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The fan who knew too much

A favorite author falls from grace when the extent of his character flaws comes to life.

Even vacations have their rituals. Time off is time wasted, I used to believe, unless I could manage to imbibe a book or two by P.G. Wodehouse between dips in the ocean or walks in the woods. For years, there has been no more reliable way to shuck those worldly cares and perk up my spirits than to lose myself in the sublimely featherbrained world of Bertie Wooster.

But I have a feeling I'll be reading someone else next summer, now that newly released British intelligence files have raised the possibility that Wodehouse was secretly on the Nazi payroll during World War II.

It has long been known that Wodehouse made a series of whimsical broadcasts from Berlin in 1941, supplying the Nazis with a propaganda triumph that infuriated many in Britain. Wodehouse apologized for his "inexcusable blunder," and many, including me, have been inclined to chalk it up to breathtaking political naivete. But the newly released documents suggest that he received monthly payments from the Nazis for two years and stayed in fancy hotels at German expense.

Wodehouse had always denied being in the pay of Germany.

There may yet be an innocent explanation. Some Wodehouse defenders contend that the money he received was either book royalties - funneled through official German channels - or funds that had been confiscated from him while interned by the Nazis. But the Wodehouse wit has lost a lot of its magic for me; there's a shadow on the page.

It's not the first time. We live in an era of perpetual disillusionment, a time of fallen idols, when our most admired artists acquire posthumous baggage with disconcerting regularity. Call it revisionist history or call it a quest for the ungilded truth about prominent lives, but the bottom line is that we are consistently forced to confront the fact that our cultural heroes had feet of clay. We read their books, watch their films, or study their paintings while knowing almost more than we want to know about their dark sides.

It's sometimes enough to make you question literary critic Malcolm Cowley's famous assertion that "no complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence."

Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Thomas Wolfe held anti-Semitic views to one degree or another. Pablo Picasso, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh behaved badly toward their families. Lillian Hellman, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht turned a blind eye to Joseph Stalin's crimes. Elia Kazan turned stool pigeon during the McCarthy era. D.W. Griffith put vile images of racism on-screen in Birth of a Nation.

We might say that an artist's character flaws or distasteful views and behavior shouldn't affect our appreciation of his work. We might say that aesthetic judgments should override moral ones. We might say the artist can and must be separated from the art.

We might say all that, but human nature makes it hard for us to compartmentalize our views in that way. In our day-to-day lives, it matters greatly to us whether a co-worker is "good people." Perhaps our appraisal of a person's job performance should be based solely on intrinsic merits, but the reality is that our judgments are colored by what we think of him or her personally. It's not logical, it's probably not defensible, but it's entirely natural - and it enters into our thinking about artists as well.

Moreover, we hold artists to a higher standard, fairly or unfairly. When we're young, we tend to idealize them, because we see them as the heralds of truth and light. But even when we're older and less starry-eyed, artists continue to command our attention, because we believe they have a deeper understanding of the world than we do. We turn to Hemingway, Eliot, et al. in the hope that they can teach us how to live more fully.

If they turn out to be unable to conquer bigotry in themselves or if they behave badly toward the people in their lives, don't they shrink considerably? If they can be so blind, doesn't it undermine their credibility as interpreters of the world and diminish their work? The blithe spirit of Wodehouse's novels, once so charming to me, now seems like evidence of a dangerous disengagement from the real world.

Of course, it could also be argued that the flaws of writers and artists reveal them to be grounded in human fallibility like the rest of us and should not affect our view of their work. A magnificent building is no less magnificent because the architect was a swine, and War and Peace doesn't cease to be a masterpiece because Leo Tolstoy mistreated his wife. The prejudices of those we otherwise admire can remind us that their art was created in a particular time and place with particular attitudes that we find abhorrent today but that were not at all uncommon then. Hellman was far from the only American intellectual who became a cheerleader for Stalin, and Griffith was far from the only racist in early Hollywood.

But emotionally if not realistically, we want the artists we admire to have risen above their times. We cannot help but see them through the prism of our own times, which is why my heart sank during a recent viewing of Duck Soup at hearing Groucho Marx make a joke about "darkies." There were people enlightened on racial matters in 1933, my subconscious murmured. Why couldn't Groucho have been among them?

I'll still laugh at the rest of Groucho, but I don't really know if I'll ever find Wodehouse funny again.