Across the Pond (5 page)

One of the gravest moral defects of Americans is that they tend to be straight, honest and plain-speaking. There have been various attempts to cure them of these vices, including the establishment of clinics where they can receive intensive therapy for their distressing tendency to mean what they say. Even with compulsory daily readings of Oscar Wilde, however, it is hard to rid them of the prejudice that there is something admirable about what you see being what you get. (“I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood,” Wilde once remarked, a statement it is hard to imagine on the lips of Pat Robertson.) For puritan types, appearances must correspond with realities, the outer present a faithful portrait of the inner, whereas irony involves a skewing of the two. To the puritan mind, appearances are acceptable only if they convey a substantial inner truth. Otherwise they are to be mistrusted as specious and superficial. Hence the familiar American insistence that what matters about a person is what is inside them. It is a claim that sits oddly with a society obsessed with self-presentation. There is no room here for what Lenin called the reality of appearances, no appreciation of just how profound surfaces can be, no rejoicing in forms, masks and signifiers for their own sake. Henry James writes in
The American Scene
of the country’s disastrous disregard for appearances. For the Calvinist, a delight in anything for its own sake is sinful. Pleasure must be instrumental to some more worthy goal such as procreation, rather as play on children’s TV in the States must be tied to some grimly didactic purpose. It can rarely be an end in itself. The fact that there is no social reality without its admixture of artifice, that truth works in terms of masks and conventions, is fatally overlooked.

The philosopher Wittgenstein once remarked that “A dog cannot lie, but neither can he be sincere,” meaning among other things that sincerity is as much something you acquire socially as a large bank balance or a reputation for reclusiveness. Jane Austen knew well enough that to be natural, rather like being ironic, is a form of social behaviour one has to learn. For her, observing the social conventions was a question of respect and consideration for others. No ceremony could be less empty. Nothing is more artificial than a cult of shambling spontaneity. People who are self-consciously blunt, plain and forthright are in the grip of an image of themselves quite as much as people who think they are Elvis Presley or Mother Teresa.

Language for the puritan is at its finest when it clings to the unvarnished facts. This prejudice has given rise in the States to a thousand creative writing classes in which sentences like “And then we rolled into town still hauling the dead mule and Davy said how about some fried eggs and he was still kind of sniggering at the thought of Charlie hollering at that goddam prairie dog and we landed up at Joey’s place with the sun still warm on our backs and the coffee was good and strong” are judged superior to anything that overhyped Stratford hack ever managed to pull off. The United States is one of the few places in which stylelessness has become a style, cultivated with all the passion and precision of a Woolf or a Joyce. It is against this current that the likes of Bellow, Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich are forced to swim.

It was not always thus. Jeffersonian Virginia was renowned for its oratory and rhetoric. The genteel class of New England were praised for what one observer called their “intellectual vigour, exalted morals, classical erudition, and refined taste.” Elegance was in high regard. A fluency of speech and manner was thought by some Americans of the period to provide a bulwark against the dangers of demagoguery. There were those, to be sure, who regarded rhetoric as suspect. It was a form of manipulative speech typical of the ruling powers of the Old World, and thus out of place in a genuine democracy. Even so, a nineteenth-­century American writer praised “the chaste and classical beauty” of the nation’s finest legal scholarship. The lawyer, wrote another commentator of the time, will exhibit “that combination of intellectual power, brilliant but chaste images, pure language, calm self-possession, graceful and modest bearing, indicative of a spirit chastened, enriched, and adorned” by a study of classical civilisation. It is a far cry from Judge Judy.

Henry James thought that America lacked mystery and secrecy, that its landscapes were all foreground, but found just such an air of enigma in Europe. This was not, he considered, by any means wholly to its credit. Civilisations which prize the mannered, devious, playful and oblique generally have aristocratic roots, since it is hard to be mannered, devious and playful while you are drilling a coal seam or dry-cleaning a jacket. And aristocratic social orders, as James was to discover, can be full of suavely concealed brutality. A dash of American directness would do them no harm at all. A culture of irony requires a certain degree of leisure. You need to be privileged enough not to have any pressing need for the plain truth. Facts can be left to factory owners.

Even so, there are times when irony is the only weapon one has at hand. Take, for example, those freakish right-wing Christians in the States who brandish banners reading “God Hates Fags” and gather to rejoice at the funerals of servicemen and women killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such people relish nothing more than for some passing liberal to engage them in indignant debate, denouncing their bigotry and homophobia. To do so is surely a grave mistake. Instead, one should ask them why they are such a bunch of liberal wimps. Why are they waving their banners when they could be acting as the Lord’s avenging arm by wiping his enemies from the face of the earth? Why don’t they actually
do
something for a change, have the courage of their convictions, rather than standing spinelessly around? Why are they such a gutless bunch of whingers?

One of the classic forms of American humour is the gag, which marks its distance from the seriousness of everyday life rather as wearing a baseball cap marks the fact that the American male is on vacation. Wearing a baseball cap signals “I Am Enjoying Myself” even when you are not, rather as a bishop’s mitre signals “I Am Holy” even when he is indulging in indecent fantasies beneath it. Humour in this view represents a holiday from reality, rather than a consistent stance towards it. Nobody is likely to mistake it for the real world. Most gags do not force you to reassess your relationship to reality.

For a certain kind of English patrician, by contrast, irony is less a figure of speech than a way of life. As a highly Europeanised American observes in Henry James’s
The Europeans,
“I don’t think it’s what one does or doesn’t do that promotes enjoyment. . . . It is the general way of looking at life.” The gentleman’s amused, ironic outlook on human existence is a way of engaging with the world while also keeping it languidly at arm’s length. It suggests an awareness of different possibilities, one beyond the reach of those who must immerse themselves in the actual in order to survive. The aristocrat can savour a variety of viewpoints because none of them is likely to undermine his own. This is because he has no viewpoint of his own. Opinions are for the plebs. It is not done to be passionate about things. To have a point of view is to be as uncouth and one-sided as a militant trade unionist. It would be a threat to one’s
sang froid
, and thus to one’s sovereignty. To find the cosmos mildly entertaining has always been a sign of power in Britain. It is the political reality behind Oxford and Cambridge wit. Seriousness is for scientists and shopkeepers.

One of the finest exponents of the English language in the United States today has been the art critic T. J. Clark. Another was the late Christopher Hitchens. Both of them came to the country from England. It can be claimed that to write as well as this, with such tonal subtlety, verbal self-assurance and exquisite play of light and shade, you need a well-established cultural tradition in your bones. In England, that culture has often enough been snobbish, malevolent, and supercilious. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had all of these vices to excess, yet they are also related in complex ways to the splendour of his style.

That permanent house guest of England, Henry James, pressed the nuance and ambiguity of English writing to the point where his prose threatened to disappear up its own intricacies. Among other things, it was a way of putting some daylight between himself and his plain-speaking native land, as was his habit of sucking up to a set of boneheaded English aristocrats. Nothing, not even Communism, could be more anti-American than James’s mannered, fastidious, overbred later style, horrified as it would be at the very idea of telling it like it is. Like James, the English upper classes value a certain verbal obliquity. This is because to talk confessionally is considered unsophisticated, and people of this rank would rather be thought wicked than naive. In this, they are at one with the natives of Paris. You would not ask someone like this on first meeting how many children he had, not because it is impertinent but because it is hard for him to return a stylish reply.

The style, they say, is the man. A friend of mine in New York once gave a copy of my
Literary Theory: An Introduction
to a friend of hers, an American woman who belonged to that wretched minority of creatures on the planet who have never heard of me. On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired “Is he gay?” No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. “Is he English?” she asked.

Satire

Most Americans are too straight-talking to make effective satirists, though many of them have become resigned to others being satirical at their expense, not least about their ineptness as satirists. Commentators can also be too deferential to power to feel easy about mocking it. It is hard to imagine a U.S. television interviewer putting the same embarrassing question to a squirming politician sixteen or so times over, as a BBC journalist once famously did. As for the Irish, they have about as much respect for their politicians as they do for their paedophiles.

Even when political pundits on American TV engage in rowdy debate, there is usually an unspoken obligation to grin and make up at the end. They must leave the impression that their squabbling is basically good-humoured. Perhaps this is written into their contracts. Political debate, after all, is only entertainment. A touch of polemic is good for the ratings, but too much of it would make viewers feel uncomfortable, a capital American crime. What America calls hard ball is soft ball in Europe. Public debate in the States, at least in the media, is generally more emollient than it is in Europe, keener to emphasise points of consensus, more fearful of outright conflict. The bunch of brawling schoolboys known as the House of Commons would probably be arrested for civil disorder in the USA.

In many a British academic conference, there is blood on the floor by the end of the first afternoon. Exchanges can be barbed, even quietly vicious. Americans, however, will tend to preface their criticisms of your lecture with a courteous reference to “your very fine paper,” rather as U.S. politicians who clash with each another on television are often careful to record the respect in which they hold each other’s views. There is less mutual bootlicking in Europe. In some ways, this courtesy is a deeply attractive aspect of American culture, even if it is not always best suited to establishing the truth. The genuine niceness of some Americans can be hard to distinguish from a certain blandness. The difference between radicals and others is that radicals suspect that the truth is generally discreditable. It is thus rarely in the open, and a degree of abrasiveness is required to dig it out. What you see is highly unlikely to be what you get.

Blandness, however, hardly characterizes the nation as a whole. On my first visit to New York, where I had come on the audacious mission of teaching two hundred nuns, I wandered into a gift store, browsed a little and then headed for the door. My exit was blocked by a large man with a drooping moustache who was standing with his back to the door. “Okay, so what ya gonna buy?” he asked. I realised after a moment that this was the proprietor and gave him a feeble, English-upper-class-idiot sort of smile. “Come on, what ya gonna buy for Christsakes?” he repeated menacingly, refusing to shift from the door. It was not until some time later that I realised that this visceral aggression was what some New Yorkers regard as humour. It is certainly a lot preferable to arch banter, self-conscious joshing and Boy Scout heartiness.

Being inept at satire or irony does not of course mean lacking a sense of humour. On the contrary, the United States is marvellously rich in comedy. It represents one of its major contributions to world civilisation. The British are thought to be a humorous bunch, but nothing in their media today can outshine
Seinfeld
,
Family Guy
,
Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office
or the early episodes of
The Simpsons
. The British, however, excel at whimsy, which is less common in the States. Because they value eccentricity, they enjoy a vein of humour which is quaint, fanciful and capricious. Some years ago, there flourished briefly in Britain a Gnomes Liberation Movement, whose project was to abduct ornamental gnomes from people’s gardens and return them to their owners on the payment of a ransom of candy. Owners who refused this blackmail would sometimes find their kidnapped gnomes lying decapitated on their doorstops, a sinister rim of red around their severed necks.

There are other instances of such humour. The
Guardian
newspaper usually conceals a spoof in its pages on April Fool’s Day, which one year appeared in the “Help Wanted” advertisements. There were job ads such as “Dynamic coordinator required for forward-looking project delivering quality service for supervision of progressive resources redistribution,” which turned out on closer inspection to mean nothing at all. It would be hard to imagine a quality U.S. newspaper engaging in this practice. Work in the States is a serious business.

TWO

The Outgoing Spirit

Angels and Demons

There is a kind of American speech which sounds too inflated to Europeans. At its least inspired, American English is a language soggy with superlatives: great, fantastic, awesome, amazing, wonderful, incredible (but not, on the whole, superb, formidable, splendid, or magnificent). One sometimes wonders if there has ever been an American who was not a very wonderful person, with the possible exception of Charles Manson.

The novelist Milan Kundera writes in
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
of a vision of the world he calls angelic—or, somewhat less politely, “shitless.” This way of seeing is full of beams, smiles and high-minded platitudes, averse to all that is dark-tinged, recalcitrant or disagreeable. The angelic march cheerfully forward into an ever rosier future, radiant and wide-eyed, disowning all complexity and ambiguity in their triumphalist self-conviction. Kundera is thinking of the ideological rhetoric of the East European Communist states, which were still alive and kicking at the time he was writing, but the point has a bearing on the world’s most powerful capitalist nation as well. To the European mind, high-pitched rhetoric suggests among other things racist rants and ranks of goose-stepping warriors. Americans are in love with spectacle, but in the wake of Nazism, spectacle in Europe can never be quite the same again. Instead, in Britain above all, there is ceremony, which is rather different.

The opposite of the angelic for Kundera, predictably enough, is the demonic, by which he means the language of the cynical and nihilistic, one with too little meaning rather than (like the angelic) one stuffed with sonorous clichés. There is enough demonic discourse in the States to suit anyone’s taste, but the fact remains that the official rhetoric of the country (which, one should stress, is far from the discourse of everyday life) is too pious, elevated, hand-on-heart and histrionic for us jaded Europeans. A dash of the demonic would do it no harm. The demonic can be found in the edgy, abrasive, sardonic speech of New York Jews, which is much closer to the Irish than it is to the Midwest. When they hear angelic American speech—“this great country of ours,” “let freedom ring forth,” and the like—most Europeans simply stare at their shoes and wait for it to stop, as some people do whenever Schoenberg comes on the radio. Many Americans, to be fair, find this kind of language just as excruciating.

European political discourse is much more downbeat. You might get away with a reference to freedom, but certainly not to God. Suggesting that the Almighty has a special affection for your nation would sound as absurd as claiming that he has a special affection for gummy bears. Phrases can be tested for their shitless or angelic quality by seeing whether the opposite would make any sense. The Republican politician Mitt Romney solemnly established a Committee for a Strong and Free America, as opposed to a Committee for an Enfeebled and Enslaved one. (“Strong,” incidentally, is a favourite American word.) Angelic discourse goes hand in hand with the high seriousness of the American public sphere. Political life in the States is colourful but earnest. It is hard to imagine a goat, nudist, flamboyant cross-dresser or can of baked beans being put up for political election, as they might be in the United Kingdom
.
Politics can be a circus, but not exactly a carnival. Michael Moore’s attempt to have a ficus plant elected to Congress is a magnificent exception.

Angelic language is too extravagant for British taste. Theatre is a venerable British art, but emotional theatricality is as un-British as sunshine. A British, French or German author might end the preface to his or her book with some rather tight-lipped acknowledgements to friends, colleagues and family. American authors, by contrast, have been known to write roughly as follows: “Finally, I should like to thank my incredible wife Marcia (remember that Caesar salad in Dayton, Ohio!), my three unbelievably beautiful children Dent, Tankard, and Placenta, our wonderful mongoose Brian J. Screwdriver who taught me wisdom, forbearance and compassion, and my totally extraordinary colleagues in the Department of Apocalyptic Studies at Christ Is Coming College . . . ” One might claim that where Americans and the British differ most is in sensibility. It is this divergence that their shared language tends to conceal. On one reckoning, however, Americans come out of the comparison rather better. They may overdo emotion, but they are not fearful of it. A surplus of feeling has rarely done as much damage as a deficiency of it.

The Kindness of Americans

There is, then, a positive side to the emotional lavishness of the States, as there is to many an American defect. In fact, de Tocque­ville writes that what Europeans tend to see as American vices (restlessness of spirit, an immoderate desire for wealth, an excessive love of independence, and so on) are exactly what makes the nation so resplendently successful, and are thus every bit as serviceable to it as its virtues. Extravagant emotion may be mawkish, but it also reflects a kindliness and generosity of spirit which are among the country’s most striking characteristics. Dickens remarks that Americans “are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” He also speaks fondly of their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm.

All of these qualities are still present in abundance today. The language of the United States may grate with its gushing superlatives, but it can also simply reflect a wish to be pleasant to others. Many a visitor to America has remarked on the astonishing gap between its politics and its people. The latter are for the most part far more congenial than the former. Republics are supposed to be places in which the people and the government are at one, which is thankfully not the case with the republic of America. That the citizens of the country have managed by and large to preserve their neighbourliness, kindliness and largeness of spirit in one of the most acquisitive, ferociously competitive civilisations on God’s earth is a remarkable tribute to their innate decency. This may be something of a backhanded compliment, like congratulating someone on winning the title of World’s Greatest Bore five times in a row, but it is a compliment nonetheless.

Americans continue to be on the whole an easy, outgoing people. If two of them find themselves together in an elevator, they will usually acknowledge each other’s presence with a friendly word. People who speak to you in British elevators are generally regarded as dangerous lunatics who should not be favoured with a reply, since this will only spur them to further outbursts of insanity. If they persist in their offensive attempts to be friendly, one can always press the emergency bell and have them carted away by security. The British are much taken by what one might call the argument from the floodgates. Once you allow one stranger to murmur a cordial remark to you about how the cricket is going, you are in imminent danger of being besieged by great herds of wild-eyed, shaggy-haired men and women who will try to talk to you about everything from the structure of the atom to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. Strangers who smile at you in public will always end up demanding to live in your spare room. They will try to kidnap your children, or offload a demented elderly relative on you. It is best to keep yourself to yourself.

Keeping yourself to yourself, however, is not the guarantee of a quiet life that it once was. Whenever those suspected of terrorism are arrested these days, their neighbours almost always remark that they struck them as quiet, polite, respectable-­looking people who never failed to give them the time of day, but who kept to themselves. People like this should be instantly reported to the police. Men who are completely covered in hair, brandish Kalashnikovs and speak some strange gibberish are entirely harmless.

Is American friendliness genuine or superficial? There is a case for claiming that it is both. There is certainly a good deal of automated pleasantness, compulsive cheeriness and manufactured bonhomie. There are times when you are not really allowed to feel down in the mouth or enjoy being on your own. Solitariness is seen as anti-social. Americans can often strike one as over-socialised, too frenetically eager to please, too anxious to make an impression in a country where impressions count for more than they should. This, however, is far from the whole story. When I stroll across an American campus, I sometimes pass a young man I don’t know, and who doesn’t know me, who murmurs, “How ya doin’, sir?” This would never happen in Europe. It may be something of a conditioned reflex, but it is an undeniably charming one. There is an agreeableness about many Americans which is less obvious in the case of some Europeans. With them, you may have to dig a little to discover it. In Americans it tends to be more readily accessible, like most other things about them.

Not all Americans, admittedly, are quite as affable as the young men I occasionally bump into on campus. A survey showed that people in Rio touch each other an average of 180 times when drinking coffee together, but only 40 times in New York. Perhaps this is because some Americans believe that touching anything, even their toddlers, is a sure way to contract bubonic plague. There are U.S. citizens who would clearly feel happier spending their lives cocooned in a plastic bag, though some of them might fear that this, too, could result in some loathsome infection. Even if New Yorkers touch each other sparingly, however, the inhabi­tants of the United States are by and large a more friendly, helpful bunch than the citizens of many a European nation. If you stop on the sidewalk with a map in your hands, they will quite often step up and ask if you need directions.

This tends to happen much less in Europe. In any case, in Britain at least, the art of giving directions on the street is rapidly dying, along with clog dancing and tapestry weaving, as people mistake left for right, omit vital pieces of information, grossly underestimate distances in order to raise your spirits, forget about one-way traffic systems, and take local knowledge complacently for granted. Perhaps the art fares better in the United States. Some of the Irish enjoy turning their road signs around in order to confuse visitors. It is possible for tourists to travel in circles for many hours in the Irish countryside, given the mischievous tendencies of the natives.

The British tend to be suspicious of instant friendliness. There are posters on garbage cans in O’Hare Airport in Chicago that read “We’re Glad To See You!” No they’re not. They don’t even know who I am. How do they know I’m here? Glad to see me personally, or just glad to see anybody? Who exactly is glad to see me? The mayor, the airport authorities, the garbage can manufacturers, or the entire population of the city? How do they know I don’t have a test-tube full of lethal germs in my suitcase, or a collapsible nuclear weapon? What if I have come to sell heroin to their teenagers?

Such are the churlish reflections of a visitor from the United Kingdom.

Openness and Obliquity

“I know of no other country,” writes de Tocqueville, “where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts.” In Ireland, a store will probably let you off a few cents if you find yourself short. It is not certain that this would happen in New York. Irish builders also tend to place coins in the foundations of houses for good luck. An American friend to whom I mentioned this custom was adamant that it would never happen in the United States. It was the waste, not the superstition, he thought was the problem. Perhaps American suburbs would resound at night with the sound of people frantically digging up their neighbours’ foundations. There is an enormous amount of generosity in the States, but not much of it extends to the financial sphere.

Even so, being so brashly explicit about money is part of America’s openness. In Britain, the oldest capitalist nation in the world, it is not done to discuss the stuff too often or too loudly, whereas one knows one is back in the United States when everyone at the hotel breakfast seems to be talking about dollars. The British can be coyly euphemistic about what Americans candidly call the bottom line. British universities “appoint” their academic staff rather than “hiring” them. One hires plumbers, not professors. (There are those of us who find it gratifying, by the way, that another word for “godly” in early Puritan America was “professor.”)

Perhaps one origin of this evasiveness is that aristocrats traditionally had so much money that they did not need to think about it, and so did not need to talk about it either. This is also true of Henry James’s fabulously wealthy characters. True gentility means having only the vaguest idea of where your income comes from, as true innocence means not knowing where babies come from. The middle classes make money, and are thus permanently preoccupied with it, while the gentry spend it, and thus do not need to harp on it so much. American talk about dollars may sometimes be brash, but at least is not conducted behind one’s hand, as though one is conspiring with a hit man to do away with one’s spouse. Old-fashioned Britons talk about money as discreetly as they do about sex. You do not discuss it loudly, any more than you tell a passing stranger about your erectile dysfunction.