That wodehouse chappie has made it to poets’ corner — and about time too, jeeves | thearticle

At Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, a service took place on September 20 to dedicate a memorial to PG Wodehouse. At long last the creator of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster and so much more joins

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Trollope. Despite Wodehouse’s popularity for well over a century, honours have taken a long time to reach him. His knighthood arrived only weeks before his

death aged 93 in 1975, and this memorial has waited another 44 years to appear.  By comparison, Noël Coward’s memorial (which is near Wodehouse’s) was erected 11 years post-mortem, and

David Frost’s shade only had to wait a year for the same honour. The delay is despite Wodehouse’s extraordinary achievement. He wrote over 70 novels, all of which are still in print (itself

probably a record), as well as 19 volumes of short stories, the lyrics for over 200 songs (often working with Jerome Kerne and George Gershwin) and over 20 plays.  He established a Broadway

record by having five shows running simultaneously, then achieved a similar record in London in 1928 when he had three new plays in the West End, a feat unequalled to this day.  Add to this

prolific journalism and letters too numerous to count, and you have the picture of a dazzling all-rounder who knocks the productivity of most writers into a cocked hat. Commercial success

aside, it is no longer in dispute that Wodehouse was a giant of his field.  Evelyn Waugh called him _“the master of my profession”_, Rudyard Kipling revered him and the Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography calls him: _“the greatest of all English humourists.”_ So why did his knighthood only arrive in the nick of time, and this latest honour take so long?  I believe there are

two reasons. One was evidenced by the style of the service. It was far from solemn: several well-known actors, such as Alexander Armstrong and Martin Jarvis, performed some of Wodehouse’s

funniest passages _(__“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?'” “The mood will pass, sir.”)_ and we heard two of his elegant but whimsical songs.  There

was much laughter, and nothing very challenging or profound was produced, because none of his work was intended to be challenging or profound.  His desire was to entertain, not to moralise

or educate.  This has often caused more po-faced critics to dismiss him as just literary froth, not a “serious” writer.  Yet he achieved so much only by being a master of words; such

lightness of touch can only be achieved by the hardest work. Still: the calumny remains. The second reason derives from a naive but foolish misjudgement he made during World War II.  He and

his wife had moved to France in 1935 in an attempt to mitigate the joint attacks of the British and American tax authorities (he was earning huge sums at the time), and although the

Wodehouses tried to leave in May 1940, ahead of the German advance, their car broke down. By then it was too late.  In July that year he was interned by the occupying Germans and he remained

under their control until the end of the war. Disastrously, in 1941 he was persuaded by the German authorities to broadcast a handful of light-hearted talks about his experiences, which

were transmitted from Berlin on American radio to his very many fans there.  The USA was still neutral at the time, and this was probably part of Germany’s propaganda efforts to keep it that

way.  That would never have occurred to Wodehouse, who was known to have no political antennae at all. Insubstantial and slight though they were, the talks inspired vicious attacks on

Wodehouse in the British press.  At the time, German bombers were daily visiting London and keeping British morale high was vital. Many felt that any such broadcasts from a well-known

British figure, living in relative comfort, ran counter to those efforts. He was defended by many, including Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell; even MI5 investigated and decided he had

committed no crime.  Wodehouse himself recognised his mistake, and after the German surrender in 1945 acknowledged it: _“I made an ass of myself and must pay the penalty,” _ Now aged 64, he

accepted the advice of friends and went straight to New York.  He never returned to Europe. But the damage was done and the broadcasts cast a long shadow, especially in official circles. 

Attempts to honour him in 1967 and 1971 were blocked by the British Ambassadors in Washington at the time, despite the huge success of television dramatisations of his stories from 1965

onwards. Time, however, eventually healed the wound.  In 1975 Prime Minister Harold Wilson overruled some residual Foreign Office scepticism and offered Wodehouse a knighthood.  He received

it weeks before he died. But still it took four more decades of rehabilitation before we could gather to honour Wodehouse in Westminster Abbey. The Duke of Kent played a part in the

ceremony, adding a dignified royal seal of approval, and the retiring Dean of Westminster was clearly delighted that the memorial was created during his time of office. We, therefore, now

have royal, spiritual and public approval, so let us put aside the guileless clanger Wodehouse dropped in 1941, and instead celebrate a breath-taking literary legacy. On Friday, his

step-grandson, an elderly retired High Court judge who knew Wodehouse well, said that four words summed him up: genius, industry, kindness and humility. Even without a memorial in Poets’

Corner, that’s a pretty good epitaph.