Last week I opened by quoting contributor AlanWSkinner. This week I'm going to do the same again - not least because I slightly misrepresented him by cutting him off halfway through.
After he wrote: "I have been wondering where you would take this Reading group, for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get", he went on to say:
"It pokes fun but it isn't satire, being far too affectionate. To try and talk about it without referencing class would be like trying to talk about Moby-Dick without mentioning the sea.
"The whole issue of class also affects the other consideration regarding Wodehouse, which is why he is no longer as wildly popular as he once was. He is one of those unfortunate cultural icons whose significance exceeds popular familiarity with his work. His humour and language ensure his works are still appreciated but far less so than when he was writing. They have lost some of their potency, though they retain the aura of fascination we still have for an era which had an undeniable beauty in fashion and design – for those born well-off enough to afford it."
As usual, he has a point. There is plenty to say about PG Wodehouse without mentioning class – but it is a hard subject to avoid. I wonder, too, if there's some truth in the idea that because they are out of step with our world, his books aren't as popular as they should be (which is to say, read frequently by every man, woman and child capable of enjoying the English language).
Yet there are also objections to raise. It could just as easily be said that their affectionate evocation of a lost privileged world is part of their charm. What's more, plenty of people worried about the settings of Wodehouse's books when he was alive and at the peak of his popularity.
An excellent article in The Atlantic magazine quotes Wodehouse's introduction to Summer Lightning, in which he wrote:
"A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names'. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy."
The same piece also quotes a slightly defensive letter from Wodhouse, written to his friend Denis Mackail:
"If only [my critics] would realise that I started writing about Bertie Wooster and comic earls because I was in America and couldn't write American stories and the only English characters the American public would read about were exaggerated dudes. It's as simple as that."
Of course, it wasn't that simple. You only have to look at the lovely descriptions of Blandings Castle in Leave It To Psmith, the affectionate portrayal of Lord Emsworth and the charm of Psmith himself to see that Wodehouse was doing more than exploiting the market. There is feeling there. There is meaning. Writing in 1929 in the Observer, a few years after the book came out, Gerald Gould went so far as to say:
"In the most serious and exact sense of the word, [Wodehouse] is a great artist. He has founded a school, a tradition. He has made a language … He has explained a generation."
OK, it's hard today to see what the "Wodehouse" school might have been. From this remove, he seems entirely inimitable. But you'll have to get through me first if you want to deny that he's a great artist, or that he made a language.
As for explaining "a generation", that's harder. Did Wodehouse's world ever really exist? And if so, did he do more than poke gentle fun at them? The aforementioned AlanWSkinner even suggests:
"Some say that the first world war precipitated the gradual decline of the English privileged class system. If it did, it had considerable help from PG himself, whose books were a hall of mirrors far too funny to be anything but subversive."
I suppose I could go along with that insofar as I wouldn't want Bertie Wooster running the country. But I would enjoy his company – and that's what makes it so difficult to get worked up about Wodehouse's portrayal of class. I know that this is the Guardian and that most of us probably do care about some of the inequalities and iniquities of the class system. But in Wodehouse's case, anger seems out of place.
For a start, his world is so gentle, and bathed in such lovely golden light, that I'm keen to avoid the shadow of those emotionally fraught, politically harsh class discussions.
I agree too with Reading group contributor Dylanwolf when he observes:
"It occurred to me how this (purposeful) affectation in the writing endears the reader to the text. This is gentle mocking, nothing hurtful or cynical, the reader is invited to push aside any prejudices against the casual degeneracy of the idle rich characters presented in the book."
The fact that the word "gentle" has now been used three times in this article my points to a certain paucity of language on my part – but it's also a good word for a man who famously said "I haven't got any violent feelings about anything. I just love writing."
One of the things that makes that writing so appealing is Wodehouse's warmth towards his fellow man, whoever he may be. It may not be violent, but Psmith's bonhomie is touching. It's funny that someone so posh, wearing a monocle, should call everyone he meets "comrade". But it's also rather sweet. In Leave It To Psmith, the hero takes everyone as they come, be they Canadian poets, transatlantic jewel thieves, dyspeptic butlers or absent-minded earls. He judges people by their actions – and only really takes against them if it seems there is a danger they're going to start spouting bad poetry all over him.
Wodehouse, by all accounts, was similar. He didn't much like company, and did his utmost to avoid parties - but he was never rude. He seems to have been empty of snobbery and full of sympathy for those repressed by the English class system. There's a telling instance in the excellent Collected Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe, about a meeting with HG Wells. Wodehouse wrote:
His first remark, apropos of nothing, was 'my father was a professional cricketer'. A conversation stopper if ever there was one. What a weird country England is, with its class distinctions and that ingrained snobbery you can't seem to escape from. I suppose I notice it more because I've spent so much of my time in America. Can you imagine an American who had achieved the position Wells has, worrying because he started out in life on the wrong side of the tracks? But nothing will ever make Wells forget that his father was a professional cricketer and his mother the housekeeper at Up Park."
Compare that to George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in his obituary of his erstwhile friend: "HG was not a gentleman." Shaw made sure it was painfully clear that Wells had broken into his rarefied world of letters from the outside. "No conventional social station fitted him. His father was a working gardener and professional cricketer. His mother was a housekeeper … Could anything be more petit bourgeois, as Lenin labelled HG?"
No wonder Wells had a chip on his shoulder. And how generous Wodehouse seems in comparison to the supposedly class-conscious Fabian society member Bernard Shaw.
Talking of class warriors, meanwhile, no appraisal of Wodehouse and class would be complete without a reference to George Orwell's superb essay in defence of PG Wodehouse. Although mainly writing about the witch hunt after Wodehouse made the mistake of agreeing to broadcast on German radio after he was interned during the second world war, Orwell also had plenty to say about class. His main contention is that Wodehouse was naive and indulgent:
"Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. 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. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious: 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'."
Orwell does also suggest that Wodehouse had some feeling for the difficulties of class:
"First, Wodehouse's complete lack – so far as one can judge from his printed works – of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of "fascist tendencies" in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, 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 USSR But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings."
Curiously, Orwell doesn't mention Wodehouse's most defiantly political statement. This came in 1938's The Code of the Woosters and his creation of Roderick Spode to stand in for Oswald Mosley. Spode appears to Bertie "as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment". The man is so loathsome that he moves the genial Bertie to a rare burst of public anger:
"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil Spode' and you imagine it is the voice of the people. That is where you make your bloomer. What the voice of the people is saying is, 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking around in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'"
It turns out Wodehouse could speak for the people after all! If only everybody were so able to see that the essential truth about the Mosleys of this world is that they are perishers – they should be laughed at rather than taken seriously. Indeed, I hope it isn't going to far to say that there's a curious sort of political wisdom in books like The Code Of The Woosters and Leave It To Psmith. They mock silliness. They encourage good humour and understanding. Wodehouse might not have done much to hasten on the glorious day. But he did enough to make anyone think twice about sticking fellow humans up against the wall.
