George Orwell on PG Wodehouse

I was looking through my copy of George Orwell's Collected Letters and Journalism last night and re-read his 1945 essay In Defence of PG Wodehouse. It's a fascinating piece from a writer who had clearly read a great deal of Wodehouse's work.

As the article explains, at the time Wodehouse was the subject of a media hate campaign due to his having made some comic radio broadcasts in Germeny while being held as a Prisoner of War.

Aside from Orwell's thoughts on this subject, his more general comments on Wodehouse's work up to this time are quite enlightening.

The full text is available here: http://www.drones.com/orwell.html

Thank you so much for posting. I generally agreed with Orwell about Wodehouse's political naivete. However, Wodehouse didn't completely avoid politics -- witness The Code of the Woosters.

It would be interesting to know how well Orwell and Wodehouse knew each other, if at all, and if Wodehouse ever responded to this defense.

I shall add my thanks as well for putting up a link to this article. Orwell's essays are always good to read. It is interesting that Orwell doesn't mention Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts - or should I say 'black Football baggers?' Although to be fair it does state that he hasn't read all of Wodehouse's books.

The more interesting aspect of the case and the key to intuiting Wodehouse's political intentions by making the recordings in question, would have to be the circumstances of his "capture" by the Third Reich. Apparently he was unaware that the country (France) he was in at the time had been overrun by the Huns and, coincidentally, they had the same intentions for his homeland. I believe he was English. And I don't believe he had a personal teletype machine feeding him the latest news from the world's capitals as borders fell and defenders died. His crime seems to have been an impenetrable disinterest in the behavior of those figures moving beyond the fictional kingdom he created and ruled.

Rule no. 1 where Wodehouse is concerned is never to believe his own autobiographical writings. He and Ethel made some bad decisions, as many of us do when we're suddenly thrust into situations we're unprepared for, but he wasn't anything like the naive, unworldly simpleton he made himself out to be. He was very alert in business deals, he read his newspapers, and he had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on in the world. But - especially after the war - it suited him to be thought of as someone who wouldn't have known there was a war on if he hadn't been in an internment camp. See the Barry Phelps biography for a pretty thorough demolition of "unworldly Plum".

I don't think the "circumstances of his capture" need any special pleading. They certainly did know there was a war on: the RAF boys stationed in Le Touquet were in and out of their house all the time. But when they heard the Germans were coming, they got flustered, as elderly people do, and worried about their house and their dogs and came up with a half-baked scheme for driving to Portugal instead of hopping on the first available boat to England as they ought (with hindsight) to have done. Where Plum was naive was in failing to realise that the Germans would use the broadcasts for propaganda directed at England. Since he had been out of the country since before the war and out of touch completely since May 1940, he obviously didn't appreciate the value of what he was putting in their hands.