Ah. sorry
And like I said, I think it’s fair assume that Orwell grouped the various assorted crimes against humanity into those few things that were definitely worse.
Anyway, we are going round in circles now. Never mind.
Bumped.
Just learned of a 2013 BBC TV movie, Wodehouse in Exile, about Wodehouse and the controversy: P.G.Wodehouse after his Berlin broadcast: BBC4 Wodehouse in Exile - YouTube
Intriguing thread; thanks for bumping it. The TV movie you mention is to be released on DVD (Region 1) this upcoming September 22, per Amazon. It does have a good cast.
In the Telegraph review of the 2013 film, it’s suggested that Wodehouse may have believed that what he was demonstrating in those broadcasts was not support for Nazis, but instead British resilience and resolve in standing up to them: Wodehouse in Exile, BBC Four, review
(The Comments section contains some interesting reading, too.)
Anyone who thinks Wodehouse could possibly have been capable of being a “Nazi collaborator” simply doesn’t know Wodehouse. He was almost hopelessly naive, a complete innocent who couldn’t even conceive of real evil, let alone condone it.
It’s what makes his writing so wonderfully escapist and endearing, and when combined with his mastery of language and his comedic skills, it makes his prolific writings a gift to the world of true literary genius. His characters may often be scrambling for a pound and a few shillings and getting themselves into humorous fixes in the process, but we know they’re never going to be in serious trouble because there’s always a huge inheritance just around the corner from their wealthy family. Evelyn Waugh put it beautifully in describing his idyllic Blandings novels and stories: “For Wodehouse there has been no fall of man… the gardens of Blandings Castle are the original gardens of Eden from which we are all exiled.”
Much of the outrage over these broadcasts came from people who had never heard them, fired up by wartime passions and further driven by vindictive BBC stories, by one reporter in particular, that have been called “probably the most vituperative attack on an individual ever heard on British radio” – all instigated at the explicit direction of one Duff Cooper, then Minister of Information in the Churchill government. With the result that Wodehouse for many years was a pariah in his own country, but found a welcoming home in America where he continued writing, co-authored many successful Broadway musicals with Jerome Kern and others, and was conscripted for a time as a Hollywood scriptwriter.
And it was during his time in Hollywood that Wodehouse’s childlike innocence got him in trouble again. This was a time when the studios were making enormous profits and being accused of greed and corruption, and in an interview poor old Wodehouse made an innocent unguarded comment about how he actually did little writing and even less of it was actually used, and basically they were paying him an enormous weekly salary to sit around the pool doing nothing. Which is exactly what they were doing. And no one was more surprised than Wodehouse when his little offhand comment exploded in the media! To the end of his idyllic sunlit days, the modern world continued to befuddle Wodehouse.
If you want an example of a Brit who really was a Nazi collaborator, who met with numerous Nazi officials before the war including a private meeting with Hitler himself, and in word and deed undermined the war effort throughout the conflict, look no further than the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, and his wife Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom he abdicated the throne. Ironically the same government that was persecuting Wodehouse was working desperately to suppress publication of Nazi records retrieved by the British and Americans after the war that so badly incriminated the Duke and Duchess, because of how the revelations would embarrass both them and the monarchy. The story might never have seen the light of day but for the integrity and perseverance of some American historians. History is full of irony.
Nah, he’d already done that with his poetry. Not much of a legacy to taint.
d&r
I know nothing of Wodehouse but I find this statement very hard to believe. Outside of mental illness or mental defect, we all can conceive of real evil. In our own small worlds we occassionally indulge it mild versions of it because we are human.
You’re taking that statement too literally, instead of reading it in the totality of my post. What I’m saying is that everything we know about Wodehouse, from the idyllic innocent charm of his novels and stories, the life he led and its celebrated incidents like the movie industry “scandal” I mentioned, his own several non-fiction works like America, I Like You which were really his version of autobiographies, and biographies like the one by Robert McCrum (Wodehouse: A Life), all paint an image of gentle naivety – someone who could not possibly have imagined the horrors the Germans were inflicting. The reality was that the Germans treated him well, especially after they realized who he was and saw the propaganda value in it, and Wodehouse, being Wodehouse, simply saw them through that lens and agreed to do some innocent, light-hearted broadcasts for them.
The second major element in this story was the degree to which the British government – Duff Cooper specifically – engaged in vilifying him and directed broadcasters to do so. Which, as I mentioned, is deeply ironic since this same government sought to cover up the fact that the Duke of Windsor had been hobnobbing with the Nazi hierarchy throughout the pre-war period, even meeting with Hitler, and during the war was constantly agitating for a “negotiated peace” with Germany and asking his friends in the Nazi regime to please take care of his house in the south of occupied France (to which they agreed). Lest there be any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting that these incidents are in any way connected – I’m just pointing out the politically driven hypocrisy in the British government in the immediate aftermath of the war. I suppose the last word in this is that Queen Elizabeth II granted Wodehouse a knighthood the year before he died – as if to say “we’re sorry for the terrible misunderstanding”.
Very good. He sounds like the British version of Forrest Gump. 
I look forward to reading his books.
I know quite a lot of Wodehouse, and I too find this statement very hard to believe.
Wodehouse characters were mostly buffoons and caricatures, but he was parodying genuine aspects of human nature, and in a rather perceptive manner, IMHO. I don’t see any indication that he was in the slightest bit naive, and very much doubt if he was.
All that said, I also don’t see any indication that he was any sort of collaborator. The rules of what is or isn’t proper to do while in captivity of an evil regime are not widely known and uniformly accepted. If all he was doing was putting out a whimsical description of his life in captivity, I don’t see that he can be condemned for anything other than an error in judgment at the most.
I completely disagree, and if you find the statement “hard to believe” then, again, you’re placing an overly literal interpretation on it rather than understanding it in the context of my post. To say that Wodehouse wasn’t “in the slightest bit naive” is a total absurdity. He had a sheltered upbringing that exposed him to all the country house rituals that he was able to write about with such authority, and thereafter was completely immersed in his writing – his stories for the periodicals, his books, his beloved musicals, and the occasional scriptwriting. At no point in his life except for his brief beginnings in the banking business and his internment by the Germans was Wodehouse ever exposed to the real world in any meaningful way. Indeed, his attempts at realistic dialog when dealing with nefarious characters or even romantic banter generally fall flat, although to me that’s part of the charm of his writing, but I think little if any of that is deliberate.
I disagree that his characters are intended as general parodies of human nature, though of course any and all comedy to some degree can be interpreted that way. The truer reality is that his characters were either clueless and/or avaricious titled nobility and their offspring, the Edwardian “knuts” who lived a life of unproductive leisure. They went to the best schools only because that was the done thing, like the ritual of dressing for dinner, and not because they had any intention of doing anything with their lives. A few were indeed productive, but here’s another revealing facet of Wodehouse: writing about what he knew, most of those who weren’t elderly nobles or knuts were writers: Ukridge’s Aunt Julia, the long-suffering Corcoran, and of course Mrs. Bingo. Or else they were evil bloodsucking publishers! Americans were different – they were all millionaires, and the solution to all financial problems was always either to marry an American industrialist or his daughter.
Indeed one of the problems with Wodehouse in the modern era is the cultural nuances that may be unfamiliar to modern sensibilities. It takes some acclimatization to really be able to immerse yourself in a world of butlers and housemaids and tweenies, the privileges of titled nobility, carefree young aristocrats, and the rigid customs that rule them all. But this is fundamentally what Wodehouse is about – a world that was already obsolete when he started writing about it – and any relationship to the real world as we know it is pure coincidence. The Blandings series, in particular, is pure escapism. So is Jeeves – I mean, in what world would someone of such profound breadth and depth of knowledge deign to work as a menial? What is the “parody” here?
But Wodehouse was nothing if not naive. He left the management of all his financial affairs to his wife, and devoted himself entirely to his writing and his Pekes. Only someone with the complete childlike innocence of Wodehouse could have declared to an interviewer, on the record, that the movie studios were paying him ridiculously exorbitant amounts of money for doing virtually nothing, and not expected repercussions from it – though bless his heart, no one deserved a bit of the movie industry’s largesse more than Wodehouse. 
BERTIE: What Heil, Jeeves!
Including Sir Roderick Spode. That’s all Wodehouse thought of fascists.
To the contrary, I would say at no point in his life was Wodehouse isolated from the real world in any meaningful way. If you look at his childhood and his later career and the circles in which he moved, there’s absolutely nothing that would lend itself to sheltering or naiveté, and many many people engaged in these fields and moved in these circles without anyone suggesting that this was any sort of indication of being sheltered - the opposite, if anything.
It’s extremely common for one spouse to leave the financial affairs to the other, and this does not imply any sort of naivete on the part of the other spouse - only a disinterest in dealing with such matters. (My wife leaves management of all financial affairs to me, and she is not at all sheltered or naïve.)
Not at all so. It’s extremely common for celebrities to say things in interviews that have implications that they did not consider, or in general to make deprecating remarks about themselves. For a recent example that parallels Wodehouse, consider Woody Allen saying: “I don’t know how I got into this. I have no ideas and I’m not sure where to begin. My guess is that Roy Price will regret this. […] This was a catastrophic mistake for me. I’m struggling with it, […] I never should have gotten into it. I thought it would be really easy, to do six half-hours. I thought it would be a cinch. But it’s not. It’s very, very hard. […] I’m not good at it. I don’t watch any television. I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m floundering… I expect this to be a cosmic embarrassment.”
And I think all of it was deliberate. Wodehouse found a niche that he was very successful with, and he went with it, as most people would do in that circumstance.
I didn’t say his characters were intended as general parodies of human nature. I said he was parodying genuine aspects of human nature.
The characters were for the most part a bunch of idle rich wastrels. But the works in general do depict parodies of human nature.
To pick one example among many, consider the exchange between Ascobaruch and the High Priest of Hec. Now I’m not saying that either of these characters was necessarily a parody about anything. But this specific exchange, in which Ascobaruch flattered the High Priest, and the High Priest fell for it, was a parody of similar stratagems as are practiced all the time, but in an over-the-top and hence humorous manner. This was not a man who was naïve to the point of being unable to appreciate Nazi evil.
This is just selecting a few people who fit your case and claiming they represent a pattern. Wodehouse works are also full of ministers, private detectives, bookies, explorers/big game hunters and so on.
This is also completely cherry-picked. Many of the upper class British people were self-made industrialists, e.g. Bingo Little’s uncle Lord Bittlesham (formerly Mortimer Little of Little’s Liniment), the husbands of both Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha and so on.
Bottom line is that there appears to be zero basis for the claim that Wodehouse was naïve or sheltered, and the entire basis for this claim appears to be the assumption that the addle-headed Drones Club members that he depicted represented his own mindset, along with some heavy cherry-picking of his general work.
You can say that again.
Pound and his sidekick TS Eliot poisoned the fountain of English poetry about 100 years ago, and the fountain has not been detoxified.
Unfortunately the truth has been escaping the professoriate and literati for the duration.
Do you think Michael Jackson in his child-like Disneyland would understand the geopolitical complexities of WW2 europe?
Or would he keep singing merrily and fondling little boys?
What did Wodehouse say that was actually pro-Nazi? He did make those broadcast while under arrest in a camp while forcefully separated from his wife. She was fine, but at the time, he was very worried about her, since he didn’t have any information.
I’ve heard some clips from those broadcasts. In the clips, he was making some humorous comments about the lousy food in the camp. Did he make any comments that was actually pro-Nazi regime?
ETA: Roderick Spode from The Code of the Woosters was created to make fun of the British Union of Fascists. I don’t think he was complete unaware of politics. But once WWII was declared, I doubt the guards gave him any access to news. So he would not have any idea on how the war politics is going and how the hard the home front was hit.
You are assuming that the public manifestation of MJ was the same as the inner man…child. And I did mention mental defect? Seriously, he had to go to school, right? He, at least marginally, controled his empire. And, if its true, he manipulated parents into using their children.
Just some more information from his biography. After fall of France, Wodehouse was sent to a former prison in Loos, a suburb of Lille, on 21 July; Ethel remained in their house in Le Touquet. He was only released a few month before his 60th birthday. (Only male enemy under 60 was interned.)
I looked up more about the broadcasts. They were aired on 28 June, 9, 23 and 30 July, and 6 August, and were titled How to be an Internee Without Previous Training. Was there anything in there that actually spoke well about the Nazi regime?
One summary I read said it was mostly about his experience as an internee.
Now available on DVD: http://www.collectablesdirect.com/product/44689-d/new-releases
Point of order. This debate has little to do with evil. The Nazi’s were not unquestionably evil during this period(before and during Wodehouse’s broadcasts). Or they were no less evil than many others the British had faced and indeed were to ally themselves with only months later. The controversy then(and now) is the suspicion that Wodehouse sided with the enemy. It’s a suspicion most do not share.