by From behind the till of a secondhand bookshop, on the funniest prose in English and the fascist in the black shorts
A Customer Asked Whether Wodehouse Was Serious and I Have Been Thinking About It All Day
A young man came into the shop this morning, about twenty, in a long coat, clearly a student of something. He spent a quarter of an hour at the W shelf of the fiction, then brought a battered orange paperback to the till and said: is this a proper book or a funny one? I said it was by P. G. Wodehouse. He said yes, but which is it. I took his four pounds. I have been composing the answer ever since, and since he has gone, this diary will have to have it.
The Shop, and Me
I work in a secondhand bookshop in one of the little lanes off the Charing Cross Road. It has a bow window, a bell on the door, a cat called Pevsner and about thirty thousand books, of which I have read perhaps four hundred. My particular parish is the fiction of the last century, the British part of it, which fills the back room from floor to ceiling.
My surname, before anybody asks, as somebody does most days, is a coincidence. I am no relation. My father’s people were tailors in Whitechapel. My mother is from Cork, which is why this diary will sometimes stray across the Irish Sea. And two days a week I write for The London Prat, a comic newspaper that has been appearing since 1961, where my bookish habits are tolerated as long as they produce a joke by Thursday.
The Case for Proper
So. Wodehouse. Born 1881, the son of a colonial magistrate, sent home from Hong Kong as a small child and raised by a relay of aunts, which explains a great deal. Schooled at Dulwich, which he loved. Put into a bank, which he did not. He began selling stories to magazines to escape, and never stopped. Something over ninety books, in seventy-odd years, along with the lyrics for a string of Broadway musicals.
The famous ones concern a rich, amiable young idiot about town and his manservant, who is the most intelligent being in England and conceals it behind a faint cough. There is another series set in a castle in Shropshire where an absent-minded earl wishes only to be left alone with his prize pig. There are golf stories, and a club full of young men in spats who throw bread rolls.
Nothing happens. I want to stress that. The stakes in a Wodehouse novel are a stolen silver cream jug shaped like a cow, an unwanted engagement, an aunt’s displeasure. Nobody works. Nobody dies. It is always summer.
And yet half the serious writers of his century thought he was the best of them. One distinguished novelist called him the head of his profession. A celebrated Catholic satirist said his idyllic world could never go stale. The claim rests on the sentences. He revised endlessly, pinning the pages of a draft round the walls of his study and raising or lowering each according to how good it was, until every page was at the top.
The result is prose that seems to have no effort in it at all and cannot be improved by a syllable. His similes arrive from nowhere and are exactly right. He mixes slang, Shakespeare, the Bible, racing tips and the language of the advertising hoarding in one breath. I will not quote him; nobody should meet those lines second-hand in a diary. But I would put any page of him against any page written in English between the wars.
So that is the first half of my answer, young man. It is a proper book. It is as proper as they come. It took more craft than most tragedies.
The Shadow
Then there is the matter one has to tell any new reader, because somebody else will, and less kindly.
In 1940 he was living in a villa on the French coast. The German army arrived faster than anyone expected, and he was interned, as an enemy civilian, and taken with other British men to a camp in a former lunatic asylum in Upper Silesia. He was nearly sixty. He kept writing. He was, by all accounts, cheerful and well liked.
In the summer of 1941 he was released, a few months before the age at which he would have been freed in any case, and taken to Berlin. There he agreed to record five talks for broadcast to America, which was not yet in the war: light, comic accounts of his experience as an internee. He seems to have thought of them as a way of thanking the American readers who had written to him, and of showing that an Englishman could keep his spirits up.
It was a catastrophic misjudgement. Britain was being bombed. To hear a famous English author chatting amiably on Nazi radio was unbearable. He was denounced in Parliament and on the wireless as a traitor. Libraries took his books off the shelves. He never lived in England again. He settled in America, went on writing a book a year and was knighted a few weeks before his death in 1975, when the country had decided to forgive him.
The intelligence services investigated at the time and concluded that he had been foolish and nothing worse. The best thing written on it is an essay by George Orwell, in 1945, which the Orwell Foundation keeps in print. Orwell had no time for the idle rich and every reason to be hard on him, and he concluded that the man was a political innocent whose mind had stopped in about 1910, who had been used, and that to hunt him was to let the truly guilty off. I think that is right. He was a child about the world. It was the price of the sentences.
The Black Shorts
Here is the twist that makes the story almost unbearable, and it is the second half of my answer.
In 1938, three years before those broadcasts, he published what many think his finest novel. In it he introduced a new character: a huge, bullying amateur dictator who leads a band of followers through the streets of London in black shorts, having found that all the shirts had been taken. He is plainly drawn from the leader of the British fascists of the day.
And Wodehouse destroys him. Not with an argument. The hero, the amiable idiot, is given a speech telling this man exactly what he looks like, a grown adult swanking about in footer bags and imagining that the people are cheering. And then the fatal secret comes out: the would-be dictator is, in private life, a designer of ladies’ underwear, and lives in terror of his followers discovering it.
It may be the most effective attack on fascism in English fiction, because it declines to be frightened. It says: you are not sinister, you are absurd, and I can see your knees. The man who wrote that was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. He had understood them perfectly well. He just did not understand that they were dangerous, because in his world nothing was.
Which Brings Me to Thursday
I took this to my editor at the paper. She said the whole of our trade is in that one scene. The essay we give to new writers, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, says that the bully’s power depends on being taken seriously, and that the job is to refuse. Wodehouse did it better in a paragraph than we manage in a year. The page on the British Onion tradition ought to have his picture on it.
She also said, and I pass it on as a caution, that he is a warning too. You can be the funniest writer alive and still be a fool about the real world, and the real world will not make allowances.
So this week’s piece: a political movement, it reports, has been forced to abandon its uniform after a supply problem left members parading in whatever was left at the outfitter’s. A spokesman denied that the leader had a second career in lingerie and then asked how we knew. It is offered in homage, on the British satirical news page, and it names no living person, because I can never keep up with who is leading what.
The Answer
If the young man in the long coat comes back, this is what I shall say. It is a funny book. That is what makes it a proper one. Read it on a bad day. Notice that you cannot find the joins. Then find out about 1941, and read the one with the black shorts, and decide for yourself what a writer owes the world besides sentences.
Pevsner is asleep on the Ws. I am not moving him. The rest of what I write is over here.
