novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle
then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system
are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile.
That is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far
as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I know, does
he so much as use the word "Fascism" or "Nazism." In left-wing circles,
indeed in "enlightened" circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi
radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just
as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of
mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological
struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to
remember, remained anaesthetic to that struggle until late into 1940.
Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia--the long series of
crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were
dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and "not our
business." One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the
ordinary Englishman thought of "Fascism" as an exclusively Italian thing
and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there
is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better
informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his
readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken
prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We
forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had
been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain
Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should
make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour
Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions.
Afterwards, of course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty
extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs
rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be "reduced to
degradation and poverty". By the middle of 1941 the British people knew
what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer
than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment,
and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed
the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms
of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time
the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some
of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted
no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was
afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly
novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable
answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost
certainly significant--the date. Wodehouse was released two or three
days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher
ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent.
It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as
possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the
U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans
could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in
combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly--and presumably
they expected to do so--the Americans might never intervene. The release
of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to
the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and
he was--or so the Germans calculated--popular with the Anglophobe
public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with
his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to
damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would
demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat
their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though
the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests
that he did not come up to expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at
work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended
largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a
war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper
classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters
of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place.
Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind,
and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association
tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and "Cassandra's" articles in the
DAILY MIRROR, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing
at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy.
For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse--as
"Cassandra" vigorously pointed out in his broadcast--was a rich man.
But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and
without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce
Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist,
however large his earnings may happen to be, is not OF the possessing
class. Even if his income touches �50,000 a year he has only the outward
semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a
fortune--usually a very temporary fortune--like the winner of the
Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave a good
propaganda opening. It was a chance to "expose" a wealthy parasite
without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.
In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry
at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years
later--and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with
conscious treachery--is not excusable. Few things in this war have been
more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and
Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the
guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats--police officials,
penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers--are
hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In
England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by
Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who
were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched
Wodehouse--just because success and expatriation had allowed him to
remain mentally in the Edwardian age--became the CORPUS VILE in a
propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to
regard the
incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American
authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a
poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we
drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British
citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.
Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national
morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home
and better worth chasing.
NONSENSE POETRY
In many languages, it is said, there is no nonsense poetry, and there is
not a great deal of it even in English. The bulk of it is in nursery
rhymes and scraps of folk poetry, some of which may not have been
strictly nonsensical at the start, but have become so because their
original application has been forgotten. For example, the rhyme about
Margery Daw:
See-saw, Margery Daw,
Dobbin shall have a new master.
He shall have but a penny a day
Because he can't go any faster.
Or the other version that I learned in Oxfordshire as a little boy:
See-saw, Margery Daw,
Sold her bed and lay upon straw.
Wasn't she a silly slut
To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?
It may be that there was once a real person called Margery Daw, and
perhaps there was even a Dobbin who somehow came into the story. When
Shakespeare makes Edgar in KING LEAR quote "Pillicock sat on Pillicock
hill", and similar fragments, he is uttering nonsense, but no doubt these
fragments come from forgotten ballads in which they once had a meaning.
The typical scrap of folk poetry which one quotes almost unconsciously is
not exactly nonsense but a sort of musical comment on some recurring
event, such as "One a penny, two a penny, Hot-Cross buns", or "Polly, put
the kettle on, we'll all have tea". Some of these seemingly frivolous
rhymes actually express a deeply pessimistic view of life, the churchyard
wisdom of the peasant. For instance:
Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.
which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine.
Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that
aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs,
does not seem to have been common. This gives a special position to
Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just been edited by Mr R.L.
Megroz, who was also responsible for the Penguin edition a year
or two before the war. Lear was one of the first writers to deal
in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and made-up words, without
any satirical purpose. His poems are not all of them equally
nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a perversion
of logic, but they are all alike in that their underlying feeling is sad
and not bitter. They express a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy
with whatever is weak and absurd. Lear could fairly be called the
originator of the limerick, though verses in almost the same metrical
form are to be found in earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered
a weakness in his limericks--that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same
in the first and last lines--is part of their charm. The very slight
change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be spoiled
if there were some striking surprise. For example:
There was a young lady of Portugal
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree
To examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.
It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear's have been both
printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he is really seen
at his best in certain longer poems, such as "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"
or "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�":
On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�.
Later there appears a lady with some white Dorking hens, and an
inconclusive love affair follows. Mr Megroz thinks, plausibly enough,
that this may refer to some incident in Lear's own life. He never
married, and it is easy to guess that there was something seriously wrong
in his sex life. A psychiatrist could no doubt find all kinds of
significance in his drawings and in the recurrence of certain made-up
words such as "runcible". His health was bad, and as he was the youngest
of twenty-one children in a poor family, he must have known anxiety and
hardship in very early life. It is clear that he was unhappy and by
nature solitary, in spite of having good friends.
Aldous Huxley, in praising Lear's fantasies as a sort of assertion of
freedom, has pointed out that the "They" of the limericks represent
common sense, legality and the duller virtues generally. "They" are the
realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are
always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing. For instance:
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, "It's absurd
To encourage this bird!"
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly
the kind of thing that "They" would do. Herbert Read has also praised
Lear, and is inclined to prefer his verse to that of Lewis Carroll, as
being purer fantasy. For myself, I must say that I find Lear funniest
when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of burlesque or perverted
logic makes its appearance. When he gives his fancy free play, as in his
imaginary names, or in things like "Three Receipts for Domestic Cookery",
he can be silly and tiresome. "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" is haunted by
the ghost of logic, and I think it is the element of sense in it that
makes it funny. The Pobble, it may be remembered, went fishing in the
Bristol Channel:
And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side--
"He has gone to fish, for his Aunt Jobiska's
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!"
The thing that is funny here is the burlesque touch, the Admirals. What
is arbitrary--the word "runcible", and the cat's crimson whiskers--is
merely rather embarrassing. While the Pobble was in the water some
unidentified creatures came and ate his toes off, and when he got home
his aunt remarked:
"It's a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier w
ithout their toes,"
which once again is funny because it has a meaning, and one might even
say a political significance. For the whole theory of authoritarian
governments is summed up in the statement that Pobbles were happier
without their toes. So also with the well-known limerick:
There was an Old Person of Basing,
Whose presence of mind was amazing;
He purchased a steed,
Which he rode at full speed,
And escaped from the people of Basing.
It is not quite arbitrary. The funniness is in the gentle implied
criticism of the people of Basing, who once again are "They", the
respectable ones, the right-thinking, art-hating majority.
The writer closest to Lear among his contemporaries was Lewis Carroll,
who, however, was less essentially fantastic--and, in my opinion, funnier.
Since then, as Mr Megroz points out in his Introduction, Lear's influence
has been considerable, but it is hard to believe that it has been
altogether good. The silly whimsiness of present-day children's books
could perhaps be partly traced back to him. At any rate, the idea of
deliberately setting out to write nonsense, though it came off in Lear's
case, is a doubtful one. Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced
gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals. As
a comic draughtsman, on the other hand, Lear's influence must have been
beneficial. James Thurber, for instance, must surely owe something to
Lear, directly or indirectly.
NOTES ON NATIONALISM (1945)
Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word LONGEUR, and
remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the WORD,
we have the THING in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a
habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on
nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the
nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word 'nationalism', but it
will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary
sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always
attach itself to what is called a nation--that is, a single race or a
geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may
work in a merely negative sense, AGAINST something or other and without
the need for any positive object of loyalty.
By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human
beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions
or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or
'bad'.[See note, below] But secondly--and this is much more important--I
mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other
unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than
that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with
patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any
definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction
between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.
By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular
way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no
wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive,
both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is
inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every
nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself
but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own
individuality.
[Note: Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the
proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to
as 'she'. Patently absurd remarks such as 'Germany is naturally
treacherous' are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless
generalization about national character ('The Spaniard is a natural
aristocrat' or 'Every Englishman is a hypocrite') are uttered by almost
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