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Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

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-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?

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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/orwel....

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?

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.

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.

> So obsolete that you'd never guess that Wodehouse would outlive Orwell himself by 25 years.

That is one of those "Cleopatra lived closer to the building of Pizza Hut than the pyramids" facts.

I just looked it up. Wodehouse even outlived the Beatles!

Was the Brave New World that anti-utopian? For all we know, the island may have been super chill.

There's a great old web comic about the differences between Orwell's and Huxley's anti-utopias and how Huxley predicted the future much better. I bet your question is related to that development.

Yes. I'd be grateful if you ever remember an URL.

Specifically, Mond tells us (ch 16):

"One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."

Looks like https://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-huxley-...

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433283

Thanks! It's reassuring to consider that "Amusing Ourselves to Death" was written in the 1980s.

The comic doesn't address the ways to leave the system, however. Brave New World, as mentioned above, has its islands, and (not having read anything of 1984 beyond the Goldstein chapters: is there anything I don't already have from pop culture in the rest of the book, or are those chapters just the "fast-forward"?) it seems that Oceanic refuseniks who didn't wish to toe the party line could be ignored by joining the proletariat (which might imply material and intellectual poverty, but freedom's just another word...)

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".

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.

which must mean that he was a fan

I heard an interview with an Orwell biographer recently and he made a similar argument about Orwell and Twain - which is a little different than the impression one might get from a casual reading of The Licensed Jester

Thank you for that. If only such a standard of writing were more common!

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

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