Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

He toiled in three demanding vineyards: musical comedy, screenwriting, and fiction. And he would seem to have made the decision, quite early in life, to become an American. The two determinations were obviously related, because in the early decades of the twentieth century it was evident to any aspiring Brit that New York was (a) where the action was and (b) where the money was. Still, it comes as a slight surprise to find him writing, “in a perfect agony of boredom” with London in the 1920s, that “all I want to do is get back and hear the American language again.” This surprise, however, is soon overtaken by the realization that American idioms, especially the idioms of the Prohibition era—“rannygazoo,” “horn-swoggle,” “put on the dog,” “bum’s rush,” “dude”—pervade the speech of his characters. Indeed, it was as an American, or at any rate as a writer with a large American audience, that he was thought useful by the Germans during the long period of U.S. neutrality. However much people like to yoke him with the phrase “quintessentially English,” it was on American soil that he did much if not most of his best work. It’s nice to remember that at his formative Dulwich School he was a near contemporary of Raymond Chandler’s.

  In Hollywood, where he didn’t do much memorable work but did make a considerable amount of money, he helped found the Hollywood Cricket Club, in 1931. Its members included Boris Karloff, Errol Flynn, and David Niven (who appears in the movie version of Thank You, Jeeves). To this we are indebted, clearly, for the marvelous opening scene of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.

  Jazz Age Wodehouse, as caught by McCrum, is out on Long Island with the Scott Fitzgeralds, staying at the Algonquin, sweeping up Broadway in triumph with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, writing musical parts for William Randolph Hearst’s future sweetie Marion Davies, hobnobbing with Flo Ziegfeld, and getting hot reviews from George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker. Frank Crowninshield, of Vanity Fair, paid him top dollar. But all the time, in this world saturated with money and glamour and sex, he remained, in McCrum’s phrase, “the laureate of repression.” And he was, when he got home to his desk, slowly evolving the primal innocence of Lord Emsworth and Bertie Wooster—an attainment that would bring him fame far beyond the Great White Way.

  Attempting to explain this dissonance between the knowing and the guileless, and between the cynical world of gay-dominated musical comedy and the blameless universe of Bertie and the Earl, I once proposed that Wodehouse must have seen or read The Importance of Being Earnest and somehow sublimated it. The theory is pathetically simple once you start to test it: Oscar Wilde’s play opens with some witty backchat between an idle young bachelor and his butler, proceeds to introduce a terrifying aunt in the shape of Lady Bracknell, and carries on with two intertwined and frivolous engagements, which are resolved in a country house with the help of a silly rural clergyman. With Wodehouse as with Wilde, nobody has any father or mother, only aunts and uncles. (I can go on about this at length if challenged, mentioning the dates when Wodehouse began going to the theater and not omitting the fact that his father was named Ernest.) McCrum even makes a bow in my direction, asserting that although Wodehouse undoubtedly knew of Reginald Bunthorne, the “fleshly poet” satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, he never included any Wildeisms in his widely scattered literary allusions.

  Nor did he—by allusion, at any rate. But I’ve recently been unhorsed by Mark Grueter, a brilliant graduate student of mine, who came across the following in the story “Pigs Have Wings.” Set in Blandings Castle, as the title implies, it features the scapegrace Galahad Threepwood (“Gally”) and the mettlesome American girl Penny Donaldson. The ambition of this dangerous young woman is to keep an appointment with her unsuitable suitor, Jerry Vail, in London. Lord Emsworth’s forbidding sister Lady Constance, warns Galahad, will not hear of this.

  “The expedition arrives in London tomorrow afternoon, so tomorrow night I shall be dining with my Jerry.”

  Gally gazed at her in amazement. Her childish optimism gave him a pang.

  “With Connie keeping her fishy eye on you? Not a hope.”

  “Oh yes, because there’s an old friend of Father’s in London, and Father would never forgive me if I didn’t take this opportunity of slapping her on the back and saying hello. So I shall dine with her.”

  “And she will bring your young man along?”

  “Well, between us girls, Gally, she doesn’t really exist. I’m like the poet in Shakespeare, I’m giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Did you ever see The Importance of Being Earnest?”

  “Don’t wander from the point.”

  “I’m not wandering from the point. Do you remember Bunbury, the friend the hero invented? This is his mother, Mrs. Bunbury. You can always arrange these things with a little tact.”

  I devoutly wish, but not for the sake of my theory, that I had never had to read this passage. It does prove, after all, my original point that Wodehouse must have read or seen the play. But it makes the reference in such clunking, leaden tones that one would prefer to have been kept guessing. Most of Wodehouse’s beautifully timed literary nudges do not give chapter and verse. (And Algernon as “the hero”?) So I sadly propose that we have here a fusion of the workaholic and the self-conscious: a grisly combination that doesn’t recur until the groan-making moment, in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974), when Bertie Wooster goes out for a stroll and runs into an anti-war demonstration. (That’s what I mean by letting in daylight upon magic.)

  I had once thought, rather simple-mindedly, that Wodehouse’s downplaying of Wilde might have to do with a revulsion from homosexuality. And his few references to the subject in his nonfictional life—he called it “homosexualism”—are generally mildly disobliging. But I learned from McCrum that in the interwar years he used to thoroughly enjoy staying with a militantly gay cousin, usefully named Charles Le Strange, who owned an eccentric but well-appointed country house in East Anglia. The most Wodehouse could be induced to say of this relative was that he was “a weird bird.” Elements of his sojourns at Hunstanton Hall were pressed into service for the innumerable country-house episodes that, Wodehouse later admitted, he relied on so greatly because any scene set under such a roof seemed somehow credible.

  His staunchest admirer would be hard put to deny that Wodehouse wrote too much, but that’s partly because he lived so long. And a biographer can’t decently quarrel with that, even though the declining years offer less and less by way of incident and amusement, and less still by way of humorous genius. McCrum is one of those who esteem the “Uncle Fred” stories, which detail the wry adventures of Lord Ickenham. One can’t quite allow this. The appeal is simply too broad; too general. If a volume of collected Wodehouse could be assembled, and could include no more than two full-length novels (The Code of the Woosters and Right Ho, Jeeves, the latter containing Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School); perhaps a dozen of the more finished Jeeves and Bertie short stories (to include “The Great Sermon Handicap,” “Jeeves and the Old School Chum,” and “Jeeves and the Song of Songs”); and a selection of the Mulliner tales (both stories about the cat named Webster, the “Buck-U-Uppo” reminiscences, and the accounts of Archibald and Sacheverell), one would have a real corker that could never, ever die. As it is, one so often bumps into lost souls who claim to have “tried” Wodehouse and not got the joke. These are the unfortunates who in early and impressionable youth were handed a duff anthology by a well-meaning but mirthless aunt (or, admittedly, uncle).

  Wodehouse never really went back to England after the Second World War; he had been semi-officially “cleared” of any charge of treason or collaboration, but the authorities, in a nasty bit of petty sadism, did not actually tell him they had in fact concluded that the evidence was insufficient. So he continued to churn out Edwardian-era plots from a home on Long Island, and to help set up the revoltingly named “Bide-A-Wee” home for stray and abandoned pets. This slushiness, like his sporadic interest in spiritualism and the occult, is of exactly the sort that he
was best at lampooning—most especially in the Princess Diana–like person of Madeleine Bassett, a ghastly girl who thinks that the stars are God’s daisy-chain. (“All rot, of course,” Bertie says of this. “They’re nothing of the sort.”) But it may have come in useful in his frequent descriptions of an almost ectoplasmic Jeeves, as he “shimmered” into a room, or sometimes “filtered” or “floated” out.

  Simile and metaphor provide so much of the energy of Wodehouse’s narration: “He writhed like an electric fan”; “He wilted like a salted snail”; “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes”; “There came a sound like that of Mr. G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin”; “He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow”; “A lifetime of lunches had caused his chest to slip down to the mezzanine floor”; “Aunt calling to aunt, like mastodons bellowing across the primeval swamp.” I myself jumped like a pea on a hot shovel only twice during the reading of this biography: first when I read of Wodehouse’s referring to his youthful case of “clap,” and second when, in his letters from prison, he twice employed the word “toilet” for “lavatory.” It’s important that his votaries be able to think of him as virtually disembodied. In a great and noble defense of Wodehouse against the wartime calumny that was spread about him, Orwell observed that the complete omission of the sex joke was an astonishing sacrifice for a comic writer to make. But for Wodehouse it seems to have been no sacrifice at all. His marriage to Ethel, though it led to a great stepfatherly love for her daughter, was a business arrangement, with pets—preferably Pekes—standing in for offspring. The nearest approach to even an innuendo comes in Thank You, Jeeves, when Bertie finds his former fiancée, the American Pauline Stoker, in his bed, wearing his “heliotrope pajamas with the old gold stripe.” He phrases it thus: “The attitude of fellows toward finding girls in their bedroom shortly after midnight varies. Some like it. Some don’t. I didn’t.”

  One gasps at Wodehouse for going even as far as that. And given that he mentioned his “clap” only to his much more seasoned friend Guy Bolton, and late in life too, I prefer to believe that he was just trying to keep up, to appear to be one of the boys. He never found this easy, however. One of his editors, Christopher Maclehose, told me that he had once been to visit “Plum” on Long Island, and had found him shyly reading a copy of Alec Waugh’s novel A Spy in the Family. This little effort was an extremely mild essay in erotic comedy, but Wodehouse found it profoundly shocking and asked Maclehose if everything in England had become so filthy in his absence. If not disgruntled, as Bertie Wooster once put it in another connection, he wasn’t exactly gruntled either. But this is just as one might have hoped it to be.

  His admirers will desert P. G. Wodehouse for his archaic Upstairs Downstairs settings on the same day that people discard Oscar Wilde for being too fond of the drawing room or discover Charles Dickens to be anachronistic for writing about stagecoaches in an age of steam. His attention to language, his near faultless ability to come up with names that are at once ludicrous and credible, and the intricacy of his plotting are imperishable. Unlike Wilde, though, he put his genius into his work, not his life.

  (The Atlantic, November 2004)

  Anthony Powell:

  An Omnivorous Curiosity25

  TO GET ONE QUESTION out of the way before we begin:

  At one of these public interrogations (I am not sure which college) a professor prefixed a question by saying—rather archly—that he was uncertain how to pronounce my name. As an inspiration of the moment I replied that like the Boston family of Lowell I rhymed it with Noël rather than towel.

  Here Anthony Powell was describing an incident on his tour of New England in the early 1960s, and he gave some tincture of both period and place. In Boston,

  The restaurant of our hotel … was called The Hungry Pilgrim. Outside stood an examplar of esurient puritanism dressed in a black-and-white Cromwellian costume with hair in a pigtail, which was a shade anachronistic and had not yet become at all chic for men. From time to time, looking as if he had just landed from The Mayflower and was in urgent need of a square meal, this gaunt figure would ring a bell. In general, however, Boston, a city of considerable charm, suggests a date later than the 17th century … Boston does not disappoint. Even on the briefest visit one can detect layer upon layer of the Bostonianism celebrated in such a long American literary tradition. When I was there in 1961 Little, Brown’s, with much other entertaining, gave me luncheon at that haunt of ancient peace, shrine of Boston brahminism, the Somerset Club. The party included Edwin O’Connor, an American novelist I had already come across in England.

  The Somerset Club is deservedly famous. I doubt if any club in London could equal—certainly none surpass—the inspissated and enveloping club atmosphere of The Somerset. Ancient armchairs and sofas underpropped one or two equally antiquated members, ossified into states of Emersonian catalepsy in which shadow and sunlight were not only the same, but had long freed them from shame or fame. It was comforting to see so splendid a haunt from the past surviving intact in a widely disintegrating world.

  And it is cheering to think of Powell, the pre-eminent novelist of English traits, discoursing there so happily with the author of The Last Hurrah.

  Some of the supposed difficulty or intractability of Anthony Powell is on show in these passages—a slight fussiness about etiquette and detail, and an almost affected pleasure in the antique or the nearly expired. Moreover, why say “esurient” when “hungry-looking” would do, or “inspissated” instead of “stifling”? Perhaps because “esurient” may also suggest “greedy” or even “voracious,” and because “inspissated” denotes an atmosphere or an element that has been thickened or congealed by evaporation—the perfect term for clubland’s residuum. In the context of commercialized puritanism in one case and brahminism in the other, we find an author who would rather be thought puritanical—or even stuffy—than use a lazy or obvious word. Look again, and you will see an observant prefiguration of the “theme” kitsch that we now all take for granted. Look one last time, and muse on the implications of “Emersonian catalepsy.” Look up the whole excerpt, and you will find that O’Connor told Powell a very amusing story about Evelyn Waugh, which story Powell subsequently tracked to its principals before finding it to be quite untrue but well worth repeating.

  * * *

  This is all part of the task for which I happily volunteer: recommending the reading of Anthony Powell. I say “happily” because I have never induced anyone to try him and been subsequently cursed for my pains. Indeed, I have been thanked in almost broken tones. Yet those of us who till this vineyard, on either side of the broad Atlantic, occasionally adopt a pre-emptively defensive posture all the same. When Powell died, in March of last year, at the age of ninety-four, the New York Times Book Review devoted a “Book-end” column to the obsequy, written by Ferdinand Mount, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement and Powell’s nephew by marriage. (A revision of his piece serves as the foreword to this edition of the memoirs.) Not even Mount, though writing at such a moment, felt that he could avoid a long, throat-clearing refutation of charges of snobbery, elitism, and such-like. “As a matter of fact,” he asserted of his uncle-in-law, “his fiction was extraordinarily democratic.”

  Oh, dear. I agree with this claim, but without feeling the slightest need to advance or defend it. (Can there be “undemocratic fiction”—the only discovery that would necessitate or imply its counterpoint?) Powell’s fiction is “democratic” because it is realistic and humane and somewhat given to the absurd. If you like, it also shows an acute awareness of a stable and long-settled society in transition. It confronts sex and death and unfairness, and brushes against love, poverty, and war.

  To Keep the Ball Rolling (which is an abridgment of Infants of the Spring, Messengers of Day, Faces in My Time, and The Strangers All Are Gone, originally published as four separate volumes) is democratic in that it shows a great and omnivorous curiosity about the lives and motives of others. And if one
chooses to read these memoirs from the standpoint of the New—or, indeed, the old—Criticism, they may stand as a Bildungs-memoir or palimpsest of Powell’s celebrated twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. For example, as a small boy Powell was taken to watch the funeral of King Edward VII, in 1910 (an experience shared by many London children), and he knew enough about the need to please adults to claim that he had seen Caesar, the late King’s dog, which had padded along behind the royal coffin and thus became, as Powell dryly recorded, “a great tear-jerker.” From this distillation of childhood half memory he intuited the following:

  I must, however, have glimpsed for a moment the officer of 2nd Life Guards commanding the escort riding a short way behind the gun-carriage. This was the 5th Earl of Longford, later killed at Gallipoli; father of my future wife. We possess a photograph which includes my father-in-law, as well as my father: Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Longford on his charger just behind Caesar’s kilted attendant; Captain Powell among the group of regular army adjutants standing at attention with drawn swords.

  Powell’s novels appear to depend much on delicate threads of coincidence, and some readers have claimed to find the coincidences too dependent on the inbreeding of class. However, probably many English people could have discovered their future fathers-in-law in an early group shot, even if that shot was not taken at a royal interment. More indicative as a childhood memory is this one. The author reckoned that he was no more than six.

  After the park and the street the interior of the building seemed very silent. A long beam of sunlight, in which small particles of dust swam about, all at once slanted through an upper window on the staircase, and struck the opaque glass panels of the door. On several occasions recently I had been conscious of approaching the brink of some discovery; an awareness that nearly became manifest, then suddenly withdrew. Now the truth came flooding in with the dust infested sunlight. The revelation of self-identity was inescapable. There was no doubt about it. I was me.