Two countries divided by a common language
Viva la difference. A passage from the incomparable PG Wodehouse demonstrates that the division isn’t a matter of language alone, but can carry across the two cultures entire, in multiple aspects and contexts. BACKSTORY: Wealthy American businessman Bingley Crocker, temporarily ensconced in London against his wishes at the behest of his godawful harridan of a henpecking wife, endeavors to sort out the incomprehensible intricacies of English cricket under the nonplussed tutelage of the family’s British-to-the-bone gentleman’s gentleman, Bayliss.
Mr. Crocker picked up his paper and folded it back at the sporting page, pointing with a stubby forefinger.
"Well, what does all this mean? I've kept out of watching cricket since I landed in England, but yesterday they got the poison needle to work and took me off to see Surrey play Kent at that place Lord's where you say you go sometimes.”
"I was there yesterday, sir. A very exciting game.”
"Exciting? How do you make that out? I sat in the bleachers all afternoon, waiting for something to break loose. Doesn't anything ever happen at cricket?”
The butler winced a little, but managed to smile a tolerant smile. This man, he reflected, was but an American and as such more to be pitied than censured. He endeavoured to explain.
"It was a sticky wicket yesterday, sir, owing to the rain.”
“Eh?”
"The wicket was sticky, sir.”
"Come again.”
"I mean that the reason why the game yesterday struck you as slow was that the wicket--I should say the turf--was sticky--that is to say wet. Sticky is the technical term, sir. When the wicket is sticky, the batsmen are obliged to exercise a great deal of caution, as the stickiness of the wicket enables the bowlers to make the ball turn more sharply in either direction as it strikes the turf than when the wicket is not sticky.”
"That's it, is it?”
"Yes, sir.”
"Thanks for telling me.”
"Not at all, sir.”
Mr. Crocker pointed to the paper.
"Well, now, this seems to be the box-score of the game we saw yesterday. If you can make sense out of that, go to it.”
The passage on which his finger rested was headed "Final Score," and ran as follows:
SURREY
First Innings
Hayward, c Wooley, b Carr ....... 67 Hobbs, run out ................... 0 Hayes, st Huish, b Fielder ...... 12 Ducat, b Fielder ................ 33 Harrison, not out ............... 11 Sandham, not out ................. 6 Extras .......................... 10
Total (for four wickets) ....... 139
Bayliss inspected the cipher gravely.
"What is it you wish me to explain, sir?”
"Why, the whole thing. What's it all about?”
"It's perfectly simple, sir. Surrey won the toss, and took first knock. Hayward and Hobbs were the opening pair. Hayward called Hobbs for a short run, but the latter was unable to get across and was thrown out by mid-on. Hayes was the next man in. He went out of his ground and was stumped. Ducat and Hayward made a capital stand considering the stickiness of the wicket, until Ducat was bowled by a good length off-break and Hayward caught at second slip off a googly. Then Harrison and Sandham played out time.”
Mr. Crocker breathed heavily through his nose.
"Yes!" he said. "Yes! I had an idea that was it. But I think I'd like to have it once again, slowly. Start with these figures. What does that sixty-seven mean, opposite Hayward's name?”
"He made sixty-seven runs, sir.”
"Sixty-seven! In one game?”
"Yes, sir.”
"Why, Home-Run Baker couldn't do it!”
"I am not familiar with Mr. Baker, sir.”
"I suppose you've never seen a ball-game?”
"Ball-game, sir?”
"A baseball game?”
"Never, sir.”
"Then, Bill," said Mr. Crocker, reverting in his emotion to the bad habit of his early London days, "you haven't lived. See here!”
Whatever vestige of respect for class distinctions Mr. Crocker had managed to preserve during the opening stages of the interview now definitely disappeared. His eyes shone wildly and he snorted like a war-horse. He clutched the butler by the sleeve and drew him closer to the table, then began to move forks, spoons, cups, and even the contents of his plate about the cloth with an energy little short of feverish.
“Bayliss!”
“Sir?”
"Watch!" said Mr. Crocker, with the air of an excitable high priest about to initiate a novice into the Mysteries.
He removed a roll from the basket.
"You see this roll? That's the home plate. This spoon is first base. Where I'm putting this cup is second. This piece of bacon is third. There's your diamond for you. Very well, then. These lumps of sugar are the infielders and the outfielders. Now we're ready. Batter up? He stands here. Catcher behind him. Umps behind catcher.”
"Umps, I take it, sir, is what we would call the umpire?”
"Call him anything you like. It's part of the game. Now here's the box, where I've put this dab of marmalade, and here's the pitcher, winding up.”
"The pitcher would be equivalent to our bowler?”
"I guess so, though why you should call him a bowler gets past me.”
"The box, then, is the bowler's wicket?”
"Have it your own way. Now pay attention. Play ball! Pitcher's winding up. Put it over, Mike, put it over! Some speed, kid! Here it comes, right in the groove. Bing! Batter slams it and streaks for first. Outfielder--this lump of sugar--boots it. Bonehead! Batter touches second. Third? No! Get back! Can't be done. Play it safe. Stick around the sack, old pal. Second batter up. Pitcher getting something on the ball now besides the cover. Whiffs him. Back to the bench, Cyril! Third batter up. See him rub his hands in the dirt. Watch this kid. He's good! He lets two alone, then slams the next right on the nose. Whizzes around to second. First guy, the one we left on second, comes home for one run. That's a game! Take it from me, Bill, that's a _game!_”
Somewhat overcome with the energy with which he had flung himself into his lecture, Mr. Crocker sat down and refreshed himself with cold coffee.
"Quite an interesting game," said Bayliss. "But I find, now that you have explained it, sir, that it is familiar to me, though I have always known it under another name. It is played a great deal in this country.”
Mr. Crocker started to his feet.
"It is? And I've been five years here without finding it out! When's the next game scheduled?”
"It is known in England as Rounders, sir. Children play it with a soft ball and a racquet, and derive considerable enjoyment from it. I had never heard of it before as a pastime for adults.”
Two shocked eyes stared into the butler's face.
"Children?" The word came in a whisper.
"A racquet?”
"Yes, sir.”
"You--you didn't say a soft ball?”
"Yes, sir.”
A sort of spasm seemed to convulse Mr. Crocker. He had lived five years in England, but not till this moment had he realised to the full how utterly alone he was in an alien land. Fate had placed him, bound and helpless, in a country where they called baseball Rounders and played it with a soft ball.
He sank back into his chair, staring before him. And as he sat the wall seemed to melt and he was gazing upon a green field, in the centre of which a man in a grey uniform was beginning a Salome dance. Watching this person with a cold and suspicious eye, stood another uniformed man, holding poised above his shoulder a sturdy club. Two Masked Marvels crouched behind him in attitudes of watchful waiting. On wooden seats all around sat a vast multitude of shirt-sleeved spectators, and the air was full of voices.
One voice detached itself from the din.
"Pea-nuts! Get y'r pea-nuts!”
Something that was almost a sob shook Bingley Crocker's ample frame. Bayliss the butler gazed down upon him with concern. He was sure the master was unwell.
That rather lengthy excerpt is from Picadilly Jim, an early (pubished in 1917) Wodehouse novel I only recently ran across. Having been a tremendous Wodehouse fan since I was about 10 or so, when my Aunt Ruth loaned me her paperback copy of Laughing Gas (pub. 1936) to read during a weekend sleepover at her house and I found myself utterly captivated by the thing. She ended up just giving me the book; I still have it, tattered and shopworn though it is from numberless re-readings over the years.
And bang, zoom! Just like that I was altogether hooked, regularly immersing myself in the sunny, amiable world of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Uncle Fred, Pongo Twistleton-Twistleton, Psmith, Mr Mulliner, and the other singularly delightful Wodehouse characters and their madcap gadding about ever since.
The man had a way with the language that flatly defies either categorization or comparison. It’s probably said of more authors than it really should be, but he’s truly one of a kind; there simply has never been anyone quite like Pelham Grenville Wodehouse in all the world, either before or since the great man’s advent. It’s impossible to mistake or misidentify him; read but a few lines and you know straightaway who the author is, it couldn’t be anyone but dear old Plum (he passionately loathed his given names and insisted on being called “Plum” from childhood on).
Even in Wodehouse's earliest published works, the engaging characters and lively, convoluted plotlines fairly leap off the page fully-formed; their howlingly-funny misadventures and Byzantine webs of intrigue somehow come off as at once extravagantly improbable yet entirely believable, at times even perfectly logical…but never predictable or dull.
As has been said of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, fans of the fictional world PG Wodehouse created want to go there, to live there; I would myself, like a shot. The Wodehouse enthusiast will doubtless be acquainted with the concise, breezily self-effacing summation proferred when asked about his creative process: “Oh, I just sit down at the typewriter and curse a bit.” Perhaps so, perhaps not, but what of it? The known facts indicate a far more careful, arduous work routine:
Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that "It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out." He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions. For a novel the note-writing process could take up to two years, and he would usually have two or more novels in preparation simultaneously. After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop. When interviewed in 1975 he revealed that "For a humorous novel you've got to have a scenario, and you've got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in...splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible." He preferred working between 4 and 7 pm—but never after dinner—and would work seven days a week. In his younger years, he would write around two to three thousand words a day, although he slowed as he aged, so that in his nineties he would produce a thousand. The reduced speed in writing slowed his production of books: when younger he would produce a novel in about three months, while Bachelors Anonymous, published in 1973, took around six months. Although studies of language production in normal healthy ageing show a marked decline from the mid-70s on, a study of Wodehouse's works did not find any evidence of a decline in linguistic ability with age.
Actually, in the twilight of his career Wodehouse’s writing sometimes unraveled into outright carelessness; he even went so far as to recycle entire story arcs on occasion, with only slight if any adjustment, particularly in the latter-day Jeeves books. Given his staggeringly prolific output over the course of more than seven decades (!!) producing short stories (more than 200 of them), novels (90+), columns and essays, plays (40), film scripts, Broadway musicals, and three (3) autobiographies, such lapses become at least understandable, if not entirely excusable.
Wodehouse and his wife were detained and imprisoned in occupied France in 1940, then moved to Berlin by the Gestapo in mid-1941 on only ten minutes’ notice. Then came Wodehouse's victimization via Nazi trickery, an unfortunate misfire along the lines of what he would call in his books “a bit of stage business” that would dog him for the rest of his life.
At the start of the Second World War Wodehouse and his wife remained at their Le Touquet house, where, during the Phoney War, he worked on Joy in the Morning. With the advance of the Germans, the nearby Royal Air Force base withdrew; Wodehouse was offered the sole spare seat in one of the fighter aircraft, but he turned down the opportunity as it would have meant leaving behind Ethel and their dog. On 21 May 1940, with German troops advancing through northern France, the Wodehouses decided to drive to Portugal and fly from there to the US. Two miles from home their car broke down, so they returned and borrowed a car from a neighbour; with the routes blocked with refugees, they returned home again.
The Germans occupied Le Touquet on 22 May 1940 and Wodehouse had to report to the authorities daily. After two months of occupation the Germans interned all male enemy nationals under 60, and Wodehouse was sent to a former prison in Loos, a suburb of Lille, on 21 July; Ethel remained in Le Touquet. The internees were placed four to a cell, each of which had been designed for one man. One bed was available per cell, which was made available to the eldest man—not Wodehouse, who slept on the granite floor. The prisoners were not kept long in Loos before they were transported in cattle trucks to a former barracks in Liège, Belgium, which was run as a prison by the SS. After a week the men were transferred to Huy in Liège Province, where they were incarcerated in the local citadel. They remained there until September 1940, when they were transported to Tost in Upper Silesia (then Germany, now Toszek in Poland).
On 21 June 1941, while he was in the middle of playing a game of cricket, Wodehouse received a visit from two members of the Gestapo. He was given ten minutes to pack his things before he was taken to the Hotel Adlon, a top luxury hotel in Berlin. He stayed there at his own expense; royalties from the German editions of his books had been put into a special frozen bank account at the outset of the war, and Wodehouse was permitted to draw upon this money he had earned while staying in Berlin. He was thus released from internment a few months before his sixtieth birthday—the age at which civilian internees were released by the Nazis. Shortly afterwards Wodehouse was, in the words of Phelps, "cleverly trapped" into making five broadcasts to the US via German radio, with the Berlin-based correspondent of the Columbia Broadcasting System. The broadcasts—aired on 28 June, 9, 23 and 30 July and 6 August—were titled How to be an Internee Without Previous Training, and comprised humorous anecdotes about Wodehouse's experiences as a prisoner, including some gentle mocking of his captors. The German propaganda ministry arranged for the recordings to be broadcast to Britain in August. The day after Wodehouse recorded his final programme, Ethel joined him in Berlin, having sold most of her jewellery to pay for the journey.
The Wodehouses' ordeal resulted in him being roundly (and scurrilously, to be frank) denounced as a “traitor” and a “coward” in the British press and the House of Commons, with several libraries removing his books from their shelves. PG’s maladroit naïveté left him shocked and flummoxed to his very mazzard. The mannerly diffidence deeply ingrained in all English gentlemen of the better sort left poor Plum ill-equipped to attenuate the squalid uproar unleashed by his oblivious but well-intentioned stab at making the best of a truly bad, terrible, double-plus-ungood situation.
When Wodehouse heard of the furore the broadcasts had caused, he contacted the Foreign Office—through the Swiss embassy in Berlin—to explain his actions, and attempted to return home via neutral countries, but the German authorities refused to let him leave. In Performing Flea, a 1953 collection of letters, Wodehouse wrote, "Of course I ought to have had the sense to see that it was a loony thing to do to use the German radio for even the most harmless stuff, but I didn't. I suppose prison life saps the intellect". The reaction in America was mixed: the left-leaning publication PM accused Wodehouse of "play[ing] Jeeves to the Nazis", but the Department of War used the interviews as an ideal representation of anti-Nazi propaganda.
The Wodehouses remained in Germany until September 1943, when, because of the Allied bombings, they were allowed to move back to Paris. They were living there when the city was liberated on 25 August 1944; Wodehouse reported to the American authorities the following day, asking them to inform the British of his whereabouts. He was subsequently visited by Malcolm Muggeridge, recently arrived in Paris as an intelligence officer with MI6. The young officer quickly came to like Wodehouse and considered the question of treasonable behaviour as "ludicrous"; he summed up the writer as "ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict". On 9 September Wodehouse was visited by an MI5 officer and former barrister, Major Edward Cussen, who formally investigated him, a process that stretched over four days. On 28 September Cussen filed his report, which states that in regard to the broadcasts, Wodehouse's behaviour "has been unwise", but advised against further action. On 23 November Theobald Matthew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, decided there was no evidence to justify prosecuting Wodehouse.
After what can only be described as a complete nightmare, the Wodehouses set sail from France for America in April of 1947. Although Ethel briefly returned to Jolly Olde in '48 to visit family and friends, Plum stayed Stateside for the rest of his days, decamping from Manhattan to Long Island and taking the oath of US citizenship in 1955. He remained a British subject as well, which made him eligible for UK state honors, thereby affording the land of his birth the opportunity of a last spiteful kick in the face or two before being dragged kicking and screaming to make belated amends.
He was considered for the award of a knighthood three times from 1967, but the honour was twice blocked by British officials. In 1974 the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, intervened to secure a knighthood (KBE) for Wodehouse, which was announced in the January 1975 New Year Honours list. The Timescommented that Wodehouse's honour signalled "official forgiveness for his wartime indiscretion...It is late, but not too late, to take the sting out of that unhappy incident.”
Gee, how very magnanimous of you trifling Limey pricks. PG Wodehouse, one of the greatest humorists and satirists ever to enliven English arts and letters, died of a heart attack one month later in Long Island’s Southampton Hospital, where he was being treated for a minor skin condition.
Now far be it from me to suggest that the mental anguish inflicted on a 93 year old man via subjecting him to the endless, cruel persecution of English officialdom as a “traitor” for the abominable crimes of being imprisoned, Shanghai’ed off to Berlin without the option, cynically manipulated for propagandistic purposes by the Nazi scum, then involuntary sequestered under house arrest in Paris until the city’s liberation in 1944 might possibly have been a contributing factor to Wodehouse's fatal heart attack in exile, mind. But if somebody else wanted to, I could probably be persuaded to put a “yes” to it.
And all this grief, remember, because of a damned car breaking down two miles from home. Life can sure be a funny old thing like that sometimes. Not necessarily in a way that makes you want to laugh, either.
At any rate, PG Wodehouse’s work perfectly exemplifies my original point: the distinction between the cultures of England and America That Was couldn’t be more marked. It’s deeper than language, food, or other such trivialities; it’s baseball deep. The real tragedy is that, as our two nations plunge ever further into the morass of the hopelessly unworkable “equity” of socialism, the gap closes, and distinctions worth celebrating and enjoying will be forever lost.