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There was also an interesting New Yorker article on Wodehouse recently about his experience as a Nazi captive: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wa

There was also an interesting New Yorker article on Wodehouse recently about his experience as a Nazi captive: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wartime-for-wodehouse https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/wartime-for-wo... I never picked Wodehouse for a prisoner of war. But I guess he handled it with characteristic aplomb. That article inspired me to search for the Fry and Laurie series. It's not being streamed on any of the popular platforms but I did find some decent quality uploads on Youtube. My wife and I have enjoyed it immensely. I think I discovered why it hasn't been picked up by any of the online platforms when we got to the blackface episode in season 2. A different era, in two respects I suppose, and all that. Unfortunate nevertheless. Anyone know where I could find the BBC radio episodes online?

klenwell 6y ago
I'll add that the punchline to the brief tossaway scene with the banjolele ensemble at the beginning of that episode elicited a full-scale guffaw from both wife and me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPNit4yev_4&t=131 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPNit4yev_4&t=131
neonate 6y ago
As the New Yorker article explains, he also did propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis while there, and while this caused a scandal in Britain that persisted after the war, it surprisingly (by today's unforgiving standards) never ruined his reputation. It seems that most people who have looked into it concluded that he was genuinely trying to cheer people up and was naive about the consequences. Orwell, whose judgment seems to have been as sound as anyone's, defended Wodehouse: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-defence-of-p-g-wodehouse/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel....
- dang 6y ago
  That Orwell article is brilliant from start to finish ("there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing"). We think of Orwell as a political and moral writer more than an arty one (and he famously wrote about how he sacrificed his art to politics), but this is among other things a fantastic piece of literary criticism. Examples: How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, 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. It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Orwell obviously knows Wodehouse inside-out, right back to obscure early books, which must mean that he was a fan. Why read them otherwise?
  - klenwell 6y ago
    I guess you could call Orwell's essay an exoneration but it is, to my reading, no defense. It strikes me as sharply political and moral. And, I agree, scintillating literary criticism. Your excerpts go to the heart of the argument. If Orwell thinks it's nonsense to call Wodehouse a fascist, it's not because Wodehouse was necessarily above fascism. It's because he was too silly and stupid ("the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity") to even perceive it, a literal schoolboy: 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. I don't know that this was fair to Wodehouse. The New Yorker article seems to take a more charitable view: His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was. My dad and I were struggling to explain the phrase "damn with faint praise" to a young relative a while back. This essay wouldn't have helped our cause because, well, it's loaded. But it is a master class in the concept.
    - gm3dmo 6y ago
      William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), an American citizen was hanged by Britain for his "treason". Ezra Pound, poet and fascist sympathizer was interned briefly by the Americans. Wodehouse was probably had good reason to be anxious while his wartime behaviour was looked into by the authorities. I would speculate that he probably had enough connections with his school tie and the old boy network to "get things smoothed out".
      - mordechai9000 6y ago
        It has been noted that he may have been naive, but he never returned to England after the war. As it may be, he truly seems to have simply been clueless. Unlike Pound, who was an open proponent of fascism and supporter of Nazi Germany. I wonder if they would have tolerated Pound if he hadn't been so enthusiastic for them, or if he would've been lumped with the so called degenerates.
    - dang 6y ago
      It's more like praising with faint damn, I think. Orwell was a man of the pretty-far left. The public-school class system must have been anathema to him (at the same time as he was a product of Eton—where, by the way, fellow future anti-utopian novelist Aldous Huxley was his French teacher) and yet he presents Wodehouse not as any kind of villain but just hapless and obsolete. So obsolete that you'd never guess that Wodehouse would outlive Orwell himself by 25 years. This article might have been as much of a defence as it was politically possible for Orwell to produce in 1945. Even his famous independence from sectarianism must have had its limits. I also think one can put one's finger on why Orwell was so sympathetic to Wodehouse and so willing to judge him softly: they were both profoundly and essentially English. People have often pointed this out about Orwell, saying for example that his deep Englishness was the wellspring of his immunity to ideology. I think that same quality is probably what resonated with Orwell about Wodehouse - he was sympathetic in the literal sense (having similar feelings). There are moments in this article where it's as if he's reading Wodehouse from within.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Thank you for that. If only such a standard of writing were more common!

klenwell 6y ago

I'll add that the punchline to the brief tossaway scene with the banjolele ensemble at the beginning of that episode elicited a full-scale guffaw from both wife and me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPNit4yev_4&t=131 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPNit4yev_4&t=131

neonate 6y ago

As the New Yorker article explains, he also did propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis while there, and while this caused a scandal in Britain that persisted after the war, it surprisingly (by today's unforgiving standards) never ruined his reputation. It seems that most people who have looked into it concluded that he was genuinely trying to cheer people up and was naive about the consequences. Orwell, whose judgment seems to have been as sound as anyone's, defended Wodehouse: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-defence-of-p-g-wodehouse/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel....

dang 6y ago
That Orwell article is brilliant from start to finish ("there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing"). We think of Orwell as a political and moral writer more than an arty one (and he famously wrote about how he sacrificed his art to politics), but this is among other things a fantastic piece of literary criticism. Examples: How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is an enormous sacrifice for a farcical writer to make. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, 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. It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Orwell obviously knows Wodehouse inside-out, right back to obscure early books, which must mean that he was a fan. Why read them otherwise?
- klenwell 6y ago
  I guess you could call Orwell's essay an exoneration but it is, to my reading, no defense. It strikes me as sharply political and moral. And, I agree, scintillating literary criticism. Your excerpts go to the heart of the argument. If Orwell thinks it's nonsense to call Wodehouse a fascist, it's not because Wodehouse was necessarily above fascism. It's because he was too silly and stupid ("the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity") to even perceive it, a literal schoolboy: 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. I don't know that this was fair to Wodehouse. The New Yorker article seems to take a more charitable view: His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was. My dad and I were struggling to explain the phrase "damn with faint praise" to a young relative a while back. This essay wouldn't have helped our cause because, well, it's loaded. But it is a master class in the concept.
  - gm3dmo 6y ago
    William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), an American citizen was hanged by Britain for his "treason". Ezra Pound, poet and fascist sympathizer was interned briefly by the Americans. Wodehouse was probably had good reason to be anxious while his wartime behaviour was looked into by the authorities. I would speculate that he probably had enough connections with his school tie and the old boy network to "get things smoothed out".
    - mordechai9000 6y ago
      It has been noted that he may have been naive, but he never returned to England after the war. As it may be, he truly seems to have simply been clueless. Unlike Pound, who was an open proponent of fascism and supporter of Nazi Germany. I wonder if they would have tolerated Pound if he hadn't been so enthusiastic for them, or if he would've been lumped with the so called degenerates.
  - dang 6y ago
    It's more like praising with faint damn, I think. Orwell was a man of the pretty-far left. The public-school class system must have been anathema to him (at the same time as he was a product of Eton—where, by the way, fellow future anti-utopian novelist Aldous Huxley was his French teacher) and yet he presents Wodehouse not as any kind of villain but just hapless and obsolete. So obsolete that you'd never guess that Wodehouse would outlive Orwell himself by 25 years. This article might have been as much of a defence as it was politically possible for Orwell to produce in 1945. Even his famous independence from sectarianism must have had its limits. I also think one can put one's finger on why Orwell was so sympathetic to Wodehouse and so willing to judge him softly: they were both profoundly and essentially English. People have often pointed this out about Orwell, saying for example that his deep Englishness was the wellspring of his immunity to ideology. I think that same quality is probably what resonated with Orwell about Wodehouse - he was sympathetic in the literal sense (having similar feelings). There are moments in this article where it's as if he's reading Wodehouse from within.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Thank you for that. If only such a standard of writing were more common!