http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/12/26/jeeves_vs_pooh

Jeeves vs. Pooh

P.G. Wodehouse, creator of the ultimate literary butler, and A.A. Milne,
creator of Winnie-the Pooh, started as friends in Edwardian London. But
their falling out in 1941 revealed something essential about the
men--and their lasting creations.

By James Parker | December 26, 2004

Few events in the annals of light radio can have received worse reviews
than the "talk" recorded by P.G. Wodehouse and broadcast on June 28,
1941. Within days, in newspapers across Britain, the beloved author of
"Leave It to Psmith" and "Right Ho, Jeeves" had been called everything
from a "performing flea" to a "Nazi stooge." His harmless, creaking
upper-class voice, in its woolly muffler of static, speaking lightly
and (as he hoped) inconsequentially, had outraged a nation for one
reason: Wodehouse was broadcasting from Hitler's Berlin.

As Robert McCrum's new "Wodehouse: A Life" (Norton) makes clear,
Wodehouse was never the shrewdest observer of international affairs. He
had been caught flatfooted by the German occupation of France (where he
was living at the time), taken into custody, separated from his wife,
and eventually placed in an internment camp -- Ilag 8 -- in Upper
Silesia. When tracked to the camp by an American journalist, Wodehouse
suddenly became an object of great interest to the German Foreign
Office. A succession of well-dressed, amiably aspected,
English-speaking Germans -- of the sort to which the genial Wodehouse,
who confessed himself "quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent
feeling," was peculiarly vulnerable -- appeared before him, and
somewhere along the line the idea for a bit of light radio was floated.

Wodehouse, fatally complaisant, went along with it. He was removed from
Ilag 8, transported to Berlin and installed in a luxury hotel. It was
1941, America had still not entered the war, and it was calculated in
Berlin that some humorous, anesthetic words from a freshly-released
Wodehouse, aimed at his vast audience in the United States, would help
keep the American giant at bay. In due course he recorded five "talks"
to be broadcast on German radio. The talks themselves were 10-minute
slices of apolitical piffle -- "I was strolling on the lawn with my
wife one morning, when she lowered her voice and said, `Don't look now,
but there comes the German army"' -- but they would almost destroy him.

"I have come to tell you tonight," William Connor intoned on the BBC on
July 15, "of the story of a rich man trying to make his last and
greatest sale -- that of his own country. . .. It is the record of P.G.
Wodehouse ending 40 years of money-making fun with the worst joke he
ever made in his life."

Connor, who wrote a column for the Daily Mirror under the name
Cassandra, was acting with the support of Alfred Duff Cooper,
Churchill's Minister of Information. Wodehouse had his allies -- George
Orwell, correctly intuiting the political background to the broadcasts,
would write a thoughtful defense before the war was over -- but popular
feeling ran against him. Libraries withdrew his books, and the BBC
announced that it would broadcast no more of his stories and lyrics.
Bewildered and horrified by the uproar, he retreated after the war to
America; he would never again return to England.

. . .

Wodehouse was not a man to bear grudges. With William Connor, for
example, peace would eventually be made. (The two men lunched together
in New York.) But "Cassandra" had gone after him with a rhetorical
blunderbuss; it was the gleaming literary scalpel of his fellow
humorist A. A. Milne that gave the unkindest cut, and which was never
forgiven.

A letter from Milne appeared in the Daily Telegraph on July 3, 1941. It
was quite a document: pale with fury, barbed with wit, and venomously
ad hominem. Wodehouse "has encouraged in himself," Milne wrote, "a
natural lack of interest in `politics' -- `politics' being all the
things grown-ups talk about at dinner when one is hiding under the
table. Things, for instance, like the last war, which found and kept
him in America; and post-war taxes, which chased him back and forth
across the Atlantic."

Milne's sneering tone outraged Wodehouse's friends, but how fair were
his charges? Wodehouse had certainly, by luck or design, dodged World
War I. He had certainly had his troubles with the taxman. And in the
affair of the broadcasts he had been guilty of simple, colossal
naivete.

Yet the animus displayed by Milne was, on the face of it, surprising. As
young men in Edwardian London he and Wodehouse had been fellow literary
swells, high earners, kings of light entertainment -- Wodehouse with
his books and librettos, Milne with smash hit plays like "Mr. Pim
Passes By." They had clubbed together and played cricket together. Now,
in late middle age, they were also equally (i.e. world-) famous, and
therein perhaps lay part of the problem.

The rivalrous Milne was famous for four swiftly-produced children's
books -- "When We Were Very Young," "Now We Are Six,"
"Winnie-the-Pooh," and "The House at Pooh Corner" -- which, he was
coming to realize, would erase everything else he had ever written.
Wodehouse, on the other hand, was famous for a steady stream of
brilliant comic novels, written in a style, a unique whip-up of
vernacular and high-flown allusion, that he had been honing for
decades.

Everything in Wodehouse's education and career -- his grammarian's
grounding in Latin and Greek, his irony-tinged affection for Victorian
poetry, his apprenticeship in journalism, his exposure to Jazz Age
slang, his work in the buoyant, sentimental realm of the musical --
went into this style.

Its triumph was the brimming double-act of Jeeves the butler and his
employer Bertie Wooster. Jeeves is an apparition of sanity and
formality, barely manifest on the physical -- "a kind of darkish sort
of respectful Johnnie," observes Wooster at their first meeting, pretty
much leaving it at that for the remainder of their long association.
But if Jeeves is rendered minimally, the narrator Bertie -- jangling,
babbling, pop-eyed, exclamatory, incipiently alcoholic Bertie -- comes
spilling off the page, with freshly-minted, lunatic imagery ("He
writhed like an electric fan," "The policeman regarded me in a boiled
way") and a hyperbolic twang that previews those later, more hectic
exercises in comic subjectivity, Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain
King" and Martin Amis's "Money."

Milne, by contrast, has dated. Indeed, in his own lifetime he dated: By
the `30s critics were comparing the characters in his plays to "caged
dormice." A more recognizably artistic type than Wodehouse -- shifty,
combative, thin-skinned, self-lauding -- he was also more politically
engaged. He had written a book-length pacifist polemic called "Peace
With Honor." He had also, unlike Wodehouse, been to war, as a signals
officer in the trenches of France. What can we say of a writer who,
having seen men literally flattened by shelling at the Somme, finds
himself able in later years to write lines like "God bless Mummy. I
know that's right/ Wasn't it fun in the bath tonight?"

We can say that he knew exactly what he was doing. A comparison with J.
M. Barrie, author of "Peter Pan" and an early sponsor of Milne's
career, is handy here. Where Barrie was a wizard, Milne was a conjurer;
he knew children, could perform brilliantly for them, but he lacked --
did not want -- Barrie's magic cloak of misery, the lonely shroud
(materialized in a series of oversized greatcoats) within which the
sunken little Scotsman could incubate his fantasia. Milne's Hundred
Acre Wood is tastefully free of the billowing nostalgia of Kenneth
Grahame's "Wind in the Willows," or the terrors and yearnings of
Barrie's Neverland. It tickles and it charms, but the world of Pooh is
less a halcyon vision of childhood than a scale model -- stuffed
animals that bubble into a fitful sentience in the mind of one very
closely and cleverly observed little boy. It was this knowingness that
exposed the Christopher Robin books to the accusation, made by Dorothy
Parker, of "sedulous cuteness."

. . .

Wodehouse was what we might call a concealed visionary. The benign fug
of absence that emanated from this man, the comfortable, Pooh-like
perplexity as to his own nature -- one friend compared his presence in
the room to "the ticking of a clock" -- was a smokescreen. Beneath it,
he was as fierce an artist as ever lived.

If the Hundred Acre Wood had happened to contain, along with the orally
fixated bear and the sociopathic tiger cub, a large bald animal who
could not stop writing, that animal would have been P.G. Wodehouse. As
Pooh to his honeypots, so Wodehouse to his typewriter -- endlessly,
obsessively, insatiably. Two and a half thousand words a day in his
prime, and rarely less than a thousand even into his eighties. Nothing
stopped him. Even in Ilag 8 he kept working, somehow managing to
complete a novel, "Money in the Bank," "in a room where fifty men were
playing ping-pong and talking and singing."

Milne, in his rancor, recognized this; he knew that Wodehouse had
protected himself, with the ruthlessness of genius, from all
interference. War, sex, reality -- it was all kept at bay for as long
as possible. Wodehouse's run-in with the 20th century -- the one actual
Event in his life -- was in the strictest sense tragic: His greatest
artistic gift, his essential levity, was mercilessly revealed as his
greatest moral flaw, and the beauty of his comic style was reduced to a
ghastly mechanical flippancy.

The odd truth is that of the two writers, Wodehouse was the purer
fantasist. His world is totally comic -- "idyllic," as Evelyn Waugh
famously declared, in an 80th-birthday salute to "The Master." The
transports of romantic love have, on Wodehouse characters, the
approximate effect of a strongly mixed drink, and the nearest they come
to sadness is an infantile petulance, generally expressed by kicking
things and dealing shortly with menservants (or caddies). Passion and
seriousness are elsewhere, in some dim Tennysonian realm where "those
poet and philosopher Johnnies" do their brooding, and deep thought is
the exclusive province of "brainy birds."

With a reflexive topicality acquired in his days as a journalist,
Wodehouse would import the occasional detail from the real world -- a
Modern Poem, a Socialist -- but reality itself, gray and daylit, never
intrudes. He had his revenge on Milne, satirizing the Christopher Robin
shtick in stories like "Rodney Has a Relapse," but history would avenge
him over and over -- remembering Milne as a writer for the nursery, and
Wodehouse as one for the ages.