Culture matters

Anglo-American relations and the intangibles of 'specialness'

Robert Hendershot, Steve Marsh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526151414
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how intangible aspects of international relations – including identity, memory, representation, and symbolic perception – have helped to shape the development and contribute to the endurance of the Anglo-American special relationship. Challenging traditional interpretations of US-UK relations and breaking new ground with fresh analyses of cultural symbols, discourses, and ideologies, this volume fills important gaps in our collective understanding of the special relationship's operation and exposes new analytical spaces in which we can re-evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Designed to breathe new life into old debates about the relationship's purported specialness, this book offers a multidisciplinary exploration of literary representations, screen representations, political representations, representations in memory, and the influence of cultural connections and constructs which have historically animated Anglo-American interaction.

1

TOWARDS SOMETHING FRESH?

P. G. Wodehouse, transatlantic romances in fiction, and the Anglo-American relationship

FINN POLLARD

The United States and Anglo-American relations first became central themes in P. G. Wodehouse’s fiction in his 1909 novel Psmith Journalist, in which a visiting Englishman becomes a muckraking journalist in New York City and brings down a slum landlord. That treatment then evolved through Wodehouse’s next four novels, A Gentleman of Leisure (1910), The Prince and Betty (1912), The Little Nugget (1913), and Something Fresh (1915). Gradually, during those novels Wodehouse retreated from the (for him) tough engagement with social problems that featured in that first novel, and from familiar tropes for Anglo-American relations like American gangsters marauding at a British public school, to more complex interactions in New York City and English aristocratic castles. He also complicated the personal interactions – both through buddy relationships building on that between Englishman Psmith and American editor Billy Windsor in Psmith Journalist, and in romantic entanglements. Most notably, in A Gentleman of Leisure and Something Fresh, Wodehouse introduced potential marriages between British aristocrats and American money, appearing to mirror a significant contemporary phenomenon in the relationship, only to frustrate those unions – a narrative strategy that contrasted both with reality and rival fictional narratives of the period.

Wodehouse’s development of the Anglo-American theme in his writings intersected with the contemporary fictional genres of the boys’ school story and the transatlantic romance. As he deepened and complicated his fictional transatlantic representation, he was also building a transatlantic literary career and the beginnings of living arrangements dividing his time physically between the two nations, a process connected to the London theatre of the time. This chapter will achieve two things. First, it places Wodehouse’s fictional representation of Anglo-American relations in the context of other contemporary cultural engagements, showing how he borrowed and challenged these alternative approaches. Second, it evaluates the significance of Wodehouse’s imagining, practicing, and advocating for closer Anglo-American relationships in these years, relationships that he saw in largely positive terms. His career and writings speak suggestively to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s claim in her 1907 Anglo-American romance The Shuttle that, among the many elements shifting attitudes, ‘Books … did perhaps more than all else.’¹ How far his perspective matched his readers is difficult to quantify, but his increasing success suggests it was not unwelcome. Bradford Perkins’s claim of a Great Rapprochement in these years has been questioned, not least in the political sphere.² But Wodehouse’s career and writings to the First World War personified it.

A word is first necessary about the existing literature on Wodehouse and on Anglo-American relations. He has not lacked for biographers but there remain lacunae. Wodehouse himself wrote a humorous account of his first visit to New York City in 1935, which is chiefly instructive about the likely business motivations.³ The best biography is the most recent by Robert McCrum published in 2004. McCrum thoroughly documented the facts of the American dimension of his career and described him as ‘an American and a British writer’ but his consideration of ‘why America’ leaves questions unanswered.⁴ Similarly, while he acknowledged the presence of American themes and characters his literary analysis is variable and from the point of view of the scholar interested in Anglo-American matters there are some maddening gaps, for example a passing, unexplained mention of ‘anglicizing’ the 1926 musical Oh, Kay! (Wodehouse wrote the book with Guy Bolton) for its London opening.⁵ Barry Phelps was keenly alive to the transatlantic nature of Wodehouse’s career and his chapter on Wodehouse and the United States is suggestive.⁶ Richard Usborne’s Wodehouse at Work to the End and Owen Dudley Edwards’s P.G. Wodehouse are richer in their literary analysis. Usborne is perceptive about Wodehouse’s fiction as a bridge between the two countries and Dudley Edwards gave detailed attention both to Psmith Journalist and to Wodehouse’s general treatment of race but neither of them examined the origins of the connection and its development through Wodehouse’s early fiction in depth.⁷ More recently, Paul Giles included a section on Wodehouse in his study of ‘the American tradition in English literature’ but this focuses on the period from the Second World War onwards and does not address Wodehouse’s early contacts with or fictions of the United States.⁸ One other angle of criticism must be noted. There is a division in interpretations of Wodehouse’s fictional world. Evelyn Waugh in 1939 regarded him as a writer of fantasy, claiming (in a line often quoted on the backs of old Penguin editions) that Wodehouse’s fictional world ‘cannot become dated because it never existed.’⁹ David Cannadine, by contrast, saw Wodehouse as very much reflecting aspects of the late Victorian/Edwardian world of his youth.¹⁰ McCrum has a tendency to hedge his bets on this question, jarringly in some cases, for example when discussing 1938’s The Code of the Woosters he first notes the satire of Oswald Mosley through the character of Roderick Spode only to assert that the novel is another case of Wodehouse writing of what he called his ‘artificial world.’¹¹ Wodehouse cannot in fact be straightforwardly categorized by either of these positions and Psmith Journalist is a particularly good instance of this.

With regards to Anglo-American political and diplomatic relations, Wodehouse came of age in a period commonly regarded as a watershed. The threat of war over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in 1895–96 instead ushered in a period that the historian Bradford Perkins termed the Great Rapprochement. The late nineteenth century also saw the phenomenon of the so called ‘dollar princesses’ – put most simply the marriages of American money to British aristocracy – but historians have paid less attention to what was happening in the wider cultural relationship and how these two strands affected each other.¹² H. C. Allen, the pioneering historian of the relationship, argued that we can only fully understand it by considering its multifaceted nature (he listed diplomatic, financial, emotional, cultural connections) and this chapter attempts to respond to that call.¹³

Turning first then to those three areas where Wodehouse clearly encountered, or might have encountered the United States prior to his own substantial fictional engagement with it – the boys’ school story, the London theatre, and the transatlantic romance.

THE BOYS’ SCHOOL STORY

Publishing for boys had undergone a transformation in the years immediately preceding Wodehouse’s crucial period of schooling at Dulwich College, London from 1894 to 1900. He was part of a generation whose collective literacy rate was higher than before, and who benefitted from technical advances enabling a mass expansion of publishing to feed that literacy. Much of the literature that resulted had a strong moral agenda well indicated by the Board of Education’s 1905 pronouncement that students ‘should feel the splendour of heroism, the worth of unselfishness and loyalty to an ideal, and the meaning of cruelty and cowardice.’¹⁴ Wodehouse was aware of and, mostly, playful about this tone, something particularly well illustrated in the last of his school-based novels Mike (1909, originally serialized in two parts under different titles in The Captain from April 1907) where Mike is being introduced to new boy Psmith: ‘“Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?” “The last, for choice,” said Mike.’¹⁵

Although these stories are primarily situated within the narrow geographical environment of a variety of boarding schools, the inculcation of these characteristics in the schoolboy could also take place through encounters with and, often, in contrast to national others as children were prepared for their role in the imperial mission. This has been particularly explored by Kathryn Castle in relation to Africa, India, and China.¹⁶ The United States was a trickier nation to engage with in this regard, by this date long outside but having once been inside the empire. Yet it does appear. Among the occasional American texts that school boys are pictured reading are James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels and on at least two occasions these become an inspiration for rebellion on home turf.¹⁷ This was a genre that Wodehouse occasionally made throwaway references to in his early fiction but did not deploy as a central theme.¹⁸ We also find examples of a disparaging tone towards America and Americans – for example on them playing golf in Ian Hay’s ‘Pip’ (1909): ‘They are playing very keenly, but they are thinking, not of the game, but of some entirely new and original way of winning it.’¹⁹

That the United States was more of a factor in school life, specifically at Dulwich, than the fictional genre suggests, is revealed via the Dulwich school magazine, The Alleynian, and a 1902 Wodehouse column in the Public School Magazine. The latter includes a recollection from ‘my first years at school’ of ‘an American youth [who] achieved a certain measure of fame by … his attitude towards the staff.’²⁰ The existing histories of the school do not identify such a student, and nor do Wodehouse’s biographers comment on this point, though Raymond Chandler’s period at the school after Wodehouse’s time is frequently remarked upon.²¹ The Alleynian both shows the United States as a point of reference and suggests another intriguing real-life connection. Thus, in October 1894, shortly after Wodehouse’s arrival, the United States figures in an account of a debate on the merits of the Conservative Party as an example either to be emulated or avoided, depending on the other nation’s disputed character. In 1895 mention is made of a boy participating in an athletics meet in New York and in 1897 a report is carried from an old boy studying in California.²²

Most significant, however, is the periodic commentary on a rival publication (part of a semi-regular column noticing such) – the American Penn Charter Magazine.²³ Notices in the earlier portion of Wodehouse’s time at the school are critical, one segment in September 1896 concluding dismissively ‘the magazine itself is not very interesting to English readers.’²⁴ By 1900, when Wodehouse had joined The Alleynian’s team of editors, the tone noticeably softened. Where an earlier columnist denounced the inclusion of adverts as ‘ludicrous and in some cases vulgar’ the 1900 writer is more charitable, noting some ‘sweet things in advertisements … mostly written in a chatty style, as who should say: “We are men and brothers, let not our business relations interfere with our friendship.”’ There is perhaps mockery lurking when the writer, having praised the same issue’s football report as being in ‘best American journalism’ then refers to its author as ‘a modern Homer,’ and the suggestion that the reported American practice of arguing the referee’s decisions ‘at great length’ might be imported to Dulwich College is probably a joke but the whole suggests an amused interest in the contrasts between the two school worlds and an ease with the idea of their mingling or influencing one another anticipatory of Wodehouse’s subsequent fiction.²⁵ As with most contributions to The Alleynian these columns are anonymous, but there is a turn to some of the phrases that suggest Wodehouse’s hand, for example: ‘The Feltstedian is like eight hours at the seaside. The whole magazine simply rollicks and fizzes (we hope we convey a definite impression to the minds of our readers).’²⁶

The most sustained representation of the United States in the genre occurred in the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Towards Something Fresh?
• 2 America in ‘British’ history textbooks
• 3 Film follows the flag: cultural and economic relations between the British film industry and Hollywood
• 4 Debating Downton: Anglo-American realities and relations
• 5 Anglo-American political culture
• 6 Pageantry, legitimation, and special Anglo-American relations
• 7 ‘A great Englishman’: George Washington and Anglo-American memory diplomacy, c.1890–1925
• 8 Anglo-American narratives in public space: evaluating commemoration and generational transmission of the special relationship
• 9 Beatlemania and the cultural politics of 1960s America
• 10 Culture and re-membering the alliance in Kosovo and Iraq: Anglo-American ironies under Clinton, Blair, and Bush
• Conclusion: culture, ‘specialness,’ and new directions
• Selected bibliography: studies of Anglo-American relations and explorations of culture
• Index