Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  It is in part because Britain has seen better days that Anglophilia is so indispensable an element in upper-class taste, in clothes, literature, allusion, manners and ceremony. The current irony of the Anglophilic class motif will not escape us. . . . To acquire and display British goods shows how archaic you are, and so validates upper- and upper-middle-class standing.

  “Literature, allusion, manners and ceremony.” On the turn of the year in 1988, The Washington Post recommended books in all categories in its weekly book review supplement. Under the section headed “Great Britain,” the titles were, in order: The English Country House, The Book of the Royal Year, The English Season, Mary Stuart’s Scotland, and Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. In the American mind, an indissoluble connection now seems to exist between the idea of England and the ideas of heritage, tradition, royalty, pageantry, and good taste.

  This is odd, in view of the fact that the two most obvious English mutations to have occurred in America in the last decade go by the names “punk” and “skinhead.” In their imported form, true, they are simulacra of authentic tendencies among British youth, and it is difficult to imagine the regalia and conduct of, say, a West German or Italian football fan commanding such attention. Perhaps even at the allegedly “classless” level, an English model is felt to be instructive. There was certainly a period in the 1960s when British rock music sold itself as a new social and democratic phenomenon—the Liverpudlian foursome, the determinedly flat vowels of Mick Jagger. But even that benefited from a preexisting contrast; one that could be reasserted when the children of those who watched The Ed Sullivan Show had ripened into Brideshead fans. Of course, this happens the other way around. In 1946, Wilson was already noting of the English that when it came to mass-produced American taste, “our Hollywood stars are already their stars, our best-sellers their best-sellers.” That would be an uncontroversial observation today.

  In America, it is, in the end, always the England of the past that reasserts itself. Here, the mutation can operate in the other direction. When T. S. Eliot said in 1928 that he was a classicist, a royalist, and an Anglo-Catholic, he may have been echoing what Charles Maurras had said of himself (“classique, catholique, monarchique”) more than a decade earlier. But whatever the inspiration, it could apparently be materialized only in England. Fleeing the Boston of Henry Adams, he took some time to acquire the confidence to say “we” while in the company of Englishmen, and would more than once sign himself with the pseudonym metoikos: the Greek word for “resident alien” and thus perfectly apposite for a convert to both kinds of Rome. Becoming a British citizen in 1927 (“I don’t like being a squatter. I might as well take the full responsibility”) he was seen by Virginia Woolf shortly before the event sporting a white tie and waistcoat. Other friends noted other affectations. Richard Aldington was embarrassed when in the course of a stroll Eliot lifted his hat to a sentry outside Marlborough House. On the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth he would wear a white flower and attend Mass in memory of the Yorkists and of Richard III. As Hope Mirrlees put it in her lecture “The Mysterious Mr. Eliot,” these and other poses made her conclude that “he wasn’t a bit like an Englishman.” But he was like an idea of an Englishman, and possessed the zeal of the convert, and identified England with history and faith and hierarchy, and could see the point of Evelyn Waugh.

  It was these “scratches on the mind” that were so artfully enlisted by the British in their incomparably skillful war for American opinion during the Second World War. In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an exhibition entitled “Britain at War.” The catalogue of this show, which was produced in collaboration with the British Ministry of Information, is still redolent with the ideas and conceptions that have underpinned Anglophilia before and since. It opens with a poem by T. S. Eliot, written for the occasion, called “Defence of the Islands”:

  Let the memorials of built stone—music’s

  enduring instrument, of many centuries of

  patient cultivation of the earth, of English verse

  be joined with the memory of this defence of the islands.

  This reached the right note of evocation, especially skillful when one recalls Eliot’s misgivings about the war and his ambiguity about the cause in which it was fought. Herbert Read contributed the introductory notes, forgoing his own preference for the aesthetic and anarchic in favor of praise for the Imperial War Museum and the Ministry of Information. He praised the new “realism” of Graham Sutherland’s paintings of air-raid damage, and wrote, as if calling on an effortless reserve of national confidence:

  It must then be remembered that though the English are energetic in action, they are restrained in expression. Our typical poetry is lyrical, not epical or even tragic. Our typical music is the madrigal and the song, not the opera and the symphony. Our typical painting is the landscape. In all these respects war cannot change us; and we are fighting this war precisely because in these respects we refuse to be changed.

  This beautifully rendered paragraph, with its tender emphasis on the pastoral, could easily induce forgetfulness of the world’s first industrial revolution and the world’s first and greatest modern empire. Henry Moore’s drawings of Londoners in bomb shelters, and the still photographs of cavalry patrols waiting under trees for mechanized Nazi invaders, also helped to reinforce a picture of England as a vulnerable miniature, populated by gentle but durable people. The caption to one photograph reads: “Tanks on a country road. Once more, the contrast of tragic mechanism and the famous old-fashioned loveliness of Britain.” Again, one would barely have remembered that the tank was a British invention. Even the photograph of a “Nelson class” warship, showing the serried “pompom” guns, captioned them as “a Chicago piano,” as if the very vernacular of modern weaponry were somehow antithetical to the English character. Under a two-page display of “ordinary people” going about their duties as fireman, nurse, pilot, and sailor there appears the caption: “Since the start of this war the virtuosity of news photographers has shown to all the world the unfamiliar beauty of the British race.”

  A few pages later comes an arresting photograph of the high altar at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the dome pierced by a Nazi bomb but the memorials to faraway proconsuls standing unscathed to either side of the great screen. With an adroit use of the restraint and understatement of which Herbert Read had written, the picture is otherwise untitled. Studies of dogs, horses, and children, some wearing gas masks, succeed it. Then comes another bomb-damage photograph, this time showing “Burlington Arcade: A shopping center familiar to all American visitors.”

  The catalogue is completed by a selection of cartoons, chosen by Sir Kenneth Clark. Here, Osbert Lancaster and Heath Robinson display every variety of British phlegm and sangfroid. As a final practical hint, “because we in the United States shall soon be seeing strange new examples of camouflage,” the endpapers give some tips on concealment in modern warfare.

  The Anglophobes, whose influence was still very great, were powerless to combat this mild yet convincing appeal, elsewhere expressed in books and films like Mrs. Miniver (George Bush’s favorite movie) which reinforced the idea of a civilized kindred people, slow to anger but resolute when roused. The phrase “love-hate relations” is often used in connection with Anglo-American emotions and entanglements, and the distance between admiration and envy has never been a difficult one to traverse. It is the abolition of the need for envy that has secured Anglophilia in the place it now occupies in America. Two anecdotal histories may illustrate the relation.

  Few people now bother to read Owen Wister, whose 1902 novel The Virginian invented the romantic discourse of the cowboy and the Western, and was read with avidity on both American seaboards as well as across the Atlantic. Of partially English descent, having the English actress Fanny Kemble as his grandmother, Wister was a lifelong friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote an adoring account of their relationship. He also composed two popular historica
l and moral books in defense of the idea of Englishness, published during and after the First World War. The first, The Pentecost of Calamity, was an early call to arms against the Kaiser, issued in 1915 and covering the entire German nation and character with atrabilious abuse. The second and the more significant and by far the longer is called The Straight Deal and subtitled The Ancient Grudge. It is a frontal engagement with Anglophobia, which Lister locates in the American inferiority complex. He identified the three foundations of “the ancient grudge” as patriotic American school-books which stressed the villainy of the redcoats and the perfidy of the King, “various controversies from the Revolution to the Alaskan boundary dispute,” and “certain differences in customs and manners.”

  In a chapter entitled “Rude Britannia, Crude Columbia,” he admitted that the British could be arrogant and superior but argued that they had much to be arrogant and superior about. Whereas, he said, he blushed at the lack of polish and sophistication displayed by Americans overseas and at home. He recorded with pleasure, for the instruction of his readers, a conversation with a gentleman in London who, elaborating the delights of the season, added: “And if there’s nothing at the theatres and everything else fails, you can always go to one of the restaurants and hear the Americans eat.”

  In his final chapter, significantly entitled “Lion and Cub,” Wister hymned the glories of the British Empire’s performance in the just concluded Great War, argued that Britain had always been the protector of America “from Bonaparte to the Kaiser,” and wrote: “We are her cub. . . . She has seen clearly and ever more clearly that our good will was to her advantage.”

  The publication of this book drew upon Wister a reply of such sustained and brilliant fury that the windows still rattle when it is read aloud. Daniel T. O’Connell, a barrister and the director of the American Friends of Irish Freedom, issued a pamphlet called Owen Wister: Advocate of Racial Hatred, which certainly started as it meant to go on by describing Wister as follows: “Parasite himself, he conceives of America as a parasite, living on from decade to decade by the favor and under the protecting wing of England.” Repudiating Wister’s praise for England’s broad and generous attitude toward Empire, O’Connell wrote:

  There is not in the history of any country, nor in criminal annals anywhere a record of crimes so shameful, so callous, so vile as England’s opium war or England’s present opium trade, or the rape of the Boer Republics, of the crimes in India and in Persia and in Ireland and in Egypt, of Amritsar and of Cairo.

  As if to show that his objection to imperialism was a patriotic rather than a radical one, O’Connell went on to derogate Wister for his attacks on the crudeness of American manners and said: “If a passage like this should occur in a book by a ‘Red’ he would be locked up.” After some indignant defenses of the American revolutionary tradition, at the expense of which Wister had had some ponderous fun, the pamphlet went on: “What he says leaves the impression that he is a frank sycophant. He is always in awe of persons and things English . . . he should know that the gorge of anybody, even an Englishman, will rise at cringing servility and flattery.” O’Connell was especially angry at Wister’s lack of respect for Ireland’s old ally, France, saying bitterly: “How foolish Pershing appears now with his ‘Lafayette, we are here.’ ” He closed with a deadly burst about “the man who is allowed to pick up the gossip of the Junker class in England,” adding that Wister would “not succeed in making this Republic a nest for the spurious Anglomaniac breed.”

  This recalls an almost forgotten epoch, when Fenianism was a serious force in American life and when real hatred of the Crown and the Union Jack was a potent political element. This, too, has declined along with the power of Britain and the natural erosion of the generation that kept the spirit of Sinn Fein alive. Still, even the attenuated Irish National Caucus mobilized as late as 1986 against a treaty which would have allowed extradition of wanted Republicans to British courts. They had enough congressional votes pledged in advance to abort the provision, and were only overborne by the sudden sentiment on the Hill which followed Mrs. Thatcher’s decision, alone among European heads of government, to endorse the highly popular American bombing of Libya.

  The second instance concerns Anglophilia in its post-imperial, mannerist phase. In 1969, Richard Nixon sent gales of mirth through the Protestant and prep school establishment of the State Department and Georgetown by appointing Walter Annenberg to be his ambassador in London. There were, from that natural establishment’s point of view, several things about this gazetting that threatened to make it a bêtise. For one thing, Walter’s father, Moe, had been accurately described by Drew Pearson as running a publishing empire “built up on the gang wars of Chicago and the illegal race wire.” For another, Walter himself had only avoided indictment for massive tax evasion because his father agreed to take the rap for both of them. For still another, the senior Annenberg’s business associates had names like Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Johnny Rosselli; men who continued William Randolph Hearst’s keen interest in Cuba but in a radically different vernacular.

  All of this, and Annenberg’s association with railroad interests in Pennsylvania which his own newspapers were not shy to promote, made him seem an impossible choice for the London embassy. People began to speak as if Joseph Kennedy, the bootlegger and Nazi sympathizer, had never had the job. “Walter Annenberg, of all people, to be Ambassador to London of all places,” groaned James “Scotty” Reston, one of the all-time “special relationship” apparatchiks. Senator William Fulbright, emulator of Rhodes in the Anglophile scholarship business, said that Annenberg was “simply not up to the standards we expect of our premier diplomatic post.” Worst of all, the Annenbergs were not replacing just anybody. They were replacing David and Evangeline Bruce. This couple came as close to an incarnation of the ruling class of the “special relationship” as any two individuals could.

  After a thin time during his confirmation hearings, where it was openly suggested that he had bought the job by campaign contributions and by his loud support for an unpopular war in Vietnam, Annenberg arrived in London for an even thinner time. Winfield House needed extensive repair after the departure of the suave and accomplished Bruces, and temporary quarters had to be found for Walter and Lee. Worse still, the day of Walter’s accreditation at Buckingham Palace was the day when a rare BBC film of the Queen at work was being made. As Her Majesty graciously inquired how the Annenbergs were settling down, the cameras caught a figure hideously ill attired in court costume saying: “We’re in the embassy residence subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of a need for, uh, elements of refurbishment and rehabilitation.” In a cruel review of the show, Gore Vidal wrote that the Queen looked as if a cigar had just exploded in her face. Certainly she was momentarily at a loss for words.

  Annenberg seemed able to do nothing right. He was openly laughed at in White’s Club for making fatuous remarks about the weather (“The rain,” he had said to break a silence, “is pouring down with determined resolution.”) He was lampooned for the lavish party he threw for Richard Nixon’s mediocre daughter Tricia and sniggered at by Joseph Kraft and other American columnists for his lack of savoir faire. But very slowly and doggedly he began to outlast his critics.

  The breakthrough came, as breakthroughs will in England, with money well spent. The million-dollar “refurbishment” of Winfield House, paid for by Annenberg himself, made the Bruces look dowdy without making the Annenbergs look ostentatious. The same was said when the ambassador loaned his extraordinary collection of pictures to the Tate Gallery. Opinion began to turn when the Annenbergs threw a party for the seventy-year-old Earl Mountbatten of Burma and remembered to decorate the main reception room in the colors of the Burma Star.

  Indeed, it was through assiduous attention to royalty that the gauche and unpromising man trumped the minor snobs who had joined in deriding him. The Queen and the Queen Mother became frequent visitors to Winfield House, and word was soon p
assed that Her Majesty felt the ambassador had been ill used. He began to bloom under the signs of her favor. He kept a portrait of Winston Churchill on his desk at all times. He commissioned a coffee-table book on the splendors of Westminster Abbey, soliciting contributions from traditionalist figures like John Betjeman and A. L. Rowse. Ranked low by art critics, the book still received royal approval and was thus much cooed over in the better circles. Most extraordinary of all, Annenberg became so obsessed with the Nixon crisis and the defeat in Vietnam that he decided to commission a book. Its subject was the parallel between the fall of the Roman Empire and the circumscription of American power. He engaged Michael Grant, an English historian, to work on the project, and the result, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A Reappraisal, was published by the Annenberg School Press. Grant purported to find thirteen “fissures” in the Roman Empire, and concluded obediently that “we have to look no further than our own fragmented British and American communities to find the very same phenomena in more or less developed forms.”

  The impending disgrace of his chief and patron, Richard Nixon, did not diminish the loyalty of the British royal family to Annenberg. In March 1974 he was able to welcome Prince Charles to his California estate, felicitously named Sunnylands, and to introduce Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, and Governor and Mrs. Reagan to him. The heir to the throne has never since made a visit to California without calling on the Annenbergs or doing some slight service to the Annenberg Foundation. When the Queen visited Philadelphia in 1976, Lee Annenberg was asked to make all the arrangements for her sojourn. All of this effort was requited when in 1981 Ronald Reagan asked her to be chief of protocol. It was in that capacity that she received Prince Charles on an official visit in 1981, and dropped the curtsy I mentioned earlier. There were some democratic mutterings at this departure from custom, and some Republican ones, too, from Fenians like Jimmy Breslin, who fumed about the British record in Ulster. The row was over in a day. The alliance of British royalty and new Reaganite money was an unstoppable combination, whatever Evangeline Bruce might say to her more ironically disposed Georgetown friends. And the Annenbergs were invited to Charles and Diana’s wedding, which Mrs. Bruce was not.