Wodehouse on Wodehouse

"This is a collection of three of Wodehouse’s non-fiction books. One of them, Bring on the Girls , describes Wodehouse’s time as a lyricist, and in Hollywood when he worked with [musical producers] Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern. It also contains his own autobiography, Over Seventy , in which he describes his Victorian childhood. He used to visit grand houses but was incredibly shy. He would take refuge in the servants’ hall, full of “kindly footmen and vivacious parlour maids”. The third part, Performing Flea , is a series of letters from Wodehouse to his friend Bill Townend, mostly about the craft of being a writer. The title is a joke. A journalist during the war referred to Wodehouse as “English literature’s performing flea”. This is all quite complicated, and the best account of it is given in Robert McCrum’s brilliant biography Wodehouse: A Life . Wodehouse was living in occupied France during World War II and was interned by the Nazis. He was interned in three places over the course of 18 months – he spent the longest time in Upper Silesia, now Poland. He was released and had to stay under supervision in Berlin before moving to occupied Paris. Just after he was released, the Nazis suggested that he broadcast some comic talks that he had written, in order to keep in touch with his fans in America. Wodehouse didn’t realise that the medium was the message – that in broadcasting on German radio, he was being framed to look like a Nazi sympathiser. It was, he said, “a ghastly blunder”, and although he was cleared of any charges of collaboration it cast a shadow over his reputation. In the letters from this period it’s very interesting – and distressing – to see this through Wodehouse’s eyes, against the background of wartime Berlin and Paris."