I’ve been tipped off recently that the hounds of Hell are after P.G. Wodehouse again. And we can’t have that sort of thing going on.

The occasion for fresh attacks on the great writer is the publication of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters in the UK. (Not available in the US yet.) It gave an opportunity to UK journalist-creeps to write book reviews in which they dredged up the old scandal about Wodehouse, the only old scandal, involving the time he was interned by the Nazis and wound up giving some cluelessly chipper radio broadcasts which got him condemned as a collaborator.

This encourages a bunch of review-reading morons to blather online about refusing to read Wodehouse anymore—that’ll teach him not to collaborate with Nazis in the afterlife! Or else they forgive Wodehouse his moral lapse, and will condescend to re-read Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and Young Men in Spats and Mulliner Nights and all his other great novels and short stories.

Fuck all y’all! You aren’t good enough for Wodehouse! Go suck on some T.S. Eliot, that’s all you deserve!

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This article was first published in The eXile on October 4, 2007

Robert McCrum’s biography of P.G. Wodehouse was published in 2004. At the time, I ignored it. I know the formula for these bios. You won’t catch me sanctioning the work of some insidious culture-sucking creep who’s picking over the bones of PGW, the peerless writer, I said to the bookstore clerk, who edged away. But you know how it is. Time passes, resolve weakens.

You find yourself back in the bookstore and everything there looks more or less rotten anyway. (more…)