There is not much that’s new, I think, in the release of the MI5 files on PG Wodehouse and his wartime broadcasts from Germany. The Guardian headline reads I was not a Nazi collaborator, PG Wodehouse told MI5 and, of course, Wodehouse told MI5 he wasn’t a Nazi collaborator because he was not, in fact, a Nazi collaborator.
Naive? Perhaps. Foolish? Certainly. But a collaborator? Don’t be ridiculous. And yet, one way or another this stuff keeps resurfacing even though you’d have thought Plum’s knighthood – delayed by the whiff of There’s Something Not Quite Right About Those Radio Programmes – might have settled the matter. If that weren’t enough then Robert McCrum’s masterly biography should have ended all doubts.
And yet perhaps there is one fresh wrinkle. I cannot recall if McCrum uncovered this dispiriting factlet:
A reminder that prosecutors are like aunts: there are good ones and bad ones but even in the better cases it is only a matter of time before out pops the cloven hoof. Besides, no-one familiar with Roderick Spode could ever seriously believe his creator held any fascist sympathies.[A] memo of a 1946 meeting between an M15 officer and the then director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, reveals that [Wodehouse’s] case was re-evaluated after the war. “The director said that he now takes the view that, if Wodehouse ever comes to this country, he should be prosecuted,” the officer recorded.
Nevertheless, I think one may argue that the war – and the criticism Wodehouse endured after it – had a profound effect upon him. Internment was not pleasant but not so different from life at boarding school and, fortunately for us, provided ample time to complete Joy in the Morning, Full Moon and Uncle Dynamite. In general, these mark the end of Wodehouse’s golden period.
The Wodehouse virgin is, all things considered, better off with the pre-war stuff than the post-war books. There remain flourishes of genius in the latter period (Pigs Have Wings, for instance) but the music doesn’t sparkle quite as reliably as once it did and the variations on the theme are not as fresh as they had been before. Some of this, doubtless, is a product of natural exhasution but some of it, I hazard, is an unwitting, perhaps subconscious, reflection or consequence of the melancholy, even the sourness that entered Wodehouse’s life after the war.
[Thanks to JH]
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