The work of P.G. Wodehouse, who died 50 years ago on St Valentine’s Day 1975, may have dated somewhat in the decades since. But the great English humorist achieved at least one distinction that remains thoroughly modern. At the height of his fame, he was cancelled.
His presumed crime was to make a series of broadcasts from Berlin in 1941, after he had been stranded in occupied France and interned by the Nazis.
Although their content was typically apolitical, the talks earned the fury of Britain’s most popular columnist then, William Connor, aka “Cassandra”, of the Daily Mirror. He in turn delivered a damning broadcast about them for the BBC.
Amid the ensuing outrage, one Northern Irish town boycotted Wodehouse with immediate effect. As the Mirror reported proudly: “Within twenty-four hours of listening to [Cassandra] Portadown Urban District Council banned P.G. Wodehouse’s books from their public library.”
The paper paraphrased a council spokesman’s verdict that the celebrated literary comic “was no longer funny”. This opinion was shared by the BBC, which banned his work from the airwaves.
Portadown’s pioneering stand might be long forgotten now except that it featured a few years later in one of George Orwell’s greatest essays: In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse (1946).
Orwell argued that the writer was politically naïve to the point of stupidity but had not behaved with “conscious treachery”. While anger against him may have been understandable in 1941, it was inexcusable now:
“Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings,” Orwell wrote. “At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats – police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers – are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape.”
Wodehouse’s temporary disgrace had roots in an interview he did in June 1941 with the Irish-American Harry Flannery of CBS, which still kept a bureau in Berlin then.
Flannery later wrote a best-selling account of the years leading to US intervention in the war, Assignment to Berlin. And in their interview, Wodehouse seems to have thought of himself as American. He has spent much of his life there, hence his comment: “We are not at war with Germany”.
In general, he presented a humorous account of his internment. But it caught the attention of the Nazis, who invited him to give a series of broadcasts in similar vein, promising he would not be censored.
This was hardly a big gamble for them, given Wodehouse’s studied air of bemused neutrality. Even so, some of the humour in the broadcasts was considered subversive enough for the Americans to use as propaganda.
One man who didn’t laugh, meanwhile, was William Connor, the Presbyterian son of a civil servant from Limavady, Co Derry, who had been an increasingly influential columnist with the Daily Mirror since 1935.
The paper first gave him the opinion slot, according to a Time magazine profile, because editors admired his “arrogant, self-assured insulting ways”. Even some of his greatest admirers had bad words to say of him. “It is a terrible pity,” lamented Winston Churchill, “that so able a writer should show himself so dominated by malevolence”.
A verbal punishment beating, his BBC broadcast began:
“When the war broke out Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was at Le Touquet – gambling. Nine months later he was still there. Poland had been wiped out. Denmark had been overrun and Norway had been occupied. Wodehouse still went on with his fun.
“The elderly playboy didn’t believe in politics. He said so. No good time Charlie ever does. Wodehouse was throwing a cocktail party when the stormtroopers clumped in on his shallow life. They led him away – the funny Englishman with his vast repertoire of droll butlers, amusing young men and comic titled fops.”
It went on to evoke the image of a diabolical “Doctor Goebbels” leading Wodehouse to a mountain top and offering the world “if though wilt worship the Fuehrer”. In response: “Pelham Wodehouse fell on his knees.”
Unlike the original Cassandra, this one was believed by most listeners. In subsequent battles fought out on the letters pages of British newspapers, Wodehouse had a few high-profile supporters. But the keynote responses included a now-famous quotation from Sean O’Casey in the Daily Telegraph.
“If England has any dignity left,” he wrote, “she will forget forever the pitiful antics of English literature’s performing flea.”
Orwell’s qualified defence argued in part that the Berlin broadcasts arose from arrested development: that Wodehouse’s world view was forever frozen in a public schoolboy’s England of decades earlier:
“I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse – just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age – became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed,” he wrote.
A lifelong socialist, bitterly opposed to Soviet communism as well as fascism, Orwell had by then also taken to keeping a list of writers he considered “crypto-communists and fellow travellers”. Among these were O’Casey. Ironically, he part-excused him on similar grounds to Wodehouse, as being “very stupid”.
