Vol. 27 No. 21 · 3 November 2005
pages 31-32 | 3574 words
No snarling
Fatema Ahmed
- Wodehouse by Joseph Connolly
Haus, 192 pp, £9.99, September 2004, ISBN 1 904341 68 3
- Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum
Penguin, 542 pp, £8.99, September 2005, ISBN 0 14 100048 1
On my father’s bookshelves, tucked between yet another novel by Somerset Maugham and J.B. Priestley’s account of a journey to Mexico with his archaeologist wife, was a copy of Carry On, Jeeves. I had never heard of P.G. Wodehouse and racing through these stories of a master and his manservant I was surprised to find that, so far as I could tell, they were seriously funny and devoid of serious meaning. There was no more Wodehouse at home; my father took a dim view of frivolous books. But my local library took a dim view of the contemporary unless it was slightly unfashionable or too popular to ignore – and the shortage of more recent fiction left room for two whole shelves of Wodehouse. I read nearly 50 books before the supply ran out. I wouldn’t really recommend this: prolonged exposure to Wodehouse can stop you taking anything seriously. Worse still, it can stop other people taking you seriously.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 22 · 17 November 2005
From Derek Robinson
Concerning the five broadcasts that P.G. Wodehouse made on German radio in 1941, Fatema Ahmed says: ‘Wodehouse’s biographers convict him only of exaggerated innocence. This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems’ (LRB, 3 November). Or perhaps it has been fetched too far. In 1941, Harry Flannery, the CBS correspondent in Berlin, interviewed Wodehouse for a radio broadcast to America. It was known then that Wodehouse intended to give talks on German radio. Immediately after the interview, a CBS commentator in New York, Elmer Davis, said: ‘Mr Wodehouse seems to be more fortunate than most of the other Englishmen in his internment camp, whose release would have had less publicity value for the Germans … People who get out of concentration camps, such as Dachau, for instance – well, in the first place, not a great many of them get out, and when they do, they are seldom able to broadcast.’ Wodehouse heard these remarks and, Flannery noted, was ‘lost in thought’ until, leaving the studio, he said: ‘Nasty of him, wasn’t it?’
Later, Wodehouse wondered why people always wanted to know if he was going to talk on German radio. ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’ he asked. Flannery told him no American would do it; the mere fact of being on a German radio programme would be seen as propaganda: ‘We would be aiding the Nazis.’ Wodehouse was not persuaded: ‘I can’t, for the life of me, see what all the fuss is about.’ His last question was: ‘Do you think these broadcasts will hurt the sale of my books in the United States?’ When he made his German broadcasts, the anger in England brought a similar reaction: he wondered whether the English would still buy his books.
Wodehouse was aware of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, of the Blitz, of the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Where does ‘exaggerated innocence’ shade into self-indulgent obliviousness?
Derek Robinson
Bristol
From Nicholas Pole
Bertie Wooster often mentions Jeeves’s ability to shimmer in or out of a room without being noticed, and he seems to have pulled this off again in Fatema Ahmed’s review. Jeeves is a looming presence who rivals Mary Poppins in his ability to do almost anything while saying almost nothing. After so many years of patient service, he deserves more than a passing mention.
Nicholas Pole
London NW8
From Will Stevens
Wodehouse was living, at the outbreak of World War Two, not in the South of France, but in the North, at Le Touquet, which makes it, perhaps, even odder that he was interned.
Will Stevens
Bristol
