Not Very Good, Jeeves

The Nazis seemed last week to be planning an extraordinary new radio coup. Fortnight ago they released tall, bald, bespectacled Funnyman Pelham Grenville Wodehouse from an internment camp at Tost, ensconced him at Government expense in a suite in Berlin's swank Hotel Adlon, gave him permission to come and go as he pleased within the confines of the Reich. During his captivity, 59-year-old Author Wodehouse, who was captured when he tarried too late at a cocktail party at his villa in Le Touquet in May 1940, was rated a model prisoner. But on a quid pro quo basis good conduct seemed hardly enough to warrant such great generosity from the Nazis. Then its logic appeared.

Interviewed in Berlin, Author Wodehouse announced that he would shortly take to the air, by arrangement with the German Foreign Office, to relate to U.S. listeners his personal experiences. Said he: "There will be np politics. ... I never have been able to work up a belligerent feeling. Just as I am about to feel belligerent about some country, I meet some nice fellow from it and lose all my belligerency." To this small clue as to his state of mind, Wodehouse added another: "Naturally I hope the war is over soon, but if I am able to continue my work I will be satisfied." He wondered whether his world was ended, evinced no convictions or aspirations about the world to come.

Inferring that the Nazis were at least going to use Wodehouse as a come-on for their .shortwave propaganda broadcasts, the British press bustled. Front-paged the London Daily Mirror: "Wodehouse . . . lived luxuriously here because Britain laughed with him, but when the laughter was out of his country's heart, Wodehouse was not ready to share her sufferings. ..." Commented the Daily Express' subacid Columnist Paul Holt: "[Wodehouse is] one of the best loved Englishmen alive, [but] he is now using quite a short spoon to sup with the devil. . . . Life in hell is good to live, I guess, if you are Mister Lucifer's personal guest."

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