Sorry!
Page 20
Sooner or later we must allow the word eccentricity into this picture of Englishness. By it we should understand an obstinate independence; or, if we reduce the word to its etymological basis, a refusal to be centrally regulated, a divergence from a rock-solid centre. The English eccentric is his own rock-solid centre: an island man who is himself an island. It is this quality, in some views, that differentiates the English from their less defiantly individual continental counterparts. As Christopher Hitchens remarked: ‘The English have long been convinced that they are admired and envied by the rest of the world for their eccentricities alone. Many … are now more durable as touristic notions than as realities.’5 Anglophilia means loving not the English, but the more archaic fragments of the English past. In the US, arguably the most Anglophile country of all, the British monarchy is generally treated as if the stuff of fairy tale, and first-time American visitors to the much mythologized attractions of London, Windsor, Bath and Oxford are often dismayed to find that the natives aren’t elegant and noble-spirited or even necessarily house-trained.
The touristic notions to which Hitchens referred are a staple of books about Englishness. Here are some statements taken from The English Inside Out, written in the early 1960s by Pearl Binder, a colourful presence on radio and TV. ‘Understatement is the trademark of the English.’ ‘Cleverness is distrusted in England.’ ‘The English people … don’t like being pushed.’ ‘English people like efficiency only so long as it can be played like a game.’ ‘England badly needs more festivals, more occasions to dress up for.’ ‘“Home.” This curious English word has no equivalent in any other language.’ ‘England, as all the world knows, is really a man’s country, no matter how gallant and able our women.’ ‘Even an artificial dog in England can spark off an orgy of protective tenderness.’6
Better known than Binder’s book is the earlier How to Be an Alien (1946), the work of George Mikes, who was born in Hungary in 1912 and settled in Britain in the 1940s. ‘The English have no soul,’ declared Mikes; ‘they have the understatement instead.’ ‘In England it is bad manners to be clever.’ Et cetera – except that Mikes, being a foreigner and inclined to see the comical side of Englishness, is more perceptive. Thus ‘in England they hardly ever lie, but they would not dream of telling you the truth’ and ‘An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’7 Mikes identified queuing as the national passion of a mostly dispassionate people. To this day, the queue seems the perfect example of the tacit understandings that inform English ideas of decency and democracy. As Mikes recognized, the English were adept, where no formal queue existed, at improvising one. The individuals in the queue may be thoroughly miserable about being stuck there, but their resentments are likely to simmer, looking very much like patience, rather than erupting into confrontation.
Before Mikes, a Dutchman called G. J. Renier scored a hit with The English: Are They Human?, which appeared in 1931. Renier’s was one of a slew of 1930s guides to English character written by foreigners; others were the work of the Belgian poet Emile Cammaerts, the German visitor Karl Silex, and Félix de Grand’Combe (really Félix Boillot), a French army officer. More extreme was another German, the geographer Ewald Banse, who wrote that the English were very much the same as Lower Saxon peasants, fiery behind their cold exteriors and graspingly materialistic.8
G. J. Renier’s book, which chimed with the period’s shrill mix of Anglophobia and Anglophilia, was perceptive and clinical. He wrote of very much the same things that Binder and Mikes later discussed, noting that ‘Throughout the day, the Englishman performs acts and pronounces words, not because they have a significance in themselves, but because they happen to be the acts and the words which, for one reason or another, it is deemed right to perform and to pronounce.’ And later: ‘The English used to practise all the little gestures and courtesies of continentals[,] which their nineteenth-century descendants gave up because they tend to diminish the distance between the individual and the outside world.’ His summary view of the English, hardly a surprise to us, was that they were ‘unintellectual, restricted, stubborn, steady, pragmatic, silent and reliable’.9 In light of the popularity of Renier’s book and those like it, another apposite generalization, itself edging towards cliché, would be that the English enjoy hearing themselves genially run down: it provides an opportunity for defiance or apology.
The desire to make forecasts about Englishness, or itemize its vices and virtues, is persistent, even if unfashionable. It fits in with the very English love of the more poignant sort of whimsy, as well as with the English appetite for collecting. This is a culture in which the true experts are often hobbyists. Pleasures are small. Many of them have a touch of the morbid. Today’s eagerness to load up on luxury is a habit (an addiction or affliction) learned from America. Unrestrained consumption is at odds with the traditional English stoicism and cult of modesty. George Orwell wrote in 1941 that ‘We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans.’ Such besottedness reflects what he called the essential ‘privateness’ of English life. ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official.’10
The ‘privateness’ that Orwell diagnoses means that shared space is shared only in quite a limited sense. Imagine you are in a museum, for instance. Do you touch the exhibits? Where do you eat your sandwiches? Do you strike up conversation with other visitors? Rules of place, which tend to be learned unconsciously, are claimed as ingredients of public order – strategies for avoiding chaos and all the costs associated with it – but they also preserve privacy within public space. A humdrum example is the seating in restaurants: although refectory-style tables may be found in some (which recreate the busy atmosphere of a canteen), we generally expect when we eat in public to be afforded a good deal of privacy. I am likely to feel uncomfortable if the tables are very close together, and adjacent diners will be offended if I touch any of the items on their table.
Victorian travellers to America were appalled to discover that they were expected to take their meals in a room shared with people they had never met. Appalled, too, when requests for privacy were met with derision or bafflement. We may now laugh at this kind of thing, but we all have notions of what might count as unwelcome encroachment on our personal space. In a café, do you vault into the conversation that’s happening at the next table? How do you react when someone sits down opposite you on a train and proceeds to devour an elaborate picnic? Do you object if someone touches you to get your attention while you are waiting for service at a bar? Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners states that an essential part of civilized living is ‘every person’s right to privacy, even in public’; consequently, ‘distracting behaviour of any kind – speaking loudly, shouting in the street, excessive gesticulation, whistling, singing, playing radios, or arguing – breaches good manners’.11
We carry around with us what I think of as an invisible hula-hoop, a portable boundary marker or buffer that others cannot see but are (we hope) able to sense. It seems to prevent our autonomy being taken away from us and to keep us from being exposed to an excess of stimuli. The hula-hoop, or bubble if you prefer, expands and contracts according to our mood and environment: it is bigger when I am using a cashpoint than when I am in the mosh pit at a rock concert. Even at its most contracted, it is bigger than I am. All of us expect a modicum of privacy on public transport or a crowded beach. We expect it when we are shopping, too. Do you look pointedly at the contents of someone else’s shopping cart? Do you point out to another shopper that he has selected a bruised bunch of bananas? Do you say, ‘You don’t want to buy all that processed shit you’ve got there’? It is normal to be interested in what other shoppers are buying, and normal also to make a point of averting your gaze from them.
More than a hundred years ago, the critic George Slythe Street called for ‘absolute sile
nce’ in the hottest rooms at Turkish baths ‘so that languorous poetry may lightly fan our brains’; he proposed that a special code be drawn up for those who frequented them, and any broken rule ‘should be tattooed on the offender’s back’.12 The specific terms may seem bizarre, and the appetite for languorous poetry may sound fey, yet the spirit is one we understand: people who pierce the skin of our privacy are regarded not just with distaste, but with violence.
The desire for privacy is not distinctively human. It appears that all species possess mechanisms with which they define the space that individuals occupy: what’s too close, and what’s too far. If you pack rats or rabbits into an unusually tight space, they become sadistic and even murderous (or suicidal). Animal sensitivity to territory, trespass and distance plays an obvious part in breeding, raising young, maintaining health and fostering a stimulating kind of sociability. Social life involves episodes of companionship and moments of reserve, the rewards of interaction and those of restraint. We fear isolation, but we also fear antisocial curiosity – which seems harder to prevent. In a classic study of notions of freedom, Alan Westin argues that it is the mark of a totalitarian society that it favours surveillance more than privacy, whereas in a liberal democracy the balance will be tilted towards ‘strong citadels of individual and group privacy’.13
Wanting to keep somewhat apart from others hardly makes bonhomie impossible. But we are suspicious of people whose bonhomie feels sticky: we recognize it as a substitute for real involvement, and automatically wonder if it is a means of compensating for some deficit. The word bonhomie was imported from French in the nineteenth century, and it has always been tinged with an air of the ridiculous or the forced, a hint of English aversion to French affectation – and also of upper-class French aversion to less patrician values, Jacques Bonhomme being before the Revolution a nickname for the lesser sort.14 The related adjective bonhomous has never gained much acceptance, as is reflected in the alternative and tellingly nervy ways in which it has been spelled: bonhommous and even bonhommious. The closest English synonym for bonhomie is somewhere between ‘good nature’ and ‘good fellowship’; the French word was adopted to fill a gap, but the gap wasn’t quite as big as was imagined – wasn’t, and isn’t.
The urge to secure a private space even while appearing to participate in public life is apparent also in the affection for clubs. Some of these are grand, others modest, but all are furnished with protocols and rituals of access, their ambience at once a re-creation and an evasion of the domestic. They need not offer anything very special by way of facilities or refreshment. The food in so-called gentlemen’s clubs is either awful or reassuringly old-fashioned, and less lofty clubs often resemble bad hotels, complete with unsmiling staff, antique plumbing and improbably incommodious furniture. Many of these clubs continue to admit only male members. The clubmen cherish the particular comradeship that this fosters, which calls to mind the single-sex boarding schools they once attended (or wish they had attended). Such exclusiveness is typically represented by clubs not as a choice they are actively pursuing, but as a function of nebulous historical forces.
However, privacy is now widely treated neither as an ideal nor even as a social norm. A lot of what would once have been kept private is loudly proclaimed. You have only to pick up a newspaper or magazine to read famous people reciting intimate details of their sexual fantasies, family life and finances. This is not to say that the desire for privacy has evaporated. Rather, our expectations have blurred, as the division between what people want to make public and what they wish to keep private has become unclear.
In the 1890s the German architect Hermann Muthesius, writing about English houses, expressed surprise that the English screened their homes using hedges, which ‘very often serve the practical purpose of a protective fence’.15 In his own country this was forbidden. The formal English hedge seemed, and still seems, a pleasantly verdant means of enclosure, yet also a battleground, for one person’s idea of necessary privacy is another’s of obstruction, a selfish and unsightly encroachment on amenity. What’s more, the moment a hedge has been established as a safety barrier, there is curiosity about what lies on the other side. Hedges, as planted and maintained by English householders, are at once defensive and provocative, a request for privacy but also an assertion that their proprietors have something they wish to keep from view.
This capacity for being both genteel and defiant perplexes outsiders. Yet, puzzling though it may be, it is less fascinatingly strange than the English attitude to abroad. There is a tendency among those deep in love with foreignness to squirm when they are in its midst, to treat their adventures either as a bit of a joke or as an activity with a particular pretext, and to boast clinically about where they have been, as if sticking pins in a map on the kitchen wall. There is a goading, counterintuitive interest in the claim made in 1918 by the poet T. S. Eliot, an American by then based in England, that since the exploits of his fellow poets Lord Byron and Walter Savage Landor almost a hundred years before, ‘no Englishman appears to have profited much from living abroad’.16 With that in mind we now turn to an English woman whose travels, in America, enabled her to profit – financially, even if in no other respect.
17
Fanny Trollope and the domestic manners of Americans
‘A single word indicative of doubt, that anything … in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.’
These damning words come from The Domestic Manners of the Americans, a two-volume work published in 1832 by Frances Trollope, commonly known as Fanny. An industrious and sociable bluestocking who embraced liberal political causes, Trollope was also a sharp satirist, whose vitriol earned her the nickname Old Madam Vinegar and etched her name on the consciousness of Americans. In Domestic Manners she observed a society that, unlike Britain with its careful gradation of privilege, seemed all bustle and impatience and affray.
Fanny Trollope is important because, writing for an audience who had with few exceptions not been to America or contemplated going there, she established a sense of what that country and its inhabitants were like. Domestic Manners introduced a generation of Britons to the quirks of American idiom, and created idiom of its own, for the verb to trollopize, roughly meaning ‘to abuse the American nation’, acquired some currency. Although there is more to the book than a cavalcade of slurs, the abuse is plentiful, and it is worth noticing, because, while a huge amount has since changed, Trollope’s hostility is of a kind we will straightaway recognize. It is the sort of hostility that is often still directed at Americans – but also now at the Chinese and at Indians. In each case the reproof and disdain stem from fear of a civilization that is flourishing.
Trollope matters to the story of English manners because she articulated – before it was common to do so – a fear of American influence. That fear remains. English abhorrence of Americanisms, in both language and behaviour, expresses a shaky sort of confidence in the purity of English diction and deportment. Trollope was in little doubt that English manners were the best. Yet there was doubt about whether they could prevail, and, as she complains about her experience of American manners, it is clear that she is thinking, ‘If it’s happening here, could it happen elsewhere?’ Could Americans’ depravities take root in Britain? Could an aristocracy based on money replace the established British aristocracy? Would Britain eventually fall victim to a clumsy cult of equality, of a sort that in America made it possible for a slaughterhouse to be put up next to a smart family home? In America, she claimed, ‘the moral sense is on every point blunter than with us’. Harking back to the age of chivalry, and invoking Edmu
nd Burke’s imagery of tradition (‘the unbought grace of life’), she reflected that ‘this knightly sensitiveness of honourable feeling is the best antidote to the petty soul-degrading transactions of everyday life’, and ‘the total want of it, is one reason why this free-born race care so very little for the vulgar virtue called probity.’
Trollope sailed for America in November 1827. She travelled with her son Henry and her two daughters Cecilia and Emily. Her destination was Nashoba, a Tennessee community run by Frances Wright, a feminist reformer who had left her native Scotland to pursue utopian projects. Nashoba was intended to prepare slaves for emancipation – and for new lives in Liberia and Haiti. On arrival, it became clear that the commune was ravaged by malaria, and Trollope, regretting this ‘maddening misadventure’, moved to Cincinnati, which was at that time the fastest-growing city in America. There she came up with several schemes to support herself and her brood, including a bazaar for fancy goods (locally known as ‘Trollope’s Folly’) and a couple of shows at the city’s Western Museum. She was there for two years, then travelled for a year, and returned to England in 1831.
The fruit of the three and a half years she had spent abroad was 600 pages of scribblings, which she turned into Domestic Manners. The book caused outrage in America and mirth everywhere else. Its success was immense (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ she wrote to her son Tom), and she would capitalize on it delightedly, producing books in a similar vein about the Belgians and the Austrians.
It was Trollope’s view of the Americans and their country that made a lasting impression. She pictured her arrival in the country not as a glorious or even curious moment of discovery, but as a descent via the Mississippi Delta into murk and mud. Arriving at Cincinnati, she found a town ‘about the size of Salisbury’ but without any of its charms; pigs and their stink were everywhere. Yet the company aboard a Mississippi steamboat was worse even than that of hogs. This, to be sure, was a country very different from her own: ‘Everything English is stigmatized as out of fashion – English material, English fashions, English accent, English manner, are all terms of reproach,’ and if a woman was described as looking English this was meant as ‘the cruellest satire’.