Dash it. It's enough to take the stuffing out of all devoted Plumheads. Bertie Wooster's creator a traitor, almost. What next? Jeeves was not a gentleman? The Drones Club was actually a meeting point for Guy Burgess and Kim Philby? Uncle Fred was a friend of Adolf Hitler? Much obliged we are to Public Record Office of the UK Government, which released official files to this effect dating to the Second World War on Friday, but if there's one thing that Pelham Grenville Wodehouse taught his readers, it was to take it on the chin, old chap, and then ask Jeeves for tea. The man whose funny bone still thrives in the person of Richard Curtis has been rudely unmasked as in the manner of all modern icons, as a silly man who thought broadcasting light-hearted accounts of his time in the internment camp in Berlin would not be taken seriously. He hadn't accounted for a time such as now when humour has descended to the depths of the Atlantic - which he had to cross forever in 1955 when he became an American citizen - atime when public lives and personal actions would be so entwined that even inhaling would acquire political overtones.The man who gave the English language a delightfully quaint zest now stands exposed as a clone of the odious Lord Haw-Haw. A man who, when arrested by the Germans at his villa in the French resort of Le Touquet in 1940, thought nothing of turning his life as a prisoner into amusing accounts for the enemy. It speaks volumes of the residual and thankful political incorrectness of his times that Wodehouse escaped conviction. The price was to leave England altogether and live only with a TV screen and newspapers for company in isolationist America. The price was that he would be given a knighthood in 1975, only six weeks before he died at the age of 93. For a man who was the ultimate chronicler of a genteel Edwardian tradition where the most terrifying aspect of life would be a hasty engagement that one wanted to invalidate or a rather forceful aunt one wanted to slip away from, there wasperhaps no worse punishment that being asked never to return to England by the director of public prosecutions - once it emerged that he was paid by the Germans for his broadcast, it was clear that he would have to be prosecuted.Yet Wodehouse is greater than the sum of his follies. He may not have made it to Harold Bloom's canon but he does live on in the language. Quite satisfactorily too. The ability to create a Spinoza-loving manservant, a bumbling master who was forever getting into scrapes, and a confection which didn't really need a plot to justify its existence as a short story, novel or even multi-volume story cycles - for Wodehouse was a dab hand at every genre - is enough to justify his place on that pedestal. And though he may have been as dim as his young creation, Bertie, who would invariably bet on fat babies and fatter uncles, he survives as a writer who took the mickey out of the stultifying class system with a silver spoon, not a hammer. So is there gloom in Siberia among all theadmirers of jellied-eel assistants and drunken owls? Let there not be. Go on, read a Wodehouse.
