In justice to Plummy
Richard Ingrams
P.C. Wodehouse Frances Donaldson (Weidenfeld £10.95) P.C. Wodehouse Frances Donaldson (Weidenfeld £10.95) A'though I had known Plummy Wodehouse most of my life,' Frances Donaldson wrote in her absorbing little book Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour (1967) '1 had never been able to read his books... never been able to under- stand the "master" stuff'. Since then I am Pleased to report that Lady Donaldson has suffered a sea change. She tells us that when she began to work on this, the authorised life at the age of 70, she set herself the task of reading the complete oeuvre-about 100 books in all — and soon found that she had Succumbed to the irresistible spell of P.G. Wodehouse.
As a woman she admits that she is in a minority of 10 per cent, the proportion of the Wodehouse readership which she estimates, probably correctly, to be female. BY and large he makes his appeal to men and more especially to those of us who share to some extent his background and the kind of attitudes it fosters. He was one °j_ three sons born to Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a Hong Kong magistrate who, as a result of winning a bet that he could walk round the island in a given time, suf- fered sunstroke and was never the same again. His mother Eleanor was a relative of Cardinal Newman's, a formidable but unintelligent woman known.in the family as the Memsahib. In 1883 she packed her three sons Peveril (6), Armine (4) and Pelham (2) off to England, to a woman called Miss Roper living in Bath. Thereafter they were looked after by a series of aunts, and their Parents became virtual strangers to them. Such parental callousness, much com- moner then than now, helped to foster Wodehouse's unusual character. Like many Others brought up by nannies and sent off to boarding schools when they have learned to walk he developed an independent, detached spirit and an indifference to other People. 'The key to his character'Lady Donaldson writes 'lies in his inability to feel strong emotions.' But he was too good- natured, too straightforward to be in any Way resentful or embittered and after a spell writing school stories he settled down to create the immortal characters by whom he is known to millions — Jeeves, Wooster, Lord Emsworth and all the drones and aunts.
, Wodehouse always resented attempts by biographers and analysts to relate his Characters to his own experience. But in an Lunguarded moment he did admit that he had a lot in common with Lord Emsworth
`I have a longing for peace and quiet and
am rather bossed about by female rela-
tions' (Lady Donaldson adds, from her own observations, that his wife Ethel who is still, apparently, alive, had some of the characteristics of Lady Constance). Just as Lord Emsworth wanted no more than to be left alone with his books, Wodehouse just wanted to be left alone to write. Nothing else much mattered to him. He had no in- terest in possessions. Once he had a typewriter and a pipe he was content.
But there was also a strong element of Bertie Wooster in Wodehouse. In the ways of the world he was completely untutored. He had no social graces and shocked his Oxford fans when they gave a dinner to celebrate his honorary Doctorship of Let- ters, by mumbling only 'Thank you', in- stead of delivering the expected speech.
Wodehouse's tragedy was that he had no Jeeves in real life. He needed someone of the sort to pilot him through his wartime crisis. It is unfortunate but inevitable that when a writer lives as uneventful a life as Wodehouse, biographers will fasten on the one controversial episode in his career and subject it to closer scrutiny than perhaps it deserves. The story of Wodehouse's cap- ture by the Germans in 1940, his internment for nearly a year and subsequent broadcasts on Nazi radio, is a familiar one. But it need- ed someone with the impartial approach of Lady Donaldson, someone too with access to Wodehouse's private papers to clear the matter up once and for all. As usual when people take sides on an issue and adopt un- compromising attitudes, the truth turns out to be somewhere in between. Wodehouse, it is clear, did not do a deal with the Germans whereby he agreed to do the broadcasts in exchange for his release from prison. On the other hand it emerges from his Camp Diary, here published for the first time, that he liked Germans and showed little or no antagonism to his captors. He had previously mentioned in a jokey way the possibility of making his own private peace treaty with Germany in an article for the Saturday Evening Post. It may have been this that gave the Germans the idea of ap- proaching him. Wodehouse, according to his own version, which is still the only one we have to go on, agreed to broadcast prior to his release, but was quite unconscious that the two things were connected, even if they were. Jeeves of course would have warned him of the pitfalls that lay ahead — 'I would advise against broadcasting, sir. Doctor Goebbels is a most ingenious gentleman who I am reliably informed by my nephew consumes a great deal of fish.' Instead of which Wooster/Wodehouse blundered into a situation the consequences of which haunted him for the rest of his days. Although Wodehouse, as Lady Donaldson rightly insists, had committed an offence, it was a technical one and his behaviour was as nothing compared to the horrible and hypocritical behaviour of the people who hounded him thereafter. It was Wodehouse's bad luck that he had been put on a pedestal to represent the British spirit at its best, so there was bound to be more of a hue and cry than there would have been if someone who was less of a Totem had been involved. But that did not excuse the viciousness of some of Wodehouse's persecutors. I have always thought that Auberon Waugh was right in saying that what these people — Duff Cooper, Quintin Hogg, Harold Nicolson, Winston Churchill (possibly) had in common was that they were all authors and that what motivated them was not patriotism so much as profes- sional jealousy of Wodehouse's greater suc- cess. (Harold Nicolson's attack, mounted, I am sorry to read, in the Spectator, looks all the more pathetic in the light of his fatal friendship with the late Guy Burgess.)
Wodehouse's own attitude to the furore is fascinating, but typical. Once he realised the error of his ways, he wanted only for the affair to be forgotten. But the Tories were unable to bury the hatchet. Even in 1951 Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, then At- torney General, refused to give an assurance that if Wodehouse came to England he would not be prosecuted. His supporters likewise could not let the matter rest. When Evelyn Waugh delivered his famous 80th Birthday tribute on the BBC he embarrassed the Master by renewing the attack on Cassandra (William Connor) who had been originally hired by Duff Cooper to attack Wodehouse but had since become a very good friend of his. It seemed that everyone could go on being incensed indefinitely, except for Wodehouse him- self.
It is to Lady Donaldson's credit that she is not a partisan for one side or another in the war of words. She writes of Wodehouse with great affection but without any of the hyperbole that some of his fans adopt or any of the pedantry of those afficionados who seek to establish the precise details of the railway timetable between Paddington and Market Blandings or the definitive membership list of the Drones Club. She is at her most interesting writing about the books — still the best and only way .of ap- proaching Wodehouse — but includes too many letters about long forgotten stage productions. There is plenty of good new stuff. I liked the quotations from Wodehouse's correspondence relating to fellow authors: 'I am reading Bleak House for the first time and it isn't as lousy as I'd expected. But oh my God, why can't he ever draw a straight character... Yes I too have had my fill of Maugham... Max (Beer- bohm). What a louse... I tried Jane Austen and was bored stiff and last night I had a go at Pere Goriot and had to give up.' No wonder he was forced to read his own books, which he seems to have done with as much pleasure as any of us.
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