WODEHOUSE: A Life
By Robert McCrum. Norton. 530 pp. $27.95
The world of entertainment seldom poses questions for ethics courses, but here's one that could round out a final exam. In 1941, Hollywood director Ernst Lubitsch made "To Be or Not to Be," an anti-Nazi satire featuring a fictitious troupe of Polish actors, with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in the leading roles. At one point, a concentration camp commandant pronounces this verdict on the Benny character's thespian abilities: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." When the movie came out in 1942, that line in particular -- and the frivolity of Lubitsch's treatment in general -- provoked so much adverse comment that he had to defend himself. "It seemed to me," he explained, "that the only way to get people to hear about the miseries of Poland was to make a comedy. Audiences would feel sympathy and admiration for people who could still laugh in their tragedy." Lubitsch withstood the controversy and went on to direct more films; "To Be or Not to Be" is now considered an American classic.
At about the same time, the English comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse and his wife, Ethel, were taken into custody in France, where they'd been living. After being held for almost a year in a Nazi internment camp (not a horribly uncomfortable year, but prison is prison), Wodehouse was approached about going on radio to tell his story. He agreed and was released. Taken to Berlin and installed in a luxury hotel, he made several broadcasts about his captivity in which he used the chaffing tone of his Bertie and Jeeves novels: "All that happened, as far as I was concerned, was that I was strolling on the lawn with my wife one morning, when she lowered her voice and said 'Don't look now, but there comes the German army.' And there they were, a fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green, carrying machine guns." In England, the condemnations were so loud and numerous that after the war Wodehouse chose to live out his many remaining days in the United States. He continued to write novels, some of them as good as anything he'd ever done.
The question: How would you distinguish the two cases morally?
While you're pondering, let me fill you in on Wodehouse's life and work, as related in Robert McCrum's admirable and stylish biography. Wodehouse hailed from the network of old English families that, in McCrum's words, "ran the country." His full name was Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronounced Wood-house), and his friends called him Plum. He and his siblings grew up suffering from a great absence -- that of their parents, who parked them with nannies for long periods: "In total," McCrum writes, "Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and fifteen, which is by any standards a shattering emotional deprivation." His defense was to cultivate the British virtue of unflappability and transform it into comedy, especially in the persona of literature's coolest and cleverest manservant, the invaluable Jeeves.
After graduating from his public school -- Dulwich College, whose teams he followed ever after, no matter where he was -- Wodehouse got the bad news: His father couldn't afford to send him to university (or so he claimed). The young man went to work as a junior clerk in a London bank and wrote comic articles on the side. In 1901, at age 19, he came down with mumps, which, in McCrum's words, "may have made him infertile, and possibly explains a diminished sexual appetite, though this subject remains opaque." Having recovered, he was asked to fill in for a vacationing editor at the Globe and Traveller, an evening broadsheet. He agreed, cutting loose from the bank and embarking on the life of a freelancer.
In 1904, he visited America for the first time, a decision that McCrum calls "the making" of him. Wodehouse loved New York, with its bustle and fizz and multiple patois, and he soon intuited that his life's work would be "selling a literary version of Britain to America, and vice versa." In addition to his novels and stories, the earliest of which tended to be about school or young love, he wrote books and lyrics for musicals. Until Cole Porter came along, Wodehouse was the wittiest man on Broadway, although his most memorable words have proven to be the homespun ones he wrote for the love song "Bill," which ended up in Jerome Kern's "Showboat." He enjoyed the collaborations, the money was good, and the returns once he started placing stories in such American magazines as the Saturday Evening Post were even better -- as much as $10,000 a pop, a figure that Wodehouse eventually managed to triple or even quadruple by serializing his novels prior to book publication.
Jeeves -- the name was borrowed from a cricketer killed in World War I -- and his "mentally negligible" master, Bertie Wooster, first appeared circa 1916; Lord Emsworth, owner of that beloved porker the Empress of Blandings, a few years later. The war itself helped put them across. In its desolate aftermath, McCrum notes, "Wodehouse's lighthearted country-house comedies were both a tonic for bereaved and depressed survivors, and a kind of lunatic elegy for a lost world." By now Wodehouse had perfected his way with a farcical plot, and his style had evolved into a scintillating blend of mock epic and slang.
Watch how he mixes high and low in this excerpt from a letter he wrote during a Hollywood sojourn in 1930, after being sounded out about writing a script for the faltering star John Gilbert: "Just before Gilbert did his first talkie, [MGM] signed him up for six more at $250,000 a picture and the thought of having to pay out those million and a half smackers gashes them like a knife. The rumor goes that in order to avoid this they are straining every nerve to ensure that his next picture will be such a flop that he will consent to make a broken-hearted settlement and retire from the screen. And what is disturbing me is this; Do they feel that I am the only writer on the payroll who can be relied on to deliver a flop? When it is essential that a motion picture shall lay an egg . . . does the cry go around the front office, 'Wodehouse is the man, send for Wodehouse'? It makes you think."
The books kept pouring out: 92 volumes of novels and short stories in all, one short of the number of years Wodehouse lived. (Those who have yet to hop onto this juggernaut of mirth might start with the stories "A Crime Wave at Blandings" and "The Great Sermon Handicap" and the novels Summer Lightning and Thank You, Jeeves.) At the end, England dropped its grudge: Queen Elizabeth II knighted Wodehouse in 1974, only a few weeks before his death.
McCrum captures his subject's world view on the book's penultimate page: "Personally enigmatic and elusive, he was happy to let life remain a mystery. In lightness and lunacy, life could be bearable, and the unexamined life, left to its own devices, could go like a breeze, especially if crowded with incident, orchestrated by butlers and valets, and dedicated to helping old pals."
Imbued with such an outlook, Wodehouse was ill-equipped for the exigencies of war. In answering that ethics question, I would start by emphasizing venue. Lubitsch was in Hollywood, freely making a movie for his studio; the worst he could be accused of was bad taste. Wodehouse was behind enemy lines, just out of jail, appearing to cooperate with the German propaganda machine as a quid pro quo for his release (he later insisted that this was not how he perceived the situation -- which to McCrum only shows what a babe in the woods he was); he could fairly be accused of collaboration. George Orwell and other friends came to Wodehouse's defense, but he himself admitted that the broadcasts were "a loony thing to do." His name will always be sullied by the incident, which McCrum both emphasizes more than any previous biographer and also puts in compassionate perspective: "It is the cruel irony of Wodehouse's story that it was the thing with which he was blessed, and which he had worked so hard to perfect, his inimitable lightness of spirit and self-protective flippancy, that betrayed him." •
Dennis Drabelle is a Book World contributing editor.
