Wodehouse in Exile, BBC Four, review
Benji Wilson reviews Wodehouse in Exile, a BBC drama
focussing how author PG Wodehouse came to face a treason charge that led to his
exile from Britain.
By Benji Wilson7:00AM GMT 26 Mar 2013
The idea of PG Wodehouse being accused of treachery towards
his country – a country whose self-image he did so much to create – may seem
laughable now, but as BBC Four’s fine drama Wodehouse in Exile showed last
night, that was what happened during the Second World War.
His crime, such as it was, was to have been released a few
months early from an internment camp in Upper Silesia in 1941, whereupon he was
enthusiastically sucked up by the German propaganda machine and put on the
radio to tell the Americans in a series of typically peppy dispatches how well
he’d been treated.
Wodehouse thought his broadcasts would show the world
unbroken British resolve. In fact he had been duped, and back in London the
response was incandescent: “The only wisecrack he ever pulled that the world
received in silence,” one newspaper said.
This was a classic BBC Four “inspired by real events” film
(of the sort that will soon be no longer: BBC Four has exiled drama as of later
this year), and it bounded on at a suitably Woosterian lick. Writer Nigel
Williams cast Wodehouse as a sweet old man who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, let
alone to an unctuous Nazi. It was only later in the piece when Wodehouse’s wife
Ethel finally let him have it with a blast of indignation that you began to
question whether a man of such brilliance could really have underestimated the
impact of his own words to such calamitous effect. But then as Ethel said, “You
can never resist it – the chance to amuse.”
Wodehouse in Exile Review – BBC Four
Posted on March 26, 2013
Wodehouse in Exile - BBC FourBBC Four’s historical drama
about P.G. Wodehouse felt like an attempt to rehabilitate a novelist who
doesn’t actually need rehabilitating. It actually seemed, ironically, a bit
like propaganda, showing as it did a version of history that portrayed
Wodehouse and his wife as the most lovable people in the world, and all
criticism of Wodehouse to be illegitimate in the extreme.
The film told the story of the English novelist’s time in
Europe during WW2. He spends some time in a concentration camp, is manipulated
by the Nazi’s into broadcasting some propaganda, and then seeks to rescue his
damaged reputation in the UK and US. I had many problems with Wodehouse in
Exile, not least amongst them the characters.
As I mentioned above, both Wodehouse and his wife, Ethel,
are portrayed as being loved by all. Now, that might have been the case, but
the work was not put into the film’s writing to justify this portrayal. Ethel
is a very annoying character; shouting at people, being rude, suddenly dancing
and singing for no reason, flirting with other men. And yet every other
character loves her. There is one scene where she somehow storms into a
recording studio guarded by the fucking Nazis and protests angrily, to
everyone’s amusement. It’s like the film is in complete awe of its characters.
That can be okay, but only if you do a lot to convince the audience to be as
equally in awe, otherwise it’s just jarring, and you find yourself asking: ‘Why
do all these characters love this incredibly annoying, rude person?’
Wodehouse himself was better written, and did seem quite a
likable person from the start, mainly because of his wit. ‘I think it’s the
German army. Shall we let them in? Or will we pretend we’re out?’ ‘I think it’s
time [Hitler] took a firm position on his moustache. Does he want it or not?’
Despite this, the level of love other characters had for
Wodehouse throughout the film was way over the top. ‘He’s a kind of saint, in a
way,’ says one character, and even the military intelligence officer sent to
question his treason loves him. As do all the Nazis. I get it, okay? Wodehouse
wasn’t a traitor. You don’t need to ram down our throats how nice he was. Be a
little more subtle.
I haven’t read any of P.G. Wodehouse’s works, so I wonder if
maybe I’m missing something, and I suspect that fans of his writing might have
appreciated the film more. For instance, the characters are almost stereotypes
of Englishmen. Everyone is so incredibly wet, and very upstanding. Everyone is
‘old bean’ or ‘chap.’ ‘There’s a bombing raid on at the moment – very boring,’
says Wodehouse’s daughter, who becomes a flustered, hysterical, antiquated
version of a woman at one point, being calmed down by her gentlemanly husband.
I can only assume such characterisation is a tribute to Wodehouse’s
idiosyncratic writing, because if it isn’t, it is bloody awful.
The film’s very flattering portrayal of Wodehouse results in
a lack of critique or exploration of his propaganda broadcasts. There is one
good scene where a government minister angrily denounces what Wodehouse has
done, but we needed more scenes like this. Instead, we got the case against
what Wodehouse did put into the mouths of some beastly journalists, with their
flashbulbs and shouts, and in every other scene where criticism is raised there
is always someone on hand to dismiss it.
The only person in the film who doesn’t like Wodehouse is
Mackintosh, a character so irredeemably bad he could fit seamlessly into a
Disney film as the villain. He could have been given a moustache to twirl
menacingly and it wouldn’t have been out of place. He was a smarmy, snivelling,
pretentious, insecure traitor. It’s poor writing to make an antagonist that
black and white. And his character made huge shifts to serve the plot: in the
beginning he’s dumb and insecure and then suddenly he’s a master manipulator.
You could maybe explain this by arguing that Mackintosh was a spy only
pretending to be dumb, but if that was the case then the film needed to
indicate that in some way.
There’s also some pretty dodgy attitudes towards Germany and
the French – ‘You loathsome little frog!’ ‘Fuck the French!’ – and an attitude
towards England that bordered on nationalism. ‘Oh England, what do you do to
those who love you,’ is a line that is so overwritten I cringed to hear it.
So, yeah, I guess I didn’t like Wodehouse in Exile. I
imagine P.G. Wodehouse fans probably disagree though. I liked the character of
Wodehouse – and Tim Pigott-Smith’s portrayal was good – but there were too many
problems with the film around him. In an essay, George Orwell wrote about
Wodehouse’s time in Europe, criticising those who attacked him: ‘It was a
chance to ‘expose’ a ‘wealthy parasite’ without drawing attention to any of the
parasites who really mattered.’ If only Wodehouse in Exile had approached the
subject with as much depth, and with less sycophantic flattery. I would guess
that the film’s writer is a huge P.G Wodehouse fan who couldn’t bring himself
to criticise what he loves. Kill your idols they say. It might have been a
better film if the writer had followed that advice, and had written more
objectively.
Random notes:
The scenes with Wodehouse’s daughter seemed shoehorned in to
add some pathos at the end, when it’s revealed she has died. To be fair, it’s
such a big event in Wodehouse’s life it probably had to be included, and it
must have been hard to try and fit it in alongside the main story.
Wodehouse changed over the course of the film, becoming more
cynical and critical, which was good.
‘Maybe jolly old England won’t be there anymore ‘old chap’,’
says Mackintosh. Such a line seems almost like a critique of anyone who doesn’t
like the whole English upper-class dialogue thing – you must be a villain if
you don’t like it.
Quite a captivating beginning: radio voiceover–opening
credits – bombs.
At the start of the Second World War Wodehouse and his wife
remained at their Le Touquet house, where, during the Phoney War, he worked on
Joy in the Morning. With the advance of the Germans, the nearby Royal Air Force
base withdrew; Wodehouse was offered the sole spare seat in one of the fighter
aircraft, but he turned down the opportunity as it would have meant leaving behind
Ethel and their dog. On 21 May 1940, with German troops advancing through
northern France, the Wodehouses decided to drive to Portugal and fly from there
to the US. Two miles from home their car broke down, so they returned and
borrowed a car from a neighbour; with the routes blocked with refugees, they
returned home again.
The Germans occupied Le Touquet on 22 May 1940 and Wodehouse
had to report to the authorities daily. After two months of occupation the
Germans interned all male enemy nationals under 60, and Wodehouse was sent to a
former prison in Loos, a suburb of Lille, on 21 July; Ethel remained in Le
Touquet. The internees were placed four to a cell, each of which had been
designed for one man. One bed was available per cell, which was made available
to the eldest man—not Wodehouse, who slept on the granite floor. The prisoners
were not kept long in Loos before they were transported in cattle trucks to a
former barracks in Liège which was run as a prison by the SS. After a week the
men were transferred to Huy in Liège, Belgium, where they were incarcerated in
the local citadel. They remained there until September 1940, when they were
transported to Tost in Upper Silesia (then Germany, now Toszek in Poland).
Wodehouse's family and friends had not had any news of his
location after the fall of France, but an article from an Associated Press
reporter who had visited Tost in December 1940 led to pressure on the German
authorities to release the novelist. This included a petition from influential
people in the US; Senator W. Warren Barbour presented it to the German
ambassador. Although his captors refused to release him, Wodehouse was provided
with a typewriter and, to pass the time, he wrote Money in the Bank. Throughout
his time in Tost, he sent postcards to his US literary agent asking for $5 to
be sent to various people in Canada, mentioning his name. These were the
families of Canadian prisoners of war, and the news from Wodehouse was the
first indication that their sons were alive and well. Wodehouse risked severe
punishment for the communication, but managed to evade the German censor.
“I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to
work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent
about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose
any fighting thoughts or feelings.”
On 21 June 1941, while he was in the middle of playing a
game of cricket, Wodehouse received a visit from two members of the Gestapo. He
was given ten minutes to pack his things before he was taken to the Hotel
Adlon, a top luxury hotel in Berlin. He stayed there at his own expense;
royalties from the German editions of his books had been put into a special
frozen bank account at the outset of the war, and Wodehouse was permitted to
draw upon this money he had earned whilst staying in Berlin. He was thus
released from internment a few months before his sixtieth birthday—the age at
which civilian internees were released by the Nazis. Shortly afterwards
Wodehouse was, in the words of Phelps, "cleverly trapped" into making
five broadcasts to the US via German radio, with the Berlin-based correspondent
of the Columbia Broadcasting System. The broadcasts—aired on 28 June, 9, 23 and
30 July, and 6 August—were titled How to be an Internee Without Previous
Training, and comprised humorous anecdotes about Wodehouse's experiences as a
prisoner, including some gentle mocking of captors. The German propaganda
ministry arranged for the recordings to be broadcast to Britain in August. The
day after Wodehouse recorded his final programme, Ethel joined him in Berlin,
having sold most of her jewellery to pay for the journey.
Aftermath: reactions and investigation[edit]
The reaction in Britain to Wodehouse's broadcasts was
hostile, and he was widely considered to be a coward and a traitor, although,
Phelps observes, many of those who decried his actions had not heard the
content of the programmes. A front page
article in The Daily Mirror stated that Wodehouse "lived luxuriously
because Britain laughed with him, but when the laughter was out of his
country's heart, ... [he] was not ready to share her suffering. He hadn't the
guts ... even to stick it out in the internment camp." In the House of
Commons Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, regretted Wodehouse's actions.
Several libraries removed Wodehouse novels from their shelves.
On 15 July the journalist William Connor, under his pen name
Cassandra, broadcast a postscript to the news programme railing against
Wodehouse. According to The Times, the broadcast "provoked a storm of
complaint ... from listeners all over the country". Wodehouse's
biographer, Joseph Connolly, thinks the broadcast "inaccurate, spiteful
and slanderous"; Phelps calls it "probably the most vituperative
attack on an individual ever heard on British radio". The broadcast was
made at the direct instruction of Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, who
overruled strong protests made by the BBC against the decision to air the
programme. Numerous letters appeared in the British press, both supporting and
criticising Wodehouse. The letters page of The Daily Telegraph became a focus
for censuring Wodehouse, including one from Wodehouse's friend, A.A. Milne; a
reply from their fellow author Compton Mackenzie in defence of Wodehouse was
not published because the editor claimed a lack of space. Most of those
defending Wodehouse against accusations of disloyalty, including Sax Rohmer,
Dorothy L. Sayers and Gilbert Frankau, conceded that he had acted stupidly.
Some members of the public wrote to the newspapers to say that the full facts
were not yet known and a fair judgment could not be made until they were. The
management of the BBC, who considered Wodehouse's actions no worse than
"ill advised", pointed out to Cooper that there was no evidence at
that point whether Wodehouse had acted voluntarily or under compulsion.
When Wodehouse heard of the furore the broadcasts had caused,
he contacted the Foreign Office—through the Swiss embassy in Berlin—to explain
his actions, and attempted to return home via neutral countries, but the German
authorities refused to let him leave. In Performing Flea, a 1953 collection of
letters, Wodehouse wrote, "Of course I ought to have had the sense to see
that it was a loony thing to do to use the German radio for even the most
harmless stuff, but I didn't. I suppose prison life saps the intellect".
The reaction in America was mixed: the left-leaning publication P.M. accused
Wodehouse of "play[ing] Jeeves to the Nazis", but the Department of
War used the interviews as an ideal representation of anti-Nazi propaganda.
The broadcasts, in point of fact, are neither anti- nor
pro-German, but just Wodehousian. He is a man singularly ill-fitted to live in
a time of ideological conflict, having no feelings of hatred about anyone, and
no very strong views about anything. ... I never heard him speak bitterly about
anyone—not even about old friends who turned against him in distress. Such
temperament does not make for good citizenship in the second half of the
Twentieth Century.
The Wodehouses remained in Germany until September 1943,
when Allied bombing led to the couple being allowed to move back to Paris. They
were living there when the city was liberated on 25 August 1944; Wodehouse
reported to the American authorities the following day, asking them to inform
the British of his whereabouts. He was subsequently visited by Malcolm
Muggeridge, recently arrived in Paris as an intelligence officer with MI6. The
young officer quickly came to like Wodehouse and considered the question of
treasonable behaviour as "ludicrous"; he summed up the writer as
"ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict". On 9
September Wodehouse was visited by an MI5 officer and former barrister, Major
Edward Cussen, who formally investigated him, a process that stretched over
four days. On 28 September Cussen filed his report, which states that in regard
to the broadcasts, Wodehouse's behaviour "has been unwise", but
advised against further action. On 23 November Theobald Matthew, the Director
of Public Prosecutions, decided there was no evidence to justify prosecuting
Wodehouse.
In November 1944 Duff Cooper was appointed British
ambassador to France and was provided accommodation at the Hôtel Le Bristol,
where the Wodehouses were living. Cooper complained to the French authorities,
and the couple were moved to a different hotel. They were subsequently arrested
by French police and placed under preventive detention, despite no charges
being presented. When Muggeridge tracked them down later, he managed to get
Ethel released straight away and, four days later, ensured that the French
authorities declared Wodehouse unwell and put him in a nearby hospital, which
was more comfortable than where they had been detained. While in this hospital,
Wodehouse worked on his novel Uncle Dynamite.
While still detained by the French, Wodehouse was again
mentioned in questions in the House of Commons in December 1944 when MPs
wondered if the French authorities could repatriate him to stand trial. Eden
stated that the "matter has been gone into, and, according to the advice
given, there are no grounds upon which we could take action". Two months
later George Orwell wrote the essay "In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse",
where he stated that "it is important to realise that the events of 1941
do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity". Orwell's
rationale was that Wodehouse's "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", which was compounded by
his "complete lack—so far as one can judge from his printed works—of
political awareness".
On 15 January 1945 the French authorities released
Wodehouse, but they did not inform him, until June 1946, that he would not face
any official charges and was free to leave the country.
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