THE ENGLISH WAY OF GETTING THINGS DONE is quite distinct from the American way. It is quieter, more orderly, politer. When our ship was about to dock at London, a British pilot came aboard to take us up the Thames. The deckhands had been cleaning the deck and draining the water out of a hole next to the ladder up which he was to climb, and one of the sailors now closed the hole. The pilot, as he appeared over the side, said to the Norwegian sailor, “Good morning, thanks for stopping the water,” and went immediately about his business on the bridge. I was somehow impressed by this and tried to think what an American would have said. He would probably have said nothing at all or would have made some kind of wisecrack. And so, when the officials of the port came aboard, it seemed to me that one’s dealings with officials in England were pleasanter and more expeditious than with those of any other country. Even when they are holding you up, there is no strain and no friction. The officials of other countries tend to behave as if they assumed you were a crook, but the British officials look up at you with a candid and friendly eye which seems to assume that you are honest. I had the impression later, in London, when I saw people getting their ration books and complying with other wartime regulations, that the whole organization of life for the war had been handled in this same calm and careful way. Compared to England after nearly five years of food rationing, fuel restrictions and the rest, the United States, in its first pangs of privation, seemed hysterical, uncertain and confused.
I stayed with a friend in London, who had been in the Ministry of Information. There arrived among his mail, the first morning, a pamphlet with the following title: Address of the Honorable Archibald MacLeish, Assistant Secretary of State, Before the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges, Atlantic City, New Jersey, January 10, 1945. He amused himself by reading me passages and demanding, “Now, what does that mean?”: “If the direct relations of peoples to peoples which modern communications permit are relations of understanding and confidence, so that the men and women of the world feel each others presence and trust each others purposes and believe that the common cause of all the people everywhere is peace, then any reasonably intelligent organization of the world for peace will work. If, however, the direct relations of the peoples with each other are relations of doubt and suspicion and misunderstanding then no international organization the genius of man can contrive can possibly succeed…. What is unfortunate about the current designation [of culture] is its suggestion to certain minds that a program of cultural relations is a decoration, a frill, an ornament added to the serious business of the foreign relations of the United States. You gentlemen, who know that a nation’s culture is a nation’s character, would not so interpret it but others do. And when they do, they endanger the best hope this country now possesses of preparing the climate of understanding in which peace can breathe. The people of the five continents and the innumerable islands can only live together peacefully in the close and urgent contact of modern intercommunication, if they feel behind the jangle and vibration of the constant words the living men and women. It is our principal duty, because it is our principal opportunity, to make that sense of living men and women real. Our country, with its great institutions of education and of culture, is prepared as are few others, to undertake the work that must be done. If we will undertake it, believing in it with our hearts as well as with our heads, we can create, not only peace, but the common understanding which is the only guarantee that peace will last.”
What MacLeish was trying to say was that radio and aviation could help bring the nations together as well as enable them to make war more effectively; but this idea, already vague, had been expanded to nine pages of sheer verbalizing nonsense. It is like one of those great wads of spun sugar that are impaled upon little sticks and sold to children at Coney Island. It is embarrassing for an American to arrive in Europe and find that this is what we have been sending them. The Atlantic Charter is not much better.
There is about London today a certain flavor of Soviet Moscow. It surprises the Londoners if you remark on this and does not particularly please them. But people told me at the American Embassy that several other visitors who had been in Russia had said the same sort of thing. The regimentation and the tension imposed by the resistance to Germany have produced certain results very similar to those of the effort, during the twenties and thirties, to make the Soviet Union self-dependent. The people look rather shabby, but almost everybody looks equally shabby. A great number are working for the government, and everyone has a definite task. There is the atmosphere of emergency and transition to which everybody has settled down; many things are left undone or unfinished—in London the repair of buildings, in Moscow the carrying out of civic projects—leaving what would in normal times be regarded as intolerable eyesores. There is a great deal of getting oneself registered and of having to have passes, and people are always lining up and waiting for hours in queues. There is also the relative democracy of manners—one of the striking changes in London—of people in the same boat who cannot afford to be too rude to one another, all threatened by a common danger and obliged to work together.
The English, since the war, have, also, been somewhat shut in from the rest of the world, as the Soviet Russians were. Their newspapers today are as meager, though not so misleading, as the Russian ones; their sense of what the other countries are like and of what is going on outside England seems to have become rather dim. People who have been living in London through all or most of the years of the war—unable even to go to the seaside: a great hardship, apparently, for Londoners—all complain of a kind of claustrophobia; and young people in government offices who have had to give up to the war five years of that part of their lives which is usually more pleasantly employed, show the same mixture of boredom with devotion as the young workers for the Soviet economy toward the end of the second Five-Year Plan. As in Moscow, there are women in pants and the problem of neglected children. There is also the quietness of everybody, the submissiveness, the patience, the acceptance. The parks, like Russian parks, seem muted. In the evening people lie on the grass or stroll along the paths or go boating on the Serpentine or play a primitive form of baseball called rounders, and are almost as soundless as the rabbits that, in an enclosure, are munching grass. Even the American soldiers playing the American form of baseball are much less noisy than they would be at home.
I had forgotten what a pleasant city London was. No doubt it comes to seem more attractive as New York becomes consistently less so. From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation—whereas a capital like London is a place in which people are supposed to live and enjoy some recreation and comfort rather than merely to feed the bank-accounts of landlords. The green parks and the open squares that interlace the whole West End seem enchanting after the windowed expressionless walls, the narrow crowded streets, of New York. The best that Mr. Moses has been able to do, admirable though it is, seems pathetic beside, say, Kensington Gardens, which provide a real escape into the country, not a mere space for benches and asphalt walks. The moist air, which softens form and deepens color, gives all these parks a special charm, as one sees them under pearly clouds in the pale-blue sky of an early April evening or, later, fringed with purple lilacs and studded with white-blossoming chestnuts, amid turf soft and dense like the air. And though a good deal of fun, at one time or another, has been made of the London statues by people like Osbert Sitwell and Max Beerbohm, it is cheering to a New Yorker with a depressed recollection of the figure of Fitz-Greene Halleck in Central Park, to find, within a short walk in London, monuments to four English poets—Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and Byron—and even allegorical statues of the conventional public kind which give a certain effect of vitality: the bronze Victory on one of the big arches driving her horses into the sky and the Saint George of World War I killing a dragon with the Kaiser’s mustaches. You realize that the English, through such symbols, almost as much as the French, have managed to keep in the air an admiration for human excellence and an imaginative vision of history. There is, however, one mechanical monument which stands out among these human ones as a bleak unassimilable block—a statue to the Royal Artillery in the shape of a huge howitzer gun. This suggests that the war just ended may eventually bring, for its memorials, bronze bombing planes, marble tanks and granite anti-aircraft batteries. You have already, in fact, something of the kind in the great war monument in Edinburgh Castle—which I saw on a trip to the North—where there are yards and yards of bas-reliefs of men with trench helmets, machine-guns and gas masks, all the complicated unsightly accoutrements in use in the last war. You feel here a definite break in the tradition of human heroism: the armored knights with their plumes and beaked helmets were still caricatures of the human animal; but the big age of engineering has reached the point, in England as elsewhere, of getting this animal quite out of sight. An appropriate monument for the next world war might be simply an enormous rocket which would never have been touched by human hands from the moment it had been shot from its stand.
The effect of being attacked from the air by rockets and flying bombs must be something quite new in sensations. While our ship was lying in the Thames on a mild and quiet April day, a rocket went off somewhere not far away among the streets of little London houses on which we were looking out; and the pilot mentioned to someone the next morning that another had just passed overhead. When we got off the boat, we were told that the tramline was now blocked, due to the blowing-up two days before of the bridge at the end of the street. The word “nightmarish,” summoned so often to convey the idea of horror, can hardly be applied to these automatic explosions. A nightmare involves apprehension: the terror must always be expected. The Londoners say that, in the case of the Blitz, you were dealing with other human beings, could see them coming and could at least try to do something: a relationship between combatants was established, so that a strategy could be evolved. But the “doodle bugs” or flying bombs, and, even more, the rockets, came as a disruption completely irrelevant, completely unpredictable, in even an emergency pattern of life. With the rockets there was nothing you could do: you could not either hear them or see them, and you might just as well not think of them at all. Though when you walked through one of those pleasant parks or squares that you were in the habit of passing every day, it might be a shock to find there a sudden great gaping ulcer, the crater of a V-2. Or you might, on some other occasion, be knocked flat in the street and stunned and have to be carried away, or you might be sitting at home and have all your clothes blown off and your skin peppered with masonry and plaster, or you might be annihilated. There were no crises of danger, it was constant; and people had to learn to live with it as a strain from which there was no escape. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the attitude of London during the days of the V-2 rockets than the atmosphere of abject panic described by German propaganda. At the time the V-2’s were falling, there was an exhibition in Oxford Street which showed a diagram and model of the rocket and photographs of some of the damage; and curious people were dropping in, very much as they did on the waxworks and the fortune-telling machines.
But those who know what the Germans were preparing say that, if they had gone on with their program, London would have been rendered uninhabitable. A commission which visited the Pas-de-Calais, after that part of the coast had been cleared, found a whole hillside studded with giant guns, fixed in their positions and aimed at London and capable of firing five or six projectiles a minute; and, in another place, a hilltop which had been scooped out and equipped with rocket sites for some larger type of weapon than V-2’s.
The London theater, to a New Yorker, is amazing. It used to be very much less interesting than ours, but it is at present incomparably better. Our stage has been demoralized by Hollywood: no one really, any more, takes it seriously. We have very few producers or directors who would even like to do a good job, and these rarely get to the point of trying. But in London the theater still exists, and the war has had the effect of stimulating it to special excellence. With so much of tight routine in their lives, so little margin for vacation or luxury, and feeling somewhat helpless in their hemmed-in world, the Londoners—again like the Russians—have needed the theater for gaiety, for color, and also—what is very important and what, for educated people, the American films can’t supply—for the vicarious participation in the drama of personal emotions which is possible only in peacetime, when men and women are relatively free.
In the first place, they put on in London plays that are really first-rate. During the month that I spent there, it was possible to see three plays of Shakespeare’s (as well as a film of Henry V), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, two plays of Ibsen, two of Bernard Shaw, one of Chekhov, one of Strindberg and, on a lower but still respectable level, two plays by Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham’s The Circle and a dramatization of Jane Austen’s Emma. Some of these were brilliantly done, and all that I saw were produced with a kind of theatrical competence that is almost obsolete on Broadway. Not only have the Londoners at the present time an appetite for serious plays, they are also connoisseurs of acting. I found everywhere discussion of actors in their roles of a kind that has not been heard at home since the early years of the twenties. I saw half a dozen of London’s top actors: Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Cecil Trouncer, Sybil Thorndike and Peggy Ashcroft—performing in repertory companies in which they were as likely to play small parts as big ones and had none of the fantastic billing which has done so much to spoil our theater. Richard III and The Duchess of Malfi were astonishing to me who had just come from New York and who had not for years—if ever—heard Elizabethan blank verse read without losing the rhythm of poetry and yet with every line comprehensible and effective as human speech. With us this tradition has been lost from the time, I suppose, when John Barrymore was persuaded to play Hamlet as if it were all in prose. And today a Shakespearean production in New York may combine a variety of accents, American, British and ham, and a variety of metrical or non-metrical conceptions of the rhythm of Shakespeare’s lines in a way that does the poet little justice. But Shakespeare in England is all of a piece and quite natural on the stage, as it never is with us. It is strange to find that the speeches sound more personal and forcible and practical, more alive at the present time, than the people of contemporary London, who beside them seem thin and dim.
Unlikely though it may appear, the Elizabethan Duchess of Malfi, not professionally performed in many years, is probably the most fascinating show to be seen on the stage in London. It seems to me, in fact, one of the best productions that I have ever seen of anything anywhere. You would think that this old tragedy of blood, with its grotesque horrors and highly wrought poetry, is the kind of thing of which a revival would be sure to turn out boring or comic; but this production by the poet George Rylands is so immensely imaginative and skilful and the acting at the same time so dynamic and so disciplined that it holds you from beginning to end. You might have thought that Webster’s style was too precious for the stage, but every speech has its force and its point. And they somehow get the emotions of wartime into both Richard III and the Duchess: the speeding-up of crime and horror, the cumulative obsession with grievance and revenge. No: The Duchess of Malfi is not funny. You understand what Gertrude Stein means when she says that she reread, during the war, in France, Shakespeare’s tragedies and historical plays and realized for the first time that human life could be like that. One sees the fall of Richard III just as Hitler is staggering to defeat; and, in The Duchess of Malfi, the scene where her doom is announced to the Duchess amidst the drivellings of the liberated madmen, at the moment of the exposé of the German concentration camps.
Thus the theater, like everything else, gives the impression of being breathless and strained, of being ridden by fatigue and fear. One can gauge in a different way how desperate the pressure must be when one goes to a contemporary play which is intended to be consoling. The Wind of Heaven, by Emlyn Williams, well done though it, too, was, depressed me by attempting to exploit the need of the people for something to believe in, something to assure them that, after all, there is a merciful God behind the world. Mr. Williams makes a Messiah appear in Wales at the time of the Crimean War: a saintly child who can cure the cholera and about whom is heard in the air the sound of celestial music. But you remember, when you go out of the theater into the blacked-out London streets, that there is no Messiah there.
In general, what I have seen of the artistic and literary world, dwindled and starved though it is, is impressive through its good faith and sobriety. These people have been living on the threshold of death, and they have had to pursue their work under the threat of defeat by the Germans and the suppression of their free press, and with, in any event, no prospect of immediate reward in either money or fame. There is, however, as in the case of the theater, a real need that they may take pride in serving.
Here the training of so many of them at Oxford and Cambridge has stood them in good stead. If they are not, so far as I know, turning out anything quite first-rate, they are not letting their standards down—whereas, with us, even the people of talent who have escaped Henry Luce and Hollywood have sometimes inebriated themselves with a frenzy of war propaganda. There are several good English writers who do literary articles for the newspapers, but they do them so very badly that one can hardly recognize their hands, and this does not seem to affect their other work. What is fatal to the American writer is to be brilliant at disgraceful or second-rate jobs. A man who has been to Oxford is always likely to keep a certain residuum that is not much affected by change or by a different intellectual climate. It is a learning that involves some wisdom: a detachment toward geography and history and a steady appreciation of those products of the human mind that outlast societies and periods. You can talk to him, more or less, no matter what is happening at the moment and whether or not you share his opinions. But with the kind of American writer who has had no education to speak of, you are unable to talk at all once Hollywood or Luce has got him.
It was also reassuring and pleasant to hear Elizabeth Bowen say that, except for some disagreeable moments when “one of those humming things” had landed near her, she had enjoyed London during the war: “Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.”
I listened, at a literary party, to a conversation between two writers who were comparing notes about their experiences in the volunteer fire brigades. They had both been to public schools, and they agreed that it was quite different from “school.” I gathered that what was lacking was the spirit of the school team: the cockneys who were sometimes in command merely counted on people to do the right thing in a more matter-of-fact way. Such a conversation could hardly have taken place between graduates of American prep schools, in their late thirties as these men were, because even an expensive education does not usually unfit Americans to work with other kinds of Americans and also because at that age Americans would not still be looking back to their school days.
This reversion to public school memories is a conspicuous and curious feature of the recent writing of the English. I cannot remember that the public school background played any important role in the literature of the earlier period upon which I was nourished in my teens. That was the generation of Wells and Bennett, Shaw and Chesterton, Kipling and Masefield. None of these men had been to Oxford or Cambridge; none, with the exception of Kipling, had been to a public school—and the brutal and raucous version of the second-rate Army and Navy school that we get in Stalky & Co. is as different as possible from the Winchester and Eton that we read about in later writers. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the British middle classes had something to say for themselves: they did not feel any need to identify themselves with the official governing class. But—what, at first sight, seems queer to an American—these writers have had no successors unless you count someone like J. B. Priestley, who does not particularly interest the people who were stimulated by the earlier crop of writers. Instead, you had Strachey and Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Harold Nicolson, Aldous Huxley and T. E. Lawrence, all of them—except Mrs. Woolf, who had, however, her university connections—educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and in most cases deriving from the official class or actively engaged in its work. All these have a tone in common, a common social-intellectual atmosphere, which are not at all the tone and atmosphere of the Bennett-Wells-Shaw generation. And the following generation of Connolly, Orwell and Auden grew up in that atmosphere, too, and have never quite lost that tone. The more vigorous ones, in their various ways, broke away from the Bloomsbury circle; but, confronted by the coming catastrophe, they tended at first to creep back into the womb of the public schools—see the memories of Isherwood and Connolly and the earlier poems of Auden—of which they gave rather an equivocal account, inspired partly by a childlike nostalgia and partly by an impulse, perhaps childish, too—one noticed it first in Strachey’s essay on Arnold—to blame the schools for their own inadequacies and for everything that was wrong with England. On the voyage over, I read a book by a young man named Denton Welch, a good deal of which is occupied with his school days and which presents an extreme case in point. Denton Welch was desperately dissatisfied with school and kept trying to get away, yet he loves to remember his boyhood and seems to want to remain a baby. When I inquired about him in London, I learned that he lived in the country and had continued to write about his teens. There was a certain amount of dispute as to what his age really was, some insisting that he has always pretended to be very much younger than he is. At any rate, he seems to represent the final stage of this regression toward childhood. He is not at all a bad writer, but he has never been able to find any other theme than that of his own attractive youth and its quarrel with the horrid people who broke in on its bemused self-consciousness by rudeness or admiration.
It is thus as if the code and the glamor of the traditional upper-class world were the last things to survive in English letters. You find them in a different form in the later work of Evelyn Waugh. Beginning, in Decline and Fall, with the comic misadventures of a naïve young man who has set out to study for holy orders but is first seduced and then destroyed by aristocratic friends, he has ended, in Brideshead Revisited, with a bedazzlement by great houses and noble names that reminds one of romantic lady novelists. The middle classes here occur only as overbearing nouveaux riches or as ill-bred and boring upstarts. And what, indeed, has become of that old middle class of which the writers mentioned above were the spokesmen? Even in the Bloomsbury phase that came between these generations, the only first-rate non-upper-class figure was D. H. Lawrence, the coal-miner’s son, who had almost as little in common with the Bennett and Shaw point of view as he did with Virginia Woolf’s. Must we conclude that that articulate middle class which thought it was working for democracy and freedom is now almost completely dead, having failed, in the time of its prosperity, to create a lasting civilization, so that there is nothing today left but a laboring and shopkeeping people, more and more equalized by the pressure of the war services and of wartime restrictions, over whom hangs a fading phantom of the England of the public school?
Certainly this new lower middle class, which may be destined to absorb the others, supplies an eager and growing market for the worst—in movies, radio and journalism—that the United States has to send them. Our Hollywood stars are already their stars, our best-sellers their best-sellers. To an American, these signs of Americanization seem mostly stale and depressing. The British feed themselves on our banality without catching our excitement and gusto. Many of them now chew gum.
The influence of America on England had already gone pretty far when I was here in 1935, and a reaction against it was evident in the humor of the London revues, which were ridiculing the United States at the same time that they were borrowing American jokes and exploiting American methods. Today the influence is more pervasive, and, though criticism on the stage and in the press is restrained by our relations as allies, the rebellion against it also seems stronger.
Everybody goes to the American films, and everybody under forty-five of whatever social class seems to say O.K. and That’s right, and the American use of fix in the sense of mend or arrange has also become very common. People, I believe, more often begin statements with Look than with the old I say; and an American is sometimes startled at hearing a phrase like het-up pronounced by an English voice. But the English, as a result of all this and of their recently having been swamped by the American Army and Navy, seem to have become rather neurotic about Americans. They look back on the descent of our troops as an ordeal of almost the same horror as the Blitz or the robot bombs. It must, of course, be a dreadful nuisance to have the people of some other country dumped suddenly upon one’s own, and the English have had cause for complaint in the uniformed hillbillies and hoodlums who took advantage of the blackout in London to snatch purses and attack women. In the case of the American officers, whose sometimes obnoxious behavior has astonished as well as outraged them, they cannot understand that in a country like ours, without permanent class-stratifications, there is no section of the population from which officers may be drawn who can be counted on to play the same role as the officers in European countries. A man who gets a commission in wartime may be a well-conducted person or he may be a rough diamond. If he is a blackguard, he will be less trained to conceal it than would be the case in England. This is one of the results of our system which must be faced and accepted for better or worse.
But now that the Army is mostly gone, I had assumed that this resentment had subsided, and was therefore surprised, in London, to hear a good deal of bitter criticism of practically everything connected with America. I had begun by being deprecatory about those products of the United States—Time magazine, movies, etc.—to which I objected as much as they did. But I soon found that this was not understood: it is a part of the Englishman’s code, probably derived from school games, never to criticize his country to outsiders, and he thinks that if you criticize yours, it is an admission of inferiority. I first became aware of this attitude some years ago at home, in meeting a visiting English scientist who told me that he hesitated to say that he had enjoyed Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt because he feared that we might not like it. This seemed to me odd at the time, but I realized, when I came to England, how different in such matters the English point of view is from ours. They do not publicly engage in self-criticism; they are too intent on keeping up face. And I felt that, in comparison with England—or, in fact, with any European country—we were not a nation at all—that is, we were not an entity which perpetuated its local breed and had to compete with and protect itself among peoples of other breeds; but a society in course of construction, composed of the most diverse elements, in which it was the way of living and not the national existence and essence that people considered important. Thus the admission of a weakness to a foreigner is, for an Englishman, an act of treason, whereas a satire on Babbitt, for us, is merely a comment on a social tendency.
But eventually I became rather irritated. If the people I met in London did not, as they often did, attack America and Americans directly, they would resort to the old offhand methods which one reads of in books of the last century and for which it seemed to me, in 1945, a little late in the day. One man who had been in the United States pretended to think that Vermont was a town in Florida and that it was pronounced as if it had the same root as “vermiform,” and another, an Oxford don who had lectured for a year or so at Harvard, a scholar of enormous reading who quoted lyrics in Portuguese and had the Russian poets all at his fingertips, remarked that he had never read Walt Whitman, who was considered, he understood, a great writer in South America. When I said that Leaves of Grass was probably the greatest American book, he asked me whether I thought it even more important than the writings of Whyte-Melville. I did not actually talk with people who believed—though I heard that the legend was current—that the long legs of the American women were due to the prevalence of Negro blood; but I met several well-educated persons who had ideas that were almost as fantastic. George Orwell, for example, believed that the language was being impoverished in America: that we had, for example, few separate names for the different kinds of insects, but called everything “some sort of bug.”
With the more offensive people I presently took a tougher line. I would retort that the American soldiers who had committed misdemeanors in England were our revenge for the obnoxious British propagandists who, from the moment the English had realized that they needed us against the Germans, had been sent over to put pressure on us, and I cited examples, in this line, of British atrocities in the United States. The first rebuttal I got was an unperturbed retort that in general the diplomatists and agents who were sent to New York and Washington were not out of the top drawer: when a man did not come up to scratch, he was usually assigned to the States. But my new tactic was not ineffective. The British, though impassive, are pugnacious: they have always stood four-square in their own little country with their fists clenched against the world. They understand giving blow for blow—again, the school-games idea. When the challenge of rudeness was offered, I would take it up in conversations that went more or less like this: “The English,” I would declare, “are fantastically incurious and ignorant about the United States. A friend of mine in Scotland who knows America well was saying that they see North America on the single page of an atlas so that it looks about the same size as England, and so assume that it is a small homogeneous place.” “One of the things,” my English friend will reply, “that make it difficult for us to learn about America is the inferiority of American books, which are usually so badly written that it is impossible for an Englishman to read them.” Or: “The social classes in England are quite different races of beings, who even speak different languages. Perhaps the jargon of the American movies may prove to have this use in England: that it will give them a common medium by which they can communicate.” “What about the American Negroes? They seem to be excluded from privilege as no group in England is. And though I am used to talking to Americans, I often find it very hard to understand what a Negro is saying.”
This attitude of the English toward America is, of course, partly a wartime phenomenon: a symptom of exasperation, of the peculiar state of mind produced by being penned up at home for five years, and in uncertainty, since 1940, about England’s surviving at all. I provoked an immediate resistance whenever I expressed the opinion that Europe, after the war, would have to be governed by somebody or something; but it took me a little time to realize that the English at once assumed that I meant that we ought to run it. When I had done so, I would explain that the difficulty would be rather, once the Germans were defeated, to induce the United States to take any further interest in Europe. Yet the British, though they shudder at the notion of any other power’s dominating Europe, shrink also from the idea of coöperating, for purposes of international control, with the other great Western countries. They used to reproach us, with reason, for creating the League of Nations and then refusing to take our place in it, but, during my visit, I got the impression that the average educated Englishman is still thinking of the future of the world in terms of old-fashioned balance-of-power, for which nations are irreducible units that can associate in pacts and alliances like the combinations of molecules in chemistry but cannot cohere to produce a new structure by a process of crystallization.
The great difference that one finds between England and the other English-speaking countries is due perhaps mainly, I have come to see, to the fact—of which, obvious though it is, I had not fully appreciated the importance—that the English inhabit an island, whereas the rest of us are spread across whole continents and, with wide spaces of sea around us, unconstrained by menacing neighbors, have acquired a certain nonchalance, a readiness to get on with people, that make the non-English Anglo-Saxon something distinct from the native of England. The Englishman sits tight on his island and makes forays into the outside world which are adventurous or predatory but do not establish friendly relations.
I had never before fully grasped what was meant by “British rudeness.” The point about it is that what we consider rudeness is their form of good manners. In other countries, manners are intended to diminish social friction, to show people consideration and to make them feel at ease. In England it is the other way: good breeding is something you exhibit by snubbing and scoring off people. This is of course closely connected with their class system, and it is partly a question of accent, vocabulary and general style, which your inferior cannot acquire. I have been told that, when a way of talking begins to pass into common use, the higher people evolve something new which will again fence them off from the lower. Certainly I heard interchanges in London of which I could hardly understand a word. But their competitiveness is also involved: it is a game to put your opponent at a disadvantage, and if you succeed in saying something blighting in a way which makes it impossible for him to retaliate without a loss of dignity more serious than that which he incurs by accepting it, you are considered to have won the encounter. You have the status of King of the Castle till somebody else comes to pull you down. Nothing in this respect seems to have changed since the days of which Henry Adams wrote in his Education, when what he had heard described as “the perfection of human society” required that a man should be able to “enter a drawing room where he was a total stranger, and place himself on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire, with an air of expectant benevolence, without curiosity, much as though he had dropped in at a charity concert, kindly disposed to applaud the performers and to overlook mistakes.”
For all that with other peoples is understood by politeness or courtesy they have a special word, civility, which is spoken of as something exceptional and rather unimportant. To say that a person is civil is usually patronizing; to complain of someone’s incivility usually means that a vulgar person has made himself offensive by breaking the rules of the game and not accepting the inferior position to which you have tried to assign him. They have also as a part of their rudeness what may be called mock considerateness, which may well be described in the words of a distinguished Russian artist with whom I once had a talk about the English. “They’re at their worst,” he said, “when they’re being kind! They scratch you and scratch you and scratch you—and then they take out a little bandage and graciously bind you up—and then they begin to scratch again.” You find it all in the Alice books, those wonderful studies of English life and character. Alice is a little lady; she is supposed to have been very well brought up; and it is a part of her good breeding to have learned how to make other people uncomfortable without ever losing the pretension of being a thoroughly tender-hearted person: “ ‘Où est ma chatte?,’ ” she addresses the Mouse—“which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. ‘I quite forgot you didn’t like cats…. Don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah. I think you’d take a fancy to cats, if you could only see her. She is such a dear, quiet thing,’ Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, ‘and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!’ cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. ‘We won’t talk about her any more, if you’d rather not.’…‘Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?…There is such a nice little dog, near our house…. A little bright-eyed terrier, you know…and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it’s so useful…. He says it kills all the rats and—oh dear!’ cried Alice in a sorrowful tone. ‘I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!’ For the Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the pool as it went.” Lewis Carroll meant this to be funny, and he knew that the nice little English girls to whom the book would be read would love to hear about the Mouse being frightened and finally making an unseemly commotion while Alice remained perfectly cool. Yet Alice, with her brutal good manners, was of course constantly jostled and crowded by creatures that were brutal in a more overt way. They were not by any means all mice: she had to stand up for herself among Mad Hatters and Ugly Duchesses, and any English child who read the book would have thought her a little fool if she had not given as good as she got.
Yet they usually seemed rather shocked when I said that the Soviet Union, England and the United States were three very different social systems which had little, among the three, in common, and which were only united at the moment by the accident that they were all afraid of Germany.
The President died April 12; and I went to the House of Commons to hear Churchill pay his tribute to Roosevelt. His speech was, however, held up by a curious and unexpected incident which turned out to be more interesting to an American visitor than the little oration itself. A new M.P., a Dr. Robert McIntyre, who represented the Scottish Nationalist Party, presented himself to be seated without the customary Parliamentary sponsors. Now, it seems that a Member of Parliament, when he first takes his place in the House, is supposed to be sponsored by two other members, who escort him on either side, as, stopping three times to bow to the Speaker, he walks down between the benches. Dr. McIntyre, the spokesman for an intransigent group, had decided to appear alone, in order, as he said, to dissociate himself from “the London party game”; but the result was that the Speaker, in his very high chair and wearing his shoulder-length wig, immediately challenged the Doctor’s procedure and, when he began to explain his position, cut him short with, “You have no place to speak from. You cannot make a speech.” He was sent to sit behind the bar—that is, to a kind of limbo consisting of a “cross-bench” at the back of the room; and he retired, walking backwards and making the Speaker two more bows. A spirited debate now took place. A Scottish member, Mr. Buchanan, with a strong Scottish accent, urged that the old rule be suspended for a day. Dr. McIntyre, he said, had been “duly elected after fighting both party machines,” and was certainly entitled to his seat. Other members objected that the rule had a very important purpose: if sponsors were not required, there would be nothing to prevent any vagabond of the streets from walking into the House of Commons and taking his seat as a member. It turned out that this regulation, in force since 1688, had come in question only once before—in 1875, when a certain Dr. Kenealy had been personally so unpopular that he could not get anyone to sponsor him—on which occasion the requirement had apparently been waived. The supporters of Dr. McIntyre were unable to make any headway. A Conservative member, Earl Winterton, even inquired indignantly whether the House were obliged to tolerate Dr. McIntyre’s remaining in the room at all, and provoked from Mr. Buchanan a counter-question addressed to the Speaker: “Could you not order Dr. McIntyre’s execution just to satisfy Lord Winterton?” The question of whether or not Dr. McIntyre was to be seated had to be put to a vote. “I could not,” said Mr. Churchill, “advise the House on this occasion to depart from tradition and custom. On the contrary, when the British House of Commons is under the gaze of the whole world, and the admiring gaze of a large part of it, we should not in the least shrink from upholding the ancient traditions and customs which have added to our dignity and power.”
I had that afternoon been very much impressed, amidst the carvings and the gilt of Westminster, by the spectacle of the opening of Parliament: the huge gold mace, the Speaker framed in his wig, the attendants with their necks rigid and their chins stuck out, all proceeding through the solemn portals while the crowd was made to stand at attention. I had never quite felt before—since we have nothing in the least like this—how dramatic and how compelling these anachronistic rites could be, how much that power and dignity of England of which the Prime Minister spoke still resided in a mystic core of which such things as crown and mace and woolsack were the most conspicuous symbols but which lived and provided an orientation for almost every British subject. As our ship was docking at London, I had been struck when the British stewardess, born in India and married in the States, who had been but once in England, had observed, looking out at the grassy shores: “There’s something worthy about it, don’t you think so?” And yet, now that the Prime Minister was appealing thus for the continuance of an obsolete custom on the ground that it would be a good thing for British prestige abroad—in a word, that it was better publicity—I felt that the power and the glory were perhaps ebbing out of these symbols, that the old virtue was no longer quite there.
I later read in a paper the program of the Scottish Nationalist Party, which included the following points: “The breakup of large landlord states among farmer-owners responsible to the Nation; Government ownership responsible to the Scottish people alone; a central bank and control of private and municipal banks, customs and excise; the curbing of combines by immediate legislation making it illegal for a Scottish firm to sell a majority of its capital to non-Scots and by a differential tax on chain-stores; national ownership of the coal reserves of Scotland”; and, as “war aims,” “national freedom for Scotland and all other nations.” To an American, these demands of the Scots had a certain familiar ring. I do not know how important this party may be or how legitimate its grievances are. The Englishmen I asked about it smilingly brushed it off, conceding sometimes that it might be a good thing if the Scots had a parliament of their own, which would prove to be merely, they said, a sort of “glorified borough council.” But the more open-minded kind of Englishmen, toward the end of the eighteenth century, must have smiled in very much the same way about the demands of the American colonies. At any rate, the oration for Roosevelt was held up while a division took place. The members went out to vote; Mr. Churchill had to withdraw with his speech in his hand. The decision was overwhelmingly for the government, against the seating of the Scottish member: 273 to 74.
This quiet laughing-off of the Scottish M.P. and the derouting of his challenge by Parliament led me to reflect on the methods which the English have invented and perfected for warding off inconvenient questions. A favorite device is the False Issue. This is best handled in the tone of light ridicule. They acquire the technique so early that I think they must be trained in it at Oxford. If you do not want to stand by the Poles, you make fun of them for their effervescence, thus implying that they are quite irresponsible; if Gandhi is becoming too powerful, you are amusing about his loin-cloth and goat. Only in more aggravated cases do you resort to moral indignation. If the Americans expect loans to be repaid, you denounce them as “Uncle Shylock”; if the Irish are becoming importunate, you raise a hue and cry against Parnell on the ground that he has committed adultery. When something atrocious one does has not merely to be defended, but to be perpetrated in the presence of the victim, a special skill and address are required. This demands that the thing be presented either—on the ground of gentlemanliness—in such a way that, if the victim objects, he will appear to be behaving badly; or—on the ground of a manly idealism—in such a way that, if he does not subscribe, he will seem to confess sordid self-interest. I saw later, in Italy and Greece, this game worked again and again on inexperienced and unsuspicious Americans. The point is that, unless you are used to it, you are unable to imagine that a person so correct in appearance and tone as the well-trained British official can be up to anything really outrageous. In America, external crudeness usually goes with a lowness of motive. But in England it is mostly with the humble that the straightforwardness and decency reside. The Norwegian captain of our ship told us that when he was making his first voyages, he was warned by other Norwegians that everybody would try to cheat him, with the single exception of the English. I am sure that this was quite true of the English with whom the captain came into contact; but it is certainly not true of the people who make and carry out British policy or in the higher reaches of British business.
I may mention here, also, a device much in vogue among British intellectuals for the purpose of taking down a rival without sacrificing outward dignity or the semblance of generosity. I forbear from quoting actual examples, but the kind of thing I mean is as if Fletcher were to have said to Shakespeare: “You know, I don’t think you ever did anything better than Love’s Labour’s Lost. You had a real lyric gift,” etc.
Thus an American of English stock, coming to England at a time when we are supposed to be working in close alliance, finds himself estranged from the English more than ever before. We have always, I suppose, an instinct to make connections with the English past from which we have been cut off; and this instinct, at the present moment, finds itself up against a blank wall. It has been brought home to me, certainly, more sharply than it has ever been before, that the real English social revolution occurred, not in England, but in America; and that the United States stands to England in the relation of England’s own modern history, as if the first French Republic had been detached and set up in another country, where it was able to prosper in a material way far more than it could have done at home, while the old regime in France continued fighting the old kind of wars with its neighbors and adapting itself, as it had to, to a moderate industrial development.
But the English will not recognize this: they go on pretending that it never happened, and the more the success of the United States is forced upon their attention, the more determined they are to ignore it. It is difficult for an American to grasp the persistence and completeness of this British refusal. We take a friendly interest in England, and we remember the past without rancor; we cannot understand to what lengths the English go in order not to know about us. It is a shock for the American visitor to read in Westminster Abbey the inscription to Major André, and to realize what his monument implies: “Sacred,” the legend reads, “to the memory of Major John André, who was raised by his Merit at an early period of Life to the rank of Adjutant General of the British Forces in America, and, employed in an important but hazardous Enterprise, fell a Sacrifice to his zeal for his King and Country on the 2 of October A.D. 1780, aged 29, universally loved and esteemed by the Army in which he served, and lamented even by his Foes. His Gracious Sovereign KING GEORGE the Third has caused this monument to be erected.” You would never get the impression from this that André was hanged as a spy, and that his name, in America, was indissolubly associated with the betrayal of Benedict Arnold. The man who died at our hands and was buried at Tarrytown had been dug up and brought to the Abbey, and one could not even get a glimpse through his epitaph at the violent page of history in which he figured. I was not surprised afterwards to notice, in a review of a book by an Englishman who had visited the United States, that he had gone there quite ignorant of the defeat of the British in the War of 1812 and had not known that the British Army had at that time burned the Capitol and the White House—quite unnecessarily and simply, as Henry Adams wrote, “because they thought it proper, as they would have burned a Negro kraal or a den of pirates.” Naturally one does not want to keep sore a feud based on ancient injuries; but an American is bound to feel that it is the British themselves who nurse it. We are the only one of the British colonies which has completely got away from the system. We have escaped being exploited like Canada by having our raw materials all taken by England and being prevented from building up our own industries; we were not left disunited like Ireland (though the British hoped to see our disruption at the time of the Civil War). We broke away from the English and beat them and sent them back to their island; and they have never forgiven this.
Altogether this visit to England has been for me almost as much of a revelation of an alien and little-known world as my trip to the Soviet Union in 1935. Though I have five times before been in England, it has been usually just to pass through. I have never before stayed here for any length of time except in the summer of 1914, when, with American college friends, I took a bicycle trip from Scotland to Cornwall, mostly making the rounds of the cathedral towns and consuming large teas in country inns. We saw nothing, except casually, of the people, and the English I had since got to know I had seen mainly in the United States. Now I am having some firsthand experience of that tough-rooted and densely-branched English life which I had learned about principally from books and which seems so unexpectedly different from our looser and shallower growth. I see now that those appalling novels which we read for amusement in America and which seem to us half fairy-tales like Homer, the myths of a remote and archaic world—Vanity Fair, Bleak House, The Way of All Flesh—are true pictures of English society. They do not represent, as we tend to think, merely the cynical worldliness of Thackeray, the grotesque imagination of Dickens, the grievances against his family of Butler: they portray basic English qualities, with which, after nearly two hundred years, Americans have to reckon again: the passion for social privilege, the rapacious appetite for property, the egoism that damns one’s neighbor, the dependence on inherited advantages, and the almost equally deep-fibered instinct, often not deliberate or conscious, to make all these appear forms of virtue. I have lately often thought of these books. When you know that they deal with realities, they become so much more powerful and terrible than the criticism of irreverent outsiders. Beside them, Bernard Shaw seems a popular Irish entertainer and his satire mere persiflage. A more deadly description by a foreigner is that by Henry James in The Wings of the Dove, which has also been much in my mind where the relations between Americans and English are concerned. Here the American disinterested idealism, indiscriminate amiability and carelessness about money, along with the aimlessness and petering-out of Americans who have made themselves rich and their helplessness outside of America, are contrasted with the desperate materialism that is implied by position in England. We find making money exhilarating, but we also find it exhilarating to spend it. Money for us is a medium, a condition of life, like air. But with the English it means always property. A dollar is something that you multiply—something that causes an expansion of your house and your mechanical equipment, something that accelerates like speed; and that may be also slowed up or deflated. It is a value that may be totally imaginary, yet can for a time provide half-realized dreams. But pounds, shillings and pence are tangible, solid, heavy; they are objects one gains and possesses. And in England every good value is bound up with the things one can handle and hold.
I stayed for a time at the Hyde Park Hotel, which still managed to keep up the appearances of a Victorian comfort and grandeur. The waiter asked me what I wanted to order for breakfast in my room the next morning. When, in reciting the meager menu, he mentioned scrambled eggs and sausages, I said, “That’s fine!—bring me that.” “That’s not what they usually say when they see it, sir,” he dampeningly replied. I should have done well to take his warning, for, when my breakfast came, the eggs turned out to be concoctions of egg-powder, and I saw what someone had meant when he told me that sausages in England were now a form of bread.
The strain of the war has made the English irritable, and it may be that these notes are affected by the atmosphere of general resentment in which Americans, too, are involved.
I had dinner one evening with a Labour man who had a job in the Air Ministry and with a journalist who had fought for the Loyalists in Spain and was now an anti-Stalinist radical. It was the moment, near the end of April, when the Americans and the English had nearly completed their hideous work of ploughing Germany under, and the conversation, over the coffee, was becoming quietly ghoulish. The official archly remarked that, when the Germans went home after the war, they would find their country “rather changed.” The radical, in reminding us that Warsaw had been “completely wiped out,” gave a kind of involuntary grin—but presently caught himself up: “Who could have imagined,” he said, “six years ago, that we should soon be talking in this frivolous way about the destruction of whole populations?” I had often thought of this myself. Through the whole of the previous war some humanitarian feeling survived and continued to assert itself: it was assumed that the misery and slaughter were abnormal and undesirable. There had been Harden, Rolland, Barbusse, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos—to say nothing of Lenin and the socialists of the Zimmerwald Conference—to protest against the war as a bad thing in itself. But today it is perfectly plain that human life is no longer an issue. No one pretends to give a damn any more—unless they are one’s close friends or relatives—whether people are killed or not. After the first shock of the German bombings, we in America followed the contest between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe as if they were football teams. After we ourselves became involved, nobody but an occasional old liberal like Oswald Garrison Villard, to whom nobody paid attention, seemed to feel any scruples whatever. The newspaper reports of our bombings were designed to make them sound quite jolly. “Smiling skies,” one would read in the dispatches, “sent out flying squadrons”; when our planes destroyed the monastery at Monte Cassino, the building “blew apart like a house of cards,” and the Germans ran out “like ants”—as if they had not been human beings. When we began to smash up Berlin, people said that it was an ugly city and that its buildings were no great loss. We have, to be sure, had to be treated, like the Germans, with a certain amount of indoctrination to arrive at this point of indifference. We have had to be convinced, as they are, that the enemy are not really people. Just after the official reports of the Japanese atrocities had been published, I went to a movie newsreel which had been made to arouse the public. First you were given a dose of the dead or still writhing bodies of Chinamen slaughtered by the Japs; then you heard one of the American officers who had suffered at the hands of the enemy and who declared that he had been convinced that the Japs were no better than “animals”—at which point the announcer took it up and pounded it home with ferocity: “You hear what Captain So-and-So says. He thinks that the Japs are animals. And now we must fight these animals! We must buy bonds to defeat these animals!” Goebbels hardly used a different technique in working up the Germans to the point at which it seemed to them quite natural to attempt to exterminate the Poles and the Jews; and our efforts have been equally successful. We can contemplate now with equanimity, with a cheerful self-satisfaction, a kind of warfare that crushes whole cities and that brings down agony and death on thousands of women and children.
Yet the long-continued concentration on killing people whom we rarely confront, the suppression of the natural bonds between ourselves and these unseen human creatures, is paid for by repercussions, the spitefulness of fear and stifled guilt, in our immediate personal relations. Our whole world is poisoned now, and we must recognize that outlawing the enemy makes it easy to dislike one’s allies.
When I was finally leaving England, the officials were equally polite, but it turned out that, from the British point of view, my papers were not in order. By that time I had the status of a war correspondent, and I had not been provided by the American bureau with a permit from the Allied Forces office, so I was not allowed to fly that morning but made to go back to London to equip myself with the necessary document. The American authorities, when I returned to them, insisted that I did not need this passport, that my papers had been in order, and a certain amount of animated argument was carried on over the telephone. I had a glimpse, in the course of all this and of some later complications, of the conflicting tendencies, in Europe, of the British and the American methods. The British handle their formalities entirely without fuss, but they are very exact about them. They were quite correct, I found, in telling me that the permit they insisted on my having would be asked for when I arrived in Italy. On the other hand, if I had not had it, the Americans would certainly have let me through. The point was that a new kind of credential had just gone into use with the Americans without the British having had notification. But the American officials thought that the fact that they sent a man to an airport provided with American credentials ought to be enough for the British.
The Americans like to act for themselves and to do things with a freer hand. They do not always take the routine of their paperwork quite so seriously as the British do. To the latter, they doubtless seem hit-or-miss, and they probably make annoying mistakes of a kind that is rare with the British. It is the result of having more space to move in, more margin of resources to dispose of. With the British every penny counts and every link in the chain must be tight. They do not understand our looser methods—the methods of a big gang of men working together with a minimum of formality to get something quickly accomplished, so that they can sit down and eat a good dinner.