Picked-Up Pieces (9 page)

When did this character differentiate itself from the German character, from the Germans who cannot go anywhere except as a gang? Geographical insularity, relatively early consolidation as a nation, an underlying Celtic pawkishness, a dash of French bitters via the Normans—whatever its cause, its enforcer is the public school system that tears a lad from his mother’s still-foaming breast and plunges him into ice water. To those prophets distressed by the possibility of test-tube conception and mechanized rearing, the British national character should be a great reassurance. After the shock of his education, nothing can shake an Englishman. True, he might emerge a little woozy, and mistake a sports car for a woman, or a birch rod for a mother’s kiss. But in this kingdom of bachelors, hobbyists, and pet-lovers, a little amiable confusion is wisely allowed. Recently I took my innocent children to a British movie about a man who fell in love with an otter. Our hero is first seen morosely strolling London’s streets with one of those Nero haircuts that signify a queer as surely as a dangling handbag used to signify a prostitute. He spies an otter in a pet-shop window, buys it, and more or less marries it. For their honeymoon they go to remotest, most picturesque Scotland, where the otter (chummily dubbed “Mitch”) eats eels in the cove. To make the abnormality of these arrangements unignorable, the plot provides a Scots lass who, though pretty as a picture and loyal to a
fault, is not only denied physical satisfaction by the hero but is degradingly compelled to feign fondness for his hirsute, quadruped, amphibian little consort. Providence is not entirely a-doze, however; a burly Scots ditch-digger dispatches “Mitch” with a shovel. The man with the Nero hairdo never stops mooning, and the fade-out shows him penning the first lines of a kind of
In Memoriam
for Mitch, just like Tennyson for Hallam. Now, I suppose such a bestial film might be made in other countries, but only in England would it be given a U rating.

English Women
. They are wonderful. They remind me of, in America, those tall, precocious boys of education-oriented households who are given rooms of their own and plenty of time for model airplanes. Only ample neglect brings such dreamy, disdainful poise. They are masterful flirts and have the miraculously steady hands of rhinoceros hunters and of women who apply eye make-up first thing in the morning. Shaw doubted that England deserved its great men; I wonder if it deserves its women. But what land does? “You Americans,” said Lady Pynchme, “you are so romantic. You all think your little dolly is Helen of Troy.” “You mean,” said I, startled, “she’s not? What, then, is she?” “Simply a jolly good lay,” was the answer. Two things shocked me here: the dog-food ads on television and the language of the upper classes.

Great Men
. The British seem to prefer, in leaders, rogues or men with a streak of the rogue. Henry VIII, Charles II, Nelson, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill. If a rogue is unattainable, the next best thing is a nonentity. An earnest, clever man like Harold Wilson is universally distrusted.

Class Warfare
. The only phenomenon in the United States comparable to the catting, at an English party, between an
arriviste
working-class intellectual and a swinging duchess is the banter, at a Manhattan conclave, between a liberated Negro and a liberalized lady of Southern birth. The hostile tension of sexual attraction. Maxim of human behavior: we want to fuck what we fear. The primordial drive toward cross-fertilization.

All those “pleases” and “thank you’s,” which the fresh visitor mistakes for elaborate courtesy, in fact prove, like the chirps of birds, to be warnings
establishing territoriality. Those fierce fences and high brick walls, sometimes enclosing scarcely a square yard of cement. The passion for separation and class distinction leads to absurdities: a fourpenny post it costs money to delay, an A classification at the cinema that compels parents to accompany their children to puerile films.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

The beheading of Charles I, the repeal of the Corn Laws: the only times an
idea
has entered English politics. A king easier to restore than foreign markets.

America is a land whose center is nowhere; England one whose center is everywhere. In America every town has its Chamber of Commerce; here every shire has been the site of a poem.

Christianity has been disposed of by giving the clergy a social status, a part in the pageant. After Trollope’s novels, there can be no apocalypse. An odd number of steeples with their tips cut off, like daggers made safe for children to play with.

Americans love England. For every tulip that comes up in Hyde Park, a tourist lands at Heathrow. I have not spoken to one American resident in London, not counting my eight-year-old daughter, who wouldn’t like to stay. And there are thousands, thousands of those mysterious men “in oil,” with their haircuts transparently cleaving to their skulls, with their expensively dressed wives, whose very good legs and taut figures are disappointingly capped by tan, hard, rather cross faces. (What do we
do
to our women, I ask myself, that is so brutalizing? What happens to our magnificent teen-age girls, with their clothes allowances, their fuzzy sweaters, their convertibles and batons and “steadies,” to give them as adults such a bitter, pushy narrowness and voices from which all melody has been squeezed?) America is uncomfortable now. On the continent fascism or anarchy reigns. Here things are civilized, cheap, pretty, educational, clean, green. Here the police and the poor are polite. The bully of the seven seas is in danger of becoming a nation of gigolos and tour
guides. In the newspapers, imbalance of trade and impending bankruptcy; in the restaurants, girls dressed like houris and men with nugget cuff-links.

Living in Regent’s Park
. During a candle-lit dinner there comes a moment when one does not know whether a lion in the zoo, or the stomach of one’s table partner, has just growled.

MINORITY REPORT

My beloved land,	1
here I sit in London	2
overlooking Regent’s Park	3
overlooking my new Citroën both green,	4
exiled by success of sorts.	5
I listen to Mozart	6
in my English suit and weep,	7
remembering a Swedish film.	8
But it is you,	9
really you I think of:	10
your nothing streetcorners	11
your ugly eateries	12
your dear barbarities	13
and vacant lots	14
(Br’er Rabbit demonstrated:	15
freedom is made of brambles).	16
They say over here you are choking	17
to death on your cities and slaves,	18
but they have never smelled dry grass,	19
smoked Kools in a drugstore,	20
or pronounced a flat “a,” an honest “r.”	21
Don’t read your reviews,	22
A M E R I C A:	23
you are the only land.	24

Line 2
. At 59, Cumberland Terrace, N.W.1, where I can no longer be found. In a sense I never was found there. For nine months in England I felt like a balloon on too long a tether.

Lines 6–8
. The Mozart would be Piano Concerto No. 21, in C Major, and the Swedish film, of course,
Elvira Madigan
. The English suit is by Cyril A. Castle, 42 Conduit Street.