WHEN this book first came out in 1947, it was badly received in England. It was even denounced by Dean Inge. Hawthorne had the same experience when he published his book on England called Our Old Home, which was based on the seven years that he had spent there as consul in Liverpool. He was somewhat surprised to find that anything he had had to say in the way of negative criticism was received as outrageous slander. “I received,” he wrote at the time, “several private letters and printed notices of Our Old Home from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion that there may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious caricature. But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate my own people.” This kind of patriotic reaction has seemed more characteristic of England than of any other nation. The French do not resent foreign criticism because they do not know it exists. They cannot even imagine it possible. It was amusing to remember the incessant disparagement to which we had been subjected by the visiting English. On this side of the water, on the other hand, I was scolded for being an Anglophile, and one correspondent wrote me that if I thought so much more highly of England than I did of the United States, I ought to go back and live there.
What seems to me rather curious is that, after having been five times to England—though usually rather briefly—and belonging as I did to a generation that had grown up on English literature, I should have had so little conception of what the English were really like. The point is that when we read English writers in youth, we assimilate them so far as we can to ourselves and treat the rest as a kind of fairy tale. One cannot find out what a people are like from seeing congenial friends who more or less share one’s own interests: one has to be obliged to deal with them as they come in business or official relations, when you can see how they habitually behave. My picture is of course somewhat dated. The England that I saw at the end of the war—bedevilled and bombed and deprived—is not the England of twenty years later, resigned to the loss of its imperialist role and trying to adjust itself to a social system less rigidly stratified. What this means for England of today has, it seems to me, been dramatized in a masterly way in Mr. Angus Wilson’s novel Late Call, with its story of three generations of a formerly lower-middle-class family in process of turning into something else in one of the modern “New Towns.” As an outsider, writing at the end of the war, I could only record a few signs of this. But what, rereading Europe Without Baedeker, does today considerably embarrass me—to the point of making me suppress one passage—is my plugging of the virtues of the United States in contrast to England and Russia. The Anglo-Irish friend whom I call Bob Leigh was more perspicacious than I then imagined in saying that if the English didn’t move in in Europe, the Americans probably would. We have done so, and not only in Europe but also in Korea and Vietnam, and have we done any better by their peoples? I used to make fun of the English assumption that “the wops begin at Calais” and assume, as I say in this book, that we of the United States had sought to coöperate with the natives of the countries of which we had more or less taken possession, and it is true that there was a difference, at the time of which I was writing, between the English and the American approaches—though I learn that in the Pacific the Americans called the natives “gooks” as the English called the Jugoslavs “Jugs,” and that that is what they are now calling the natives in Vietnam. How we behave now I do not know. We have earned the slogan, “Yanks, go home!” In any case, after killing and mutilating so many Koreans and Vietnamese, we can hardly be said to have been helpful. Our talk about bringing to backward peoples the processes of democratic government and of defending the “free world” against Communism is as much an exploit of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy as anything ever perpetrated by the English. And I must, also, now deflate my boast of twenty years ago that we should probably be able to avoid the evils of the modern bureaucratic state. I did not foresee the present development of our huge official bureaucracies, Pentagon, C.I.A., Internal Revenue Bureau, or that a human bureaucracy of clerks and officials, invested with special powers which are more or less mechanically exercised, would resort in the long run to a mechanical bureaucracy of computers.
The three new sections included here also first appeared in the New Yorker.
1966