Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  After Mr. Hart gave me an inscribed copy of this book in the summer of 1987, I turned its pages with interest. My interest was undiminished when I realized that I had read parts of the work before. For example, at the opening of the fourth chapter Hart gave an account of a conversation with one of his Dartmouth Review colleagues, a man named Keeney:

  “The problem with modern education is that you never know how ignorant some people are,” Keeney said. “It’s not that students are stupid. In fact, many have a worldly surface. But suddenly the crust breaks and you find yourself in a bottomless pit of chaos.”

  In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh has the old Farm Street confessor Father Mowbray observe wearily:

  The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. These young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface and then the crust breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

  As I reviewed the pages further, I found more echoes of the same work. Still describing the embattlement of his young conservative co-thinkers, Hart recalled a certain Jones:

  Jones and I often went to Mass together. Jones seemed to spend an awful lot of time in the confessional. Whatever he said to Monsignor Nolan through the grille, his confessions must have been memorable, as the silver-haired priest always emerged from the booth afterward with an amused look on his face.

  Or as Anthony Blanche had put it so well in Brideshead, remembering the boyhood of Sebastian Flyte at Eton:

  We used to go to Mass together. He used to spend such a time in the confessional, I used to wonder what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at least he never got punished. Perhaps he was just being charming through the grille.

  I was rather touched by Hart’s reaction when I teased him about this source of inspiration. “Brídeshead Revisited,” he said with some gravity, “was the stylebook upon which my generation modeled itself.” Under further teasing, he conceded that some of his generation were going less by the novel than by the celebrated television series shown on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1981, at the dawn of the Reagan era.

  The Masterpiece Theatre Sunday evening debauch of Englishness is one of the standbys and continual referents for students of Anglophilia and its American mystique. When Alistair Cooke assumes the leather armchair, the free association begins and Englishness takes on its varied guises and incarnations: the civilized country house; the strained but decent colonial civil servant; the regimental mess; the back-to-the-wall wartime coolness under fire; the stratified but considerate social system; the eccentric but above all literate milieu of London in assorted moods and epochs.

  As the cameras roam the room before discovering Mr. Cooke, they linger upon marble busts, oil paintings, carefully bound first editions, and sporting and military prints. As an additional touch for the transmission of John le Carré’s The Perfect Spy, with its boarding schools, racecourses, and fog-sodden country scenes, a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen was placed on the wall behind Mr. Cooke’s perennially reassuring features. Tom Wolfe, whose satirical attitude toward the cult of England is well known, once drew attention to the fact that Masterpiece Theatre is subsidized by Mobil Oil. He could have emphasized the irony of a giant corporation which had grown fat on the eclipse of Britain’s position in the Middle East, but as an archconservative and nativist he chose rather to dub PBS “Petroleum’s British Subsidiary.”

  On the occasion of the showing of Brideshead Revisited, Mr. Cooke ceded the leather armchair to William F. Buckley. There was more irony in this than might have been thought—more irony even than in Benjamin Hart and his cohort of moralistic young “family values” warriors, modeling themselves on the doings of a fictional group of English upper-crust bisexual alcoholics at the close of the First World War.

  Shortly before the showing of Brideshead, Mr. Buckley had printed a defense of his own close relations with Evelyn Waugh, and a reply to the detractors and mockers of those relations, in the National Review of November 14, 1980. His indignation had been aroused by a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Letters written by John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith had made much of the fact that in 1960 Waugh wrote to his old schoolmate and friend Tom Driberg as follows:

  Can you tell me: did you in your researches come across the name of Wm F. Buckley Jr., editor of a New York, neo-McCarthy magazine named National Review? He has been showing me great and unsought attention lately and your article made me curious. Has he been supernaturally “guided” to bore me? It would explain him.

  As Edmund Wilson had noted in his favorable review of Scoop, the word “bore” is one of the deadliest in the English lexicon, and one reserved by Waugh as an ultimate deterrent. (“The story of William Boot comes to its climax when the grown-up public-school boy faces down the Communist boss of Ishmaelia, who is trying to get him off the scene while a revolution takes place. ‘Look here, Dr Benito,’ said William. ‘You’re being a bore. I’m not going.’ ”) Stung by its employment in connection with himself, Mr. Buckley ransacked the correspondence. He had written to Waugh in 1960, inviting him to reconsider some published criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy and to think about contributing to National Review at “a guarantee of $5,000 a year for a piece every few weeks, of two thousand words. That is higher pay by far than we have given before, higher than what we have paid to Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Whittaker Chambers . . .”

  Waugh’s reply to this enticing offer (more money than Whittaker Chambers, he may not have appreciated, was the highest favor the magazine could bestow) was rather churlish. “Until you get much richer (which I hope will be soon) or I get much poorer (which I fear may be sooner) I am unable to accept.” Buckley persisted, sending Waugh a free copy of his book McCarthy and His Enemies and enclosing a review of Waugh’s latest novel. The review was by Joan Didion, who in those days wrote for National Review. Waugh’s reply was even more de haut en bas:

  Thank you for sending me the proof of the preface to the new edition of your book on Senator McCarthy.

  The only correction I would suggest is that it is improper to call Bertrand Russell “Lord Bertrand Russell,” a style only used by the younger sons of Dukes and Marquesses. He is properly called either Earl Russell or Lord Russell.

  Having delivered this piece of what his admirers would rather tiresomely call “vintage Waugh,” he closed with another two sentences of near-pure condescension:

  Please thank Miss Didion for her kind review. I could not understand the opening, but the rest of her article showed her to be a most agreeable young lady.

  In later exchanges with an indefatigable Buckley, Waugh said things that one is surprised to see Buckley reprinting. “At your best you remind me of Belloc; at your second best of Randolph Churchill.” This is better than being called a bore, but not by nearly enough. Yet Buckley was so determined to show the increase in the warmth of the correspondence that he omitted no detail. And Waugh did finally contribute a piece to the National Review, at a rate of payment not disclosed. It was a review of Garry Wills’s book on Chesterton. (“Mr. Wills’s literary style . . . is not uniformly bad. Indeed, again and again he shows himself capable of constructing a grammatical, even an elegant, sentence.”)

  In 1958, Harold Isaacs—who had, incidentally, been one of the few Americans to witness the British restoration of the French Empire in Vietnam in 1945—published an extremely influential book called Scratches on Our Minds. His ostensible subject was India and China, but his theme was the subliminal mastery that is exerted on consciousness by certain literary, historical, cultural, and emotional images. Isaacs found that images of this sort, at once inchoate and durable, were important at the level of decision making in government, as well as among elites in journalism, business, and the academy. They formed part of the common stock of allusion and reference—one might call it the unacknowledged legislation— which underlay the ways in which people thought and responded, and the ways in which they made up their
minds.

  The English connection to America—the “special relationship”— and the competing strains of Anglophobia and Anglophilia are at bottom a matter of “scratches on the mind.” The scratches are more numerous and wider and deeper than in any comparable case, and educated persons can debate them with some background. Thus a writer like Evelyn Waugh can be a matter for some disputation and analysis, and a figure of some importance, for two such widely separated commentators and essayists as Edmund Wilson and William Buckley. He can also provide a kind of guidance and suasion to a generation that never knew him, and which heroically fails to get his point.

  Mr. Wilson was in very many ways the product of an English education, as that term is classically understood, and Mr. Buckley actually underwent a brief incarceration in an English boarding school (from which he wrote a pompous letter to King George V reminding him of the obligation of the British Crown to repay its war debt to America). Mr. Buckley’s style, whether in print or on the small screen, is regularly described by both admirers and critics as “Anglicized,” a description which most English residents in America find mildly risible but which testifies to a definite “scratch on the mind” in the association of certain manners with a certain grammar and vocabulary. Mr. George Will, one of the products of the Buckley forcing house, takes care to have himself photographed for publicity purposes with a neatly folded copy of the London Times on a breakfast tray beside his desk, which is a scratch of a kind also.

  The scratch on the mind is of its nature hard to identify or to classify, but there seems very little doubt that it has to do, in this case, with different definitions of the word “class.” In America, class means style, presence, heft, glamour, taste, charm, wealth, poise, moxie, ambition, achievement, and what you will. In England, where to “have class” may also mean all or at any rate most of those things, it carries the further implication of anything that may be envied, or that cannot be faked, or that can be recognized more easily than defined. But it also means, famously, something that can be defined: hierarchy, snobbery, discrimination, stratification, and the hereditary principle.

  (To go back a paragraph or two, this is why Mr. Buckley was entirely wasting his time in trying to interest Evelyn Waugh in the cause of Senator McCarthy. Waugh may have been sympathetic to Franco, and may have derided Auden and Isherwood as “Parsnip and Pimpernel” when they exchanged their modish Communism for exile in the United States in 1940, but to him Joe McCarthy was an ignoble demagogue, attempting to incite the vulgar against the East Coast Establishment and not incidentally trading on Anglophobia to do so.)

  Waugh took the trouble to make this sort of unspoken “scratchy” connection tolerably explicit in The Loved One. The cynical hero Dennis Barlow is at the mercy of his crude boss at the pets’ funeral parlor, but still finds that servitude has its consolations:

  “Through no wish of my own I have become the protagonist of a Jamesian problem. Do you ever read any Henry James, Mr. Schultz?”

  “You know I don’t have the time for reading.”

  “You don’t have to read much of him. All his stories are about the same thing—American innocence and European experience.”

  “Thinks he can outsmart us, does he?”

  “James was the innocent American.”

  “Well, I’ve no time for guys running down their own folks.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t run them down. The stories are all tragedies one way or another.”

  “Well, I ain’t got the time for tragedies neither. Take an end of this casket. We’ve only half an hour before the pastor arrives.”

  Barlow behaves in this deplorable way in spite of the tribal admonitions of Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the deliberate stage Englishman who has guessed the link between “class” English style and “class” American, and who sees it as part of a personal and national survival kit:

  We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit—the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles—they may think us cliquey and stand-offish, but, by God, they respect us. . . . I often feel like an ambassador, Barlow. It’s a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it. . . . You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs— except in England of course.

  Sir Ambrose here touches lightly on the critical question of mutation. An Englishman, he is saying, need only cross the Atlantic in order to acquire a cachet that would by no means belong to him automatically if he remained at home.

  Why should this be? Clearly, some part of it has to do with the matter of race (or tribe, or genealogy if you prefer). An Englishman in America is so to speak an axiomatic WASP; a member of that large and strange minority that needs no national day parade on Fifth Avenue to make itself felt, and which might be met with weird oaths if it did choose to stage such a procession. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, the word WASP has an ambivalent relationship to ethnicity and usually denotes a certain tone as much as a certain shade or confession.

  Clearly, the thing that makes America so penetrable to “class” as defined in the English sense is this. As defined in the English sense, America is not supposed to have any sense of class at all. “Class,” says Paul Blumberg in his book Inequality in an Age of Decline, is “America’s forbidden thought.” Status, yes. Income, yes. Even “mobility”—yes, yes, yes. Class—no.

  The English presence in American life, however, allows the mutation of class as “class” into class as “style.” The world of fashion and glossy journalism, as well as the world of television and advertising, provides continual evidence of this process. To choose only at random from my reading while writing this chapter:

  •An article in the New York smart set magazine Seven Days asks why S. I. Newhouse prefers British editors for his Conde Nast magazine empire. “ ‘Si likes the U.K. accent,’ said a designer. Others say these editors are also adept at analyzing American society as a class system. Tina Brown has nearly created her own for Vanity Fair.” As well as Vanity Fair, Newhouse’s Vogue, Traveler, and Self were at this period edited by English immigrants.

  •In the May 1989 issue of Esquire, the “Man at His Best” feature opens with the words: “Carl Reiner once said that he didn’t believe Englishmen really had accents, they just all got together and agreed to talk that way to make the rest of us feel bad.” Three pages later is an article on the great American zip fastener and the struggle that this innovation had to become accepted over the fly button. “A zipper added a dollar to the cost of a pair of trousers; buttons cost only two cents. That’s where matters stood until 1934, when the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and their second cousin ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten suddenly started wearing zippered flies. It wasn’t something they flaunted, obviously, but word got around anyhow. The zippered fly was finally respectable.”

  •As the Bush era began, the much-consulted New York Times culture critic Paul Goldberger advanced the opinion that Ralph Lauren, né Lipschitz, was “the real design symbol,” “the one-man Bauhaus” of our age. The Lauren style, given a substantial exposure by the Bush weekend manner at Kennebunkport, Maine, is based on the real expense and the supposed gentility of sports like polo and sculling; the assumed Edwardianism of dress and the WASP aesthetic in general. One of Lauren’s admirers, Hugh Barnard of Retail Marketing Report, anatomized the secrets of snob appeal as follows: “Steamer trunks, antique armoires, life-size paintings of military officers of long-ago wars, upholstered chairs by tables laden with books.” In principle these status artifacts can be found in the inventory of any culture; in practice they are the props department of Masterpiece Theatre.

  Examples of this sort could be multiplied by any casual reader of the American press. Especially in the advertising of certain kinds of car, tweed, scotch, and hotel, and in the advertising industry itself, a version of the English accent seems to be de rigueur. The British pander to this taste even at the official level, with the national airline advertised by the likes of Rob
ert Morley and the Tourist Board presenting England as a hellhole of thatched roofs, Dickensian pubs, and haunted castles. These pubs, and these county affiliations, can of course be mutated for transatlantic purposes. In order to reach the exclusive suburban town of Somerset, outside Washington, D.C., you turn left on Warwick, right on Windsor, and so forth. In his book Class, Paul Fussell gives a list of the tract suburbs surrounding Houston, Texas: Nottingham Oaks, Afton Oaks, Inverness Forest, Sherwood Forest, Braes Manor, Meredith Manor, and so on. Somewhere in Middle America there is a suburb entirely fitted out by Fussell, who was asked by a developer to supply an alphabetical list of British-sounding street names that would raise the neighborhood in the esteem of potential middle-class house buyers. Fussell was then living in Knightsbridge, and furnished a list beginning Albemarle, Berkeley, and so on, until “I couldn’t resist Windsor for W, and today there’s some poor puzzled fellow wondering why success is so slow in arriving, since for years he’s been residing at 221 Windsor Close instead of living on West Broad Street.”

  In one of the terminals at John F. Kennedy Airport, I recently came across an American public telephone housed in a red London telephone box, or booth. A notice inside informed me that this was a gift of the British Tourist Board, to convey a little of the flavor of England in a faraway land. Red telephone boxes, for so long so characteristic of the English scene and as reliable an “establishing shot” in movies about London as the uniformed bobby or Nelson’s column, are of course being uprooted and replaced by more American, streamlined, colorless models. In other words, the condition for the appearance of this artifact at JFK was its failure to represent even a hint or taste of the actual England. This was as good a working definition of English kitsch as I could have hoped to find— with the arguable exception of the “English muffin,” a confection so grim that it could not have been sold in England even in wartime.

  It is of the essence of Anglophilia that the object of its desire is unattainable. The cult of something at once vanished and superseded is secure against any too abrupt swing in fashion. It is reliable and time-tested. It also avoids the awkwardness that used to bedevil Anglophilia, especially Anglophilia of the political kind, in that no question of “dual loyalty” or “servility” is any longer involved. When the British fleet patrolled the oceans and upheld Imperial Preference, and the King was the Emperor of India, an overfondness for things English could expose the American addict to ridicule and even contempt. As Paul Fussell puts it: