[In the following essay, Cohen describes the mild nature of Wodehouse's anti-American humor, asserting that “his bashing of Americans is as unmalicious as befits an Englishman who would eventually become an American citizen.”]

In Evelyn Waugh's collection of travel pieces When the Going Was Good (1946), there is a scene at the tombs and pyramids in Sakkara. Waugh, who has already examined one of the tombs, emerges to find a party of Americans, led by an Egyptian guide, about to enter the underground caverns. He turns and follows them back in.¹ Why? Not to be enlightened by their dragoman—not because he craves company, but for one reason that becomes obvious in the descriptions that follow: to get material for American-bashing. Waugh is one of a number of English authors who feels the need to make up for the irony and self-mockery he finds lacking in Americans. And, indeed, the provincial comments of the American tourists do help make Waugh's next few pages of description more entertaining than they could have been without. The Americans count, aloud and together, the number of sarcophagi, they want to know how much all of this cost, but most of all, they are eager to be enlightened, educated, broadened by their travels. Waugh describes the group:

First the Arab with his blazing white ribbon of magnesium, and behind him, clutching their candles, like penitents in procession, this whole rag-tag and bobtail of self-improvement and uplift. Some had been bitten by mosquitoes and bore swollen, asymmetrical faces; many were footsore, and limped and stumbled as they went; one felt faint and was sniffing ‘salts’; one coughed with dust; another had her eyes inflamed by the sun; another wore his arm in a sling, injured in heaven knows what endeavour; every one of the party in some way or another was bruised and upbraided by the thundering surf of education.

(40)

Well, every one except their observer, of course, because despite Waugh's attempt to jolly us into thinking this is a ship of fools image that includes the satirist satirized, what we take from the description is an image of Americans. Although Waugh says he longs “to declaim. … Surely the laugh, dear ladies and gentlemen, is on us” (41), he also keeps in mind that he is not one of these people: “But I remembered I was a gate-crasher in this party and remained silent” (41).

The Sakkara gate-crashing is only one of the more gratuitous examples of American-bashing in Waugh's work and that of his contemporaries. Waugh goes after Americans from both north and south of the Canadian border in Brideshead Revisited. Rex Mottram, the rich and resourceful Canadian who eventually marries Julia Flyte, comes in for most of Waugh's satire. Rex's comic failing is an approach to life that blinds him to things of the spirit. Waugh puns on Rex's inability to appreciate spirits, in several forms. In a scene set in Charles Ryder's favorite Parisian restaurant, Waugh has Rex say things like “we don't take much account of Catholics in Canada, but that's different; in Europe you've got some very posh Catholics.”² At the same time Rex is showing what he thinks he knows about spirits in another form:

The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.

“Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about,” said Rex. “This is a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble.”

They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it over the spirit lamp. Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes, and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.

So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.

“That's the stuff,” he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass. “They've always got some tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you make a fuss. Have some.”

“I'm quite happy with this.”

“Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it.”

(177-78)

A few pages later come the hilarious scenes where Father Mowbray attempts to instruct Rex in Catholicism and Rex reveals himself as another kind of spiritual imbecile. He is not only, as Father Mowbray says, without “the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety” (192), he is also willing to believe anything he is told about what Catholics believe, and willing to swear that he believes it himself.

The U. S. Americans in Brideshead Revisited are mere walk-ons who appear within a few pages of each other in that section of the book where Charles Ryder voyages home with his wife Celia and, more importantly, with Julia Flyte Mottram. Mr. Kramm of Interastral Films (shades of P. G. Wodehouse!), Senator Stuyvesant Oglander, and an Episcopalian Bishop (an epithet Charles Ryder thinks redundant), all share the inability to follow a simple conversation (244-46).

Waugh is in the middle of a scale of American-bashers that runs from the mildness of P. G. Wodehouse to the acerbity of Kingsley Amis. Wodehouse gives us hilarious American caricatures to play against his equally hilarious English caricatures. But his bashing of Americans is as unmalicious as befits an Englishman who would eventually become an American citizen.

Wodehouse first came to America in 1904, but only for a visit of less than three weeks. When he returned to this country in 1909 he immediately began to sell stories to magazines, and for a time he lived in Greenwich village, writing drama criticism and comic articles for Vanity Fair. In 1914 he married and moved to Long Island, the beginning of a long residence on the East Coast, interrupted by many lengthy stays in England and France and by his internment in France and Germany during the war. In 1952 Wodehouse settled in Remsenburg, Long Island, where he remained until his death in 1975. His West Coast American sojourns were brief. He worked in Hollywood as a script writer for a year and a half in 1930-31 and again in 1936-37 for just over a year.³

Given his experiences with the country, it is perhaps not surprising that Wodehouse's fictional America is a thin continent with two cities, New York and Hollywood. New York is almost always a pleasant place in Wodehouse books. The newspapers are likely to be reporting grim news—in more than one book the headlines which greet the disembarking passenger from England are variations of “Sugar Daddy Discovered in Love Nest as Blizzard Grips City” (The Luck of the Bodkins and Young Men in Spats, for two examples). The ritual of transiting customs may be tedious in Wodehouse's New York: the port officials issue landing tickets “in the rather grudging way that characterizes the port officials of New York; as if they had reluctantly decided to stretch a point for once, but wished it to be understood that this sort of thing must not occur again.”⁴ But America is a place where a new life is likely to begin, and New York tends to invigorate young Englishmen like a kind of tonic, almost as if stepping onto the city's streets were like taking a shot of Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo. Wodehouse's Hollywood is described from the point of view of the script doctor or the writer of additional dialogue who, as Mr. Mulliner says, ranks “just above a script girl and just below the man who works the wind machine” in the movie hierarchy.⁵ This perspective is likely to affect even descriptions of setting and weather, as in the opening of The Plot That Thickened:

As always when the weather was not unusual the Californian sun shone brightly down on the Superba-Llewellyn motion-picture studio in Llewellyn City. Silence had gripped the great building except for the footsteps of some supervisor hurrying back to resume his supervising or the occasional howl from the writer's ghetto as some author with a headache sought in vain to make sense of the story which had been handed to him for treatment.⁶

The country, shrunk though it is, provides useful locations for comedy, and tends to be seen through Wodehouse's own experience, comically transformed. But American characters also affect Wodehouse's plots and even his style.

Wodehouse plots are carefully fashioned and very eclectic in their derivation. New Comedy is one influence: most of Wodehouse's plots aim toward a romantic coupling, are impeded by one or more blocking figures, and feature wily servants who help resolve the difficulties, although they sometimes also contribute to them. Elements of detective fiction intertwine with bizarre plot complications born of American soap operas. Wodehouse, who was six when A Study in Scarlet was published, loved Sherlock Holmes, read Doyle and other mystery writers all his life, and never missed an episode of The Edge of Night.⁷ Underlying many of his plots is something that might be called the American Myth. In Wodehouse's version of the myth, America is a land of astounding innocence, even though the headlines record violence, even though there are gangsters. A gangster in Anything Goes who is masquerading as a priest admits who he is to the male romantic lead and says “I'm wanted in America.” “Don't be silly,” says the Young Handsome One, “Why should they want another gangster in America?” Gangsters are comic creatures, never very effective at their trade: Dolly and Soapy Molloy, American gangsters who appear in a number of books set in England, never seem to come up with the pearls or the “jools.”

Part of the myth says that America is the land of opportunity, apparently bursting with millionaires, who are very useful because Wodehouse plots need money to oil them, and many of Wodehouse's young men need jobs to keep them out of mischief. A typical American family in Wodehouse is composed of the millionaire, his domineering wife—a counterpart to Lord Emsworth's nagging sister Constance and to the ferocious aunts all the young men seem to have—and a daughter. The wife is usually a blocking figure who can be outwitted by her clever, pretty, and eligible daughter, or, more rarely, by her husband. Eligible American women have married and made better men of a sizeable number of Wodehouse's young and usually scatter-brained men, including Monty Bodkin, Freddie Threepwood of Blandings Castle, and Freddie's own Uncle Fred (Frederick Altamont Cornwallis, fifth Earl of Ickenham). Lord Ickenham spent twenty years in America as a soda jerk and a cowboy, before assuming his title, and it did him a world of good, as did marrying an American girl. Very little bashing goes on when Wodehouse meets the female of the American species.

Occasionally Wodehouse gets confused in the great transatlantic miscegenation plots he carried on for decades, and he repatriates someone. Such is the curious case of Ivor Llewellyn, head of Superba-Llewellyn Studios, who despite his Welsh name is clearly an American when he is introduced in The Luck of the Bodkins. Ivor lubricates the action with money and provides studio jobs for Monty Bodkin and Ambrose Tennyson so that each can pursue honorably the girl he loves (both end up with American wives). Ivor is dim on English literature and hires Ambrose thinking he has got the “real” Tennyson—the “Charge of the Light Brigade” man. But in The Plot That Thickened, we pick up the Bodkin-Llewellyn story a year later, and now Ivor quotes Richard III and tells Monty about his Welsh boyhood. There are other reversals in this book: Ivor now borrows money from Monty (to gamble and to buy food in order to foil the stringent diet his wife imposes on him) and ultimately takes charge of the plot rather than blocking it or attempting to sabotage it as in the earlier book.

American characters, whether mocked or not, noticeably affect Wodehouse's style as well. Alexander Cockburn, writing from an admitted anti-caste bias, argues that Wodehouse's style is so good precisely because he did not like England very much.⁸ Certainly Wodehouse found the American tongue inventive and stimulating to his own inventiveness of style. Americans love cliches, for example, but they refashion them moment by moment, as do Wodehouse characters whether American or English. Wodehouse's juxtapositions of different levels of diction—running together slang, cliches, and literary allusions—effectively puncture any conventions of a class language. Most characters in Wodehouse, English and American, speak a brand of language not immediately identifiable as either British or New World. Moreover, American plain style has in common with the speech of most Wodehouse characters a short range of feelings from a certain diffidence about learning and the arts to a definite Philistinism.

At the other extreme from the mildness of Wodehouse is the savagery with which Kingsley Amis goes American-bashing, as may be illustrated in his 1978 novel, Jake's Thing. Here the American target is an arrogant and dangerous encounter group “facilitator” named Ed. To be fair, Americans are not the only extrainsulars Amis goes after; Ed is introduced by Dr. Rosenberg, the first doctor Jake tries for his collapsed libido. Rosenberg turns out to be, despite his name (which may signal, just by the way, another one of Amis's dislikes) a little and very young-looking Irishman who rides a child's bicycle and who has what Jake calls “a largely unreconstructed accent.”⁹ The implication seems to be that anyone living in the English part of the British Isles has an obligation to get rid of his native brogue, drawal, or whatever and start talking in Jake's own Oxonian accents.

Jake has a very long and precise list of things Rosenberg is ignorant of (156-57), since knowledge is for Jake a touchstone for other kinds of worth. Rosenberg is very convenient for the venting of a lot of scorn by the taller, non-Irish, mature, well-spoken and well-educated Jake. But the poor little man does not provide quite enough venting. We must have Ed, the American. Ed's encounter group is called the Workshop, and it is a trendy sort of affair with primal scream therapy, mutual insults, and various other unpleasant and demeaning activities. Before meeting Ed, Jake expects that the American will be “somebody designed to be as offensive in his sight as possible” (158), and he is not disappointed. But lest we suppose that this character is just accidentally American, because of the origin of thse particular approaches to mental therapy, Jake makes his feelings very explicit as a prior judgment, before he has met Ed or seen the Workshop: “Funny how everything horrible or foolish was worse if it was also American”(154).

Eventually, when one of the Workshop participants attempts suicide, Ed acts unfeelingly to save face and avoid publicity. Although there are some problems in this novel gauging the extent to which we are expected to sympathize and identify with the main character, it is fairly clear that Jake's judgments about the American therapist coincide pretty much with Amis's. Jake thinks him “a ravening charlatan”(235), who, by his own admission, does not aim to cure his patients, but “to release checks on emotion and to improve insight”(263); Jake thinks the result is “dangerous in the extreme”(264) as well as “offensive and nonsensical”(285).

Can we, in the light of these examples, still look at American-bashing dispassionately, as an aspect of the aesthetics of the novel rather than as any issue of international sociology or politics? Do these novelists depict the American simpleton seen through old World eyes not as political comment; but as an avatar of a very old stock figure, the humors character? Perhaps. But it seems to me a devastating admission that Amis has Jake make, when he thinks that “everything horrible or foolish was worse if it was also American.” The remark might be taken, by the most charitable hearts, to merely point to a kind of hyperbole about the American approach to things, as if it suggested also that everything fine and admirable is even better if it is American. I do not have the most charitable of hearts, and I suspect that what is unsaid in Jake's thought and in Amis's as well is that when anything horrible or foolish is to be depicted, letting it be depicted by an American will give just the requisite dash of chauvinist self-satisfaction to the writer and reader, if the reader happens to be English. I think we fool ourselves to leave politics and nationalism out of it.

The English know perfectly well, or think they do, that the chauvinism works both ways. Here is E. M. Forster talking about the American reception of his Passage to India:

A few years ago I wrote a book which dealt in part with the difficulties of the English in India. Feeling that they would have had no difficulties in India themselves, the Americans read the book freely. The more they read it the better it made them feel, and a cheque to the author was the result.¹⁰

Forster goes beyond gratuitous American-bashing to ingratitude as well. But is it not at least possible that Americans can read about people making fools of themselves without supposing they could do better, and even without saying to themselves, “Ah, funny how everything horrible or foolish is worse if it is also English”? It would be folly indeed to argue that Americans are not capable of writing off whole nations or races. But the worst of our prejudices do not usually end up in our best-educated writers' best books, Funny how we cannot say the same about our English cousins.

Notes

1. Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (1946; rpt. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), p. 40. Subsequent references are in parentheses within the text.

2. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), p. 176. Subsequent references are in parentheses within the text.

3. James H. Heinemann and Donald R. Bensen, eds., P. G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration 1881-1981 (New York and London: Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), pp. xvii-xxi.

4. P. G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins (1935; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 245.

5. P. G. Wodehouse, The World of Mr. Mulliner (New York: Avon, 1972), p. 601.

6. P. G. Wodehouse, The Plot That Thickened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 7.

7. Herbert Warren Wind, The World of P. G. Wodehouse (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1972), pp. 85-6, 101.

8. Alexander Cockburn, “The Natural Artificer,” a review of Frances Donaldson's P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1982) in New York Review of Books (23 September 1982): 22.

9. Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing (London: Hutchinson, 1978; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 36. Subsequent references are in parentheses within the text.

10. E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (1936; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1955), p. 21.