Across the Pond (6 page)

There is a similar reticence about the British brand of English. I was once a Fellow of an Oxford college of which the Warden (Principal) was the legendary wit and
bon viveur
Sir Maurice Bowra. It was this patrician rogue who, when invited to the wedding of a glamorous young pair, is said to have remarked, “Lovely couple, slept with them both.” Though famously gay, he once rather grudgingly contemplated marriage, and on being asked why he had chosen a rather plain woman with whom to tie the knot, replied breezily, “Ah well, buggers can’t be choosers.”

Bowra’s most superlative term of praise was “far from bad,” which is technically known as litotes. In Americanese, this would be the equivalent of “wonderful” preceded by three or four “verys.” Shakespeare was far from bad, so was Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and so was lying naked on the banks of the river Isis in full, shameless view of passing boaters. One suspects that in his more pious moments, which were admittedly somewhat rare, Bowra thought that God was far from bad as well. Homer was “quite a clever fellow,” while the more melancholic of the nineteenth-century novelists were “the gloomy boys.” Botticelli was “not at all a disgrace,” though some of the more flamboyant Romantic poets “laid it on a bit thick.” Malt whisky, J. S. Bach and ravishingly handsome male undergraduates “could be worse.” “Not a little boring” meant mind-numbingly monotonous.

If the British upper classes hold that it is not good form to gush, it is because emotion is seen a form of weakness, and to display such weakness before one’s social inferiors or colonial subjects is to risk a bullet through the brain. Emotional constipation can save your life. Those who do not have their tender feelings beaten out of them at school may be subjected to a more lethal kind of beating in the long run. Understatement thus has political roots. It can sometimes be pressed to bizarre extremes. A few years ago, an Englishman who happened to be in Japan when the country was struck by an earthquake, tsunami, large-scale fires and a threat of nuclear meltdown, was asked about the situation on BBC television. “Well,” he replied, “it’s not very nice and I rather wish it hadn’t happened.” “Not very nice” is British for “unbelievably awful.” When an American is asked how she is, she might reply, “Pretty good.” A typical British or Irish response would be, “Not too bad.” Or alternatively, “Can’t grumble,” a statement which has never actually prevented the British from grumbling. It would take a collision with a comet to do that.

Amping Up, Playing Down

The American impulse is to amplify, while the British habit is to diminish. When thanked, an American might say, “It’s my pleasure,” “You’re very welcome” or, “You bet,” whereas the British, who tend naturally to the negative and low-profiled, tend to murmur, “Don’t mention it,” “Not at all,” “No problem,” or even the hideous “No probs.” In an unintended put-down, they imply that they have done nothing worth being thanked for—that being helpful to you does not count as an event, and that your gratitude is therefore both superfluous and embarrassing.

“It can’t do any harm” in British English usually means that it is precious beyond words. The British, unlike Americans, speak of “popping” in and out of places. To “pop” into a store is to be there so briefly as not really to be there at all. It is a very British kind of self-effacement. There is never a catastrophe in the United Kingdom, just “a bit of a problem.” Neither, as we shall see later, are there any catastrophes in the United States, though for rather different reasons. Instead, they are known as “challenges.” It sounds so much less catastrophic. The instinct to play down is as common among the Irish as the British. An Irish acquaintance once told me that he was doing fine, except for “a touch of cancer.”

One thing one is supposed to play down in Britain is one’s offspring. It is generally considered distasteful to praise one’s own children, which is less true in the United States. There are dubious as well as admirable motives for this reticence. The British do not praise their own children rather as they would not boast about their farmhouse in Provence, which implies that they regard their children as counting among their possessions. But at least it means that nobody would sport a notice in the back of their car reading “My Child is on the Honor Roll,” as some Americans do. More satirically-minded Britons might display notices reading “My Child is a Hooker” or “I Married an Incurable Alcoholic,” but “My Child is on the Honor Roll” is desperately, distinctively American. If you were caught making this kind of pathetic boast in Britain or Ireland, you would probably need to emigrate immediately, or at least have emergency cosmetic surgery to disguise your appearance. (Speaking of signs in cars, an effective way of alarming your neighbours if you live in an up-market suburb called, say, Sandyfield, is to drive around with a poster in the back window of your vehicle reading “Say No to Sandyfield Sewage Plant.” If you are looking to buy a cheaper house in the area or dispose of some particularly annoying neighbours, this should do the trick.)

When I hear Americans proudly recounting their children’s achievements, I make a point of telling them that I am training up my small daughter to be a pickpocket, and hope she will be adept enough at the trade to avoid joining her three elder brothers in jail. There are, however, plenty of Americans who share this distaste for drooling in public over their offspring. The positive side of such praise is that Americans are not afraid to encourage their children and boost their self-assurance. By and large, they are a supportive people. In working-class Britain, at least when I was growing up there, praising one’s children was thought to make them soft, and thus unfit for the tough life that lay ahead of them. It was the kind of soppy thing posh people did.

The Irish are particularly allergic to boasting, and tend to downplay their attainments. Until recently, Ireland was a fairly impoverished place, so that mentioning your villa in Umbria would have been thought tasteless when others were struggling to survive. It is because other people might be short of food that it is customary in Ireland even today to refuse the offer of a meal or even a cup of tea, and then be persuaded to accept. Truly heroic citizens might even refuse the offer of a Guinness. Britain, by contrast, has a history of affluence; but much of that wealth was bound up with its imperial power, and the nation’s ruling class was not slow to recognise that power is likely to produce a backlash if exercised too haughtily. This did not stop the British from torturing and massacring their colonial subjects from time to time, but they did so in a modest, unassuming kind of way, as though they were offering them a much-sought-after service.

Among the more emotionally constipated of Britons is the Duke of Edinburgh, who was once asked in the course of a television interview how he felt about having had to abandon a promising naval career to spend the rest of his days walking two paces behind his wife. “Feel about it?” barked the Duke. “I don’t go around psychoanalysing myself, you know.” It is not quite the response one would expect from a guest on
Oprah
. Introspection for the Duke is a form of illness. Aristocrats like him regard the whole notion of an inner life as a shameless middle-class self-indulgence. Rather than morbidly picking over your finer feelings, you just get on with things. The positive side of this ethic is a rather stiff kind of selflessness. The point is to be of service to others, not to lie around brooding and whining. The negative side is that since the Duke of Edinburgh seems to have about as much inner life as a fruit bat, courteously suppressing it is unlikely to prove much of a problem for him. Americans may hype their emotions, but at least they do not regard them as something to be kept under wraps, like a history of incest or a lunatic uncle.

Emotional reticence is hardly a quality of the U.S. media. In fact, Americans might find themselves astonished at the untheatrical behaviour of Scandinavian TV weather forecasters, who when the camera alights upon them are sometimes to be found with their heads buried shyly in their wall maps. They look as though they would prefer to be anywhere but in front of the public, and mutter their script as though they are reluctantly disclosing some dreadful news, which sometimes they are. No self-conscious joshing, heavy-handed humour or cavorting around for them. British TV weather forecasters, by contrast, tend to have an irritatingly cheerful bedside manner. They predict that the rain might not carry on for quite the whole of the summer in the tones of a doctor trying to console you with the news that the tumour is so far confined to only one of your kidneys.

Sentimentality

Overseas observers often feel that there is a compulsion in the States to get everything instantly out in the open. No doubt there is a streak of puritan confessionalism in this habit. But it is also part of the emotional forthrightness of Americans, in contrast to the shyness of the British. Other nations sometimes regard Americans as lacking in complex inner depths, which is of course a mistake. But the mistake is a significant one. It is not that Americans exist only on the surface, but that their surface is where their depths are supposed to be. They seem to have a more untroubled passage between inner and outer, a greater fluency in translating the one into the other, than Scots or Swedes. Puritans may find spectacle and razzmatazz distasteful, but this is not because these things are on the surface. It is because they are surfaces which fail to manifest any depths.

The shy and socially awkward, who are plagued by a gap between their internal and external worlds, probably fare less well in the United States than they do in, say, Ulster or Malaysia. Since the easy expressiveness of Americans is a great aid to social intercourse, it is mostly a virtue. The country values honesty, directness and spontaneity, which are not quite so high on Europe’s list of moral priorities. They are virtues to which Europeans tip their hats but fail to get excited about. At the same time, honesty and directness can involve the tiresome assumption that keeping things to yourself is morbid and unsociable. One should share one’s emotions as one should share one’s cookies. In a country which dislikes the idea of living in a house which is attached to someone else’s, one’s inner space is constantly at stake in the public sphere. In this view, whatever is unexpressed has no real existence. What is inside you is valid only if it is externalised. This is why foreign visitors to the United States can be astonished by how quickly two of its inhabitants can progress from meeting each other for the first time to exchanging steamy details of their sex lives.

It is partly because their feelings are more out in the open that Americans are more sentimental than the British. It is acceptable for them to indulge their emotions in public with a certain theatrical touch, which is less true of their transatlantic cousins. Almost all Oscars received by American actors need a thorough rub-down with a towel by the time they leave the stage. The British are sentimental about animals but not much else, while the Irish are scarcely sentimental at all. Perhaps the harshness of their history plays a part in this tough-mindedness. Irish children are notably more mature than British or American ones. Generally speaking, the Irish do not suppress emotion like the British, but they do not wallow in it either. European politicians are rarely to be found moist-eyed and broken-voiced, with a catch in the breath and a lump in the throat. Some of them are more likely to be found hurling each other across the debating chamber. American politicians, by contrast, are occasionally to be found sobbing in public, as are American judges, bishops, police chiefs, newscasters, and business executives. This is partly because American feelings are near the surface, but also because in the case of politicians, crying in public can be something of a vote-catcher.

Americans like their leaders to be human, a quality which one demonstrates by sobbing or saying something folksy. Being a republic means demanding a government which is in touch with everyday emotion. Americans tend to be suspicious of the aloof, clinical and impersonal. This is why U.S. popular culture almost always portrays crazed scientists, invading aliens and demonic psychopaths as speaking in sinisterly robotic tones. The nation is instinctively humanistic. Many American movies are about the conflict between an anonymous political or technological order and the rugged, warm-blooded individual. The opposition is in fact deceptive. Historically speaking, it was rugged individualism which gave rise to technocratic systems indifferent to human feeling.

Sentimentality and the Family

Sentimentalists tend to believe that the more emotion you display, the more human you are, but the reverse can be the case. I have seen concentration camp survivors in Germany reduce an American audience to tears with an account of their experience, while remaining impassive and level-voiced themselves. The idea that emotion is an adequate response to such horrors is absurd. They lie in a region as far beyond sentiment as the theory of relativity. Those who can sob and wail are the lucky ones. It may be that some American business types and politicians are sentimental because sentimentality is the emotional mode of those unaccustomed to genuine feeling. Rather as broad humour is the only kind of comedy appreciated by the humourless, so stagey, broad-brush emotion is the speciality of those who are not often called upon to cope with the subtle motions of the heart.

“Family,” as I noted earlier, is a mantra-like American word, guaranteed to evoke a flow of profit and a flood of warm feeling. To find this domestic piety in such a robustly Christian nation is odd, since the New Testament displays a marked hostility to the family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are a curious parody of one. As a child, Jesus wanders off to teach in the Temple, making it clear to his distraught parents that his public mission takes precedence over his domestic affections. He is careful to point out that his apparent father is not his real one. His parents do not seem to be among his immediate comrades, though his mother shows up at his execution and his brother James ran the church in Jerusalem (he, too, was later to be executed). When a woman in the crowd calls out a blessing on the womb that bore Jesus and the breasts that suckled him, he responds with an acerbic put-down.