How the NYT covered P.G. Wodehouse's captivity during World War II (2019)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494599
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13135934
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5122663
Surely there have been others...
[1] Leave it to Psmith http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60067
[2] At Long Last… The Public Domain Expands! https://cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2019/01/08/at-long-last-the-public...
> Wodehouse said he had “wanted to tell some of the amusing side of life in an internment camp.” When the reporter pressed him, asking what was so humorous about his experience, Wodehouse “said he could think of no particularly amusing incidents offhand, but that his talks were intended to present the lighter side of camp life, ‘for instance, washing one’s own clothes.’”
(I know they are several websites that do that, but this is NYT traffic we're talking about)
One thing that stood out to me was this passage:
> Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism.” In left-wing circles, indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained an¦sthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and “not our business.” One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.
But of course, Roderick Spode in e.g. Code of the Woosters (1938) is a parody of the British fascist Oswald Mosley:
> Don't you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn't get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.
Orwell's point stands, but it's just interesting to me in two ways:
1) In 1946, you couldn't just use Google to search the corpus of Wodehouse books for the string "fascis" to see what turned up.
2) I think Code of the Woosters is the most popular Wodehouse novel today, but it must have not been very familiar to Orwell, because Spode is such a key part of the plot, you could hardly miss him.
MI5 didn't think he was a collaborator
His books are well worth a read. You can get them on Gutenberg
However, for the benefit of HN readers who don't know Wodehouse, I will add that the selection is somewhat limited, and seems to be mostly the earlier work.
We often hesitate to use words like "aristocrat" in post-Victorian settings, but Jeeves showed us that wealthy industrialists weren't all that different from barons or princesses or dukes.
It doesn't seem terribly out of character for him to 'cheerfully write a book about crooks' in a prison camp. Stiff upper lip and all that, don't you know.