Gedge. Mrs Gedge is also a blackmailer, bleeding (by means of his letter to his bootlegger) the prohibitionist Senator Ambrose Opal whom McCrum also reads as ‘another typical Wodehouse character from the1920s’: Wodehouse never again made use in his fiction of the corruption in US Congressional politics. McCrum says Hot Water was actually written just after Prohibition had been lifted’: it was written in 1931 and Prohibition was not repealed until December 1933. The Presidential election of 1932 arrayed the Democrats, committed to repeal Prohibition, against the Republicans, sworn to retain it. It looks very much as if Hot Water was a satire against Prohibition with a title Americans in 1932 would easily read as a sneer against the political opponents of alcohol. McCrum is committed to the consensus view that Wodehouse was wholly unpolitical: Prohibition made politicians out of many an apolitical, even those whose alcohol intake was as moderate as Wodehouse’s. But how apolitical was Wodehouse? And why should McCrum consense with consensibility? His back of jacket features encomia from Tom Sharpe and John Ie Carre, and no two major writers of the last half-century more tellingly flaunt their Wodehousian colours. Le Carre predicts that ‘as long as P. G. Wodehouse is read, this will be the seminal work of reference, the indispensable vade mecum and let us say at once that Le Carre has rung the bell and is entitled to the cigar or coconut according to choice. Sharpe sees the book as ‘head and shoulders above all previous biographers’. It is also true that McCrum stands on their heads and shoulders, but in so doing he has got more from them (and handsomely acknowledged it) than anyone would have imagined they provide. He also honours debts all Wodehouse students must have to two nonbiographers, Richard Usborne and N. T. P. Murphy. Usborne’s Wodehouse at Work (1961) does what it says, with small biographical knowledge and little critical pretension: it is indispensable in ways few of Wodehouse’s biographers or critics could even hope to be. Wodehouse’s greatness rests on the basis of Scott’s or Balzac’s or Dickens’s or Trollope’s: he was a workman. He did not even take the time off Scott did for law or public affairs, Dickens for performing his own works, Trollope for sanitising the Irish postal service or inventing the pillar-box. Jailed or quarantined, as he was by the Nazis, he simply went on writing his stint. Money in the Bank (1946) may be the funniest novel written in prison, all the more for having its central character based on one of his fellow-prisoners. Like Trollope, Wodehouse ultimately produced a writer’s report on his work; the letters to Townend reworked by writer and recipient. Readers interested in writing as a way of life find much to inspire their business in Performing Flea (1953) much as they can in Trollope’s Autobiography. Like Trollope also, Wodehouse died in harness: the title of Usborne’s revised book summed it up – Wodehouse at Work to the End (1976).
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Usborne showed his man creating and building characters; Colonel Murphy’s In Search of Blandings (1981, 1986) showed where they had come from, fastening on places and persons in Wodehouse’s life. McCrum makes excellent use of their findings, sometimes with insufficient improvement. McCrum, for instance, follows Murphy’s proof of Wodehouse’s aristocratic lineage and himself gives us Bertram de Wodehouse, serving with Edward I against the Scots, as origin of Bertram Wooster standing firm against Jeeves’s opposition to his benjoleile-playing by the thought that ‘his ancestors did dashed well at the Battle of Crecy’ (Thank You, Jeeves). Wodehouse brought inspiration from the Scottish wars to another character, but not on the same side as Bertram de Wodehouse: Lord Emsworth did not grind his teeth, for he was not given to that form of displaying emotion; but he leaped some ten inches into the air and dropped his pince-nez. And, though normally a fair-minded and reasonable man, well aware that modern earls must think twice before pulling the feudal stuff on their employees, he took on the forthright truculence of a large landowner of the early Norman period ticking off a serf. ‘Listen, McAllister! Listen to me! Either you send that girl away to-day or you can go yourself. I mean it!’ A curious expression came into Angus McAllister’s face – always excepting the occupied territories. It was the look of a man who has not forgotten Bannockburn, a man conscious of belonging to the country of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. He made Scotch noises at the back of his throat. ‘Y’r lorrudsheep will accept ma notis,’ he said, with formal dignity. ‘I’ll pay you a month’s wages in lieu of notice and you will leave this afternoon’, retorted Lord Emsworth with spirit.’ ‘Mphm!’ said Mr McAllister. (‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’, Strand, December 1924; Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935) Ultimately McAllister rescues Emsworth from a police arrest and Emsworth pleads with him to return, in a fine contribution to MacDiarmid’s revival of Lallans: Angus McAllister gazed woodenly at the tulips. ‘A’ weel,’ he said at length. ‘You will?’ cried Lord Emsworth joyfully.
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‘Splendid! Capital! Excellent!’ ‘A’ didna say I wud.’ ‘I thought you said “I will,”’ said his lordship, dashed. ‘I didna say “A’ Weel,”; I said “A’ weel,”‘ said Mr McAllister stiffly. ‘Meanin’ mebbe I might, mebbe not.‘ Lord Emsworth laid a trembling hand upon his shoulder. ‘McAllister, I will raise your salary.’ The beard twitched. ‘Dash it, I’ll double it!’ The eyebrows flickered. ‘McAllister ... Angus,’ said Lord Emsworth in a low voice. ‘Come back! The pumpkin needs you.’ And on that plea of Art for Art’s sake, McAllister returns (the quarrel having been about his cousin whom Emsworth’s son wants to marry and does), but that shrinks into insignificance beside the needs of the would-be prize pumpkin. Yet while McCrum proclaims Wodehouse’s selfmockery on aristocratic ancestry, he simply throws in that one Wodehouse won a baronetcy in 1611, another ‘secured a peerage in 1797; and, finally, a third was rewarded with the earldom of Kimberley in 1866’. It may be that McCrum is so disillusioned by the peers of pelf promoted in the twentieth century that he sees no need to ask why: but that earldom was given scarcely fifteen years before Wodehouse’s birth, and it’s fair to feel that a man who wrote about earls might be
influenced by having one given to the family so soon before his birth. Wodehouse was in fact a third cousin of Gladstone’s Colonial Secretary (in 1881 when he was born), an office retained in subsequent Liberal reigns until Wodehouse was thirteen when Kimberley became Rosebery’s Foreign Secretary). Wodehouse himself was of less well endowed parents, and hence knew little of the world of the great house until he was rich and famous, but if the Foreign Secretary is your third cousin,you are no more apolitical than Lord Emsworth was unlanded. You ignored the politics – or the land – until you felt you should take a look at it in case a spot of bother developed. Wodehouse toyed with a little Socialism in the Edwardian era (Psmith in the City (1910)) at a time
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when other youngsters in old Liberal families went in for it. McCrum notes a dedication of Meet Mr Mulliner (1927) to Asquith. There are one or two hilarious stories of idiotic wealthy young men making disastrous efforts to enter politics by skating on the thinnest of informational ice: in his ninetieth year Wodehouse produced a gorgeous episode in which Bertie Wooster tries to canvas a voter for the Tories (Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971)): I pressed her closely, or do I mean keenly. ‘You want taxes cut, don’t you?’ ‘I do.’ ‘And our foreign policy bumped up?’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘And our experts doubled and a stick of dynamite put under the pound? I’ll bet you do. Then vote for Ginger Winship, the man who with his hand on the helm of the ship of state will steer England to prosperity and happiness, bringing back once more the spacious days of Good Queen Bess.’ This was a line of talk that Jeeves had roughed out for my use. There was also some rather good stuff about this sceptred isle and this other Eden, demi-something, but I had forgotten it. ‘You can’t say that wouldn’t be nice’, I said. A moment before, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that she could look more like Aunt Agatha than she had been doing, but she now achieved this breathtaking feat. She sniffed, if not snorted, and spoke as follows: ‘Young man, don’t be idiotic. Hand on the helm of the ship of state, indeed! If Mr Winship performs the miracle of winning this election, which he won’t, he will be an ordinary humble back bencher, doing nothing more noteable than saying “Hear, hear” when his superiors are speaking and “Oh” and “Question” when the opposition have the floor. As’, she went on, ‘I shall if I win this election, as I intend to.’ And, at story’s end, she is clearly about to win it, Jeeves having persuaded the Tory candidate to withdraw in her favour. But not before Lord Sidcup, a Tory supporter, is hit in the eye with a potato, thus disposing of his intentions of standing in the Tory interest. Sidcup has inherited a peerage he has been proposing to relinquish to qualify for Commons election. But constant Wodehouse readers had already encountered him in 1938, as Roderick Spode, Fascist leader of the Saviours of Britain, making his repulsive debut in one of Wodehouse’s finest works, The Code of the Woosters. Ex-Fascists as Tory peers and possible candidates! Fairly hot stuff for the supposed non-politician. The Code of the Woosters is the most scathing attack produced by British fiction before World War II: in fact, it appeared less than a year before the outbreak of war. McCrum pursuing the consensus of Wodehousian apoliticism has to grasp that nettle first, and does so by telling us that the book in some ways (pg 250) ‘is as sublimely detached from reality as The Swoop!, but it also bears the imprint of the times in which it was written’. This is a bit like saying that
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Orwell’s 1984 ‘is as sublimely detached from reality as Animal Farm, but it also’ &c, &c. It may be dubious criticism but it is excellent conjuring. The Swoop (1909) was a hard-hitting early satire by Wodehouse which McCrum (p. 87) has already analysed with the acumen readers of his book have every reason to admire and love: the novel nominally recorded England under invasion but actually subverts the conventions of an odd little genre. In place of the customary North Sea naval engagement, the invaders arrive like day-trippers at Brighton, Lyme Regis and ‘the little Welsh waterubg okacem Llgxtpll’. As McCrum notes, the invasion-scare novels then growing fashionable were taken up by the sensationalist press baron Northcliffe; in fact, they were playing a subsidiary part in the coming of World War I. Wodehouse for good measure subverted the classic imperial novel for boys by having the Russian and German commanders lured into mutual hostilities by a Boy Scout. McCrum finds that much of its strength consisted of Wodehouse capitalising on his own knowledge of ‘Edwardian music halls and the Edwardian popular press’, In fact he showed how such star performers in War reporting as Edgar Wallace and Bart Kennedy pumped up chauvinist fever on what proved much less authority when pathfinding through home terrain. One can learn much today on The Swoop’s targets, and it is not reassuring to the usual picture of a benign Edwardian peace. McCrum hones into the novel’s ‘basic joke, a good one, ... that the English are indifferent to international politics until they impinge on the nation’s sporting prospects’. But what The Swoop tells us is how the media are gearing up to bring about an unwanted war. Wodehouse recorded a peace, but an increasingly self-doomed peace. How then can McCrum, less than 200 pages later, see The Swoop as ‘detached from reality’? Or rather, is McCrum playing a linguistic game as sophisticated as some of Wodehouse’s own? The Swoop pitched a fable into the real press and music hall environment to warn against an increasingly dangerous scare literature. Equally, The Code of the Woosters directly lampoons the reality of British Fascism, with Roderick Spode ‘plainly modelled on Sir Oswald Mosley’. But Mosley’s Black Shirts become Spode’s ‘Black Shorts’, as Gussie Fink-Nottle explains to Bertie: Wooster: ‘... That chin. ... Those eyes. ... That moustache. By the way, when you say “shorts”, you mean “shirts”, of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.‘ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Bare knees?’ ‘Bare knees.’ ‘Golly!’ ‘Yes.’
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This targets Mosley all right, but it also volleys left and right at the sources of Mosleyism. The Mosley cult invited English imitation of the Hitler cult. Spode looks like a Dictator, more of Mussolini than of Hitler girth but Bertie thinks of him fundamentally for Hitler physical features. The footer bags deride German Lederhosen but they also indict the Nazis for confusing schoolboy games with adult life. Because Wodehouse of all writers enjoyed appealing to the child in his readers – as opposed to writing for child readers – and because he himself followed the fortunes of his own school at football and cricket he was the man exactly to measure what was wrong with a movement based on footer bags. And when Bertie is suddenly enabled to defy Spode, he becomes what Orwell saw elsewhere as the little man defying the bully (Orwell listed Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, Popeye the Sailor, but this, turning on vocabulary, set truth against propaganda): ‘He asked me if I had called him a slob, and I said that I had.’ ‘A fat slob?’ ‘A fat slob. It is about time’, I proceeded, ‘that some public-spirited person came along and told you where you got off. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”’ And there is no softening of Nazi bullying, or of upperclass adoption of lower-class brutality: ‘Now, what you are saying to yourself, no doubt, is that you will not be caught. You imagine that you and this precious aunt of yours will be clever enough between you to steal the cow-creamer without being detected. It will do you no good, Wooster. If the thing disappears, however cunningly you and your female accomplice may have covered your traces, I shall know where it has gone, and I shall immediately beat you to a jelly. To a jelly’, he repeated, rolling the words round his tongue as if they were vintage port. ‘Said he would beat you to a jelly, did he?’ ‘That was the expression he used. He repeated it, so that there should be no mistake.’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t for the world have you manhandled by that big stiff. You wouldn’t have a chance against a gorilla like that. He would rend you limb from limb and scatter the fragments to the four winds.’ I winced a little. ‘No need to make a song about it, old flesh and blood’ This bird of whom I speak was a simple, untutored soul and Spode a man of good education and upbringing, but it was plain that there was one point at which their souls touched.
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I don’t suppose they would have seen eye to eye on any other subject you could have brought up, but in the matter of wanting to see the colour of my insides their minds ran on parallel lines. The only difference seemed to be that whereas my employee had planned to use a carving knife for his excavations, Spode appeared to be satisfied that the job could be done all right with the bare hands. In the nick of time Bertie remembers that all will be saved if he tells Spode he knows all about Eulalie (on which he knows nothing) and at the end of the story Jeeves (who has given him the escape-mechanism) confides: ‘Mr Spode designs ladies’ underclothing, sir. He has a considerable talent in that direction, and has indulged it secretly for some years. He is the founder and proprietor of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs.‘ ‘You don’t mean that?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Good Lord, Jeeves! No wonder he didn’t want a thing like that to come out.’ ‘No, sir. It would unquestionably jeopardize his authority over his followers.’ ‘You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.‘ ‘No, sir.’ ‘One or the other. Not both.’ ‘Precisely, sir.’ This was probably the most effective piece of literary anti-Fascism to appear in Britain, in sales, wit, and realism. McCrum produces one of his best thumb-nail critiques of the novel, and his best is sublime, apart from minor conflation of the plot with its predecessor Right Ho, Jeeves. He even insures himself against plot misstatement by justly warning us that ‘to summarize the plot of The Code of the Woosters is to concentrate on the well-oiled machinery of a beautifully constructed fictional timepiece to the exclusion of its style and rightly chooses as his first example: He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled ... McCrum even takes Bertie’s Philippic against Spode and shows its use of ‘late-Victorian slang of the bank clerks and the Pooters, those lower-middle-class denizens of south London, land of laurels and semis. By the late 1930s, it was a language that, almost single-handedly, Wodehouse had forged into a universally recognized English style, a marriage of suburban vernacular with classical syntax’. At other points he sensitively explores Wodehouse’s interweaving American usages with his own classical and colloquial vernacular. He follows the consensus in grounding Wodehouse so firmly in late Victorian style, but it mixed with the world of Hollywood writers and New York literati, Anglophones in France and musichall (British) and musical-comedy (American) creators and camp followers. Tacitly McCrum acknowledges a
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style perfected over time and space, and brought to culinary perfection – as Wodehouse delicately insinuated in making his ‘wonder’ chef, Anatole, a speaker mingling Drones Club (learned from Bingo Little) and Brooklyn (from a native chauffeur called Maloney): ‘Hot dog! You ask me what is it? Listen. Make some attention a little. Me, I have hit the hay, but I do not sleep so good, and presently I wake and up I look, and there is one who make faces against me through the dashed window. Is that a pretty affair? Is that convenient? If you think I like it, you jolly well mistake yourself. I am so mad as a wet hen. And why not? I am somebody, isn’t it? This is a bedroom, what-what, not a house for some apes? Then for what do blighters sit on my window as cool as a few cucumbers making some faces?’ (Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)) This creation of the Anatole macedoine mixed its own special recipe from literary sources as varied as Damon Runyon and the Magnet comic, Balzac and Scott Fitzgerald, Conan Doyle and Ollendorff’s French exercises. Wodehouse amused himself with various self-portraits – the schoolboy cricketer Mike Jackson, the visionary con-man Ukridge’s long-exploited schoolmate Corky, the younger Bertie Wooster, the autobiographer Galahad Threepwood, the later Lord Emsworth – but Anatole is a creation exceptionally remote from him. Yet in Anatole is the self-portrait, in caricature, of his stylistic craft. McCrum reminds us that Anatole is in any case marinated by Wodehouse’s sojourns in various parts of France, almost in reflection of how he felt he sounded to the French. McCrum, very early on, chooses a res ipsa loquitur opening The Luck of the Bodkins (1935):
Yet McCrum’s insistence on the antiquity of influences on Wodehouse, so often right, still runs risks of a wellplayed note in a misleading context, creating problems such as afflicted the seaside orchestra at the opening of Wodehouse’s short story ‘Best Seller’ (Strand (July 1930), Mulliner Nights (1933): From far away in the distance came the faint strains of the town band, as it picked its way through the Star of Eve song from Tannh’auser – somewhat impeded by the second trombone who had got his music sheets mixed and was playing ‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’. Take Spode, for instance (granting it sounds like an invitation to pocket the Albert Hall, as Wodehouse would say). McCrum takes him straight on (p. 251): ‘Wodehouse’s devastating portrait of Spode is not only a clear indication of his political sympathies but also a characteristic use of humour to defuse a bad situation, and obliquely to suggest the virtues of tolerance through an infuriating tease. But having done so
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. McCrum sees this sentence as proof of the perpetual ‘passion for grammar and ... virtuoso assurance over the perils of the most sophisticated English sentence’ deriving from the fluency in Latin and Greek from Wodehouse’s schooldays at Dulwich:but the sentence’s preoccupation with translation (for which the French waiter then shows much more capacity than the Englishman seeking speech with him) does McCrum’s work twice over. Wodehouse was no great linguist, but he thought of words under the lens of the translator, foreign words, words of classical derivation, words colliding with one another from different varieties of English.
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much, why tie Wodehouse to Bertie Wooster’s irritation in the same book at being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast ... [and] by a female crony after dinner? Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world. ...
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Bertie betrays not only Wodehouse’s sentiments, but also his creator’s Victorian origins.’ It won’t do. Stiffy Stephanie Byng, the blackmailing crony, is based in part on the person Wodehouse seems to have loved most in the world, his adopted daughter Leonora (Snorkles) who also supplied model material for Zenobia (‘Nobby’) Hopwood in Joy in the Morning, Roberta (‘Bobbie’) Wickham in seven short stories, and above all Sue Brown in Summer Lightning and its sequel, the unjustly slighted Heavy Weather (vindicated by McCrum in a masterly miniature of positive criticism). Bertie is infuriated by Stiffy, Jeeves censorious of Bobbie, Lady Constance Keeble (convincingly identified by McCrum with Wodehouse’s Wife) is hostile to Sue Brown, but all the signs are that Wodehouse heartily disagreed with them. But McCrum must follow the consensus that Wodehouse was really a Victorian/Edwardian marooned and freely spouting his hundred books and hundred-odd short stories to subsequent ages (whose welcome for them revealed universal time-machine-slippage?). Spode thus has to be explained ‘While Wodehouse could escape from threatening reality into Wooster-shire, even he could not ignore it altogether’. Wodehouse’s grudging conformity, his half-nod to threatening reality was to outdo all his literary contemporaries in ‘devastating’ British Fascism! With this logic McCrum would place Churchill irreparably before 1910. There is good sense in arguing that Churchill’s strength owed much to the survival of late Victoran and Edwardian attitudes within him: not very peaceful ones, but 1881-1914 were much less peacetul years than McCrum seems to think – they may well have taken his England to the edge of revolution, according to some historians. But Churchill was the man to stand up to Nazism in 1940, and Wodehouse was the man to stand up to British admiration for Nazism in 1938. Without the dissection of Spode, there could have been more British defeatism in those terrible months following April 1940, with all the European continent in treaty, or capitulation, to Hitler. If The Code of the Woosters stiffened a few backs against international bullies, and strengthened the image of the weak man defending decency against them, so much the better for Britain (and for humanity).
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If it reinforced the notion that the brave but idiotic aristocrat must make a stand, and must depend on the brains of his Jeeveses, the workers and professional subordinates – so much the better still. But Wodehouse, captured by the Nazis in France in 1940, imprisoned and released under German control, broadcast on German radio and became identified with capitulation. Some brave and intelligent people who stood firm in the Britain of 1940 subsequently refused to read Wodehouse and saw him as the collaborator in Britain’s darkest (though finest) hour. I do not include among the brave those who publicly denounced him, dealt with by McCrum in awesome integrity. Orwell’s generous defence of Wodehouse (initially in the Windmill (July 1945) and reprinted by him in his Critical Essays the following year) summed up the case against them: 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. ... 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. ... 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 ... 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.
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McCrum’s historical sense of period may occasionally be shaky – his Edwardian England is far more selfassured than it really was, and Wodehouse’s early work ferreted out much more of its social ills and fears than McCrum allows himself to notice. But as a historian, in quest of objectivity, McCrum’s is an example to cheer: he is, in fact, as judicious as Jeeves. He culls the Daily Telegraph correspondence of 1-13 July 1941, and there, if anywhere, we might expect to encounter Tories with pasts to hide behind witch-hunts against Wodehouse. It even included a prize entry from Orwell’s other guilty men, the Communists needing to conceal their appeasement fervour during the Hitler-Stalin pact, which had just been unilaterally ended by Hitler’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941: Sean O’Casey is quoted by McCrum (pg 315): ‘If England has any dignity left in literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature’s performing flea’. McCrum terms this ‘a brilliant phrase that Wodehouse later turned to his advantage’, ie. entitling his revised letters to Bill Townend, his testament as a writer, Performing Flea, which McCrum (p. 386) salutes for its ‘almost insolent irony’, Wodehouse closing the book with what McCrum happily affirms ‘an exquisite, slightly lethal, courtesy’: With Sean O’Casey’s statement that I am ‘English Literature’s performing flea’ I scarcely know how to deal. Thinking it over, I believe he meant to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trooper. But while Wodehouse turned O’Casey’s malice into as neat and just a self-epitaph as one could ask, malice it was. O’Casey was not seeking to have Wodehouse’s alleged offences forgotten; but Wodehouse and his work. Wodehouse possessed much common ground with St Francis of Assisi, and his praise for the flea (whose abilities in gymnastics certainly resembled his own prose technique at its finest) made a mocking contrast with the self-appointed Irish cultural emancipator only ready to see the flea as a means of abuse. O’Casey had of course been attempting a variant for Tennyson’s denunciation of Churton Collins, ‘a louse on the locks of literature’ (O’Casey, to his credit, was fond of Tennyson, and rendered his waspish homage in entitling the last volume of his own autobiography Sunset and Evening Star). O’Casey’s posture as arbiter elegentiarum for England with his wild Hitler-Stalin harp slung as far behind him as possible made sense in his Communist party’s rush to respectability: the war it had denounced as a capitalist squabble, possibly to end in the deserved destruction of the British empire, had now become the war whose most fervent patriots were (and always had been) the Communist party. There was an awful appropriateness to his finding the Daily Telegraph as the appropriate shooting-range in which to perform his shadow gunmanship. But O’Casey was no more than a great playwright selling himself short in self-deluding masquerade as a politician. Wodehouse’s old
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collaborator Ian Hay stated that ‘No broadcast from Berlin by a world famous Englishman ... can serve as anything but an advertisement for Hitler’ which (if McCrum has conveyed Hay’s denunciation limits in that quotation) was perfectly fair: the tragedy was that Wodehouse, fresh from his internment camp, had no inkling that such was the case, and gave his interviews and broadcasts under the illusion that he was simply showing stiff upper lip, and not letting the side down by moaning. The real horror was the traitor: A. A. Milne, whose diatribe against Wodehouse McCrum finds ‘consumed by envy at his old friend’s literary success and frustrated in his own career’. McCrum worked for some four years on this present book, but he had ample opportunity to consider Milne’s case when editing Ann Thwaite’s excellent biography of Milne (1990) for her publishers, Faber and Faber. It showed that while the Telegraph did print letters defending Wodehouse from Dorothy Sayers, Sax Rohmer, Storm Jameson and Gilbert Frankau, they suppressed a counter-attack on Milne by Compton Mackenzie (Milne, whose letter seems scarcely sane, had denounced Wodehouse for shirking the responsibilities of fatherhood in a quotation which was in fact from a speaker in a Wodehouse story; Mackenzie retorted that a father who had exploited his own son for literary cash to the extent Milne had in Christopher Robin, was in no position to sneer at others). But there was a worse case. McCrum notes that Harold Nicolson –parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Information to 18 July 1942 and then Governor of the BBC – thought Wodehouse a traitor, though telling his diary ‘I do not want to see Wodehouse shot on Tower Hill. But I resent the theory that “poor old P. G. is so innocent that he is not responsible”. A man who has shown such ingenuity and resource in evading British and American income tax cannot be classed as unpractical.’ In fact, as McCrum shows, Wodehouse’s tax troubles arose because he trusted in badly chosen advisers: it was not evasion. Nicolson’s support helped Duff Cooper, his Minister, to let loose an evil denunciation of Wodehouse in a BBC broadcast by W. N. Connor despite Nicolson’s future fellow governors’ indignation. Nicolson, ten years before, had been a political associate of Mosely. A year before the Wodehouse affair Nicolson had vetoed a BBC broadcast by Bernard Shaw, the oldest great writer in the UK: ‘Shaw’s main theme is that the only thing Hitler has done wrong is to persecute the Jews’ [the script in fact said ‘we must risk our lives for’ the need to defeat anti-Semitism]. Nicolson’s view (shared, he said) by Duff Cooper) continued: ‘millions of Americans and some other people’ thought Hitler’s anti-Jewish persecution ‘is the only thing he has done right’. McCrum does not go as far afield as this (and in any case would have been restrained by permission he was granted by Nicolson’s heirs to quote the unpublished diary passage on Wodehouse). But it is worth noting, for Wodehouse’s stupid acceptance of the Nazi offer to let him broadcast seems far less heinous than the standards of his official British critics. Orwell had known his business. The Nicolson record and claims on Cooper come from
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Michael Holroyd’s Shaw vol, 3. Holroyd was particularly aware that Shaw had designed his own biography, imposing his version of events on biographers in his lifetime and posthumously facing his biographers with records as he wished them to be studied. McCrum is aware of some comparable force from Wodehouse, particularly in his frequent self-portrait as a workaholic Bertie Wooster. Few great writers have more vigorously enjoyed presenting themselves as idiots. He had been doing this long before World War II, in his occasional non-fiction piece and over-generous introductions to Townend’s and others’ writings. Wodehouse was ceaseless in help – financial as well as professional – for Townend, his oldest friend, mostly concealing gifts from the knowledge of Wodehouse’s wife. Townend was not the writer Wodehouse claimed, but he was better than McCrum thinks. McCrum is constantly on the watch for Wodehouse’s revisions of events, including letter-texts, mostly because as a workman he was a perfectionist. He died, as Usborne says, working to the end: McCrum tells us he died alone in hospital with the manuscript of the novel on which he was working beside him, having intended to get back to it after dinner. Usborne published it, rightfully re-entitling it Sunset at Blandings, but what appeared would probably have been greatly changed, including the loss or gain of individual characters, had Wodehouse survived. In general what Wodehouse changed (in any control he possessed of versions of his life) was in the interest of entertainment. McCrum does not, of course, intend to be trapped by Wodehouse: he knows his man was a great writer, and a writer whose incessant work made him so. But there is always the Goldsmith factor. David Garrick’s premature epitaph for Goldsmith is easily remembered: Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness call’d Noll, Who wrote like an angel, but talk’d like poor Poll. Its facility gets it confused with reality, although we get much closer the reality if we look at Goldsmith’s reply, ‘Retaliation’, whose dissection of Garrick (and Edmund Burke and various others) has profound truth, not simply superficial attraction. If Nicolson had been less despicable, he might have judged Wodehouse’s intellect by his writing rather than his tax adventures. McCrum, unquestionably, sees the genius in the writing of Wodehouse, but explains his irresponsibility over the Nazi offer to broadcast by putting him perpetually into Edwardian attitudes. Here, he follows Orwell, writing with the same intent. But in so doing they are compelled to deny Wodehouse the hard foundation of realism in his early work which remained where he wanted it for his later. Wodehouse’s masterly analysis of American Populism come east to fire the journalism of American Progressivism, in Psmith, Journalist (The Captain, serialisation 1910; book 1915), is perhaps the shrewdest observation of the sources of the great Muckrake movement in the USA‘s early twentieth century.
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The old Etonian who changes his name and ethnicity to Irish so as to get his hands on the rewards of police corruption, in A Gentleman of Leisure (1906), teaches a lesson about status displacement by choice in immigrant machines, and it is not Wodehouse’s fault if historians were slow to learn it. Wodehouse’s satire on literary pretentions, forms of creativity, spawn of parasite journalism, &c remains at home in the postmodern era because it was so blazingly acute (and because literary activity changes inherently much less than it likes to think it does). Also, of course, it is blazingly funny, a quality at a premium in discussion of literature anywhere, in any place, at any time. Wodehouse is not behind the times, but what the times discover still laughing ahead of them. And he was not out of touch when he invented Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts. So how do we account for the Berlin broadcasts? One answer was simply the effect of sudden apparent liberation from internment camp conditions. The atmosphere of friendship and goodwill in place of harshly circumscribed jail would be bound to make anyone lose perspective. McCrum’s time-lapse in Wodehouse’s sense of his world of the 1930s won’t work if we (and he) confront some of his more hardbitten fiction such as Summer Moonshine (1938) with its desperate expedients in house-letting and housesale for impoverished aristocrats, bitter hatred between stepsons and stepmothers dictating the writing of plays and their suppression, not to speak of the romance of
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process-servers’ lives. But McCrum has a point with regard to wars. Wodehouse noted that when moved to internment in Liege in late July 1940: We walked through Liege, whistling ‘Tipperary’ and ‘The Barrel’, and up a long steep hill which tested some of us pretty severely. Then parade. Then hot soup. Lovely day, so arrival not depressing. McCrum has found this, but he might have decoded it. They were in fact doing something very brave. ‘Tipperary’ was a famous marching song for British (and even more, for Irish) troops, although the words deploring the distance to Tipperary and taking leave of the posher parts of London bore little formal antiGerman sentiment (naturally the troops provided their own very graphic sentiment of intent of affection (for French girls) and hostility (to German men) although the same four-lettered verb might be employed for each activity). But ‘The Barrel’ was something else: Roll out the Barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun! Roll out the Barrel, we’ve got the Hun on the run! Wodehouse does not say they sang it, and there would have been sharp remonstrance if they had. But it clearly was something uniting the British prisoners. We cannot say how much they knew of the tragic fate of the French and British troops in the preceding weeks when the Hun very definitely had them on the run. They did know they themselves were prisoners of war, however nominally civilian in treatment. And they responded in the whistles of the only war songs they knew – World War I, or perhaps also the Boer War. The vital thing was to keep up good spirits, and show they believed in keeping up morale. Wodehouse’s chief Mentor in writing had been Conan Doyle (Jeeves and Wooster are two of the greatest literary children of Holmes and Watson), and one of Conan Doyle’s finest stories, ‘The Lord of Chateau Noire’ is about treatment of prisoners in the FrancoPrussian War. Wodehouse could first have read it in the Strand for July 1894, when he was a boy of 13. It turns on a French count’s capture of a German captain on whom he inflicts all the sufferings and insults meted out to his son, a victim of the conflict; but he also seeks to bestow all the acts of kindness. It is a story of immense power, and Wodehouse never wavered in his admiration for the Conan Doyle writing of those years. Wodehouse’s prison notes seem scrupulously anxious to follow the Count’s principles, and every kind gesture by his captors seems to be noted, where possible. There is no capitulation in any of this: but there is almost a stoical fairness. Since anything written was under scrutiny by their captors, hostile comment was not likely to survive, although accounts of ugly official actions did. Also, it was vital not to get into a whining mood; so comment should be as positive as possible, looking at the problem of imprisonment in Nazi hands as though it were holding one’s own while isolated from the rest of the world by a fall of rock when climbing. And that meant the importance of getting messages out to friends and the
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beloved (but now married and English-domiciled) Leonora. We must remember that while Wodehouse had written for the movies, and had written better social criticism of them than anyone save his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished Last Tycoon, he seems to have had little sense of the weapon wireless had become from the World War I days when it scarcely existed. Radio talks as a means to say he was alive and had not allowed ill fortune to make him whine, made sense to him in his isolation. His mentality tacitly assumed that his hearers would be heartened by realising matters were much worse than he was allowing himself to say, but that he was true to his code in staying good-humoured. He clearly never imagined people would think him a collaborator with the Nazis: had he not, after all, written The Code of the Woosters? It surely is not necessary to de-intellectualise Wodehouse in order to protect his memory. Britain saved the world between July 1940 and June 1941. That many, including Winston Churchill, misjudged Wodehouse because of the broadcasts is understandable for the suffering those of them with good consciences had gone through. (It remains even more understandable for those with bad consciences.) Wodehouse’s immediate circumstances lessened his remarkable powers of perception: that does not mean he didn’t have any, or that his work did what it did bereft of social observation beyond his twentieth year. Orwell in his anxiety to clear Wodehouse of the charge of being anti-British went to an extreme he often inhabited (and on which McCrum quotes him with uncritical respect): finding writers of 1940 who had also flourished in the days of King Edward, his reaction was to insist their social attitudes remained unchanged over thirty years. Wodehouse (if only in reaction against the new world of Black Shorts) might have softened his satire against aristocracy from its first contemptuous brilliance in Something Fresh (1915): Lord Emsworth gradually becomes more lovable since the days when he fired Angus McAllister. But the present benevolence was built on the earlier acidity against the worthless peers, and if Emsworth grew charming, the utterly selfish bullying Duke of Dunstable did not, The Code of the Woosters made a venal magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett the ally of the would-be Dictator, and the Princess von und zu Dwornizchek bought her stepson’s play to destroy it. Wodehouse was deeply grateful for Orwell’s defence, all the more since he realised how stupid he had been, but after Orwell’s death he found himself resenting the charge of being out of touch. It remained in however sweetened a form the basis of the Wodehouse cult: to Evelyn Waugh in the broadcast with which he regally apologised on behalf of Britain to Wodehouse, in 1961 twenty years after Connor’s attack, eighty from Wodehouse’s birth, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale’. But this in part derived from its enchantment beyond mundane reality. Penguin repeated Waugh on every Wodehouse jacket for many years: ‘He has made a world for us to live in and delight in’ – thus it had no more to do with the world Wodehouse had witnessed and on which so much of his best work was grounded, than Lewis Carroll’s
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‘Jabberwocky’ had to do with his academic subject, mathematics. McCrum’s biography is thus flawed, if only lightly flawed, by his fidelity to a consensus built from the noblest motives. The weakness is normally serious, but not here, so gigantic have been McCrum’s labours in Wodehouse papers, and so profound his analyses (the last four pages are surely the best thing that has ever been written about Wodehouse). But McCrum’s mastery of such detail, and his wisdom over so much deduction, are not simply heroic in stature. They are heroic in nature. McCrum merely tells the reader via his publisher that his other books have included five named titles in fiction, two for children, and two in nonfiction, the second being My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke. To learn more one goes to that book, which is a Godsend to anyone either making a similar recovery or to anyone ministering to stroke patients. It is a brave and wonderful book, at once a delight and a lesson. McCrum actually makes the reader enter his body and almost physically understand the impact of that paralysis. Officially, that has nothing to do with the Wodehouse biography. Actually, it does everyone less than justice if we do not realise that this gigantic biography is in itself a human triumph, that it is as good as it is, not in spite of McCrum’s having previously sustained a stroke, but because of it. The stroke no doubt accounts for mistakes, especially in Wodehouse summaries: his subject’s innumerable readers can enjoy themselves with appropriate corrections. But the stroke also narrows his focus, deepens his understanding, and makes the greater labour it entailed result in a heroic book about a heroic writer. And it’s one man’s victory – no consensus could make it. ‘Well?’ we said, anxiously. ‘I like it’, said the editor. ‘Good egg!’ we murmured. The editor pressed a bell, a single ruby set in a fold by the tapestry upon the wall. The majordomo appeared. ‘Give this man a purse of gold’ said the editor, ‘and throw him out.’
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