Like a literary serial killer, we knew the next victim would be found soon, we just didn’t know when, where, or even if it had already happened. Now the corpses of Jeeves and Wooster have washed up on the shore, a blood splattered bowler hat and broken bottle of Pimm’s found nearby.
Unlike the revisions made to Dahl or Fleming, there is a special incredulity to the doctoring of Jeeves and Wooster. Like the spraying of a graffiti hammer and sickle on a garden gnome.
For Dahl the justification was (as is often the case) to save the children. With Fleming, well, book Bond really was a bad man at odds with the loveable crazy uncle he is in the films. But with Wodehouse it’s hard to find a moral, literary, or even economic rationale.
The books aren’t meant for children but neither are they polemical or propagandistic in nature. Rather they are the epitome of light-hearted whimsy, the literary equivalent of an expertly made summer soufflé. Inherently light and well-wishing, yet requiring immense skill and dexterity to pull off. Sure, the recipe may contain more salt, sugar, and fat than is recommended by the current health regulators, but that doesn’t make it a noxious narcotic requiring alteration.
Even a cynical commercial argument that removing “problematic” words would increase readership seems as absurd a plan as Bertie Wooster’s failed scheme to grow a moustache to impress a girl, only to shave it off and feign fight injuries when the prospective love interest was less than enthralled by his paltry sub-nasal patch.
Are we really to believe that the removal of the word “minstrel” is the only thing preventing the diversity obsessed young of today from dropping their smartphones and delving into pre-war English comic fiction about a white toff and his equally white valet? They didn’t even watch Downton Abbey.
The publisher Penguin Random House attempted to re-assure readers that edits were only made to the language and not the actual story. For a writer lauded as much for his prose as his plot, this is akin to saying we changed Monet’s Water Lilies from oil paint to CGI, but don’t worry they’re still about plants in a pond.
In actuality, what such alterations amount to is a sort of presentist colonialism. The enlightened gentry of the current civilisation taking up the burden of reforming the savages of the past. With the vestiges of our heritage fully bought under the woke imperial yoke, only then can civilisation blossom, untroubled from destabilising Zulu and Comanche attacks at the periphery.
However, as Kipling cautioned in his poem The White Man’s Burden, such endeavours are inherently doomed:
Take up the White Man's burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
But then again, Kipling was a racist and also mean to his wife.
Rather than a quasi-colonialist approach to reform the past, what is required is an authentic anthropological assessment of it.
As the British writer L.P. Hartley opened his 1953 novel “The Go-Between”:
“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”
It is a maxim worth bearing in mind when embarking from the comfort of the present for the alien lands of Bygonia. For the more temporally well-travelled (that is to say the old) this wisdom is tacitly understood. For the young however, it seems a more didactic approach is required, as it is the university students of today who are calling loudest for the censorship and removal of “dangerous” texts from the past.
Given the historical tendency of the past to increase in size, appreciation of Hartley’s adage is only likey to become more important. Conversely, projections indicate that the amount of future future is rapidly reducing in response. According to some analysts (who are very much not of the past), there is only about 10 years or so of future remaining, depending on the carbon emissions of London’s outer ring road and the oleaginous impulses of snooker fans.
As such, is it any surprise that the young are increasingly losing interest in building a future worth travelling to?
Due to the anxieties of geographic travel in the post covid era, and the inherent evil of passenger planes, rather than a gap year in Angola, or Easter in the Algarve, the youth of today are ever more electing to holiday in history. Like many a novice traveller, their excursions are largely confined to the domestic and the familiar, the historical equivalent of a staycation, with perhaps a summer break to somewhere abroad where they still speak English and you can drink the tap water.
A popular package trip is a whistlestop tour of 1990s to 1770s America, complete with an Atlantic cruise to 1790s Britain and back. The so called “Snowflake trail”. What a shame it is then, that these tourists aren’t more respectful of the historical paths they tread.
The young are all too quick to denounce the ways of their own ancestors in the past. The postcards these wanderlusts write about their retro-vacations are filled with a haughty derision at the backwardness of the natives, their racism, misogyny, and penchant for burning dead dinosaurs to ensure that more than half their children live long enough for a second set of teeth. Yet when it comes to the benighted practices found in foreign lands of the present era, involving similiar racism, misogyny, and deceased spinosaurus based heating solutions, the young display a fawning liberal apologism.
Likewise, the western scientific tradition is lambasted for its euro-centerism, reductionism, and faustian allegiance with capitalism. Yet, at the same time we are admonished to respect the scientific practices of other cultures, such as the Palestinian empirical exploration of gravity by answering the question, what falls faster when dropped from a great height, a tonne of feathers or a tonne of homosexuals?
Though it is not just the young who display poor time-travel etiquette. The tendency is often politically tinged. I am talking of course about the woke left, though I prefer the term “regressive left” as it denies them a linguistic trojan horse with which to smuggle the decidedly un-Hellenic ideas of post-modernism into the culture.
If the coordinates of the land in question are measured more in decades and centuries than miles, then like the god of the old testament, the young and the left (if that is not a tautology) set the full judgemental force of the present zeitgeist upon its peoples.
In the case of the young, this is not surprising. Those least acquainted with the past are often the most likely to castigate it, just as it is often the least travelled who sneer most vehemently at that which sits outside their parish lines.
For a generation whose main marker of time is the hollow horology of their TikTok feed, excursions into the deep past are liable to produce hostility and a flight to comfort. The phenomenon is akin to how the most provincial of American tourists gawk at the backwardness of other countries whilst lamenting the impossibility of sourcing a dozen Twinkies, a quart of Ben & Jerry’s, and two bottles of Jack Daniels at two AM in the morning at the Parthenon.
As such, we can treat the young’s juvenile appraisals of the American revolutionary war, the British Empire, and the 1990’s sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S, with the same level of dismissal that we would an Instagram feed documenting a frat-pack spring break trip to the ruins of Herculaneum.
As for the supposedly grown-up regressive left, one can only suppose that their inherent soterian maternalism compels them to indulge the worst traits of the young, rather than equipping them with the means to become fully functional and capable conservatives.
However, we should also call the regressive left out on their hypocrisy. They portray themselves as earnest scholars of diversity, in contrast to the knuckle dragging xenophobes on the right. In reality it is they who are the parochial jingoists, uncomfortable leaving their provincial village in time. Whilst the young may simply be bad tourists, the regressive left are something much worse, bad custodians, liable to destroy the places they purport to cherish and ruining them for future generations. With only a little exaggeration, Rewriting Wodehouse to make it more accesible is akin to installing escalators up the side of the Pyramids at Giza.
It is not my intention to give the impression that no enjoyment can be gleaned from the ongoing saga of literary serial killings. Like actual serial killers, the sadness of the murder is eclipsed by the mystery of the murderer’s next move and the accompanying frisson of the manhunt for him.
Who will be the next victim? Orwell would be great, if only for the irony. However, if irony is the criteria, I would relish an attack on the aformentioned novel, The Go-Between. “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. Well for a start, “foreign” is an offensive concept, perhaps “the past is another country” would be safer?
I asked Chat GPT 4 for its assessment of any potential inflammatory and offensive passages in The Go-Between. It highlighted the protagonist Leo’s relationship with an African-American classmate. Somewhat risibly, the omnipotent AI was confusing the novel with "Goodbye to Berlin" by Christopher Isherwood. Let’s hope the sensitivity editors are better read.