Angelic language is too extravagant for British taste. Theatre is a venerable British art, but emotional theatricality is as un-British as sunshine. A British, French or German author might end the preface to his or her book with some rather tight-lipped acknowledgements to friends, colleagues and family. American authors, by contrast, have been known to write roughly as follows: “Finally, I should like to thank my incredible wife Marcia (remember that Caesar salad in Dayton, Ohio!), my three unbelievably beautiful children Dent, Tankard, and Placenta, our wonderful mongoose Brian J. Screwdriver who taught me wisdom, forbearance and compassion, and my totally extraordinary colleagues in the Department of Apocalyptic Studies at Christ Is Coming College . . . ” One might claim that where Americans and the British differ most is in sensibility. It is this divergence that their shared language tends to conceal. On one reckoning, however, Americans come out of the comparison rather better. They may overdo emotion, but they are not fearful of it. A surplus of feeling has rarely done as much damage as a deficiency of it.
The Kindness of Americans
There is, then, a positive side to the emotional lavishness of the States, as there is to many an American defect. In fact, de Tocqueville writes that what Europeans tend to see as American vices (restlessness of spirit, an immoderate desire for wealth, an excessive love of independence, and so on) are exactly what makes the nation so resplendently successful, and are thus every bit as serviceable to it as its virtues. Extravagant emotion may be mawkish, but it also reflects a kindliness and generosity of spirit which are among the country’s most striking characteristics. Dickens remarks that Americans “are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” He also speaks fondly of their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm.
All of these qualities are still present in abundance today. The language of the United States may grate with its gushing superlatives, but it can also simply reflect a wish to be pleasant to others. Many a visitor to America has remarked on the astonishing gap between its politics and its people. The latter are for the most part far more congenial than the former. Republics are supposed to be places in which the people and the government are at one, which is thankfully not the case with the republic of America. That the citizens of the country have managed by and large to preserve their neighbourliness, kindliness and largeness of spirit in one of the most acquisitive, ferociously competitive civilisations on God’s earth is a remarkable tribute to their innate decency. This may be something of a backhanded compliment, like congratulating someone on winning the title of World’s Greatest Bore five times in a row, but it is a compliment nonetheless.
Americans continue to be on the whole an easy, outgoing people. If two of them find themselves together in an elevator, they will usually acknowledge each other’s presence with a friendly word. People who speak to you in British elevators are generally regarded as dangerous lunatics who should not be favoured with a reply, since this will only spur them to further outbursts of insanity. If they persist in their offensive attempts to be friendly, one can always press the emergency bell and have them carted away by security. The British are much taken by what one might call the argument from the floodgates. Once you allow one stranger to murmur a cordial remark to you about how the cricket is going, you are in imminent danger of being besieged by great herds of wild-eyed, shaggy-haired men and women who will try to talk to you about everything from the structure of the atom to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. Strangers who smile at you in public will always end up demanding to live in your spare room. They will try to kidnap your children, or offload a demented elderly relative on you. It is best to keep yourself to yourself.
Keeping yourself to yourself, however, is not the guarantee of a quiet life that it once was. Whenever those suspected of terrorism are arrested these days, their neighbours almost always remark that they struck them as quiet, polite, respectable-looking people who never failed to give them the time of day, but who kept to themselves. People like this should be instantly reported to the police. Men who are completely covered in hair, brandish Kalashnikovs and speak some strange gibberish are entirely harmless.
Is American friendliness genuine or superficial? There is a case for claiming that it is both. There is certainly a good deal of automated pleasantness, compulsive cheeriness and manufactured bonhomie. There are times when you are not really allowed to feel down in the mouth or enjoy being on your own. Solitariness is seen as anti-social. Americans can often strike one as over-socialised, too frenetically eager to please, too anxious to make an impression in a country where impressions count for more than they should. This, however, is far from the whole story. When I stroll across an American campus, I sometimes pass a young man I don’t know, and who doesn’t know me, who murmurs, “How ya doin’, sir?” This would never happen in Europe. It may be something of a conditioned reflex, but it is an undeniably charming one. There is an agreeableness about many Americans which is less obvious in the case of some Europeans. With them, you may have to dig a little to discover it. In Americans it tends to be more readily accessible, like most other things about them.
Not all Americans, admittedly, are quite as affable as the young men I occasionally bump into on campus. A survey showed that people in Rio touch each other an average of 180 times when drinking coffee together, but only 40 times in New York. Perhaps this is because some Americans believe that touching anything, even their toddlers, is a sure way to contract bubonic plague. There are U.S. citizens who would clearly feel happier spending their lives cocooned in a plastic bag, though some of them might fear that this, too, could result in some loathsome infection. Even if New Yorkers touch each other sparingly, however, the inhabitants of the United States are by and large a more friendly, helpful bunch than the citizens of many a European nation. If you stop on the sidewalk with a map in your hands, they will quite often step up and ask if you need directions.
This tends to happen much less in Europe. In any case, in Britain at least, the art of giving directions on the street is rapidly dying, along with clog dancing and tapestry weaving, as people mistake left for right, omit vital pieces of information, grossly underestimate distances in order to raise your spirits, forget about one-way traffic systems, and take local knowledge complacently for granted. Perhaps the art fares better in the United States. Some of the Irish enjoy turning their road signs around in order to confuse visitors. It is possible for tourists to travel in circles for many hours in the Irish countryside, given the mischievous tendencies of the natives.
The British tend to be suspicious of instant friendliness. There are posters on garbage cans in O’Hare Airport in Chicago that read “We’re Glad To See You!” No they’re not. They don’t even know who I am. How do they know I’m here? Glad to see me personally, or just glad to see anybody? Who exactly is glad to see me? The mayor, the airport authorities, the garbage can manufacturers, or the entire population of the city? How do they know I don’t have a test-tube full of lethal germs in my suitcase, or a collapsible nuclear weapon? What if I have come to sell heroin to their teenagers?
Such are the churlish reflections of a visitor from the United Kingdom.
Openness and Obliquity
“I know of no other country,” writes de Tocqueville, “where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts.” In Ireland, a store will probably let you off a few cents if you find yourself short. It is not certain that this would happen in New York. Irish builders also tend to place coins in the foundations of houses for good luck. An American friend to whom I mentioned this custom was adamant that it would never happen in the United States. It was the waste, not the superstition, he thought was the problem. Perhaps American suburbs would resound at night with the sound of people frantically digging up their neighbours’ foundations. There is an enormous amount of generosity in the States, but not much of it extends to the financial sphere.
Even so, being so brashly explicit about money is part of America’s openness. In Bri
tain, the oldest capitalist nation in the world, it is not done to discuss the stuff too often or too loudly, whereas one knows one is back in the United States when everyone at the hotel breakfast seems to be talking about dollars. The British can be coyly euphemistic about what Americans candidly call the bottom line. British universities “appoint” their academic staff rather than “hiring” them. One hires plumbers, not professors. (There are those of us who find it gratifying, by the way, that another word for “godly” in early Puritan America was “professor.”)
Perhaps one origin of this evasiveness is that aristocrats traditionally had so much money that they did not need to think about it, and so did not need to talk about it either. This is also true of Henry James’s fabulously wealthy characters. True gentility means having only the vaguest idea of where your income comes from, as true innocence means not knowing where babies come from. The middle classes make money, and are thus permanently preoccupied with it, while the gentry spend it, and thus do not need to harp on it so much. American talk about dollars may sometimes be brash, but at least is not conducted behind one’s hand, as though one is conspiring with a hit man to do away with one’s spouse. Old-fashioned Britons talk about money as discreetly as they do about sex. You do not discuss it loudly, any more than you tell a passing stranger about your erectile dysfunction.
There is a similar reticence about the British brand of English. I was once a Fellow of an Oxford college of which the Warden (Principal) was the legendary wit and bon viveur Sir Maurice Bowra. It was this patrician rogue who, when invited to the wedding of a glamorous young pair, is said to have remarked, “Lovely couple, slept with them both.” Though famously gay, he once rather grudgingly contemplated marriage, and on being asked why he had chosen a rather plain woman with whom to tie the knot, replied breezily, “Ah well, buggers can’t be choosers.”
Bowra’s most superlative term of praise was “far from bad,” which is technically known as litotes. In Americanese, this would be the equivalent of “wonderful” preceded by three or four “verys.” Shakespeare was far from bad, so was Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and so was lying naked on the banks of the river Isis in full, shameless view of passing boaters. One suspects that in his more pious moments, which were admittedly somewhat rare, Bowra thought that God was far from bad as well. Homer was “quite a clever fellow,” while the more melancholic of the nineteenth-century novelists were “the gloomy boys.” Botticelli was “not at all a disgrace,” though some of the more flamboyant Romantic poets “laid it on a bit thick.” Malt whisky, J. S. Bach and ravishingly handsome male undergraduates “could be worse.” “Not a little boring” meant mind-numbingly monotonous.
If the British upper classes hold that it is not good form to gush, it is because emotion is seen a form of weakness, and to display such weakness before one’s social inferiors or colonial subjects is to risk a bullet through the brain. Emotional constipation can save your life. Those who do not have their tender feelings beaten out of them at school may be subjected to a more lethal kind of beating in the long run. Understatement thus has political roots. It can sometimes be pressed to bizarre extremes. A few years ago, an Englishman who happened to be in Japan when the country was struck by an earthquake, tsunami, large-scale fires and a threat of nuclear meltdown, was asked about the situation on BBC television. “Well,” he replied, “it’s not very nice and I rather wish it hadn’t happened.” “Not very nice” is British for “unbelievably awful.” When an American is asked how she is, she might reply, “Pretty good.” A typical British or Irish response would be, “Not too bad.” Or alternatively, “Can’t grumble,” a statement which has never actually prevented the British from grumbling. It would take a collision with a comet to do that.
Amping Up, Playing Down
The American impulse is to amplify, while the British habit is to diminish. When thanked, an American might say, “It’s my pleasure,” “You’re very welcome” or, “You bet,” whereas the British, who tend naturally to the negative and low-profiled, tend to murmur, “Don’t mention it,” “Not at all,” “No problem,” or even the hideous “No probs.” In an unintended put-down, they imply that they have done nothing worth being thanked for—that being helpful to you does not count as an event, and that your gratitude is therefore both superfluous and embarrassing.
“It can’t do any harm” in British English usually means that it is precious beyond words. The British, unlike Americans, speak of “popping” in and out of places. To “pop” into a store is to be there so briefly as not really to be there at all. It is a very British kind of self-effacement. There is never a catastrophe in the United Kingdom, just “a bit of a problem.” Neither, as we shall see later, are there any catastrophes in the United States, though for rather different reasons. Instead, they are known as “challenges.” It sounds so much less catastrophic. The instinct to play down is as common among the Irish as the British. An Irish acquaintance once told me that he was doing fine, except for “a touch of cancer.”
One thing one is supposed to play down in Britain is one’s offspring. It is generally considered distasteful to praise one’s own children, which is less true in the United States. There are dubious as well as admirable motives for this reticence. The British do not praise their own children rather as they would not boast about their farmhouse in Provence, which implies that they regard their children as counting among their possessions. But at least it means that nobody would sport a notice in the back of their car reading “My Child is on the Honor Roll,” as some Americans do. More satirically-minded Britons might display notices reading “My Child is a Hooker” or “I Married an Incurable Alcoholic,” but “My Child is on the Honor Roll” is desperately, distinctively American. If you were caught making this kind of pathetic boast in Britain or Ireland, you would probably need to emigrate immediately, or at least have emergency cosmetic surgery to disguise your appearance. (Speaking of signs in cars, an effective way of alarming your neighbours if you live in an up-market suburb called, say, Sandyfield, is to drive around with a poster in the back window of your vehicle reading “Say No to Sandyfield Sewage Plant.” If you are looking to buy a cheaper house in the area or dispose of some particularly annoying neighbours, this should do the trick.)
When I hear Americans proudly recounting their children’s achievements, I make a point of telling them that I am training up my small daughter to be a pickpocket, and hope she will be adept enough at the trade to avoid joining her three elder brothers in jail. There are, however, plenty of Americans who share this distaste for drooling in public over their offspring. The positive side of such praise is that Americans are not afraid to encourage their children and boost their self-assurance. By and large, they are a supportive people. In working-class Britain, at least when I was growing up there, praising one’s children was thought to make them soft, and thus unfit for the tough life that lay ahead of them. It was the kind of soppy thing posh people did.
The Irish are particularly allergic to boasting, and tend to downplay their attainments. Until recently, Ireland was a fairly impoverished place, so that mentioning your villa in Umbria would have been thought tasteless when others were struggling to survive. It is because other people might be short of food that it is customary in Ireland even today to refuse the offer of a meal or even a cup of tea, and then be persuaded to accept. Truly heroic citizens might even refuse the offer of a Guinness. Britain, by contrast, has a history of affluence; but much of that wealth was bound up with its imperial power, and the nation’s ruling class was not slow to recognise that power is likely to produce a backlash if exercised too haughtily. This did not stop the British from torturing and massacring their colonial subjects from time to time, but they did so in a modest, unassuming kind of way, as though they were offering them a much-sought-after service.
Among the more emotionally constipated of Britons is the Duke of Edinburgh, who was once asked in the course of a television interview how he felt about having had to aba
ndon a promising naval career to spend the rest of his days walking two paces behind his wife. “Feel about it?” barked the Duke. “I don’t go around psychoanalysing myself, you know.” It is not quite the response one would expect from a guest on Oprah. Introspection for the Duke is a form of illness. Aristocrats like him regard the whole notion of an inner life as a shameless middle-class self-indulgence. Rather than morbidly picking over your finer feelings, you just get on with things. The positive side of this ethic is a rather stiff kind of selflessness. The point is to be of service to others, not to lie around brooding and whining. The negative side is that since the Duke of Edinburgh seems to have about as much inner life as a fruit bat, courteously suppressing it is unlikely to prove much of a problem for him. Americans may hype their emotions, but at least they do not regard them as something to be kept under wraps, like a history of incest or a lunatic uncle.
Emotional reticence is hardly a quality of the U.S. media. In fact, Americans might find themselves astonished at the untheatrical behaviour of Scandinavian TV weather forecasters, who when the camera alights upon them are sometimes to be found with their heads buried shyly in their wall maps. They look as though they would prefer to be anywhere but in front of the public, and mutter their script as though they are reluctantly disclosing some dreadful news, which sometimes they are. No self-conscious joshing, heavy-handed humour or cavorting around for them. British TV weather forecasters, by contrast, tend to have an irritatingly cheerful bedside manner. They predict that the rain might not carry on for quite the whole of the summer in the tones of a doctor trying to console you with the news that the tumour is so far confined to only one of your kidneys.
Across the Pond Page 5
