But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —Newsweek/The Daily Beast, December 2012

  REVIEWS IN BRIEF: NEW LINCOLN BOOKS

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

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

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

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

  No crop of Lincoln books would be complete without yet another version of the assassination. So comes Wilmot Dimwiddle’s expansive, five-volume Sic Semper.

  Somewhat boiled down, Dimwiddle’s thesis is that Lincoln, bored “out of his gourd” by the play Our American Cousin, was scratching the back of his head with his own .44-caliber derringer when it went off accidentally. Dimwiddle asserts that John Wilkes Booth had snuck into Lincoln’s box to congratulate him personally on winning the war and freeing the slaves. When the gun went off, Booth’s “acting instincts spontaneously took hold of him, like a sudden fever.” Realizing this could be “the role of a lifetime,” he pulled out his knife, carved Major Rathbone “like a Thanksgiving turkey, and leapt onto the stage, spouting Latin.” Dimwiddle even goes so far as to allege that Booth, “an early proponent of Method Acting, broke his leg on purpose, knowing that this would give his performance extra authenticity.”

  —The Daily Beast, February 2009

  OUR MAN IN HAVANA

  I first read Our Man in Havana in my teens and ever since have recalled it as being kind of a hoot: the hapless protagonist Wormold, recruited by the British Secret Service, sends London diagrams of the vacuum cleaners that he sells for a meager living, resulting in high-comic mayhem. Fun stuff.

  So I was surprised, on returning to the novel after all these years, to find it rather darker than I had remembered. The basic premise remains hilarious, if perhaps less so in the era of “Curveball,” the supposed Iraqi intelligence “asset” who managed to convince our government that there were abundant Weapons of Mass Destruction to be found in Iraq.

  The novel’s atmospherics are intense, the characters vividly morose or menacing. I dare you not to wince when Wormold’s only friend, the forlorn Dr. Hasselbacher, reveals what happened to him in the trenches in the First World War; or not to squirm when Captain Segura (nickname: “The Red Vulture”) explains the difference between the “torturable” and “untorturable” classes. So what I had remembered as comedy, one of Greene’s “entertainments,” turned out to be quite grim. When I came across Greene’s own description of the novel as “light-hearted comedy,” I wasn’t sure quite what to think, but then Greene himself remains a slippery character: you never quite know when he’s pulling your leg or up to mischief.

  If Our Man seems darker now, it is almost eerily undated, no small compliment for a book first published in the waning years of the Eisenhower administration. In its adumbration of the coming conflict between the superpowers over Cuba, it was bizarrely prescient. Within three years of the book’s publication, the world was nearly turned to cinders because of missile silos planted amid the Cuban verdure. Not much comedy there.

  Few novels become everyday phrases. “Catch-22” has entered the language to such an extent that one uses it all the time, usually to describe an encounter with some ag
ency of municipal government. “Our Man in [blank]” is not quite as common, but one hears it often enough. When I worked at the White House, various people in our embassies were pointed out to me—wink, wink—as “Our Man in [Moscow, Paris, etc.].” It is also one of those rare novels that went on to become a movie, an opera, and a play. I’m surprised that my eighteen-year-old son isn’t playing an “Our Man in Havana” game on his Xbox.

  If you’ve seen the movie, made only a year after the novel came out, you may find it impossible not to hear Alec Guinness’s voice rising up at you from the pages. Guinness’s quiet monotone is deceptive, for it contains a vast emotional diapason; it’s like listening to tapes of whale sounds, slowed down, and discovering that enormous vocabularies are being deployed. Guinness was as perfect a Jim Wormold as Michael Caine was a Thomas Fowler in the 2002 remake of The Quiet American: two of England’s finest actors in roles created by England’s finest twentieth-century novelist (a distinction he shares with his fellow Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh).

  For Americans, Greene remains problematic. To put it bluntly, he despised us. Really despised us. (As indeed did Waugh.) His anti-Americanism is muted here, but you can see the periscope poking through the surface. We might just as well relax and live with it. Ones doesn’t read Greene to have our sense of American exceptionalism validated. We read him because he was an incomparable writer who heard the beating of the human heart like few others, and because he was possessed of what Hemingway called the writer’s most indispensable tool, “a first-rate s— detector.” Fowler understood that America’s anti-Communist crusade in Vietnam was doomed from the start, and to boot, pernicious; in Havana, Wormold understands that America has thrown in on the wrong side. Within months of the publication of Our Man, the foul Batista regime and its Captain Seguras were casting off from the dock and headed to Miami in a flotilla that has held American electoral politics hostage ever since.