Plum Sees It Through

Though his novels and plays have minted him millions of dollars--and countless loyal friends--British-born P. G. Wodehouse once confided that his life has been "greatly devoted to feeling like 30 cents." His first feeling of being below par interrupted the ceremony in which, 79 years ago, the infant Wodehouse was named Pelham Grenville. Said he: "I remember protesting vigorously, but to no avail." His longest bout with misfortune came in 1940 when Plum, as he has been called since schooldays, was arrested by the Nazi army in his home at Le Touquet on the French side of the English Channel. The Nazis whisked him from jail to jail for 49 weeks, then released him.

Soon the bombed and battered British were startled to hear Plummie's fluting, very English voice on Radio Berlin. Plum was living in Berlin's swank Hotel Adlon, and at the invitation of the Nazis, had recorded a series of five radio talks with the bantering title: How to Be an Internee in Your Spare Time Without Previous Training. Though heard in Britain, the series was beamed to the U.S., which was wavering on the edge of war. Apparently, Hitler's propagandists believed Plum's breezy account of his misadventures as British Civilian Prisoner 796 would lull U.S. hostility by picturing the Nazis as good-natured nitwits in the inane, innocuous image of Cyril (Barmy) Fotheringay-Phipps or G. D'Arcy (Stilton) Cheesewright.

Soft Bed in Berlin. Instead, the broadcasts convinced Britain's government that Jeeves's erratic inventor had turned traitor. To repudiate Wodehouse, choleric William Connor--author of the Daily Mirror's Cassandra column--was drafted by the Minister of Information. In a virulent attack broadcast by the BBC, Connor castigated Wodehouse as "an old playboy" who had "fallen on his knees and worshipped Hitler." Roared Connor: "It is a somber story of self-respect, honor and decency being pawned to the Nazis for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel."

Last week, long after most Britons had forgiven or forgotten Wodehouse's broadcasts, the controversy flared back with much of its wartime acrimony. It was ignited by Fellow Novelist Evelyn Waugh. In a BBC broadcast on the 20th anniversary of Connor's explosion, Waugh offered "An Act of Homage and Reparation," designed to "express the disgust the BBC has always felt for the injustice of which they were guiltless and complete repudiation of the charges so ignobly made." A far-right Tory himself. Waugh declared that attempts to brand Wodehouse a fascist were part of a wartime conspiracy to "direct the struggle for national survival into proletarian revolution." Far from being a playboy, bristled Waugh, Plum is "one of the most diligent writers living" (total: 81 books, 23 plays), whose European royalties had in fact paid for the "soft bed".

Dodderers & Bashi-Bazouks. In the Mirror, Bill Connor staunchly defended his handiwork: "My denunciation was harsh and bitter, for those were the harshest and bitterest days in a thousand years of our history." He disclosed that the script had even been criticized as "too mild" by a man with a reputation "more weighty than that of the author of Vile Bodies"--Winston Churchill himself. On the other hand, he argued, Waugh's "Ceremony of the Opening of the Wounds" could only hurt Wodehouse. Snapped Connor: "Now Mr. Waugh, in the role of an eager exhumer, disinters the corpse and with busy spade and blazing arclights, goes smartly to work in the graveyard of the past."

In fact, U.S. and British post-mortems showed Wodehouse to have been unwise rather than unpatriotic. His political savvy, say friends, could comfortably be compressed in an aspirin bottle. The script of the controversial broadcasts, finally published in London's monthly Encounter in 1954, smacked more of Lower Smattering-on-the-Wissel than upper Silesia (where Wodehouse spent some time in a prison that had once been an insane asylum). Plainly, Wodehouse said nothing to support the Allied picture of the Nazis as brutes and sadists. During his stay in jail, Wodehouse reported, he had written a novel, read the complete works of William Shakespeare. "Square meals were rather noticeably lacking in squareness," he commented, and he did a stint of "clearing out latrines with one hand and peeling potatoes with the other." But after "spavined old dodderers" like himself were excused from prison chores, Wodehouse conceded that he "lived the life of Riley."

On the other hand, by sly understatement, his chipper account poked fun at officious "bashi-bazouks" like the camp Kommandant, and a corporal whose mania for counting and recounting the prisoners prompted one inmate to swear: "After this war is over. I am going to buy a German soldier and keep him in the garden and count him six times a day." Concluded Plum: "I would say that a prison is all right for a visit, but I wouldn't live there if you gave it to me." Bertie Wooster could hardly have put it better after a night in the Bow Street cooler.

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