PG Wodehouse's guide to fighting fascism
What the creator of Jeeves and Wooster can teach us about defying evil
That the great English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse "disgraced" himself during World War II is about as established as any fact about Wodehouse's life is. Certainly, it was accepted as fact by just about anyone who wasn't a Nazi who was alive in the early 1940s.
Granted, this fact was (and is) interpreted differently by Wodehouse's fans and detractors. To the latter, Wodehouse was at best a sell-out and at worst a traitor. George Orwell's defense of his fellow scribbler, on the other hand, is typical of the former: Wodehouse (argued Orwell) was merely a victim of his own glorious naivete, of that innocent, wholly apolitical soul that could dream up the modern fairylands of Blandings Castle and Bertie Wooster's flat.
The facts, for those who don't know them, are these: In 1940 Wodehouse was living in his villa in Le Touquet, France. At the time he, like most everyone, assumed that the Germans would be repulsed long before they reached France.
He was wrong. Carried by the momentum of their remorseless blitzkrieg across Belgium, the Nazis swept into Le Touquet before Wodehouse and his wife Ethel could plan an escape. Wodehouse was taken into custody and sent to a series of civil internment camps. A little less than a year later, four months shy of his sixtieth birthday, he was released.
In the weeks before his release, Nazi propagandists in the German Foreign Office conceived the plan of asking him to do a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin about his war experiences. Evidently, the Nazis hoped that Wodehouse's slightly premature release (the usual age for release was sixty) and broadcasts would help keep America (where Wodehouse was wildly popular) out of the war. Not knowing of these machinations, Wodehouse agreed to the request, recording a series of talks putting a typically Wodehousian spin on his incarceration: painting the time as a kind of a lark, a belated throwback to his public school days.
Understandably, Wodehouse's appearance on Nazi radio and his lighthearted tone did not sit well with a British populace hunkering down as their cities were being flattened by nightly air raids and who were daily losing fathers and sons to the Hun in the trenches of Europe. Hence, his disgrace.
I have no interest in re-adjudicating this old controversy. All this is only by way of background to what seems, to me, as a writer and academic, by far the most astonishing and under-appreciated fact about this period of Wodehouse's life: namely, that during his internment he wrote - and finished - an excellent comic novel (Money in the Bank) that makes not the slightest reference to the war, his sufferings, or anything else of the slightest social, political or moral consequence.
It is important to understand the conditions in which this feat was accomplished.
On the day of Wodehouse's arrest, the Nazis showed up at his villa unannounced, gave him ten minutes to pack, and then whisked him away from his wife, his friends, his work, his life. He was then shuttled from camp to camp in packed railway cars, without ever being told where he was being sent. His internment was spent in often bitterly-cold dormitories lacking all privacy with hundreds of other men (some of whom committed suicide), during which he lost nearly 60 pounds from malnourishment. Having refused any special treatment, including the offer of a private room, the two luxuries that he availed himself of were the abundant spare time, and (eventually) a rented typewriter.
Money in the Bank was written, Wodehouse later wrote to his friend Bill Townend, "in a room with fifty other men playing darts" and with Nazi guards looking over his shoulder.
There are parallels in the annals of art, of course. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, wrote a 1200 line poem while serving a sentence in the Gulag, in conditions even much worse than those endured by Wodehouse. Solzhenitsyn would write each line on a bar of soap in the morning, and then memorize it. John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress while in prison. Ditto Boethius with The Consolation of Philosophy. Etc.
But that's the point isn't it? Even if Money in the Bank hardly ranks alongside The Consolation or Pilgrim's Progress as immortal art, the writing of it places Wodehouse among a remarkable few - those so committed to their craft that they would allow nothing short of death to stop them from producing. And even then, there is something that sets him apart, i.e. his towering insouciance. Whereas these other detainees typically sought to make sense of their sufferings, or the human condition, through art, he seems to have somehow transcended his sufferings, writing as if they did not even exist.
It has always seemed to me that there is something strangely moving about this thoroughly Wodehousian act of defiance.
Hitler wanted Wodehouse, and every other person on the planet, to do nothing but think about him. If they were not thinking about him with rapturous adoration, then at the least he wanted them thinking about him with an all-consuming hatred and dread. There he was at the microphone, bellowing to the world with that furious, frenetic energy of his, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" And there was Wodehouse, cheerily tapping away at his typewriter, thinking about Hitler not at all.
What a beautiful thing!
It's true that one wouldn't necessarily want a world filled only with Wodehouses. And yet, as Bishop Barron noted in a recent interview with Lex Fridman, one can disagree with pacifists, and yet be grateful that they exist. "Because," as he noted, "they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares."
So too with the Wodehouses of the world. More than anything, evil lusts for attention. It wants our minds, our thoughts, our souls. It wants us to forget that goodness and innocence and beauty and love and truth even exist. It wants us to think that evil is the only thing with any power. It wants us to fret and to fight, and in the fighting to lose hope, and in losing hope to lose all dignity and all humour and all happiness. It wants us to continually obsess about its every move, and to live in dread what it might be up to next. And sometimes, it seems, we are all too willing to oblige.
That is why we need to be reminded from time to time that sometimes the most brilliant tactical move when coming face to face with the devil may well be that of the scrappy, happy little boy who enrages his bully more by walking past him, entirely absorbed in his own thoughts, whistling a cheery tune. Or, by writing a comic novel.
That's really interesting, thanks