Across the Pond (8 page)

The American tourist’s spirit of adventure seems unquenchable. Americans seem to have mental and physical resources quite beyond the shrunken capacities of Europeans. They will drive for days on end, for example, whereas the British need to stop every ten miles to picnic, throw up, exercise the dog or stroll aimlessly around. The fact that there is hardly anywhere in Britain to picnic does nothing to quench the picnicking zeal of its inhabitants. It would not occur to many Americans abroad not to experience as much as possible, whereas an Irish friend of mine once spent three weeks in Paris, a city he had never visited previously, without once leaving his hotel room. His general attitude to abroad was that once you had seen one bit of it, you had seen the lot. Cynics are those who feel much the same about humanity.

Despite America’s self-involvement, then, one should recall the insatiable curiosity about the rest of the world that so many of its citizens reveal. It is a desire which drives them to every nook and cranny of the globe, from Moroccan villages to Indonesian temples. This thirst for experience, so characteristic of American culture, shows up well when contrasted with British inertia. A good many of the British do not approve of abroad, whereas some Americans cannot get enough of it.

Nor is it true, as the stereotype has it, that they throw their weight around when they arrive in foreign parts. Far from being loud-mouthed and domineering, some Americans in Europe are more likely to smart under the sense that the natives regard them as flashy and dim-witted. They are sometimes quite right to suspect so. By and large, Americans abroad are a remarkably civil, courteous bunch, which is more than can be said for spewing, scrimmaging British football fans on the rampage in France or Italy. One might point out, however, that some of this spewing and scrimmaging springs from a curious embarrassment on the part of British working-class youths who feel culturally out of their depth away from home, and who react by smashing the place up, rather like a child who is out of control because he has lost his coordinates. Britain, too, is a notoriously insular nation. There are many senses in which it can rival the States in this respect. Ireland is smaller than Britain but much less insular, not least since it never had an empire. The most inward-looking nations are usually those with their gunboats in everyone else’s harbours. The Irish also needed to emigrate. For a long time, there have been many more millions of them living outside the country than in it.

The good news for Americans is that most of the world does not regard them as arrogant and thick-headed, though once upon a time it did. American military personnel stationed in Britain during the Second World War were handed a leaflet advising them that the natives expected them to “swank” (brag), and warning them not to. The bad news is that a lot of people see Americans not as thick-headed braggarts but as uncultivated ignoramuses. Ignorance is not the same as lack of intelligence. European attitudes to the United States typically mix a degree of admiration for its inventiveness and never-say-die spirit with a mildly patronising contempt for its culture. Many a formidable power has been both feared and mocked, and the United States is no exception. On the whole, ruling powers have been more tolerated than admired.

On American Loquacity

Americans are unflaggingly active, curious and loquacious. British academics who are asked what they are working on will tend to reply dismissively: “Oh, Gothic, vampires, that sort of thing.” They seem no more eager to discuss their research than they are to discuss their haemorrhoids. This is because it is thought bad form to jaw on about oneself and one’s work. I spent twenty years in an Oxford college without once hearing my colleagues discuss their work with each other in more than the most cursory way. It is also because the British are modest, and have much to be modest about. If you ask an American academic what he or she is working on, however, you should be sure to equip yourself with a folding chair, a flask of coffee and a thick wedge of sandwiches, since you are still likely to be there three hours later. It is not that Americans are immodest, simply enthusiastic. If you are trying to pick your way through the traffic on Fifth Avenue with an American graduate student at your side, he is bound to ask you what you think about hermeneutical phenomenology just as a taxi is about to toss both of you over its roof.

Behind this British reticence lurks the cult of amateurism, so deeply alien to the United States. One of Henry James’s American characters is unclear what the word “amateur” means, but suspects that it may be a European term for a broker or grain exporter. People who hold forth about their work are professionals, and professionals are not really gentlemen. Gentlemen leave earnestness to pastors and specialist knowledge to their chefs. The phrase “to talk shop” suggests that technical discussions are the province of tailors and barbers. Gentlemen are formidably cultivated, but they acquire their cultivation in a careless, off-hand, unlaborious way, as you might acquire a small lump on the back of the neck. To parade your knowledge would be as vulgar as to parade your genitals.

Besides, boring other people is a more grievous offence in Britain than it is in the States. Americans are concerned about sin, and the British about bad manners. It is alright in Britain to talk about serious matters as long as you also find a way to make them entertaining. “Amusing” is one of the most affirmative words in the gentleman’s vocabulary, and those who display this virtue can generally be forgiven for also being fraudsters or bigamists. As befits a puritan race, Americans tend to make a sharper distinction between what is serious and what is not. There is sometimes more need for a shift of tone to signal that what you are saying is meant to be frivolous, light-hearted or just plain silly.

THREE

Mortal Bodies and Immortal Minds

National Physique

An American student who once walked behind me on a college campus told me later that he knew I was from Britain by the way I walked. Perhaps he found my walk ironic, understated, reserved and self-effacing. I do not believe for a moment that this was a fantasy on his part. There is an American male style of walking, just as there is an English male one. A lot of young American men walk with a slightly hunched, ape-like, shambling gait, legs splayed but one foot turned inwards, as though a horse has just escaped from between their knees without their noticing. They walk as they talk: casual, loose and uncoordinated.

John Malkovich plays an eighteenth-century French nobleman in the movie
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, but moves like a twentieth-century American. American men are typically bigger and rangier than their British counterparts. This means that at American baseball games we have to be placed on the backs of burly, beer-swilling spectators so as to see what is going on. On a U.S. campus I generally feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, expecting one of the colossal youths around me to stoop down, scoop me up and perch me on his shoulder like a parrot. Everything in the States is on a more epic scale than in Britain, including its people.

Americans who come to live in Britain or Ireland sometimes undergo a gradual physical change. When they arrive, not least if they come from one of the dodgier parts of some large American city, they tend to leap several feet in the air if someone pads noiselessly up behind them on the sidewalk. After a while, they begin to relax, unravel their physical reflexes, reconstitute their nervous system, and take on a different kind of body. They cease to be horrified by the sight of sugar bowls on café tables, where the sugar lies open to all kinds of unspeakable infections. An adventurous few might even come to enjoy the delicacy known as black pudding, especially if you do not tell them beforehand that it consists of congealed pig’s blood. Some of them can be brought to confess that bathrooms are not really bathrooms at all, and that one does not stroll into a restroom to find people stacked in bunks sound asleep. They might even cease to shriek hysterically at the smell of cigarette smoke, though this usually takes a decade or so of intensive de-purification. There have been suggestions that this process could be speeded up by herding all visiting Americans into contamination camps, where they would be coated in cow shit and exposed to a range of non-lethal viruses in order to accustom them to the mind-shattering notion that germs and dirt are a regular part of everyday life. Europeans might receive exactly the opposite treatment when they land in New York.

Physical appearance in Britain is deeply conditioned by class. There is a certain kind of tall, stooped, willowy, long-faced, chinless, floppy-haired aristocrat who could not possibly be mistaken for a mechanic even if he were to wear oil-stained overalls and brandish a wrench. Centuries of fine food and selective breeding play their part in producing this physique, though so occasionally does a spot of incest. Hugh Grant could not possibly be from the working-class—not just on account of his accent, but because of his physiognomy. There is a working-class, North-of-England face which is different from a middle-class, South-of-England one. Jeremy Irons could not hail from anywhere north of Oxford, and Albert Finney is unlikely to come from the so-called Home Counties around London. Bob Hoskins looks like a Cockney as well as talking like one. Prince Charles could not be a Texan, though if the Texans wanted to take him in, there are those among us who would have no principled objection.

I was once on an escalator in the London Underground, puzzling yet again over signs reading “Dogs Must Be Carried,” and wondering whether I would be arrested for not clutching a spaniel to my chest, when I noticed a middle-aged man on the escalator opposite standing just behind a young soldier in uniform. The middle-aged man was stout and expensively dressed in a camel-hair overcoat, with swept-back grey hair and a rubicund countenance. Having eyed the soldier’s back for a few moments, he murmured, “Put your cap on, Private.” The soldier turned, glanced at him for no more than half a second, and replied, “Yes, sir.” He then took his cap from his pocket and put it on, and the middle-aged man fell into some good-humoured conversation with him about where he was stationed.

It was clear that the two men did not know each other. But it took the private only the blink of an eye to recognise that despite his civilian dress the man behind him was a high-­ranking army officer, and it took me only about the same time. It was not just his straight back, air of authority and imperious accent which gave him away. He had the face of a British colonel or major-general, rather as many Oxford and Cambridge academics have the mild, unused, ascetic faces of Oxford and Cambridge academics. He also had the voice of a high-ranking military officer, which in Britain is different from the voice of a banker or a bishop. If I myself had told the soldier to put his cap on, even though I looked fairly middle-class and was reasonably well dressed, his reply would no doubt have consisted of a couple of abrupt monosyllables.

It is sometimes claimed that Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland can identify one another visually. This, one would think, is the ultimate stereotyping fantasy. In fact, there is probably something to it. The two main religious groups in the region stem largely from different ethnic backgrounds. Catholics are for the most part of the same ethnic stock as the Irish to the south of them, whereas Protestants are mostly of Scottish provenance. A woman with jet black hair and blue eyes is likely to be a Catholic, while a stocky, sandy-haired man is probably a Protestant. Of course this does not apply across the board. There are sandy-haired Catholics and black-haired, blue-eyed Protestants, just as there are no doubt people who declaim Dante in Butte, Montana, and taxi drivers in Brooklyn who curl up with a volume of Goethe. But it serves as a rough guide to religious denomination. You can also tell the difference between a Protestant and a Catholic in Northern Ireland by noting the way they pronounce the letter
h
. The former says “aitch” while the latter says “haitch.”

Postmodernists tend to be uneasy with this kind of talk. It seems to play down culture while playing up nature and biology, a realm of which postmodernism is unduly nervous. Cultural style is allowed a part in physical appearance, but not genetics. Humanists have always had it in for science, and this is simply the latest phase of that long prejudice. The fact is, however, that the human body, pierce, paint and pummel it as one will, is a given. We do not choose our bodies, and cannot trade them in as we can our trombones. For a civilisation like the United States, which places so much value on choice, control and the constructive will, fleshliness is thus something of a scandal. It seems to be at odds with our self-fashioning. America is unhappy with things that are simply given rather than strenuously created. They smack too much of destiny, which is not among its favourite notions. (Providence is another matter.) This is why the nation has sometimes been reluctant to admit that the land was there before its people got to work on it. It is also why reconstructing the body has become such a heavy industry in today’s United States.

Many Americans look different from Europeans, and not just because they wear check shirts or bright pink trouser suits. Simply by their physical appearance, Eisenhower and Billy Graham could have been nothing but American. The same is true of Julia Roberts and Andie MacDowell, though not, ironically, of Sarah Palin. Richard Nixon looked intensely American, and so does John McCain, but the same is not true of Jack Nicholson, Hillary Clinton or Harrison Ford. Mitt Romney looks more American than Mount Rushmore. To some extent, it is possible to distinguish male Democratic politicians from male Republican ones. On the whole, Republicans look more stereotypically American than Democrats, a fact which may stoke the prejudice that the latter are less patriotic than the former. In general, the squarer the chin, the more likely you are to oppose tax increases. A few more square-jawed, fresh-faced, steely-eyed recruits to the ranks of the Democrats might boost their cause immeasurably.

How you look is vitally important in American politics. Experiments show that even young children can pick the winners of political elections on the basis of photographs alone. Who cares if you believe in nuking Iran as long as your teeth sparkle? A recent Irish prime minister who bore a distinct resemblance to a toad would not have made it to Capitol Hill even as an intern.

There is an ideal of feminine beauty in the States which is distinctly non-European. It favours high cheekbones, thin faces and very wide mouths. Quite a few famous female movie stars in the States look like this. The faces of American women can seem over-expressive to an outsider’s eye, with the flesh too tightly moulded to the feeling. American women are also the only group of human beings in the world who sometimes nod as they speak, and then continue to nod for a second or two after they have fallen silent.

Vile Bodies

Physically speaking, American tourists in the centre of London or Dublin are easily identifiable. For one thing, they are usually the most tastelessly dressed of overseas visitors. Many of the men wear tartan, lumberjack-like shirts, which are so common that one suspects they must be issued to all prospective male tourists by the federal government. Perhaps Washington also makes wearing them compulsory, since it is hard to see why else anyone would do so. The old men wear their trousers too high and have bleached, scaly, lizard-like skin, of a kind only ever seen on elderly American males. Shuffling along in twos and threes, they look like a leper colony on a day out.

Tourists from the States also stand out because a good many of them tend to hobble and waddle, being overweight and unused to walking. In fact, by the end of a day in Stratford or Edinburgh, they may well have done more hobbling and waddling than they have done back home for the past ten years. Like other tourists, Americans arrive equipped with a cunning device which saves them from having to look at what they are standing in front of. This is known as a camera or cell phone. Perhaps tourists from different parts of the globe could simply send their cameras and cell phones by mail to various overseas tourist boards, who would take snapshots on their behalf for a modest fee and send them back. This would save prospective visitors a good deal of time, money and painful hobbling.

One of the many paradoxes of the United States is that it is both fleshly and ascetic, worldly and otherworldly. The nation is as metaphysical as it is materialistic. The will which drives you to accumulate goods also detaches you from them. It does so because all such goods are finite, and therefore imperfect. If the will gorges itself upon them, it does so with its gaze fixed steadfastly on infinity. There is something profoundly religious about consumer capitalism, which is one reason why the United States is among the most godly places on earth, as well as one of the most profane.

The balance between engagement and detachment, however, is a hard one to strike. In the States, it tends to tip on the one side towards total immersion, as people triumphantly consume seventy-eight hot dogs in two minutes flat, and on the other side towards a withdrawal from the flesh altogether. In a familiar narcissism, the body becomes an object you carry around with you like some priceless, sickeningly fragile vase. What to put inside it becomes as fraught an issue as what to put in your will. Many of the well-off eat sparingly, which is the only bond they have with the poor. You care for your body not because you love it, but as you might attend to some temperamental beast which is capable of turning on you and savaging you at any moment. There are those who react to being offered an aspirin as though they are being handed a tarantula.

Eating and drinking are acts of transgression, as the purity of one’s inner space risks being polluted by a messy material world. The body acts as the symbolic threshold between the two. Poised ambiguously between the two realms, it is fully at home in neither. The body is an ambiguous zone in any case. If it is what binds us to others, it is also what walls us off from them. You can let it run to seed, secure in the knowledge that the real you is buried deep within it (“What matters is what’s inside you”). Or you can punish and purify it by running thirty miles a day, converting it into a steel-hard instrument of your will. Either way, the true self is disembodied. It has no truck with the degenerate flesh. The real you is either so deep within the body as to be no part of it, or it manipulates it from a lofty distance.

On Purity and Poison

At worst, a fear of transgression can result in the misery and occasional tragedy of eating disorders, though there are many other ways of accounting for such ailments. It is not, of course, that all those afflicted by such disorders are possessed by the manic will. It is rather that, as Freud knew, there is a psychopathology of everyday life, in which the behaviour of those who are ill and unhappy serves to write large the malaise of a whole civilisation. Western civilisation as a whole has a pathological relation to the material world, of which food and the body are palpable signs. The metaphor of invasion is to be found everywhere in America, from eating to Al Qaeda. An American physician I know was taught in medical school that the way to make real money was to “invade the body.” What the British know as burglary is sometimes called home invasion in the United States.