Ethel Wodehouse, spy?

Ben Macintyre's Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is, as expected, full of drama, surprise, and interesting tidbits--just seeing Anthony Burgess and Kim Philby pop up as members in good standing of MI5, commenting on reports from double agents, is fascinatingly creepy. What I didn't expect, and something I haven't seen noted in any of the reviews, is that it also goes a ways toward rehabilitating P. G. Wodehouse's wife, Ethel, from the lingering charge of collaboration during the couple's internment.

The last I'd read on the issue was in Robert McCrum's 2004 biography of Wodehouse. McCrum builds a convincing case for what is now, I think, the general assessment of Wodehouse's own level of culpability for his pro-German broadcasts: Wodehouse, McCrum argues, was guilty at most of gullibility and ignorance, rooted in naivete and a desire to please. He should have known better, but he certainly didn't intend worse.

Ethel, however, doesn't come off so well in McCrum's book. Major Cussen, the M15 officer assigned to interrogate the couple after the war, McCrum writes, was strongly critical of Ethel:

"From what I have seen of Mrs Wodehouse," he wrote, " I expect to learn that she conducted herself [in Germany] in a flamboyant manner and that she accepted all the attention which was no doubt paid to her by German officials."

Macintyre, drawing on security service documents, paints a different picture.

The Wodehouses enter Macintyre's account because, while living in France in the pre-war years, they became friends with a German agent, Johnny Jebsen, who was quietly anti-Nazi and eventually became a double agent for Britain. Among his many shady activities, Jebsen ran a minor currency scam, accepting forged British banknotes from Nazi officials to trade for dollars, while skimming a substantial amount--some of which he used to help support the Wodehouses, who knew nothing of Jebsen's secret job or the source of the money.

Macintyre doesn't offer any new information about Wodehouse himself, but Ethel appears very differently in this report from MI6 operative Charles de Salis, written in conjunction with an analysis of Jebsen (whose codename was Artist):

Mrs. Wodehouse is very pro-British and is inclined to be rude to anyone who dares address her in German. She has on occasion said loudly in public places: "If you cannot address me in English don't speak at all. You had better learn it as you will have to speak it after the war anyway." Artist thinks she might be a useful source. . . . Wodehouse himself is entirely childlike and pacifist.

Here's how MaciMntyre glosses the report:

It is not known whether MI6 acted on this suggestion and recruited Ethel Wodehouse, but Jebsen's suggestion casts a new light on their time in Paris. . . . Jebsen's report proves that while Wodehouse himself may have been passively apolitical, his wife was so anti-Nazi that she was considered a potential spy.

Though I realize that security service files, with their purging and blackouts, don't allow for a lot of certainty, it does seem reasonable to assume that if Ethel Wodehouse had actually been recruited that fact would have emerged in the subsequent decades. Regardless, for a Wodehouse fan it's good to see this report--anything that further clears the cloud of collaboration is welcome.

The D-Day spies and their echoes in Lisbon

A lot of the double agents who play leading roles in Ben Macintyre's Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (2012) are controlled from Lisbon (on the Nazi side), and reading that book you'd be forgiven for thinking that perhaps every single person in 1940s Lisbon was a spy, probably a double or even triple agent. Take the following account of a dinner party thrown by von Karsthoff, the German control of Dusko Popov, a double agent who was secretly working for the British. The names aren't important; just attend to the cat's cradle of secret connections:

[Von Karsthoff] threw a dinner party in Popov's honor and invited Jebsen, Aloys Schreiber (the new head of counterintelligence), and their secretaries. It was a bizarre occasion. Two of the guests were German intelligence officers, and two others were secretly working for British intelligence; Jebsen was sleeping with Schreiber's secretary, who was spying on her boss; the married von Karsthoff was having an affair with his secretary, Elizabeth Sahrbach, while ripping off the Abwehr. Popov was conducting at least six love affairs. Everyone was involved in the lying and cheating game.

I don't know nearly enough about Portuguese history to be sure of this, but the incidental sense I get of neutral Portugal from MacIntyre's book is of an utterly louche, feckless netherworld, a sort of fascist Monte Carlo of the soul, blithely untroubled by the fears, dangers, shortages, and existential threats faced by the rest of Europe at the time:

An Abwehr office who arrived in Libson shortly before Jebsen was shocked by the behavior of his new colleagues, who "were leading a rather loose and immoral life in Lisbon," with little concern for their duties." Some were sleeping with their secretaries. Others were cocaine abusers. "All had enormous amounts of money, most had their own cars, made frequent pleasure trips throughout Portugal and spent their evenings gambling in the casinos."

It's been at least fifteen years since I read Cees Nooteboom's wonderfully compact little meditation on death, The Following Story (1991, English translation 1994), but its vision of a haunted, hushed, exhausted Lisbon has stayed in my mind--the hangover of neutrality and fascism?

Evening in my memory, evening in Lisbon. The lamps in the city had been lit, my eyes were like a bird flying above the streets. It had grown cool, up there; the voices of the children had gone from the gardens; I saw the dark shadows of lovers, statues locked in embrace, lazily moving double-people.

Nooteboom presents the town as labyrinth, of frustrated plans and forgotten intentions, leading to the only exit: death.

The most striking aspect of the Lisbon component of the XX, or Double Cross, group, however, is the network of fake spies set up by Portuguese double agent Juan Pujol, known by the British as "Garbo." Pujol, who "possessed what his case officer, Tomas Harris, called a 'remarkable talent for duplicity'," not only convinced his Nazi handlers that he was supplying them good information even as he was doing the bidding of his English paymasters, but also had them believing in an entire network that he'd made up out of whole cloth. MacIntyre explains:

By the end of 1942, the Garbo network included an airline employee, the courier who supposedly smuggled Garbo's letters to Lisbon, a wealthy Venezuelan student named Carlos living in Glasgow, his brother in Aberdeen, a Gibraltarian waiter in Chislehurst whose anti-British feelings were said to be exacerbated because "he found the climate in Kent very disagreeable," a senior official in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information, an anti-Soviet South African, and a Welsh ex-seaman living in Swansea described by Pujol as a "thoroughly undesirable character." The personality, activities, and messages of each spy were carefully imagined, refined, and entered in a logbook. Some of these subagents were supposedly conscious collaborators, while others were unwitting sources of secret information; some were given names, while others remained anonymous. . . . Pujols's subagents were able to correspond with the Germans independently after he was authorized to supply them with secret ink; those agents then began recruiting their own sub-agents. The network began to self-replicate and metastasize, until the work of Pujol and Harris came ot resemble a limitless, multicharacter, ever-expanding novel.

Who else could possibly come to mind than Lisbon native Fernando Pessoa, who, in the words of translator Richard Zenith,

wrote under dozens of names, a practice--or compulsion--that began in his childhood. He called his most important personas "heteronyms," endowing them with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits. . . . The many . . . alter egos included translators, short-story writers, an English literary critic, an astrologer, a philosopher and an unhappy nobleman who committed suicide. There was even a female persona: the hunchbacked and helplessly lovesick Maria Jose. At the turn of the century, sixty-five years after Pessoa's death, his vast written world had still not been completely charted by researchers, and a significant part of his writings was still waiting to be published.

Or, as Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet,

And all this, in my walk to the seashore, was a secret told me by the night and the abyss. How many we are! How many of us fool ourselves! What seas crash in us, in the night when we exist, along the beaches that we feel ourselves to be, inundated by emotion! All that was lost, all that should have been sought, all that was obtained and fulfilled by mistake, all that we loved and lost and then, after losing it and loving it for having lost it, realized that we never loved; all that we believed we were thinking when we were feeling; all the memories we took for emotions; and the entire ocean, noisy and cool, rolling in from the depths of the vast night to ripple over the beach, on my nocturnal walk to the seashore . . .

Ah, though the pleasures of multiplicity might tempt, the intrigues of spies are not for Pessoa:

I've always felt an almost physical loathing for secret things--intrigues, diplomacy, secret societies, occult sciences.

No, for Pessoa, multiplicity was too hermetic to be part of an external scheme. "Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret." He could be no spy.

Counting all this money is so tiresome!

'Tis a Friday of virtual hobnobbing with the wealthy and titled . . .

We'll start with the diary entry of Count Harry Kessler for June 20, 1911:

Dinner at Madame Edwards's. D'Annunzio, Boni de Castellane, Rejane, Bakst, Romain Coolus, Tata Golubeff, Sert, the lover of Rejane Nicodemi, and an Argentinian, Quintana, the son of a former president, were present. After dinner came Maupeou, Gloria, Ricciotto Canudo, and the Russian Baryton Kedroff, who sang wonderfully. The apartment of Edwards is one of the most tasteful I have ever seen. Many chinoiseries from the time of Louis XV and Louis XVI, everywhere expensive old laces as curtains and tablecloths and on the walls, like tapestries, decorations by Bonnard. In between a mass of roses, big and small. D'Annunzio had said he would come after dinner but arrived during the fish course. He seemed to enjoy our surprise. Rejane who is a ruin, but still of a refined elegance and very amusing, allowed D'Annunzio to pay court to her. They disappeared together after dinner into a boudoir as Rejane, in leaving the salon, cried out, "When you hear the first cry, you will come . . . no, not the first, but at the third."

Those of us who generally move in less refined circles can take solace from the fact that most of those names mean nothing today, even when annotated--but it's hard to begrudge Kessler his society and name-dropping, as he at least seemed to appreciate it and make good use of it, working with von Hofmannsthal and spending time with Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Nietzsche, Rilke, Verlaine, Richard Strauss, Shaw, and others of impressive accomplishment.

But mightn't we, were we to be suddenly dropped, Quantum Leap–style, amid all that glamor, simply get bored? Ben Macintyre, early in his new book about the D-Days spies, Double Cross, offers an example:

Boredom stalked Elvira Chaudoir like a curse. Her father, a Peruvian diplomat, had made a fortune from guano, the excrement of seabirds, bats, and seals, collected off the coast of Peru and exported as fertilizer. Elvira grew up in Paris, where she was expensively educated and tremendously spoiled. In 1934, at the age of twenty-three, to escape the tedium, she fled into the arms of Jean Chaudoir, a Belgian stock exchange representative for a gold-mining firm. Jean turned out to be a crashing bore, and life in Brussels was "exceedingly dull." After four years of marriage and a number of unsatisfactory love affairs with both men and women, she came to the conclusion that "she had nothing in common with her husband" and ran away to Cannes with her best friend, Romy Gilbey, who was married to a scion of the Gilbey gin dynasty and very rich. Elvira and Mrs. Gilbey were happily losing money made from gin in a casino in Cannes when the Germans invaded France; they fled, in an open-top Renault, to St. Malo before taking a boat for England.

In London, Elvira moved into a flat on Sloane Street, but the tedium of life swiftly descended once more. She spent her evenings shuttling between the bar at the Ritz and the bridge tables, losing money she did not have. She would have borrowed from her parents, but they were stuck in France. She tried to join the Free French forces gathering around the exiled Charles de Gaulle but was told she was unsuitable. She did a little translating for the BBC and found it dreary.

Chaudoir eventually turned to the elixir that has stemmed the ennui of so many of the idle rich over the centuries: spying.

Finally, lest you assume that our jet-powered, ever-connected, new Gilded Age has freed the poor wealthy from the besetting curse of boredom, I'll leave you with the unimpressed glories of the Pierces.



Milton's ending to Paradise Lost--

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest

--was surely intended to be equivocal, perpetual grace traded for free will--but little did he know those centuries gone that with but the appending of a weary sigh his lines could be adapted to the pitiful plight of the privileged.