Cruel twist of Wodehouse's life

P.G. Wodehouse always regretted his World War II broadcasts. Photo / AP

P.G. Wodehouse is a writer of genius whose plots teem with brilliant comic vicissitudes. Privately, he was also a lifelong connoisseur of the snakes and ladders of everyday life. "Isn't it the damnedest thing," he wrote to a friend in 1945, "how Fate lurks to sock you with the stuffed eel skin?"

The latest MI5 (the British security service) release of restricted files about wartime "renegades" has proved a big week for stuffed eel skins. It must be one of Fate's cruellest jokes that the creator of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves and Lord Emsworth should be so mixed up in the toxic afterlife of the Third Reich.

Once again, the new "Wodehouse files" (actually just a few pages of dodgy Berlin gossip) provide an opportunity to hash over the "infamous" Nazi broadcasts and some long discredited accusations of "treachery" and "collaboration".

Among the many ironies from this latest episode is the fact that MI5 itself concluded, after a thorough interrogation of Wodehouse in 1944, that he was innocent, though the writer was never told of this secret verdict in his lifetime, another cruel twist.

Wodehouse confessed he suffered "a great deal of mental pain" from Berlin. To his countless fans around the world, Wodehouse's wartime disgrace is a continuing source of anguish. The author of some of the most sublime comic novels and stories in the English language, they say, long ago paid a terrible price for something that he always conceded was "a loony thing to do". Why, they wonder, will this story not go away?

When I published my biography, Wodehouse: A Life in 2004, I examined the record of Wodehouse's war in excruciating detail. I concluded, with MI5, that he had behaved stupidly and that, yes, some of his decisions were questionable.

But there were no grounds for prosecution. None. This conclusion was widely accepted.

Yet here we are, reading headlines such as "Wodehouse's Nazi contacts" and "Nazi collaborator".

It's 70 years since Wodehouse made his broadcasts. Today, these five talks seem frivolous, inconsequential and not even very funny.

But there it is: Wodehouse has become shackled to the Third Reich like Prometheus to his rock.

At the point, in 1941, at which Wodehouse was released from internment as an "enemy alien", he had already written most of the books for which he is remembered - Very Good, Jeeves, Heavy Weather, The Code of the Woosters and Uncle Fred in the Springtime - and been celebrated across the English-speaking world for his genius in a way known to few writers of the 20th century.

It was his success that placed him in France in 1940 (a villa in Le Touquet) and it was his fame that attracted the Nazis' attention.

It is another cruel irony of Wodehouse's story that the thing with which he was blessed - his inimitable lightness of spirit and self-protective flippancy - betrayed him.

His instinct to look for the joke in a bad situation was typical of his class and his generation. What he did not understand was that his fateful collision with the 20th century had put him in circumstances that were beyond a joke.

The Wodehouse saga has many tantalising dimensions - what serious propaganda advantage did the Nazis hope to extract from England's most celebrated writer? Why did Wodehouse agree to use Nazi radio? But at its heart there lies the simplest, most existential, question of all: how, confronted with a terrible challenge from history, should a human being respond? Indeed, who among us, faced with an unthinkable evil such as Nazism, and a dreadful moral choice, could be certain of their response before the eye of eternity?

What Wodehouse was obliged to address, in Germany in 1941, at terrible personal cost, was a moment of reckoning unique in English literature, a simple question: what is the proper stance for an artist faced with overwhelming moral evil?

Wodehouse's answer - his broadcasts - was a dreadful error of judgment and, in his words, a "ghastly mistake". It enraged Britain at war.

Looking on the bright side, as Wodehouse was inclined to do, this latest reappearance of Fate's stuffed eel skin will remind another generation about his oeuvre, approximately 100 of the funniest books ever written in the English language.

- OBSERVER