Across the Pond (4 page)

To tell someone that their beliefs are a lot of rubbish is most certainly considered insensitive, even though it is an essential part of the democratic process. The idea that one should respect other people’s beliefs simply because they are other people’s beliefs is plainly absurd. It is like claiming that one should admire the cut of people’s trousers simply because they are people’s trousers. If my beliefs are arrant nonsense, I expect you to have the decency to tell me so. It would help if you did not call me a slimy little rat in the process, but it is not indispensable. Do those who urge respect for the creed of Rastafarians extend a similar welcome to the doctrines of the Moonies? Is the belief that men after death will get to rule their own universe, but women will not, to be greeted with reverence simply because it is held by Mormons? Can nothing be said to be plainly ridiculous as long as it is touted by a minority? What about those American Evangelical sects who are preparing to film the Second Coming, and engage in intricate technical debates about where best to set up the cameras?

Tolerance does not mean respecting viewpoints simply because they are viewpoints. It means accepting that ideas which make you feel sick in your stomach should be granted as much of a hearing as those that send an erotic tingle down your spine, provided such views do not put others at risk, and provided you have done your damnedest to argue their advocates out of their fatuous or obnoxious opinions. Otherwise you are simply buying your tolerance on the cheap. Dismissing whatever one finds offensive as “abuse” is a distinctly American brand of intolerance.

Volume

Americans, unlike Europeans, are generally said to be loud. In fact, the volume in Europe is gradually turned up as you sink southwards from Sweden to Sicily. Dockers in Naples and sailors in Athens can sound as though they are bawling murderous insults at each other when they are actually just inquiring tenderly after each other’s children. In the days when their telephone technology was poor, the Chinese used to bellow so loudly down the receiver that they could probably have heard each other without the aid of it. There are also national differences when it comes to noise in general. If some European countries are quieter places than the States, it is partly because the use of sirens and flashing lights by emergency vehicles, except when absolutely necessary, is considered anti-social. It is true that “absolutely necessary” may include dashing back to base, all sirens blaring, when the news comes over the radio that your lunch is getting cold. Generally speaking, however, the air of most European cities is not permanently rent by the shriekings and wailings of the emergency services. On the other hand, British towns are besieged at night by the sound of brawling drunks far more than their law-abiding U.S. counterparts. Many of these places in America are ghost towns after dusk, lacking as they do all notion of a night life. They pay for their tranquillity in the coin of a deep-seated dullness.

Americans can indeed be loud. Most American men have a “Yoo-hoo!” buried somewhere inside them. But the loudness is a matter of timbre as well as volume. There is a particular kind of American voice, common to both men and women, which is peculiarly piercing and resonant, so that whole conversations conducted in normal tones are audible from a couple of hundred yards away without the slightest strain on the speaker’s part. People with voices like this might be usefully employed as human foghorns, stationed around the coast to warn shipping of treacherous rocks. They are also, however, especially suited to TV news networks. Whereas European television journalists address their audiences in normal conversational tones, American reporters are clearly selected for the bat-like shrillness or stentorian loudness of their delivery. Even when they are standing in the middle of a tranquil Indiana corn field, they sound as though they are trying to make themselves heard through a tornado. The truth is that they are actually trying to make themselves heard in noisy American living rooms, and that if they fail to grab the viewer’s attention, so will the advertisements. In this sense, there is a connection between pitch and the profit motive. One may contrast these tones with the soothing, earnest, measured, concerned, deep-throated voice of U.S. public broadcasting. There is a liberal-Democratic American voice as well as a right-wing Republican one.

Language and the Irish

When it comes to verbal matters, there are particular pitfalls lying in wait for Americans who visit Ireland. Many of them may be unaware that though Northern Ireland is officially part of Britain, it is not part of Great Britain. It is, however, part of the United Kingdom, just to compound the confusion. Many Irish republicans find the term “Northern Ireland” objectionable, since it seems to legitimate the political status quo. They might speak of “the six counties” instead (or the “sick counties,” as the Irish novelist Flann O’Brien has it). Some people in Northern Ireland regard themselves as British, some as Irish, and some as both. Some of those who see themselves as British would regard the Irish Catholic population in the North as being as much alien interlopers in their land as Kenyans or Cambodians.

Most of the Irish do not regard themselves as part of the British Isles, since most of Ireland is no longer British. Apart from “these islands,” however, there is no convenient phrase to describe the two places as a whole. Since most of Ireland is not part of Britain, it would be both offensive and incorrect in Ireland to refer to Britain as “the mainland,” though Northern Unionists would use the phrase. It would be as unacceptable as New Zealanders calling Australia the mainland. For Irish republicans, calling the Northern Irish city of Derry Londonderry would be as heinous an offence as calling Native Americans redskins.

American tourists should know that there is a Northern Ireland but not a southern one. The term “southern Ireland” is rarely used by the Irish themselves, since they regard themselves simply as Irish, and perhaps because it implies acceptance of the partition of the country. (Though Dublin has now in fact officially accepted it.) “Ireland” or “the Irish Republic” will do instead—though to compound the complications, some Irish republicans would reserve the latter phrase for a nation which does not yet exist, namely, an Ireland completely independent of Britain. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) sees itself as deriving its authority from a future it has yet to create. In any case, some bits of so-called southern Ireland are geographically to the north of some bits of Northern Ireland. The preposterous word “Eire” should be avoided at all costs, for reasons too tedious to recount. It is probably best to forget about these geopolitical puzzles and simply enjoy the scenery.

The Irish language, incidentally, is called Irish, not Gaelic, since the latter term covers a whole family of languages. To say you speak Gaelic would be a bit like an Englishman saying he spoke Indo-European. Extensive brain surgery is required in order to learn Irish. The language most Irish people speak is known as Hiberno-English, and includes such imaginative terms of abuse as “gobshite” and “fecking.” The latter word, overseas visitors will be surprised to hear, is not a sanitised version of a somewhat stronger oath. The Irish version of that is “fugghan,” repeated by some of the population every six seconds or so except during the more solemn parts of the Mass.

There are, then, a number of linguistic and geopolitical traps in Ireland to catch the unwary. But the same could be said of the United States. Why do its inhabitants call themselves Americans? Why are Mexicans and Canadians not Americans as well? Isn’t this rather like the Chinese being allowed to call themselves Asians, but not Indians or Koreans? Is a certain land grabbing built into the very way its citizens designate themselves? I was once treated to a fine example of U.S. linguistic imperialism when an American editor changed the phrase
The Times
, which I had written in a reference to the London newspaper of that name, to
The London Times.
My efforts to point out that there is no such periodical were dismally ineffective. According to U.S. journalistic practice, so I was advised,
The Times
of London is indeed called
The London Times
, even though it is not. It is up to the United States to decide what the names of other people’s newspapers are. One can imagine other such alterations. “We know your prime minister is actually called David Cameron, but we like to call him Billy Badger.” “Your correspondent spent an interesting afternoon in Popesville, known to the natives as Vatican City.” “After viewing the Finger, or the Eiffel Tower as the inhabitants quaintly call it, we spent an instructive morning strolling around Main Street, known to the locals as the Champs Elysées.”

This is not as improbable as it sounds. The American golfer Bubba Watson once caused an uproar in France by announcing that he had seen “that big tower” (the Eiffel Tower), the “building starting with a L” (the Louvre), and “this arch I drove around in a circle” (the Arc de Triomphe). He later excused his ignorance on the grounds that he “wasn’t a history major.” Perhaps he had trouble distinguishing history from geography. He also declared that he felt “uncomfortable” (indispensable American word) with being criticised for these
faux pas
.

At a Loss for Words

There is a great tradition of American writing, epitomised in the modern age by the burnished masterpieces of Saul Bellow, in which a luminous poetry is plucked from the prose of everyday life, and the patois of hucksters and dockers invested with epic grandeur. Such writing, at once mundane and magnificent, transcends the commonplace without leaving it behind. It preserves the feel and texture of everyday existence while disclosing a depth within it. Behind this literary heritage, as behind so much in the United States, lies the culture of Puritanism, with its conviction that daily life is the arena of salvation and damnation. The everyday is the place where the most momentous questions are to be confronted. It is a belief that lends itself naturally to the novel.

There have been too many tales of literary decline, too many premature obituary notices for the novel, too much traditionalist nostalgia for a golden age of letters. Even so, it is hard not to feel that the culture of the word has taken something of a nose dive in today’s United States. The same is true of Britain, though to a lesser degree. There is a British television show in which panellists engage in superbly witty exchanges and surreal flights of comic fantasy without a single word being scripted. On American TV, by contrast, it is impossible to say “Hey!” or “Wow!” without the aid of an autocue. Hamlet’s dying words were “Absent thee from felicity awhile/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story. . . . The rest is silence.” Steve Jobs’s last words were “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!” Perhaps he did not do quite as much for human communication as his fans imagine. Some U.S. academics deliver their papers at conferences as though they are translating from the Sanskrit as they go along. Columns in up-market British newspapers can be intricate and inventive, whereas equivalent pieces in the States tend to be sparse, thinly textured and lexically challenged. An editorial in a British newspaper can be a literary
tour de force
, which is hardly ever true across the Atlantic. Some of the most revered national commentators in the United States write a basic, colourless, crudely utilitarian prose. No decent piece of writing simply tells it like it is, without a sensual delight in the way of telling it.

Generally speaking, American students are a delight to teach. Yet they are not always able to voice a coherent English sentence, even at graduate level. Some of them are easy to mistake for Turks or Albanians who have only just arrived in the country, and are still struggling with the language. Only later does one realise that they grew up in Boston. They tend to tie themselves up in great chains of unwieldy syntax, overlain with a liberal layer of jargon. Dishevelled syntax is true of both genders, but jargon is confined largely to the men. This is part of the painful demise of the spoken word in the United States. Another sign of linguistic decline is the existence of an organisation known as Scientology, a name which is in fact a tautology. It means the knowledge of knowledge. Names, however, are not always rigorously logical. It is only quite recently that a London hospital stopped calling itself the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, a title which contains one word too many.

Perhaps the real threat to freedom of speech in the United States is not one to freedom but to speech. Perhaps the nation will end up free to say anything it likes while being incapable of saying it. Nor is logical precision a strength of American students. Many of them have had their brains severely addled by an overdose of media. Perhaps they should all have a compulsory first year in which they learn nothing but how to think and speak straight, ridding themselves of the language of texting as a clinic purges its patients of cocaine. Despite all this, no more generous, open-minded and enthusiastic group of students can be found in the world. American students tend to be courteous, responsive, cooperative, eager to acquire ideas and ready to criticise anything whatsoever, not least themselves. They are also the last group of students on the planet who are prepared to speak up in class.

Irony

I once wrote a piece for the
New York Times
that included a few mild touches of irony, only to be informed by a startled journalist on the paper that irony was unacceptable in its columns. One should be as wary of writing for a journal which bans irony as one should for one which seeks to ban immigrants. There are English journals, by contrast, in which the use of irony is almost as compulsory as the use of commas. Pieces can be sent back for being insufficiently insincere.

It is a mistake to think that Americans do not understand irony. Yet though they may respond to it, they rarely initiate it. They also occasionally blunt its edge by too blatantly sarcastic a tone. For a puritan civilisation, irony is too close to lying for comfort. A renowned American philosopher once told me of a discomforting time he had spent at an Oxford High Table. Throughout the entire evening, he had no idea whether a single word that was said to him was meant to be serious or not. “Dammit!” he exploded to me, “I’m an American!” And this was a philosopher for whom irony was a precious moral posture, though he did not seem to appreciate the irony.