The elder brother of P.G Wodehouse was an erudite Theosophist who had been one of the tutors of Jeddu Krishnamurthi- Annie Beasant's Universal Messiah for the Twentieth Century, Unlike P.G, his brother Armine passed the Army's physical exam and could fight in the Great War. Meanwhile Beasant was heading the Indian Home Rule League.
PG was close to his older brother. He liked egalitarian America and considered Dulwich- an American style dormitory suburb- a veritable earthly paradise. But then Richmal Compton was soon to make of H.G Well's Bromley the site of an Edenic childhood for not Just William.
There is a Socialism founded upon actual Society in Wodehouse and Compton and Christie. They adapted their literary genius for ordinary people- and not just those for whom English was a mother tongue.
I salute them.
Bihar, before the rule of Nitish Kumar, was- as many older people like me will remember- statistically speaking, not a good place to be born. Those coming into the world in Motihari were more likely to end up under-educated and, if not emaciated, then prone to ideological imbecility of some Samajwadi type. George Orwell is a case in point. He wrote
Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that Wodehouse had gone over to the enemy, which from his own point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find that he regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours.
P.G Woodhouse, like Lord Haw Haw, may have thought of himself as American though he hadn't been born there and had neglected to be naturalised- probably because of FDR's ferocious Income Tax regime. He- like his true Guru, W.S Gilbert- considered the British aristocracy to be utterly worthless- save for the purposes of musical comedy.
This is a mistake that it would be very difficult for an English person to make,
Yet the English made precisely this mistake when they heard Wodehouse's broadcasts. They considered him a turncoat. Orwell may have been an Etonian, but Eton isn't England. His was the minority view.
and is a good instance of the way in which books, especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience.
Orwell's books don't have this problem. The man was utterly humourless.
For it is clear enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper-class either.
During a War, not being against your country is not enough. Since aristocrats in the military and in Cabinet had left Britain unprepared for the war, being anti-upper-class was the path of sanity. Colonel Blimp, it is true, may have been a brave warrior and perfect gentleman but he was old fashioned. He had to be swept aside by younger men with unpleasant accents but the determination to win by fair means or foul.
On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.
Snobbishness is very harmful if the aristocracy has shit for brains and your country is fighting for its life.
Just as an intelligent Catholic
is in the same boat as the imbecilic Catholic when it comes to the mysteries of Faith
is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith,
whereas the illiterate Catholic remains in condign ignorance of both
so an English reader can see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking the social hierarchy.
Yes he is. That inbred nitwit sits in the House of Lords. His idiot nephews get to misrule the Empire. This endangers British lives and British liberty.
Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so much.
Yes they would if their purpose was to undermine faith in a hereditary peerage with Legislative functions.
Wodehouse’s attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code – a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance.
Yet, in the broadcasts, Wodehouse refers to himself as American. It was an American Senator who had led the campaign, mainly American or otherwise 'neutral', to have him released. PG says 'we are not at war with Germany' because America was not at war with Germany. But for Wodehouse's negligence- or canny business sense- in not getting naturalized, he might never have been interned.
As for the public-school moral code, it is the same as the 'approved school' moral code- snitches get stitches.
The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity,
Why? Is it because he is the British equivalent of a Senator? But an undignified Senator might not get re-elected. Emsworth can go to the House of Lords to vote against any law his class does not like even if he chooses to dress like a crossing sweeper. On the other hand, it was a hereditary nobleman who introduced the two Bills whereby Britain ceased badgering buggers, or butchering badgers.
Still, Orwell misses a trick in not mentioning 'Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend' which came out in 1928 and which Rudyard Kipling praised. Here, a working class little girl gives the belted Earl the courage to defy his dragon of a sister. I suppose the story could be said to be a bit 'Socialist'.
and Bertie Wooster’s helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant ought not to be superior to the master.
No. A person of diminished capacity should have a custodian- more particularly if inherited wealth can defray the expense. The comedy in the Wooster's stories arises from the fellow's futile attempts to rebel against Jeeves's superior wisdom. But we too often defy our Doctors or Solicitors or Accountants and end up repenting our actions in monologues of like bathos.
An American reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile caricatures because he is inclined to be anglophobe already and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy.
The British aristocracy was shite. That's why it no longer has a legislative function.
Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman.
On which stage? Surely all Englishmen on the English stage represented some sort of traditional stage Englishman? Wooster represented the upper class twit. But there were plutocratic twits in America and all manners of fops on European stages. In Indian cinema, even at that time, there were characters of that sort.
But, as any English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are.
Why is Orwell, an Englishman- albeit of Bihari birth- writing for Englishmen, insisting so much on Englishness? He mentions an Indian Nationalist. Presumably, Orwell's meaning is that Indians view Wooster as a wastrel wholly unconcerned with the manner in which the money he squanders is extracted from starving subjects of the King Emperor. But the same point could be made by the English working man! Perhaps Orwell thought genuine Englishmen were comfortably middle class. The language they spoke was English. What the worker's spoke was Cockney or more or less rustic regional dialects.
All through his books certain problems are consistently avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming,
Oofy Prosser unassuming! No. Wodehouse's moneyed young men are competitive. They only hang together lest they hang apart.
good mixers,
a pack animal is not a good mixer though no doubt internecine quarrels help while away the tedious hours.
not avaricious:
they are motivated by sex and money not patriotism or Platonic Love
their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing everyone as ‘Comrade’.
Nonsense! Psmith is a brainy fellow who, mercifully, is good at cricket. He inspires fear, not loathing, because he is clearly bored out of his gourd by his milieu and will soon move on to better things.
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the ‘knut’ of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as ‘Gilbert the Filbert’ or ‘Reckless Reggie of the Regent’s Palace’.
Wodehouse wrote an essay on the 'knut' and appropriated the term for his Drones. But Saki had already appropriated it for a type of sexual ambiguity or recklessness which could get you a long stretch of porridge or, the choice of blowing your brains out rather than having to face a court martial.
The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of the ‘clubman’ or ‘man about town’, the elegant young man who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in his button-hole, barely survived into the nineteen-twenties.
No. It revived in the nineteen-twenties as economic conditions improved. However, Waugh's generation was readier to embrace aestheticism and the Yellow Book.
It is significant that Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled Young Men in Spats. For who was wearing spats at that date?
Who was still wearing ten gallon hats and striding around with holstered colt revolvers? But there was a ready market for stories of such dudes.
They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier.
Because the King stopped wearing them. But American gangsters stuck with them till the Forties.
But the traditional ‘knut’, the ‘Piccadilly Johnny’, ought to wear spats, just as the pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail.
Orwell didn't live to see the Communist takeover of China. We may live to see China overtake America. Whether Socialism will triumph is an open question. What is certain is that Orwell's brand of that poison failed- probably because it featured pigtailed Chinamen.
A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his internment.
This is not true. Wodehouse had visited England in 1939 to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oxford. He had divided his time between the US and the UK till he settled in France in 1934 because he was fed up with being taxed by both the US and the UK. Had he become a US citizen, he'd have been on the hook for Federal Income Tax. But, in that case, he wouldn't have been interned by the Germans.
His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naïve, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture.
But Wodehouse's England's self-image had already been re-constituted on the basis of W.S Gilbert's depiction of it. By 1917, even the inventor of Sherlock Holmes had begun to believe in fairies.
Nor did he ever become genuinely Americanized.
He was very successful there- that's true Americanization.
As I have pointed out, spontaneous Americanisms do occur in the books of the middle period, but Wodehouse remained English enough
or simply old enough
to find American slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He loves to thrust a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English (‘With a hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me and went out into the night’),
Wodehouse has no withals or whiloms. He is never Wardour Street.
and expressions like ‘a piece of cheese’ or ‘bust him on the noggin’ lend themselves to this purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any American contacts,
Adrian Ross- who, like W.S Gilbert spent his early years in France- was familiar with this 'trick'. The fact is, wealth was flooding back from America at about this time setting off dreams of 'shop girls' marrying millionaires and English society being overturned according to the rules of musical comedy
and his use of garbled quotations is a common device of English writers running back to Fielding.
Chaucer surely?
As Mr John Hayward has pointed out,[2] Wodehouse owes a good deal to his knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare.
Who doesn't?
His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a high-brow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines.
What other lines existed back then? Wodehouse, like Christie, wrote in a manner intelligible to the shop-girl and the delivery boy- or Indian Babu.
When, for instance, he describes somebody as heaving ‘the kind of sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch’, he is assuming that his readers will know something of Greek mythology.
No. He is assuming his readers have had a Board School education and hoped to better, if not themselves, then their children.
In his early days the writers he admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F. Anstey, and he has remained closer to them than to the quick-moving American comic writers such as Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon.
Wodehouse understood that he couldn't compete with Yanks on their own turf. But he could do very well sticking with an American conception of England as a sort of country cousin saved from utter boorishness by being 'old money'.
In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether ‘the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war’, not realizing that they were ghosts already. ‘He was still living in the period about which he wrote,’ says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.
The Edwardian age was turning Socialist. Indeed the King Emperor adopted Harcourt's slogan 'we are all Socialists now'. Then came the Twenties and the Great Strike, which the Woosters definitively won. The Drones came out of their Clubs to don the uniform of special constables under the Generalship of crazy Lesbians. Clearly, Labor had to concede to Capitalism till clitorises became less engorged.
If my analysis of Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He may have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging to British interests.
This argument fails if he thought that it was in Britain's interest to do a deal with Hitler or if his spiritual home was isolationist America.
As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins.
Orwell could not have known that a whole bunch of public-school boys were busy spying for the Soviets at around this time. Waugh was more prescient.
But how could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse’s complete lack – so far as one can judge from his printed works – of political awareness.
But, according to Orwell, Wodehouse was an overgrown schoolboy. He knew it was wrong to talk to the beaks more particularly if they offer you buttered scones and other such obvious bribes.
It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all.
But Fascist tendencies- those of the Welsh Wizard being a case in point- existed in the Edwardian era and, in more pronounced form on the Continent. Boulanger died in 1891. There could easily have been a Boulangerist, anti-Dreyfusard, Sorelian, Maurrassian dictator wannabe in France. Portugal too could have been quicker to dump its utterly worthless Liberals.
The fact is, from the 1880's onward, there was already a widespread disenchantment with Liberal Democracy associated with the recognition that Socialists be shite.
Might a 'superman' not reconcile Capital and Labor and show the way to a more cohesive and prosperous Society? The First World War had revealed that resources could be mobilized for great conflicts of attrition. Might not a similar mobilization serve a progressive purpose? Of course, you might have to beat or kill a few trouble-makers along the way.
Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions,
not for us Brits. Our own class is best just as our own Mum is the bestest Mumsy in the wide world.
and scattered through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In The Heart of a Goof (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the U.S.S.R.
Orwell means 'the Clicking of Cuthbert' where a Russian novelist says Tolstoy and P.G Wodehouse are not good but not bad. Perhaps Orwell, in Burma, had Malaria when he read the thing.
But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous
Really? How strange!
and, considering the date, not markedly hostile.
Very true. Wodehouse, clearly failed to incorporate Slutzkian 'Income effects' in his Leontief type input-output analysis of the N.E.P. His wife often scolded him about it.
That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings.
Whereas Orwell's political consciousness, as discoverable from his writings, was stupid shit. You can take the old Etonian out of Eton but if you don't get him to run a business or take a lot of courses in econometrics and forecasting, he is gonna be a fag hag to some all-buggering Bolshevism or the other.
Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word ‘Fascism’ or ‘Nazism.’ In left-wing circles, indeed in ‘enlightened’ circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it.
Then Stalin and Hitler did a deal and JBS Haldane and others were suddenly saying Stalin's real concern was to save the Jews of Poland and 'West Ukraine'.
But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism.
That struggle was useless. Franco continued to rule Spain into the Seventies. Hitler and Mussolini were defeated on the field of battle.
The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained anaesthetic to that struggle until late into 1940.
But the Labor Government which came to power in 1945 did not think it worthwhile to make a big stink about Franco. He was left in place.
Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia – the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and ‘not our business.’ One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of ‘Fascism’ as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany.
Mussolini had prevented Austrian 'Anshluss' in 1934. It was only after Italy became isolated that Mussolini did a deal with Hitler in 1937. But Stalin was to follow suit.
And there is nothing in Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.
There is plenty in Orwell's to suggest he was a cretin.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase.
For Britain, this was certainly true. America hadn't yet entered the War.
We forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid.
Because people remembered what had happened to the young men who rushed to enlist in 1914.
There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour-Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions.
But Ernie Bevan was for rearmament and a firm attitude to Herr Hitler.
Afterwards, of course, things changed.
French uselessness came as a surprise.
The army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be ‘reduced to degradation and poverty’. By the middle of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939.
He was reacting as an American. Sadly, he had neglected to take American nationality.
He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They attracted no attention, however.
They were court-martialed. The worst were sentenced to be hanged but were released in the early Fifties.
And even an outright quisling like John Amery was afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
Amery was hanged. He had neglected to take Spanish citizenship. People felt sorry for his father- Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry?
I think there was some confusion between Wodehouse and 'Lord Haw Haw'- William Joyce, one of Moseley's lieutenants- who was actively aiding the Nazis.
One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.
A.A Milne, who had been a friend of Wodehouse, attacked him bitterly. He read great significance into the fact that PG had once remarked that he'd have liked to have had a son provided the chap was at least 15 years old at birth. For Milne, this showed an irresponsible attitude.
Wodehouse defended himself as follows- ' “You misunderstand me, Mr Milne, I was simply talking as one businessman to another. When we authors have infant sons, our first thought is to cash in on them, and what I meant was that you had nipped in first and cleaned up on your infant son so thoroughly that the racket was busted.
“By the time you had finished exploiting the commercial possibilities of the young Milne, infant sons had reached saturation point and there was no more money in the game. The public will accept one Christopher Robin going hoppity hoppity hop, but not a sort of Russian ballet of the offspring of rival authors going hoppity hoppity hop, too.”
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant – the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent.
Higher ranks maybe, but not the low level functionaries tasked with propaganda.
It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before.
The Germans were hoping that Churchill too would back an anti-Soviet crusade.
The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly – and presumably they expected to do so – the Americans might never intervene.
Yet Hitler gratuitously declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor. The man was barking mad.
The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists.
Because American isolationists are such big fans of the effete English aristocracy- right?
He was well known in the United States, and he was – or so the Germans calculated – popular with the anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle.
Nazis loved monocles. Their big grievance was that didn't have a big Empire with a lot of niggers to whip and coolies to kick.
At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.
There was another possibility. Hesse had flown to England in May of 1941 and had told Beaverbrook about Hitler's plan to invade the Soviet Union. The fear was that Stalin might think Churchill would make a separate peace with Hitler. Thus giving PG a damn good kicking in Parliament sent the right signal. England was in it to win it.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts.
Britain stood alone. Stalin and Hitler were pals. America was isolationist. If Britain went down in defeat, it would have no upper class. All would be slaves.
The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social-levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind,
No. Those who sought to influence 'the popular mind' wanted to create that association.
and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and ‘Cassandra’s’ articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time.
When what was really needed was euphuistic screeds of a highly metaphysical type.
In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy.
Because people had heard of him.
For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse – as ‘Cassandra’ vigorously pointed out in his broadcast – was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook.
Who had worked his ass off as Minister of Aircraft production
A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches £50,000 a year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a fortune – usually a very temporary fortune – like the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse’s indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to ‘expose’ a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.
The problem here is that rich people who own a lot of property have a strong interest in defending the country from an invader. A novelist can always settle somewhere nice and neutral and carry on making money.
In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later – and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery – is not excusable.
It sent a signal to Stalin. That's a good enough excuse. The bigger question was why Duff Cooper- who had ordered a vicious attack on Wodehouse broadcast by the BBC- continued to persecute Wodehouse after Paris was liberated. Not content with having the couple thrown out of the hotel he himself was staying at, he got the Paris police to lock up both of them. The wife was released and PG was put in a hospital- probably thanks to Malcolm Muggeridge's intervention. But PG continued to be detained by the French. There was talk of him being deported to stand trial in England. It was in that context that Orwell wrote his article. Still, it wasn't till mid-way through 1946 that the French gave PG permission to leave the country.
Turning from Orwell, who was born in Bihar, to Shashi Tharoor, who was born in London, we find a similar ideological preoccupation- arising, no doubt, from Tharoor's position as a 'Drone' within a Party whose Head Drone is the utterly useless Rahul Gandhi. Tharoor writes-
I am told by a British-Indian friend that in a passionate public debate in London in 2015 on the merits or otherwise of my Oxford views, more than one speaker sought to discredit me in my absence (I was in India) on the grounds that I was a known aficionado of Wodehouse and the English language, who had even revived St Stephen’s College’s Wodehouse Society, the first of its kind in the world, and still served as patron of the London-headquartered (global) Wodehouse Society.
The implication was that one cannot denounce British colonialism and celebrate the doyen of English humorists at the same time.
I think the implication was that Tharoor, who speaks in the plummy accents of a Wodehouse character, had about as much brain as Bertie Wooster. His denunciation of British colonialism was merely a caprice, not the result of any serious thought.
Tharoor, could easily rebut the notion that PG stood for British colonialism by mentioning his attachment to his elder brother who, as a Theosophist, had promoted a dark skinned South Indian as the Universal Messiah. While this brother was fighting in the trenches, Annie Beasant, the head of the Theosophists, was presiding over the Indian Home Rule League. But for the Maha-crackpot, India might have avoided partition and gained independence under the leadership of a nice English lady.
My critics could not have been more wrong. Yes, some have seen in Wodehouse’s popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj, the British empire in India.
Who? Malcolm Muggeridge? But he knew that Wodehouse's South Indian readers were Congress-wallahs to a man. Yet he is supposed to have said "Indians are the only surviving Englishmen'. Perhaps he was thinking of Nehru who described himself as the last Englishman to rule India.
Writing in 1988,the journalist Richard West
a foreign correspondent who knew a lot of his Indian counterparts harbored a nostalgia for what they believed had been a golden age of Indian journalism.
thought India’s Wodehouse devotees were those who hankered after the England of fifty years before (i.e. the 1930s):
When the English said no to Sex and yes to Moral Rearmament.
‘That was the age when the English loved and treasured their own language, when schoolchildren learned Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Rudyard Kipling…
As opposed to illiterate multi-culti shite.
It was Malcolm Muggeridge who remarked that the Indians are now the last Englishmen. That may be why they love such a quintessentially English writer.'
Wodehouse, like Raymond Chandler, studied at Dulwich and found his promised land in America. His comedy derives from W.S Gilbert who spent his first eleven years in Italy and France. The odd thing is Michael Arlen- an Armenian- would have been considered the premier chronicler of the English upper class in the Twenties.
Those lines are, of course, somewhat more fatuous than anything Wodehouse himself could ever write.
Tharoor, fatuously, is repeating his own Guardian article published in 2002. With commendable thrift, this man- or some put upon secretary of his- recycles his own bromides in the hope that repetition may endow them with truth.
Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself, and the Raj is largely absent from his books.
Kipling is loved because he was the 'poet of work'. India is a karmabhumi. Kipling shows that dedication to work can bring together the Bengali Babu and the Afghan horse trader and 'Gora'- the British child who believes himself to be Indian.
Kipling, trained as a journalist, wrote stories exposing corruption- e.g. 'the bridge builders'- the mechanics of communal riots- 'under the city walls'- faulty Famine Relief policies- 'William the Conqueror'- and bureaucratic machinations and intrigue in high places. For this reason, Kipling will live.
(There is only one notable exception I can recall, in a 1935 short story, ‘The Juice of an Orange’: ‘Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience.’)
Sir Desmond Young, of the Punjab Civil Service, had undertaken two fasts as part of a 'Nature Cure'. He wrote to the Viceroy suggesting that the health benefits of hunger strikes be highlighted so as to defuse public concern about the Mahatma's tactics in this regard. Wodehouse couldn't possibly have been funny about the Raj. The thing beggared satire. His own elder brother, a Newdigate winner, ended up as the tutor of a dusky fellow whom the daughter of a Viceroy considered the Universal Messiah. You can't make up that sort of stuff.
But Indians saw that the comment was meant to elicit laughter, not agreement.(Mahatma Gandhi himself was up to some humorous mischief when, in 1947, far from sitting down to steak, he dined with the king’s cousin and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and offered him a bowl of home-made goat’s curd—perhaps from the same goat he took to England when he went to see the king in a loincloth! I reinvented the moment in my satirical, The Great Indian Novel, only substituting a mango for the curd.)
OMG! Mango for goat curd! How amazingly funny! What wonderful satire! The odd thing is that Tharoor made the Congress party the bad guys in his novel. They were the Kauravas. Indira was Duryodhana. Nehru was Dhritirashtra blinded by partiality for his own spawn.
If anything, Wodehouse was one British writer whom Indian nationalists could admire without fear of political incorrectness. Saroj Mukherji, née Katju, the daughter of a prominent Indian nationalist politician, remembers introducing Lord Mountbatten to the works of Wodehouse in 1948; it was typical that the symbol of the British empire had not read the ‘quintessentially English’ Wodehouse but that the Indian freedom fighter had.
Wodehouse's elder brother was a big wheel in Theosophical circles. Annie Beasant had been head of the Home Rule league. Connect the dots.
Indeed, it is precisely the lack of politics in Wodehouse’s writing, or indeed of any other social or philosophic content,
Jeeves is a Spinozan jivanmukhta who magically appears just when PeeGee is most anxious for his big bro who is serving in the trenches with the Scots Guard. This gives a particular poignance to the following ' he resembles one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves in the air and nip through space. I've got a cousin who is what they call a theosophist and he says he has nearly worked the thing himself.'
that made what Waugh called his ‘idyllic world’ so free of the trappings of Englishness,
the guy wrote well about cricket. Also he didn't go in for smut.
quintessential or otherwise. Whereas other English novelists burdened their readers with the specificities of their characters’ lives and circumstances, Wodehouse’s existed in a never-never land that was almost as unreal to his English readers as to his Indian ones.
But his Indian readers knew that Indian authors were serving up infinitely duller never-never lands which ended with everybody giving up sex and nice things to eat and saying anything sensible or witty.
Indian readers were able to enjoy Wodehouse free of the anxiety of allegiance;
whereas English readers feared that reading Wodehouse might turn them into Dowager Duchesses with die-hard Tory views.
for all its droll particularities, the world he created, from London’s Drones Club to the village of Matcham Scratchings, was a world of the imagination, to which Indians required no visa.
The same could be said of Benson's Mapp & Lucia novels, or Richmal Compton's William books which have no takers in India. On the other hand, Barbara Cartland was popular.
But they did need a passport, and that was the English language.
Why? Wodehouse became a best-seller in Japan a couple of years ago. He has been translated into many languages.
English was undoubtedly Britain’s most valuable and abiding legacy to India, and educated Indians, a famously polyglot people,
Educated Tamils aren't polyglot. We turn every language into Tamil- except Tamil, which we pepper with English.
rapidly learned and delighted in it—both for itself, and as a means to various ends. These ends were both political (for Indians turned the language of the imperialists into the language of nationalism)
like the Irish- and now the Scots, not to mention a little thing called the American Revolution back in 1776.
and pleasurable (for the language granted access to a wider world of ideas and entertainments).
Only recently for the rural masses, thanks to mobile web browsing.
It was only natural that Indians would enjoy a writer who used language as Wodehouse did—playing with its rich storehouse of classical precedents,
His headmaster was a good Classicist. The kid had struggled with Thucydides and the upshot was that he could subdue vast strings of subordinate clauses to a lapidary end.
mockingly subverting the very canons colonialism had taught Indians they were supposed to venerate (in a country ruled for the better part of two centuries by the dispensable siblings of the British nobility, one could savour lines like these: ‘Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.’)
This sentiment is captured in the Persian phrase 'sag bash, birader a khurd na bash'- better a dog than a younger son.
Wodehouse, like other popular writers with a Public School education, doesn't 'play with a rich storehouse'. He sticks with the sort of quotations familiar to ordinary people who left School at 12 or 14. If he uses a fancy word- like 'soigne'- he makes sure we know how to pronounce it and in what context to use it. Moreover, his fictional world is full of 'need for achievement'- which, it was believed, enabled a vernacular mass market literature to trigger endogenous growth. One reason India stagnated economically was because its literature was sternly miserabilist.
I am grateful, in other words, for the joys the English language has imparted to me, but not for the exploitation, distortion and deracination that accompanied its acquisition by my countrymen.
Tharoor and his countrymen acquired English from Indians- not British people. Whatever exploitation and distortion and deracination this may have involved was the fault of Indians- most notably the dynasty Tharoor still slavishly serves.
Vikas Swarup is from Allahabad. His Hindi must be pretty good. Though he is an IFS officer, his knowledge of India is not bad at all. Yet he wrote in English, not Hindi. 'Six Suspects' is very funny, excellently written, and is as tightly plotted as any Wodehouse novel. Apart from the American character's dialogue, everything else could be rendered in Hindi. But, precisely for that reason, it might as well be written in English.
Swarup is probably now too busy to return to literature. Perhaps, after he retires, he will start publishing again. By then, he may have turned to Religion. At that point, by all means, let him write in Hindi. Perhaps, thanks to his knowledge of Turkish, he will be able to identify a Turanian strain in Bedil & Ghalib and thus unite Islamic barzakh to Tibetan bardo and Sanskrit antarabhava. Tharoor, however, will stick to being a character in his own Great Indian Novel. Will he cross over from the Kauravas of the Congress to the Pandavas who constitute the Janata Parivar? Who knows? But the thing is bound to be richly comic.
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