The Unvolved One

...There is a good deal to be said for internment...

...The theory is, on its face, plausible except that McCrum needs to bend and twist the square realities of Wodehouse's life to fit the round hole of the theory—starting with Wodehouse's own explicit denial of the premise...

...It brought him the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton, and glowing tributes from Poland's Lech Walesa, Germany's Helmut Schmidt, and a host of foreign policy notables—from everyone, in fact, except those who counted most: the AFL-CIO's labor barons who sat on its executive council and held Kirkland's fate in their hands...

...During this period, he also served two short, mostly unproductive stints in Hollywood (though he did, with C. Aubrey Smith, found the Hollywood Cricket Club) and produced most of his best song lyrics (working primarily with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern...

...The Wodehouse children were raised in boarding schools and by aunts, uncles, and other relatives in England...

...And apparently Wodehouse was one of those rare borderline misogynists who kept his condition secret from everyone he knew, including his wife of 60 years...

...and that he bore great scars from his neglected childhood...

...Hiss was part of the American elite...

...In May 1940, Wodehouse and his wife, Ethel, MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 B O O K S I N R E V I E W were living in France and, like much of the country, were caught by surprise by the German blitzkrieg...

...The Unloved One G. WODEHOUSE is to the comic novel what Franz Joseph Haydn is to the symphony...

...BOOKS N REVIEW Iles, and the organizational capabilities of the AFL-CIO to promote Solidarity, defend its activists, and punish those who vowed to destroy it...

...And as good as Haydn might be, could he have described, in music, a worried soul as looking like "a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow...

...So his father instead got Plum a job at a bank...

...I don't think so...

...and that he lied about his treason for the rest of his life...

...McCrum skews the portrait of his subject with suspect psychoanalysis, and that flaw is fatal...

...In a childhood starved of love, sport became his version of intimacy...

...To White, it is per- Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery fectly clear that Hiss was a member of the Communist Party...

...Wodehouse honestly, if naively, did not recognize the propaganda value to the Germans of a prominent Englishman broadcasting over Nazi radio...

...McCrum even argues that abandonment by his mother left Wodehouse with a distrust of women bordering on misogyny, as evidenced by a few unflattering },r<'micn Crocker is a real estate executive and writer living in San Diego, Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum (W.W...

...The young Wodehouse, however, had other ideas, and his fledgling career as a free-lance writer soon took off...

...After marrying in 1914, he settled into a quiet home life (though "home" moved around a lot), established his workman-like writing schedule, and spent his spare time reading, taking long walks with his dogs, swimming, and playing an occasional round of golf...

...White was not blinded by family ties, however, and leaves no stone unturned in making the case for Hiss's guilt...

...In his final years of life, Kirkland was an increasingly isolated figure—a modern-day version, as it were, of the Last of the Mohicans...

...But the claim that "the theme that animates Wodehouse's work...

...It is a rather pedestrian observation that the paucity of parents and an overabundance of aunts in Wodehouse's works have a connection with his upbringing, and McCrum is not satisfied to leave it at that...

...What perfect rot...

...A thumbnail sketch of the case will remind readers what the case was all about...

...McCrum writes, "In sport, Wodehouse could have physical relationships with other boys but in a pursuit that was not sex...

...But if the labor movement he had led was in disarray, and the political tribe he belonged to was virtually extinct, at least the old warrior had the satisfaction of knowing, before finally biting the dust himself, that 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 the Soviet Union had preceded him to the grave, and that he had contributed mightily to its demise...

...Unfortunately, this book is a prime example of the biographer getting in the way of the biography...

...Dulwich also provided Wodehouse with the classical and literary education that would manifest itself throughout his writings, most notably in the mangled allusions emanating from Bertie Wooster—and in Jeeves's corrections...

...Half a century earlier, his tribe (variously known as the Right-Wing Social Democrats, the Liberal Internationalists, and the Cold War Liberals) had produced many of the Great Men of the Land...

...To many of them, Kirkland's record was fairly dismal: He had failed to stop Reagan, failed to defeat Bush, failed to derail NAFTA, and, most unforgivably, failed to stem the AFL-CIO's membership decline...

...Though genuinely shocked by the reaction, he freely admitted, "I made an ass of myself, and must pay the penalty...

...But one does not need to search so far for explanations for political naivete...

...McCrum, an author of several works of fiction and literary editor of the Observer, instead plays at psychoanalyst...

...White, a law professor at the University of Virginia and a biographer of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, became interested in Hiss through his father-in-law, who in 1948 had represented Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee and who maintained his belief in Hiss's innocence throughout his life...

...Unfortunately, McCrum's simplistic and unconvincing psychoanalysis, which protrudes everywhere in the narrative, is the sharp skeleton on which this biography hangs...

...Wodehouse was no more detached from world events than are a good many other people...

...But Wodehouse's golden years abruptly ended with World War II and the infamous Berlin broad-casts...

...Wodehouse's dreams of following his brother Armine to Oxford were dashed when his father (now retired and back in England) concluded that he could not afford the expense of having two sons there...

...But by the time of Kirkland's death in 1999, the older tribal members had long since given up the ghost, while the younger ones had gone on to make careers for themselves in the Republican Party, where they were known as neoconservatives...

...It keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up with your reading...

...His writing rarely displayed discernible political messages, but his late pre-war work recognized and clearly ridiculed the British fascist movement (as in the character of Roderick Spode, leader of the "Black Shorts...

...But pages later McCrum notes that Wodehouse unnecessarily brought friends into literary collaborations to fulfill a "constant need for companionship...

...Wodehouse, who wrote 90 novels and short story collections and contributed to 33 musical comedies, usually as a lyricist, was, arguably, the greatest comic writer of the 20th century...

...At age 12-and-a-half, Wodehouse entered Dulwich College for what he would later describe as "six years of unbroken bliss...

...But, counters McCrum, Wodehouse never had any friends with whom he was comfortable talking about sex...

...He spent his final 27 years—writing to the end, consciously out of step with a post-war culture he viewed as degenerate—as a de facto exile in America...

...NORTON, 530 PAGES, $2795) B O O K S I N R E V I E W remarks about women by the fictional confirmed bachelor Bertie Wooster and by the appearance of several imperious females in Wodehouse's work, such as Wooster's flame-breathing Aunt Agatha...

...He pressed the cause of Polish workers in Congress, kept the heat on three presidential administrations, enlisted the aid of labor movements from other countries, and coordinated a wide-ranging program of material assistance that supported beleaguered union activists and enabled Solidarity to maintain an underground press that amounted to hundreds of newspapers and bulletins...

...Wodehouse's pre-war views, as evidenced in private correspondence, showed the same naivete regarding Germany as those of Neville Chamberlain...

...His eventual successor, John Sweeney, promised to restore the AFL-CIO's fortunes by "repositioning" it as a militantly left-wing institution...

...that he was a spy for the Soviet Union...

...At Dulwich, he excelled at both rugby and cricket...

...The reaction to his broadcasts in Britain, which by this time was being regularly showered with German bombs, was furious...

...When the Germans finally released him they took him to Berlin and slyly offered him the opportunity to broadcast some humorous stories about his experiences to his American (still neutral) audience...

...Eventually, most of the British public forgave him—culminating in his knighthood awarded shortly before his death in 1975...

...Wodehouse: A Life is well researched and rich with detail...

...Now Robert McCrum provides us with what his publishers call the "definitive" biography of "the Master...

...And by itself, the creation of a world filled with the likes of Tuppy Glossop, Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Bertie Wooster is hardly evidence of a tortured soul...

...Because of the imperial duties of their father in Hong Kong, Plum and his two brothers (a third would come later) rarely saw their parents—Plum for about a total of six months between the ages of three and 15...

...It is an open question to what extent Wodehouse intentionally or unintentionally retreated from the real world into his own mythical land of Blandings Castle and the Drones Club—or was simply absorbed in the literary process of its creation...

...There is no reason to believe that Wodehouse had less insight into his childhood than McCrum does...

...Wodehouse foolishly accepted and recorded five such broadcasts...

...Wodehouse was a workaholic who often retreated into the solitary comforts of his work, because his wounds from childhood taught him that it is "better to be alone than take the risk of company...

...that he stole documents from the State Department and transmitted them to Moscow...

...Over the next 25 golden years, Wodehouse produced a dizzying number of great stories and novels...

...McCrum again sees in this misstep the workings of Wodehouse's childhood, which caused him to become "detached" from the realities of disagree-able world events...

...clerked for Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy by G. Edward White (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 297 PAGES, $30) Alfred S. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator...

...Like Chamberlain, Wodehouse was too trusting of some people and got hoodwinked...

...Thus far, Sweeney has kept only half his promise: He has indeed "repositioned" labor, but its fortunes continue to decline...

...is a quest for love" is absurd...

...Though he avoided, as much as he could, mingling with the Beautiful People at big parties, Wodehouse was no weird hermit—he made friends easily throughout his life, forging several close friendships...

...In fact, McCrum writes, Wodehouse created his distinctive literary world as an emotional "defense mechanism" to shield him from unpleasant realities...

...Well, there you go...

...The difference being that of Haydn's 107 symphonies, as even a Haydn backer will admit, few, if any, are real corkers...

...When, in 1989, Solidarity scored an overwhelming triumph over the Communists in democratic elections, it triggered a chain reaction that within months brought down the entire apparatus of Communist oppression in Eastern Europe...

...Though Wodehouse always described his child-hood as enjoyable, McCrum confidently states that Wodehouse was "in denial...

...Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (or "Plum" from his Reviewed by Brandon Crocker own unsuccessful childhood attempts at pronouncing "Pelham") was born in 1881 to a mid-ranking British colonial official and his well-bred wife...

...O W DEHOUSE'S EARLY CAREER writing school stories, comic poetry, and light verse allowed him a reasonably comfortable living, but it was not until 1915 with Something Fresh the start of the "Blandings Castle Saga"—and shortly thereafter, with the introduction and evolution of two characters named Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, that Wodehouse's career really blossomed and his ever-lasting fame was secured...

...He was a graduate of the Harvard Law School...

...The penalty, aside from being personally crushed and his career, apparently, ruined, was an official investigation (which cleared him of the treason charge...

...In 1995, these critics forced Kirkland to surrender his presidency...

...14 A Life of Deception TT IS HARD TO IMAGINE, AFTER SO MANY YEARS and after so much written about the case, that there would still be any question of Alger Hiss's guilt...

...With the addition of G. Edward White's book, there really isn't...

...Or perhaps, like other English boys, he just liked sports...

...But as his first novels were school stories (some semi-autobiographical), and as he didn't really start creating what we now call his "world" until after he had been writing professionally for ten or 15 years, calling Wodehouse's later literary endeavors a response to childhood issues is grasping...

...But as his friend Malcolm Muggeridge noted, Wodehouse's temperament made him "ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict...

...Moreover, his stories contain many women who (even in Bertie Wooster's opinion) are "good eggs...

...McCrum does make some interesting observa62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 tions, and Wodehouse's work does reveal the hand of a gentle sentimentalist...

...Wodehouse made his first trip to America not for commercial reasons or out of a long-time interest, as he professed, but to liberate himself (psychologically) from his family...

...Wodehouse was labeled a "Goebbels stooge" and a "traitor...

...Kirkland's role in securing Poland's independence was undoubtedly his finest achievement...

...In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, then a senior editor at Time magazine, in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, named Alger Hiss, then the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former member of FDR's State Department, as a member of the American Communist Party's underground who had spied for the Soviet Union...

...Wodehouse spent almost a year separated from his wife in a series of internment camps with other male expatriates caught behind enemy lines...