Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

unwise to broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse

  (though in one broadcast he refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to

  regard himself as an American citizen. He had contemplated

  naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even

  used, to Flannery, the phrase, "We're not at war with Germany."

  I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse's works. It names

  round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be

  honest, and I ought to start by admitting that there are many books by

  Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the total--which I have not

  read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular

  writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed

  his work fairly closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am

  well acquainted with its peculiar mental atmosphere--an atmosphere which

  has not, of course, remained completely unchanged, but shows little

  alteration since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery's book which I

  quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike any

  attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that Wodehouse "was

  still living in the period about which he wrote," and the other that the

  Nazi Propaganda Ministry made use of him because he "made fun of the

  English." The second statement is based on a misconception to which I

  will return presently. But Flannery's other comment is quite true and

  contains in it part of the clue to Wodehouse's behaviour.

  A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse's novels is how

  long ago the better-known of them were written. We think of him as in

  some sense typifying the silliness of the nineteen-twenties and

  nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and characters by which he is

  best remembered had all made their appearance before 1925. Psmith first

  appeared in 1909, having been foreshadowed by other characters in early

  school stories. Blandings Castle, with Baxter and the Earl of Emsworth both

  in residence, was introduced in 1915. The Jeeves-Wooster cycle began

  in 1919, both Jeeves and Wooster having made brief appearances earlier.

  Ukridge appeared in 1924. When one looks through the list of Wodehouse's

  books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three fairly well-marked periods.

  The first is the school-story period. It includes such books as THE GOLD

  BAT, THE POTHUNTERS, etc and has its high-spot in MIKE (1909). PSMITH IN

  THE CITY, published in the following year, belongs in this category,

  though it is not directly concerned with school life. The next is the

  American period. Wodehouse seems to have lived in the United States

  from about 1913 to 1920, and for a while showed signs of BECOMING

  AMERICANISED IN IDIOM AND OUTLOOK. SOME OF THE STORIES IN THE MAN WITH

  TWO LEFT FEET (1917) appear to have been influenced by 0. Henry, and

  other books written about this time contain Americanisms (e.g. "highball"

  for "whisky and soda") which an Englishman would not normally use IN

  PROPRIA PERSONA. Nevertheless, almost all the books of this period--PSMITH,

  JOURNALIST; THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE; PICCADILLY

  JIM and various others-depend for their effect on the CONTRAST between

  English and American manners. English characters appear in an American

  setting, or vice versa: there is a certain number of purely English

  stories, but hardly any purely American ones. The third period might

  fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties

  Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social

  status of his characters moved upwards accordingly, though the Ukridge

  stories form a partial exception. The typical setting is now a country

  mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an expensive golf club. The

  schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades out, cricket and

  football giving way to golf, and the element of farce and burlesque

  becomes more marked. No doubt many of the later books, such as SUMMER

  LIGHTNING, are light comedy rather than pure farce, but the occasional

  attempts at moral earnestness which can be found in PSMITH, JOURNALIST;

  THE LITTLE NUGGET; THE COMING OF BILL, THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET and

  some of the school stories, no longer appear. Mike Jackson has turned

  into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not a very startling

  metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is

  his LACK of development. Books like THE GOLD BAT and TALES OF ST

  AUSTIN'S, written in the opening years of this century, already have the

  familiar atmosphere. How much of a formula the writing of his later

  books had become one can see from the fact that he continued to write

  stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years before his

  internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.

  MIKE, which is now a difficult book to obtain in an unabridged form, must

  be one of the best "light" school stories in English. But though its

  incidents are largely farcical, it is by no means a satire on the

  public school system, and THE GOLD BAT, THE POTHUNTERS, etc are even less

  so. Wodehouse was educated at Dulwich, and then worked in a bank and

  graduated into novel writing by way of very cheap journalism. It is clear

  that for many years he remained "fixated" on his old school and loathed

  the unromantic job and the lower-middle-class surroundings in which he

  found himself. In the early stories the "glamour" of public school life

  (house matches, fagging, teas round the study fire, etc) is laid on

  fairly thick, and the "play the game" code of morals is accepted with not

  many reservations. Wrykyn, Wodehouse's imaginary public school, is a

  school of a more fashionable type than Dulwich, and one gets the

  impression that between THE GOLD BAT (1904) and MIKE (1908) Wrykyn itself

  has become more expensive and moved farther from London. Psychologically

  the most revealing book of Wodehouse's early period is PSMITH IN THE

  CITY. Mike Jackson's father has suddenly lost his money, and Mike, like

  Wodehouse himself, is thrust at the age of about eighteen into an

  ill-paid subordinate job in a bank. Psmith is similarly employed, though

  not from financial necessity. Both this book and PSMITH, JOURNALIST

  (1915) are unusual in that they display a certain amount of political

  consciousness. Psmith at this stage chooses to call himself a

  Socialist-in his mind, and no doubt in Wodehouse's, this means no more

  than ignoring class distinctions-and on one occasion the two boys attend

  an open-air meeting on Clapham Common and go home to tea with an elderly

  Socialist orator, whose shabby-genteel home is described with some

  accuracy. But the most striking feature of the book is Mike's inability

  to wean himself from the atmosphere of school. He enters upon his job

  without any pretence of enthusiasm, and his main desire is not, as one

  might expect, to find a more interesting and useful job, but simply to be

  playing cricket. When he has to find himself lodgings he chooses to

  settle at Dulwich, because there he will be near a school and will be

  able to hear the a
greeable sound of the ball striking against the bat.

  The climax of the book comes when Mike gets the chance to play in a

  county match and simply walks out of his job in order to do so. The point

  is that Wodehouse here sympathises with Mike: indeed he identified

  himself with him, for it is clear enough that Mike bears the same

  relation to Wodehouse as Julien Sorel to Stendhal. But he created many

  other heroes essentially similar. Through the books of this and the next

  period there passes a whole series of young men to whom playing games and

  "keeping fit" are a sufficient life-work. Wodehouse is almost incapable of

  imagining a desirable job. The great thing is to have money of your own,

  or, failing that, to find a sinecure. The hero of SOMETHING FRESH (1915)

  escapes from low-class journalism by becoming physical-training instructor

  to a dyspeptic millionaire: this is regarded as a step up, morally as well

  as financially.

  In the books of the third period there is no narcissism and no serious

  interludes, but the implied moral and social background has changed much

  less than might appear at first sight. If one compares Bertie Wooster

  with Mike, or even with the rugger-playing prefects of the earliest

  school stories, one sees that the only real difference between them is

  that Bertie is richer and lazier. His ideals would be almost the same as

  theirs, but he fails to live up to them. Archie Moffam, in THE

  INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE (1921), is a type intermediate between Bertie and

  the earlier heroes: he is an ass, but he is also honest, kind-hearted,

  athletic and courageous. From first to last Wodehouse takes the

  public-school code of behaviour for granted, with the difference that in

  his later, more sophisticated period he prefers to show his characters

  violating it or living up to it against their will:

  "Bertie! You wouldn't let down a pal?"

  "Yes, I would."

  "But we were at school together, Bertie."

  "I don't care."

  "The old school, Bertie, the old school!"

  "Oh, well--dash it!"

  Bertie, a sluggish Don Quixote, has no wish to tilt at windmills, but he

  would hardly think of refusing to do so when honour calls. Most of the

  people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites,

  and some of them are plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be

  described as immoral. Even Ukridge is a visionary rather than a plain

  crook. The most immoral, or rather un-moral, of Wodehouse's characters is

  Jeeves, who acts as a foil to Bertie Wooster's comparative

  high-mindedness and perhaps symbolises the widespread English belief that

  intelligence and unscrupulousness are much the same thing. How closely

  Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that

  nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is

  an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make. Not only are there no

  dirty jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations: the

  horns-on-the-forehead motif is almost completely avoided. Most of the

  full-length books, of course, contain a "love interest", but it is always

  at the light-comedy level: the love affair, with its complications and

  its idyllic scenes, goes on and on, but, as the saying goes "nothing

  happens". It is significant that Wodehouse, by nature a writer of farces,

  was able to collaborate more than once with Ian Hay, a serio-comic writer

  and an exponent (VIDE PIP, etc) of the "clean-living Englishman"

  tradition at its silliest.

  In SOMETHING FRESH Wodehouse had discovered the comic possibilities of

  the English aristocracy, and a succession of ridiculous but, save in a

  very few instances, not actually contemptible barons, earls and what-not

  followed accordingly. This had the rather curious effect of causing

  Wodehouse to be regarded, outside England, as a penetrating satirist of

  English society. Hence Flannery's statement that Wodehouse "made fun of

  the English," which is the impression he would probably make on a German

  or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I

  was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended

  Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that Wodehouse HAD gone over to

  the enemy, which from his own point of view was the right thing to do.

  But what interested me was to find that he regarded Wodehouse as an

  anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British

  aristocracy in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be

  very difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of

  the way in which books, especially humorous books, lose their finer

  nuances when they reach a foreign audience. For it is clear enough that

  Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either. On the

  contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all

  through his work. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the

  blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to

  the Catholic faith, so an English reader can see that in creating such

  characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside

  Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking

  the social hierarchy. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would

  write of them so much. Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social

  system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code--a

  mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance. The Earl of

  Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and Bertie

  Wooster's helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the

  servant ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can

  mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile caricatures, because

  he is inclined to be Anglophobe already and they correspond to his

  preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie Wooster, with his

  spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any

  English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure,

  and Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as

  much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain problems

  are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men

  are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious: their tone is set for them

  by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges the

  social gap by addressing everyone as "Comrade".

  But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his

  out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs

  to an epoch earlier than that. He is the "knut" of the pre-1914 period,

  celebrated in such songs as "Gilbert the Filbert" or "Reckless Reggie of

  the Regent's Palace". The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by

  preference, the life of the "clubman" or "man about town", the elegant

  young man who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his

  arm and a carnation in his buttonhole, barely survived into the

  nineteen-twenties. It is significant that Wodehouse could publi
sh in 1936

  a book entitled YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. For who was wearing spats at that

  date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But the

  traditional "knut", the "Piccadilly Johnny", OUGHT to wear spats, just as

  the pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous writer is not

  obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins,

  Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt

  all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen

  years that preceded his internment. His picture of English society had

  been formed before 1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom,

  admiring picture. Nor did he ever become genuinely Americanised. As I

  have pointed out, spontaneous Americanisms do occur in the books of the

  middle period, but Wodehouse remained English enough to find American

  slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He loves to thrust a slang

  phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English ("With a hollow

  groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me and went out into the

  night"), and expressions like "a piece of cheese" or "bust him on the

  noggin" lend themselves to this purpose. But the trick had been developed

  before he made any American contacts, and his use of garbled quotations

  is a common device of English writers running back to Fielding. As

  Mr John Hayward has pointed out, [Note, below] Wodehouse owes a good deal

  to his knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare.

  His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an

  audience educated along traditional lines. When, for instance, he

  describes somebody as heaving "the kind of sigh that Prometheus might

  have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch", he is assuming

  that his readers will know something of Greek mythology. In his early

  days the writers he admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome,

  W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F. Anstey, and he has remained closer to them

  than to the quick moving American comic writers such as Ring Lardner

  or Damon Runyon. In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered

  whether "the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will

  live after the war", not realising that they were ghosts already.

  "He was still living in the period about which he wrote," says Flannery,

  meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the

  Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round

  about 1915.

  [Note: "P. G. Wodehouse" by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942.)

  I believe this is the only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse.

  (Author's footnote.)]

  If my analysis of Wodehouse's mentality is accepted, the idea that in

  1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable

  and even ridiculous. He MAY have been induced to broadcast by the promise

  of an earlier release (he was due for release a few months later, on

  reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised that what he

  did would be damaging to British interests. As I have tried to show, his

  moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to

  the public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable

  of all the sins. But how could he fail to grasp that what he did would be

  a big propaganda score for the Germans and would bring down a torrent of

  disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must take two things into

  consideration. First, Wodehouse's complete lack--so far as one can judge

  from his printed works--of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk

  of "Fascist tendencies" in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies

  at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the

  problem of class distinctions, and scattered through it at various dates

  there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In THE

  HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian