Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

by Christopher Hitchens

In a great and noble defense of Wodehouse against the wartime calumny that was spread about him, Orwell observed that the complete omission of the sex joke was an astonishing sacrifice for a comic writer to make. But for Wodehouse it seems to have been no sacrifice at all. His marriage to Ethel, though it led to a great stepfatherly love for her daughter, was a business arrangement, with pets—preferably Pekes—standing in for offspring. The nearest approach to even an innuendo comes in Thank You, Jeeves, when Bertie finds his former fiancée, the American Pauline Stoker, in his bed, wearing his “heliotrope pajamas with the old gold stripe.” He phrases it thus: “The attitude of fellows toward finding girls in their bedroom shortly after midnight varies. Some like it. Some don’t. I didn’t.” One gasps at Wodehouse for going even as far as that. And given that he mentioned his “clap” only to his much more seasoned friend Guy Bolton, and late in life too, I prefer to believe that he was just trying to keep up, to appear to be one of the boys. He never found this easy, however. One of his editors, Christopher Maclehose, told me that he had once been to visit “Plum” on Long Island, and had found him shyly reading a copy of Alec Waugh’s novel A Spy in the Family. This little effort was an extremely mild essay in erotic comedy, but Wodehouse found it profoundly shocking and asked Maclehose if everything in England had become so filthy in his absence. If not disgruntled, as Bertie Woo...