“Camp was really great fun,” the English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse wrote to an old school friend. He was speaking of the forty-eight weeks between 1940 and 1941 that he spent in a series of German-run civil-internment camps. He lost nearly sixty pounds. He was separated from his wife. He slept on a straw-filled mattress, and tried to avoid scabies and lice. At Tost, in what is now Poland, the fourth of four camps, Wodehouse was offered his own room, on account of his fame, and maybe his age. Declining the offer, he shared a cell with sixty-three others. He was nearly sixty when he was released. The only privilege of which he availed himself was paying eighteen marks a month for a typewriter. The typewriter was housed in a room also used by a saxophonist and a tap dancer.
Wodehouse was the third of four children born to a British colonial administrator and his wife, who were based in Hong Kong. At age two, he was sent to Bath, to be brought up by a nanny; he went to boarding school at age seven. This was not unusual for the time. “My childhood went like a breeze from start to finish,” he wrote, half convincingly. “As for my schooldays . . . they were just six years of unbroken bliss.” In his final year at boarding school, his father told him that there were too many kids to educate, and that Wodehouse could not go to Oxford, where his brother was studying. Instead, his father arranged for him to work as a bank clerk in London. He wrote articles and funny bits for the newspapers on the side. He didn’t go out much. After two years, he decided that he could make a living by his pen alone.
The former bank clerk went on to write more than seventy novels and dozens of plays. By the time he was detained, he’d become a beloved national figure. While interned, he kept a journal. Here is a not untypical early entry:
It is that “All very genial” that distinguishes Wodehouse from the irritable rest of us, while the observation of the fit from smoking tea shows that he isn’t oblivious, or deranged. He frequently writes about difficulties in his camp notebook, just never at much length. “Today the bread ration failed and we had small biscuits,” he writes, on August 12, 1940. “Many men with false teeth find it impossible to eat the biscuits in their natural state,” he notes six days later. “Bitter wind and snow,” he writes, in December. But, later in the same entry:
The first time I read Wodehouse’s “Camp Note Book,” I kept waiting to see the bonhomie and the buoyancy flag. It’s a private notebook, after all. Maybe for the first weeks an illusion that internment was a brief change of circumstance would persist. It was a short situation comedy! But wouldn’t that feeling fade? “A wonderful day!” he writes on August 14th, sure, but that was only a month in, and it was summer. What would he be thinking by November?
The entry for November 14th begins, “I must make a note of this day as one of the absolutely flawless ones of my life.” Even if his private journal was a kind of performance—for himself? for future readers?—it was a very convincing one. (The pencilled journal pages can be read in the rare-books room of the British Library.)
Soon after his camp experience, Wodehouse paid dearly for his indomitable high spirits. Though, as in the twist of one of his plots, not in the way one might have expected.
Wodehouse’s most enduring literary creation is the duo of Jeeves and Wooster. The two men feature in novels and stories that make up more than a dozen books. Bertram (Bertie) Wooster is a hapless but sweet member of the English upper class; Jeeves is his laconic, dry, and brilliant valet. Wooster gets into tangles. Jeeves gets Wooster out of tangles. The tangles are perennially gentle: Wooster gets engaged to a girl he doesn’t want to marry, or is thought to have stolen a silver cow creamer that he has not stolen (though later will be pressured to steal). Sometimes Wooster dresses garishly—in a scarlet cummerbund, for example. Sometimes the stakes are even higher: Anatole, the master chef, is being hired away from Aunt Dahlia. Repeatedly, Jeeves makes tasteful interventions offstage, and the idyll of their lives—of all the lives, of all the characters—is restored. It’s like Holmes and Watson, but no one ever gets murdered; no one even goes hungry.
My first encounter with Wodehouse was as a teen-ager, as my hard-of-hearing father stood two feet away from the television, the volume turned up to maximum. The Jeeves-and-Wooster stories were made into a television series, which began airing on PBS in 1990. My father, who was born in September, 1939, in the British-mandated Palestine, and grew up in a collective-farming community, and who by the goofy wheel of fortune was now teaching classes in fluid dynamics at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman—my dad thought “Jeeves and Wooster” was hilarious. In my memory, he watched these episodes, all of them, while wearing a towel, fresh out of the shower. That not-losing-a-minute feeling remains. I watched the episodes, too. Or at least was in the room while they were on.
I aspired to find the show funny, but didn’t, really. We had a couple of the books in our house—“Right Ho, Jeeves” and “Joy in the Morning”—and I read them dutifully, more bemused than amused. Like that of many comfortable teen-agers, my reading taste was more for the moody, or the extreme. I didn’t fall for Wodehouse until I had passed through the inevitable losses, fears, disappointments, and embarrassments that even a fortunate person accumulates over the decades—only then did the Jeeves-and-Wooster books become essential comforts. These are not difficult modernist tomes. One favorite plot hinges on a banjolele. I don’t necessarily read them front to back, but pick them up more as someone would a whiskey-and-soda, or a hymnal. The books are cozier than cozy mysteries, and, like a mystery, they help take one’s mind off real calamities.
In June, 1941, Wodehouse was released. Civilian men were normally released at the age of sixty. Wodehouse was four months shy. It remains unclear why he was released early, but many well-placed American friends and journalists had lobbied on his behalf. In Berlin, he was reunited with his wife. Within days, he was asked by the German Foreign Office if he would record some radio broadcasts for American audiences. He had already written and published a lightly comic account of his time in camp for The Saturday Evening Post.
Very few English people heard the broadcasts when they first aired. But many English people heard that they happened. A week after Wodehouse was released, the journalist William Connor, writing under the pseudonym Cassandra, suggested in the Daily Mirror that Wodehouse’s early release had been part of an unsavory deal. The English reading public mostly defended Wodehouse: it wasn’t fair to speculate. A few weeks later, Connor delivered a BBC broadcast, following the nine-o’clock news. It called Wodehouse a traitor to England, and again claimed that he had engaged in a quid pro quo for his early release. There were angry letters to the BBC, calling the broadcast slanderous. But the idea was now up for debate.
I have taught the Wodehouse broadcasts for several years now, in a graduate writing seminar on comedy and calamity. The distance of time makes it difficult for students to imagine how the innocuous and honest Wodehouse voice of the broadcasts could get him into so much trouble. He describes having ten minutes to pack a suitcase while a German soldier stands behind him telling him to hurry up; his wife thinks he should pack a pound of butter; he declines, saying he prefers his Shakespeare “unbuttered.” He also forgets his passport. His privilege and his political cluelessness are included in the joke: “Young men starting out in life have often asked me, ‘How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along.”
Wodehouse didn’t do the broadcasts in exchange for being released. But he did do them—he apparently received two hundred and fifty marks for his work. British forces had suffered through Dunkirk; London had been firebombed. The United States was not yet in the war, and we now know that the German Foreign Office saw the release of Wodehouse, who was beloved in America, as propaganda designed to keep the U.S. out of the war. The proposal for the broadcasts was part of a German plan. Wodehouse was a fool but not, by most definitions, a traitor. When he learned that the broadcasts horrified much of the English public, he recorded no more. He wrote to a friend that “it was a loony thing to do.”
Connor’s address on the BBC began, “I have come to tell you tonight of the story of a rich man trying to make his last and greatest sale—that of his own country.” Later, he described Wodehouse falling to his knees as Joseph Goebbels asks him to bow to the Führer. Wodehouse and his wife had trouble getting out of Germany, but eventually moved back to France, then, after the war, to New York. The scandal of the broadcasts didn’t diminish. Some British libraries banned his books. In 1946, when the new Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was asked in the House of Commons whether Wodehouse would be tried for treason, he answered that the question would be addressed if and when the writer returned to England.
“I have no hesitation in saying that he has not the slightest realisation of what he is doing,” a good friend of Wodehouse’s wrote to the Daily Telegraph. “He is an easy-going and kindly man, cut off from public opinion here and with no one to advise him.” George Orwell, in his essay “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse,” from 1945, concluded, of Wodehouse’s broadcasts, that “the main idea in making them was to keep in touch with his public and—the comedian’s ruling passion—to get a laugh.”
When an M.I.5 officer and former barrister, Major Edward Cussen, interviewed Wodehouse, he said that he had wanted to reach out to his American public, who had written to him and sent him parcels while he was interned. Wodehouse said that there was also “a less creditable motive. I thought that people, hearing the talks, would admire me for having kept cheerful under difficult conditions but I think I can say that what chiefly led me to make the talks was gratitude.” Later, Wodehouse wrote to the editor of The Saturday Evening Post that he didn’t understand why the broadcasts were seen to be callous: “Mine simply flippant cheerful attitude of all British prisoners. It was a point of honor with us not to whine.” Wodehouse failed to understand how even a children’s bedtime story broadcast on Nazi radio could be a form of propaganda.
And yet, across time, Wodehouse’s naïveté seems the less extraordinary of his qualities. There are lots of political fools. Wodehouse had a rarer trait, too: a capacity for remaining interested and curious, even in a setting of deprivation. His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was. In his second broadcast, he writes of going to sleep on the floor of his cramped cell: “My last waking thought, I remember, was that, while this was a hell of a thing to have happened to a respectable old gentleman in his declining years, it was all pretty darned interesting and that I could hardly wait to see what the morrow would bring forth.”
Wodehouse’s novels focus almost exclusively on the madcap troubles of the perilously leisured. Many take place in country houses, and often turn on such events as the hope of extracting an allowance increase from a difficult uncle. Wodehouse’s camp notebook, by contrast, shows an eye for occupation, and especially for occupational contentment. “Met cook and congratulated him on today’s soup,” he writes. “He was grateful, because his professional pride had been wounded by grumblers saying there wasn’t enough. He said he could have made it more by adding water, which would have spoiled it.”
Wodehouse had to write. He was introverted, and, with the exception of schoolboy camaraderie, preferred to be at home, working. One thinks—if one has been reading a lot of Wodehouse—of those ducks elegantly moving across the water, as their duck feet paddle furiously, unseen below the surface. (I think that image may even come from a Wodehouse novel, but which one?) Even when Wodehouse was imprisoned a second time, for a couple of months, in 1944, he worked on a novel. He generally wrote one or two novels a year but published nothing in the U.K. between 1941 and 1945. It was the years of not being able to work—as opposed to internment—that must have been the real hell.
In 1938, Wodehouse published the third of the Jeeves-and-Wooster novels, “The Code of the Woosters.” It came out serially in The Saturday Evening Post, and was the last of the books issued before his internment. “The Code of the Woosters” is perhaps the most madcap of them all. There are several confused engagements, a plot to steal a police helmet, a lover of newts studying how to make bold speeches, a mustachioed Fascist named Roderick Spode. Wooster relies on Jeeves to navigate the landscape, which at every moment threatens him with social embarrassment, at the least, and maybe with an engagement to a pretty woman he doesn’t much like, at the most. It’s low stakes at its highest; an epic form for the supremely minor.
The character of Roderick Spode is a lesson in how Wodehouse metabolizes politics. We meet Spode at an antique shop; he accuses Wooster first of stealing an umbrella, then of stealing a precious antique. Later, Spode reappears at the country house to which Wooster has strategically been deployed by his aunt, who is trying to secure funds for Milady’s Boudoir, the literary magazine she runs. Spode appears as a real threat and as a buffoon—both. “I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now,” Wooster narrates. Spode, we learn, is the head of the Black Shorts, a group clearly kin to Mussolini’s Blackshirts, but hampered by a shortage of shirts. “Bare knees?” Wooster asks in disbelief, learning about Spode’s activities. He is horrified . . . by the popliteal unpleasantness.
Spode threatens everything: two engagements, Wooster’s bodily well-being, the literary magazine. (The larger threats are implied.) By the novel’s end, Spode has been tamed. Not by force, or ethical argument, but by knowledge of his secret: he is a co-owner of Eulalie Soeurs, a women’s-underwear line.
What a dream! That menace can be dispensed with so easily. In one of Wooster’s most anxious moments in the novel, Jeeves offers him instruction on the hem of his trousers:
The Wodehouses ended up spending the last years of their life in Remsenburg, Long Island. His reputation in England was partly redeemed by the persuasive efforts of Evelyn Waugh, in a radio broadcast in 1961. Opposition blocked Wodehouse’s being knighted in 1967, but sentiment was shifting. Connor became, according to Wodehouse, a “great” friend, and, in a 1961 letter, he asked Waugh not to say bad things about the journalist on TV. At the age of ninety-three, Wodehouse was finally knighted. He died a month later. He had published four novels in his nineties.
I’m reading Wodehouse novels every evening now, not because my own life is difficult—I’m eating a lot of peanut butter, and am healthy—but because whenever the impersonal or personal news cycle becomes overwhelming I find that it’s easier to transition into a night of sleep after a character is described as looking like a bewildered halibut. Having taught Wodehouse for a few years, I’ve discovered that most students have never heard of him. This seems to me a missed opportunity to improve the public’s mental health.
It is not the brilliant Jeeves who narrates these books. Jeeves is the Sherlock. The accounts of his brilliance can be credibly told only by the dimmer light—the mild Watson, the affably ineffective Wooster. I used to think that this was because it was easier to write the voice of a familiar fool than that of a mastermind. I no longer think so. The fantasy that there’s a Jeeves who can resolve all problems is the necessary joy of these books. That fantasy would never hold if we heard him tell his own tale. ♦
