The Novel Life of PG Wodehouse, page 3
And eight hundred internees can’t just go to the cauldron and lap. For one thing, they would burn their tongues, and another the quick swallowers would get more than their fair share. The situation was one that called for quick thinking, and it was due to our own resourcefulness that this problem was solved. At the back of the barrack yard there was an enormous rubbish heap, into which Belgian soldiers through the ages had been dumping old mess tins, old cans, cups with bits chipped off them, bottles, kettles and containers for motor oil. We dug them out, gave them a wash and a brush up, and there we were. I had the good fortune to secure one of the motor oil containers. It added to the taste of the soup something that the others hadn’t got. [Third broadcast]
At Tost we had a noticeboard on which camp orders were posted each day, but this ingenious system had not occurred to anyone at Huy. The only way they could think of there of establishing communication between the front office and the internee was to call a parade. Three whistles would blow, and we would assemble in the yard, and after a long interval devoted to getting into some sort of formation we would be informed that there was a parcel for Omer - or that we must shave daily - or that we must not smoke on parade - or that we must not keep our hands in our pockets on parade - or that we might buy playing cards - (and that next day that we might not buy playing cards) - or that boys must not cluster round the guard room trying to scrounge food from the soldiers - or that there was a parcel for Omer. [Fourth broadcast]
In the penultimate paragraph of the final broadcast - the final one was a ‘thank you’ to those who had written to him in camp - he spoke of how rumours were important to camp life, and how they were nicknamed ‘bedtime stories’:
These bedtime stories never turned out to be true, but a rumour a day kept depression away, so they served their purpose. Certainly, whether owing to bedtime stories or simply the feeling, which I myself had, that, if one was in, one was in and it was no use making heavy weather about it, the morale of the men at Tost was wonderful. I never met a more cheerful crowd, and I loved them like brothers.
In America, Wodehouse’s words and actions were noted by those in power. Recognising his genius in going on German radio ridiculing his captors and stating how high morale was among those imprisoned, the American War Department made the texts of his broadcasts part of the syllabus at Camp Ritchie as an example of anti-Nazi propaganda.
The British government had spent time and money on producing wartime propaganda ridiculing the Germans. Now they had a wonderful example of the Germans being lampooned by one of the finest comic writers alive. Moreover, on German radio, he had spoken of the high morale of British prisoners. What a stupendously wonderful propaganda opportunity this presented.
So, how did the British government seek to exploit this amazing opportunity? With a display of utter fatheadedness.
Rather than seeking to spread the word of what Wodehouse had said, it poured vitriol on the author. What it hoped to achieve by this is not clear. Whether it was even clear to those who devised and carried out the action has to be questioned. Was it merely an outpouring of fury that a famous British author was broadcasting on German radio? Was it designed to bolster British resolve? It had been suggested that there was anger that Wodehouse was broadcasting to America, whom the British government wanted to enter the war against Germany, and it was afraid that Wodehouse’s words might make this less likely. Does one light novelist and farceur have so much power? If so, this was surely a case of barking up the wrong tree, as the political powers in America were forming their own judgement on the broadcasts and their, extremely rational, conclusion was that Wodehouse was not pro-Nazi.
British establishment thinking appears muddled. Or just too narrow-minded. Rather than using some lateral thinking and investigating what Wodehouse had said and seeing how best to utilise it in a positive manner, their reaction seems to be the knee-jerk one of a bully. After a lunch - reported as a boozy one where six were present - Alfred Duff Cooper, Minister of Information, decided that William Connor, a journalist who wrote under the pen name Cassandra, should be put up to give a ten-minute talk on BBC radio attacking Wodehouse. The idea was originally to broadcast this talk to America, to negate whatever damage the government felt Wodehouse’s broadcasts to that country had done. Later it was decided to broadcast this attack over the Home Service as well as the Empire Service.
This talk was delivered on 15 July. By this date Wodehouse had made two broadcasts from Berlin, both monitored by the BBC. The governors of the BBC objected to the planned broadcast, telling Duff Cooper that their monitoring of Wodehouse’s talks had shown them to be free of any pro-Nazi or anti-British sentiments. Duff Cooper ignored their objection, knowing that, under wartime regulations, the BBC had to provide airtime for government propaganda. The governors responded with their lawyers’ opinion that, as the attack on Wodehouse was slanderous, Wodehouse could sue the corporation. Duff Cooper’s response was that the Government would bear the costs of any action and damages resulting from the broadcast.
Thus it was that the BBC carried a vituperative attack on PG Wodehouse, its force made stronger by the fact that it came directly after the reportage of the nine o’clock news. The following are extracts from this talk:
I have come to tell you tonight of the story of a rich man trying to seek his last and greatest sale - that of his own country. It is a sombre story of self-respect, of honour and decency being pawned to the Nazis for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel… When war broke out Wodehouse was at Le Touquet - gambling. Nine months later he was still there. Poland had been wiped out. Denmark had been overrun and Norway had been occupied. Wodehouse went on with his fun. The elderly playboy didn’t believe in politics. He said so. No good time Charlie ever does. Wodehouse was throwing a cocktail party when the storm troopers clumped in on his shallow life…
Wodehouse was steadily being groomed for stardom, the most disreputable stardom in the world - the limelight of quislings. On the last day of June this year, Dr Goebbels was ready. So too was Pelham Wodehouse. He was eager and he was willing and when they offered him Liberty in a country which has killed Liberty, he leapt at it. And Dr Goebbels, taking him high into the mountain, showed him all the Kingdoms of the world…and said unto him: ‘All this power will I give you if you worship the Führer.’
Pelham Wodehouse fell on his knees…
Fifty thousand of our countrymen are enslaved in Germany…. they endure but they do not give in. They suffer but do not sell out.
The talk continued in this vein. Cassandra, who in his talk accused Wodehouse of tax evasion, was paid 20 guineas. It is a shocking piece of journalism. Cassandra had pitched his talk for maximum effect, and in this he succeeded.
Opinion in Britain was swung against Wodehouse. To some patriotism equalled hating Wodehouse. His books, once taken from library shelves to be borrowed, were now taken off them to be suppressed. It was open season on Wodehouse, though many urged restraint until the facts of the case became known, and others condemned Cassandra’s antics as strongly as others were condemning the behaviour in which they believed Wodehouse to have indulged.
Some who attacked Wodehouse merely did so through genuine, though misguided, feelings of patriotism. Others saw it as a chance to attack a literary reputation they considered undeserved, and in particular his award of an honorary degree from Oxford University. Sean O’Casey wrote, in a letter to the press, that:
It is amusing to read the various wails about the villainy of Wodehouse. The harm done to England’s cause and to England’s dignity is not the poor man’s babble in Berlin, but the acceptance of him by a childish part of the people and the academic government of Oxford, dead from the chin up, as a person of any importance whatsoever in English humorous literature, or any literature at all. [The Daily Telegraph, 3 July, 1941]
EC Bentley also wrote to the national press:
There is only one opinion about Mr PG Wodehouse’s bargain with the German Government; but those who feel it most keenly on the subject, I should imagine, are the learned body responsible for conferring upon him the Oxford Doctorate of Letters in 1939.
Oxford in recent years has been suffering from an attack of what may be called the ‘Why-Shouldn’t-I’s’; and the most distressing symptom of it was the bestowal of one of the highest literary distinctions in the world upon one who has never written a serious line.
Amends can be made, however. Those who awarded the honour can take the earliest opportunity of removing it. This action would have a certain effectiveness, not only as a mark of disapproval but as a sign of repentance; and most of my fellow-graduates, I believe, would heartily welcome it on both grounds.’ [The Daily Telegraph, 8 July, 1941]
Others saw an opportunity to use Wodehouse’s broadcasts to make political points of their own. The Communist newspaper the Daily Worker opined that:
We do not dispute that Wodehouse is as petty and contemptible as the ruling-class characters portrayed in his bestsellers. But since when has amiability and boneheadedness been an excuse for serving Goebbels?
The sloppy Wodehouse broadcasts from Berlin were deliberately selected by the subtle German propagandists. Better a famous British author expressing doubts about the victory of his own country than a second Haw-Haw churning out fantastic lies.
Wodehouse represents the rottenness that infected a section of Britain in the years preceding the war. His day is over.
Wodehouse, when he became aware of how English public opinion - albeit manufactured - viewed his broadcasts, was horrified. Thrice he appealed to the Germans to be allowed to return to England to explain and defend himself: a naive request.
It was not just the five scripted talks which Wodehouse broadcast which had caused a storm. On his discharge, Wodehouse had been interviewed by Harry W. Flannery, the American correspondent in Berlin of the Columbia Broadcasting System, on 26 June. Flannery perceived a chance to attack Nazism by making Wodehouse look a foolish traitor, which is what he genuinely thought he was. As was customary at that time, the interview was scripted and read out by the participants. Flannery wrote the script, and in doing so deliberately tried to show Wodehouse in a poor light. Wodehouse walked into the trap, naively reading out Flannery’s responses:
Flannery: Do you mind being a prisoner of war in this fashion?
Wodehouse: Not a bit. As long as I have a typewriter and plenty of paper and a room to work in, I’m fine.
Later Wodehouse read from Flannery’s script:
I’m wondering whether the kind of people and the kind of England I write about, will live after the war - whether England wins or not, I mean.
The first comment Wodehouse thought would demonstrate a cheerful British stiff-upper-lip attitude, a determination to make the best of a bad job. This was the code of the internee, and Wodehouse viewed his comments through these eyes. To the outsider, it could appear that he was living in high luxury, swanning about in German high society. The comments about England winning or not just seem to have slipped past the radar of a too-trusting Wodehouse. In a 1946 interview with Hubert Cole of Illustrated he explained the comments:
Cole: The phrase which has been singled out in your talks as being defeatist and pro-Nazi is ‘whether England wins or not’. Why did you include this in your script?
Wodehouse: I didn’t. There is no such phrase in my talks. It occurred in a brief interview with me by the American representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System in Berlin. He wrote the entire script, including the words you mention, and I read them out without realising their intention. I did not even notice them at the time.
After the three-and-a-half minute interview with Flannery, listeners had been returned to the New York studio, where the presenter Elmer Davis said:
Mr Wodehouse’s many friends in the United States will be glad to know that he is free and that he is apparently comfortable and happy. Mr Wodehouse seems to be more fortunate than most of the other Englishmen in his internment camp, whose release would perhaps have less publicity value for the Germans, and, of course, he was only in an internment camp to begin with, which is very different from a concentration camp. People who get out of concentration camps, such as Dachau, for instance - well, in the first place, not a great many of them get out, and, when they do, they are seldom able to broadcast.
Wodehouse had been well and truly stitched up. The words of the interview became mixed up in public minds, and public prints, with his broadcasts, and the rumour mill further jumbled everything up and added to it so that Wodehouse was said to have said and done all sorts of things which he had not.
Major Plack, who was charged with the supervision of the Wodehouses, was diligent in ensuring their comfort and peace of mind as far as was possible. The Wodehouses had to pay their way in Germany. In the winter months they stayed at the Adlon hotel - the German authorities’ choice not theirs. In the summer they stayed with friends in the country, until accommodation in Berlin became scarcer as Berlin was increasingly flattened and led to the Wodehouses being despatched to Paris. They were able to pay their way only because Ethel Wodehouse sold some of her jewellery and from some continuing payments from Wodehouse’s writing. Even then they had to rely upon loans from friends to make up the deficit. Wodehouse was able to receive some royalties from his book sales - which were channelled through the German authorities, leading to some confusion and stories that he ‘had been paid by the Germans’ - and he sold a short story to a Paris newspaper and the film rights of one of his novels to a German company. As part of the sale came the stipulation that the film was not made until after the war and no publicity was to be given to the transaction lest it be used for propaganda purposes.
After France was liberated, Major Cussen rapidly came to the conclusion that Wodehouse was not guilty of treachery. Of necessity, with the war still continuing and German records unavailable to him, his inquiry could only be partial. He concluded, however, in his report on the matter of Wodehouse’s wartime behaviour that:
It seems clear that the actual text of the Wodehouse broadcasts does not contain material of a pro-German character, and the view may well be taken that the mere words used by Wodehouse in his broadcasts were unlikely to assist the enemy.
Upon the information at present available it seems, subject always to the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions, that Wodehouse has not been guilty of treasonable conduct and his conduct does not bring him within the terms of Section 1 of the Treachery Act 1940.
‘That Wodehouse is not a traitor as far as we know, but he might be’ is a fair summary of British government policy over Wodehouse. He was never totally cleared, although a knighthood conferred days before he died at a great age was seen by many as a sign of acceptance that he had not behaved dishonourably. In the absence of this official clearance rumours were allowed to ferment. The BBC attack on Wodehouse had struck home, especially as they continued to ban his works for some years after the war was over. Years later the ‘facts’ of Cassandra’s talk were still trotted out by reviewers as the ‘truth’ of Wodehouse’s wartime activities.
In 1947 when Wodehouse left France, it was for America, where he was sure that he would remain a free man even though press opinion in America had also been hostile to him. The New York Times, for example, had written in September 1942 that he had ‘accepted German hospitality on a luxurious scale’; the next year it said he had ‘been installed at the Adlon hotel at the expense of the German government’ and in July 1944 it reflected on the fact that he ‘had broadcast from Berlin advocating a separate peace’.
Unsure whether he might be arrested if he were to return to his homeland, he never did. The last 36 years of his life were spent, effectively, in exile. When Iain Sproat finally achieved the release of official papers on Wodehouse’s wartime conduct, they declared no guilt on Wodehouse. Yet the impression that Wodehouse was guilty had been left to remain rooted in the public mind through government secrecy. Those who favour the ‘cock-up’ theory of history can see this as just another example. Conspiracy theorists can divine a reluctance by government to admit to error, especially as it could, at least in theory, lead to the defence of a large libel action. I prefer the cock-up theory - here caused by natural inertia and ignorance combined with a culture of secrecy. In truth it is hard to point to such a thing as ‘The Government’; what there is is a disjointed, amorphous body made of conflicting interests, transitory people and changing policies.
It has to be considered whether Wodehouse, far from being too dim to understand the implications of his broadcasts, was too clever. His broadcasts were clever and subtle, too much so for the manufactured force of a public opinion which was hampered by limited imagination and information. Had the British government shared Wodehouse’s intelligence and imagination then this particular bit of wartime history could have been very different.
Many have defended Wodehouse’s actions during the war by asserting that he was unworldly, an author all at sea outside the confines of his writing, lacking a full understanding of life and human nature. In his excellent PG Wodehouse: Man And Myth, Barry Phelps spends a lot of time demonstrating that Wodehouse was far more astute than he let on. Even if one allows the argument that Wodehouse the writer was a genius, but Wodehouse the private man was a bit of a naive simpleton, it was Wodehouse the writer who wrote, in 1910, in Psmith In The City about the unloved bank manager’s successful campaign for parliament:
It had been discovered, on the eve of the poll, that the bank manager’s opponent, in his youth, had been educated at a school in Germany, and had subsequently spent two years at Heidelberg University. These damaging revelations were having a marked effect on the warm-hearted patriots of Kenningford, who were now referring to the candidate in thick but earnest tones as ‘The German Spy’.
