INTRODUCTION

I

ONE DAY AT the end of the 1950s, long before monetarism, Dallas, and Legionnaire’s disease, when the world was still quite young, two pelicans were seated on a warm current at the mouth of the Saint John’s River, in Northern Florida, snapping their beaks at fish and eyeing each other quizzically, when they were interrupted by an unexpected sight. A battered, salt-caked freighter, no bigger than a large bedroom slipper, had penetrated through the well-nigh impassable shoals at the river’s mouth, and was proceeding on an uncertain course up the estuary. A string of flags fluttered from the mastheads, proclaiming either that the pilot was on board, or the cholera was. But what attracted especial attention was the dull, ravaged figure, his features pasty-white, his clothes scuffed and battered, his eyes fixed on the foggy horizon with the myopic gaze of the true visionary, who stood at the ship’s rail. His Rex Harrison hat and the thick tweed suit in which he sweated proclaimed him to be unmistakably British. His socks somehow failed to match; something resembling a postgraduate thesis appeared to be tucked under one of his two armpits. ‘Hullo, another goddam Columbus,’ said the more observant of the pelicans; and they took off south to fulfil an old wing-flapping engagement they were booked for at the Fontainebleu in Miami.

Meanwhile the freighter staggered on on its disorderly course up the channel; the raddled figure by the rail staggered with it, desperately looking for harbour. It seemed to him extraordinary that only a mere six weeks before this he had been back at home in 1950s Britain, boarding, somewhere off a back street in Salford, Manchester, this same vessel, the M.S. Necrophilia—a fine sight then as she lay, her spars agleam, her brasswork shining, her crew gaily dancing hornpipes, at rest on the muddy bottom of the Manchester Ship Canal. It seemed to him even more extraordinary that he had started on his voyage a debonair and promising youth, a young Nottingham intellectual with five published articles to his credit, all in journals of absolutely no importance. A Nottingham intellectual may not seem on the face of it a demanding pastime; it is therefore worth remembering that in the later 1950s there was just as much angst, despair and hard thinking, and of just as good a quality, in Nottingham as there was anywhere else. For in those days the provinces were in; Nottingham was full of Jewish refugees called Grizelda, who played the harp in black stockings; in its espresso bars, under the heavy tropical greenery, lulled by the aphrodisiacal pulsing of Spanish guitars, the coffee machines worked without steam, and the bright young writers and intellectuals steamed without work. For only shortly before this, John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger had tempted into existence a large motley crew of intellectual vagabonds and misfits who, when they were not sleeping in sleeping bags on Hampstead Heath, sat around in Nottingham and Leicester, drinking cups of broth and condemning the world, consumerism, Harold Macmillan, and virginity. And they dreamed dreams, above all of the United States, the land of modernity, freedom, space, jazz, spontaneity and, with luck, even a little sex as well.

Such, then, was the spirit of the quest that had driven this now broken figure on board the Necrophilia, determined to take the freighter route to America and the free and open life. Six weeks before, the fabulous voyage had begun, out past ancient Altrincham; it was only when three days had gone by, and the vessel, seemingly growing smaller by the hour, had still not made open sea, that the uneasy thought had begun to arise in our traveller’s mind that perhaps not every omen surrounding his New World voyage was propitious. A mere ten days out, and Dublin was sighted. Here several more days were devoted to commerce, largely on the part of the mate, whose business it was to sell perfectly new hawsers to strange red-nosed men in unmarked vans; then the voyage proper commenced. Nosing round the southern tip of Ireland into the December gales, which had waited until February to find a ship as ill-equipped as this, the vessel began its Atlantic passage. Battered by storms, it responded magnificently, converting itself into a kind of submarine and advancing forward just a few feet below sea-level. Water came down the funnel frequently; the cargo, of ill-packed crates of Scotch whisky, now began shifting, needing the frequent attention of the crew; the captain, judging the weather, ordered that not only should the ship’s furniture be screwed down, but the six passengers as well. Yet a mere six weeks later, the famous landfall had come, just that morning. The shouts of sailors sounded on deck, warning that the ship was about to run into a large hut marked McDonald’s Hamburger; the captain was raised from his drunken stupor; maps were, with difficulty, found, and it was discovered that all this was consistent with having reached America.

It is hard, in these cynical times, to evoke that classic sense of wonder that has always occurred, throughout history, as the New World reveals itself in its marvellous novelty. But we may be sure our immigrant experienced it as, by a mere three in the morning, the gangplank was secured, and he descended at last into the new land, felt Florida underfoot, halted on the dock-side, and shook his fist at the captain of the Necrophilia in a last malicious gesture of farewell. Then he turned to confront America: the land of the free, the home of the brave, the world of the modern and the new. There was a bare dock wall; two or three longshoremen stood in the shadow of the wharf, pilfering beef and arguing whether it was better to be written up by Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. No form of transport was to be seen; the lights of the town shone, ridiculously far away, beyond a nexus of railroad tracks and waterlogged ditches in which alligators snapped at rusting Coke cans. A frost scarce in these parts seeped up the leg of the visitor’s trousers. Wiping a tear of chagrin from his eye, and shouldering a metal foot-locker that seemed to him neither smaller nor less weighty than the Empire State Building, in fabulous New York City, which he took to be just up the road, the figure lit out, sagging at the knees, into the territory that Christopher Columbus had once, in a not dissimilar state of confusion, discovered.

Yet, despite his bleak, late-night landfall, the stranger’s arrival had not gone unnoticed. Indeed, throughout the Land of Liberty, preparations were at that moment being made for his arrival. In the immigration shed along the dock, officials were doing revision seminars in aggression and hostility. In great cities the length of his likely route, taxi drivers were resetting the meters in their cabs; in hotels and motels clear across the nation, box-spring vibration-mechanism body-contoured mattresses were being removed from beds, and replaced with straw-filled sacks. In major research libraries everywhere, rare books were being removed from shelves and concealed in private homes, in case he wished to consult them. Thus, as he dragged his footlocker through the swamplands to the nearest Greyhound station, where the sailors slept on benches with their mouths open, and cleaners came round to brush his shoes with brooms as the daylight rose, America expected him, just as much as he expected America. Three hours later, on a dark-windowed bus going northwards, with the Spanish moss dripping over the long straight highway, the lavatory flushing just behind him, and a magazine on his knee displaying pictures of sunbathing beauties by a luxury pool, under the legend ‘This Time, Try it By Freighter’, the traveller began to reflect on his experience. It came to him then that not all was lost. There was probably a book in it, several books. For it is with literature as with diarrhoea; nothing stimulates either as much as travel and cultural comparison.

II

It is as well to admit at this point that this gawping pioneer was, give or take a total lie or two, no other a person than my own early self, come to look for a new life somewhere beyond cosy, comfortable, confining 1950s Britain. I was not an angry young man, perhaps, since to me the angry young men were all old, ten years or so older than I was. But I was a niggling one, an uneasy figure struggling in my Englishness, fighting to get out. The British provinces had been swallowing me like an eiderdown; America seemed the great good place. I took the bus to New York, and rode in the endless elevator up to the top of the Empire State Building; below was the great metropolis, looking like a gigantic waffle-iron. Excitement grew; I took the ferry and sailed out to the Statue of Liberty, while fireboats sprayed me with jets of water; I wandered Macy’s, and bought nylon shirts, then a new invention that made you ping with static electricity when you put them on and off. The Beat Generation was riding high: I went to poetry readings in gloomy bagel shops in Greenwich Village, where poets in dark glasses would look up at the ceiling and cry ‘Come, little bird of poetry, fly down to me’ (actually it rarely did). I talked to deviants on benches outside the New York Public Library, while dapper secretaries went by, carrying plastic Lord and Taylor’s bags. It was different, exciting; yet I still didn’t feel I knew what America was. Then one day the revelation came. I was staying with the parents of a Jewish friend in their small apartment in the Bronx. It was not a notable apartment, but it did have a notable American kitchen: a shining bulbous icebox, a glinting split-level cooker, Formica worktops, a whirring blender and mixer, a toaster that threw bread into the air as if in sport, and, in the middle of the sink, an object called a Dispose-All which consumed the kitchen refuse and sent it all straight to the sewage company. Commonplace now, it was a wonder of the fifties; I used to wander in there frequently, just to experience it all. One day my host came and found me there, staring down the Dispose-All’s magnificent orifice, as if seeking the meaning of life. Not speaking, he opened the door of the icebox, took out an entire uncooked chicken, thrust the creature into the grinder, and switched on. Standing there, watching the machine consume the entire bird, I knew at last that I had seen the New World, and it worked.

I stayed on in the States for a long time, in the American heartland, teaching Freshman Composition—better known as Readin’, Writin’, Speakin’ and List’nin’—at a university in a cornfield in the Middle West. Here I taught coeds in tight sweaters, cantilevered bras and Elizabeth Arden make-up, and seven-foot-tall footballers with crew cuts and huge ears, who could sit in the third row and still put their feet up on my desk (‘Duh, I didn’t doe dey was mine,’ said one of them when, after five weeks, I complained). I taught them the simple things of life: how to use human language, how to write on pieces of paper from left to right, how to open books without splitting the spine, how to put in verbs to give a sentence the completeness of a sentence. I taught a lot, but I learned more. My students called for me in cars and took me out on dates, teaching me how to drink milkshakes; they showed me the way to the Doosie Duds, where I washed my socks, and the Piggly Wiggly, where I bought comestibles and acquired free Melamine tableware on food orders of five dollars or more. I thought I was growing American, though the students never quite agreed. ‘Pip-pip, old chap,’ they said as they came into class, ‘Bin shootin? How’s the Queen?’ Indeed, as time went by, a certain excess of Englishness crept into my character. Though by origin a good deal closer to Jimmy Porter than the Duke of Windsor, I acquired a degree of bearing. My old cheap Harris tweed sports jacket with plastic patches on the elbow (only Oxbridge undergraduates could afford leather) acquired a fine old glow, as if it had been carefully smoked over a peat fire by willing peasants, and then systematically stained with claret by family butlers. I became an expert in politeness, rank, the Royal Family, hunting, and warm beer.

At the same time my literary ambitions were proceeding apace. For in addition to haunting the coffee bars of Nottingham, shouting about Sartre and nibbling the ears of leggy girls named Ernestine, I had spent three years being a student at a certain nameless English provincial university. A strange youth, who wore pink intellectual shirts and clip-on bow ties that kept falling off suddenly into cups of black coffee, I had spent most of those three years writing a novel, about, of course, an English provincial university. I used to sit for hours in the university entrance hall, ostentatiously correcting a large sheet of proofs: ‘He’s a writer,’ my two or three friends would explain to any passing visitor who happened to stumble in, usually under the impression that they had found the public library. I had once seen T. S. Eliot, or someone very like him, emerge from the offices of Faber and Faber in Russell Square, so I felt alert to everything that was happening in the literary scene; I had even been discovered—by a college friend, the editor of the literary magazine, a man named Michael Orsler, an impressive figure who used to stand naked at the window of his room, shouting ‘Sex rules the world’ to occasional passing suburban shoppers. Everyone assured me that a book about an English provincial university would never sell, and this confirmed me in my integrity. It was to these talents that I now turned in my office in the midwestern heartland; passing strangers, wandering close to the English Department late at night, would hear the tapping of typewriter keys as I wrote down for posterity the benefits of my Anglo-American experience in articles that went to Vogue and Harper’s and Punch and somehow managed to appear in print.

It all came to an end, of course. My contract ceased after a year. I posted the final grades on the door of my office and locked myself in, while disappointed students shouted through the keyhole in fury. I said goodbye to my friends, who explained that they had not understood a word I had said all year, because of my foreign accent. I knew, with a kind of dread in my heart, that it was time to go home to England. I knew that going home was always an agony, if not a disaster; that I would miss what I had enjoyed. I had learned much about America, in the Doosie Duds and the Piggly Wiggly and the long car and bus journeys I had taken right across the nation, there to find more Doosie Duds, more Piggly Wigglies, more and more and more. In a dark, or at any rate decidedly ill-lit, night of the soul, I put all my Melamine tableware into my great footlocker, heaved it lightly over one shoulder, and set off to walk the thousand or so miles to New York City and the Cunard Pier, on that most ancient of quests, the tale of return. Great liners with big red funnels still ran in those days, though plane-travel was becoming fashionable in some quarters. Looking forward to six days of leisure, I climbed aboard the grand vessel, a haven of Englishness, smelling of marchionesses, carbolic soap, and good old kippers. The freighter I had come on, all those lifetimes ago, would have made one of its lifeboats; ‘Directions for Adjustment’, said the notices on the wall of the underwater tourist cabin in which I found myself, showing a picture of a very well-developed girl strapping herself into some apparatus that made her look even more well-developed still. And adjustment, after a long spell of America, was exactly what I needed. For I looked around at my fellow passengers, and the severe guardians who formed the crew. They appeared to me odd, until I realized that they were simply English. I would need to learn England all over again.

III

For five days I drank my bouillon and played deck-quoits with the best, convalescing from America. Then we suddenly emerged from the spray just off the Scilly Isles, and the old land was nearby, somewhere in the mist and the rain. The BBC News came over the loudspeakers, and the old high-toned voice of the British newscaster announced, in confident and reassuring tones, as if we would be pleased to hear it, that there was a Crisis. I forget which one it was: someone had robbed us of a colony, or the miners had gone on strike, or the balance of payments was adrift. Nonetheless, it was clear that the news greatly cheered my fellow passengers, many of whom had gone for months or years without a decent Crisis. A natural aroma, a mood, began to take shape: that distinctive British mood of confidence in eternal values and rightness, coupled with a feeling of endless decline and decay, that we have in fact been living in for the last twenty-five years. We all got off the ship at Southampton, where the customs men went through the luggage hunting for illicit copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; then we stepped out into the ancient land. It looked much as it always had, if not more so. The houses, the trains, even the people, appeared very tiny. People stood on street corners, talking in hushed tones about the bad weather. There was no Piggly Wiggly, and life was sedate. Everything was as one had always expected—or was it?

For, riding up to London on the tiny train, filled with silent, self-questioning people, it seemed that certain things were in fact changing, probably for good. The agrarian past, for example, was disappearing very rapidly. The Electricity Board vans were out everywhere, cutting down all the trees they could see; speculative builders were busy all over, raping the land and putting up squashed-together houses for toy people to live in. A concept of the modern seemed to have overtaken the British, here and there. Suburban dwellers were adding sun-lounges to the backs of their semi-detacheds; there were plastic-covered urinals, mosaic-fronted tobacconists, cedar-wood bicycle sheds. In London this uncharacteristic taste for the modern and the new was even more apparent. The beehive hairdo and the glass-walled office block spoke word of a new regime. Shops in Marks and Spencer’s international style were going up apace. In the streets, there was a lot of youth about, asserting youthiness. In the shops, Swedish glass and Danish furniture indicated that the British were acceding to what the experts in these things—and now, suddenly, Britain was filled with experts in such things, calling them sociologists—called cultural drag. Commercial television had started, and the jingle-writers were showing off their wares, the pop stars screeching in mid-atlantic accents. There were supermarkets instead of grocers’ shops; a kind of inebriated torpor, the kind of glazed look that comes to people’s eyes after they have been watching too many television quiz shows, seemed to have settled over the population. Austerity had stopped, growth was growing, and the droop-moustached Prime Minister of the day was saying we had all ‘never had it so good’. As someone put it at the time, the British were replacing the jingoism of the past with the bingoism of the present. Everywhere people were worrying about just the same kind of problems that had been disturbing Americans—the problem of conformity, the perils of creeping suburbanization, the woes of the waist-high culture, the spirit of the shook-up generation. It was apparent that I had returned at a time of subtle transformation. It was not that the old English stuffiness had gone away; it was there, more than ever. But at the same time the British were turning themselves into a nation of modern consumers, on the world model, aligning the old mood of post-imperial tristesse with the new mood of Having it Good.

I have told you all this because there are phases in the lives of writers when certain essential materials seem to drop before them, all ready to be used. I came back home just at the time when my provincial redbrick novel was, after all, being published: I was all ready to begin. And it was about all this, America and England, post-imperial tristesse and the new English unease, that I wanted to write. Just at this same time, my old colleague and mentor, Michael Orsler, bearded now and wearing glinting spectacles, had also returned from a stint abroad. He had been teaching in Singapore and Hong Kong, and become known as Master of Manners to a thousand Chinese schoolchildren. Comparing notes, we decided that we had come home again at a curious tidal moment, a cross-over point in British history. What to do about it? Humour, I thought, in the circumstances, seemed the only answer. I began an American novel, and also, in a frenzy of invention, started writing a number of humorous articles for magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Developing from these articles—in Vogue, the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly in the States, and in Punch and the Tatler in Britain (to the editors and proprietors of all of which warm acknowledgements are due for permission to reprint)—came two humorous books, which fattened a selected number of Christmas stockings in 1960 and 1962. One of these books was called Phogey! How to Have Class in a Classless Society, and the other All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go, or The Poor Man’s Guide to the Affluent Society. It is these two books, revised to fit neatly into one, and with some but not all of the period allusions removed, that you are now about to enter.

I am glad to see them in print again because they do draw together so much of the experience and material that started me off as a writer. It is all long ago; the world is no longer so young, and nor for that matter am I. We do have Dallas and Legionnaire’s disease, the Melamine tableware has long since been lost, and I do not any more wear clip-on bow ties. Instead of the age of You’ve Never Had It So Good, we have the new era of sado-monetarism, a little less of everything for everyone. Harder notes of satire in order; I shall be trying to oblige. So is all this a period piece? To a point, yes; but not entirely. For the ship on which we seem now to be sinking is the one that set sail in the 1950s, when I went to America, came back again, discovered the British divided between two worlds, and ventured on the analysis you are now poised to read. It is true that some of the things I then saw with amazement and described with surprise have become the routine, the ordinary, the commonplace stuff of British life. Matters have indeed been going rather oddly, this last twenty years or so. We’ve become a very strange lot of chaps altogether—wearing jeans in public, dressing ourselves in decorated and inscribed underwear, drinking aperitifs, reading paperback novels, listening through headphones to the barbaric yawp of streetwise, green-haired mutants, as they sing their songs that complain that no one likes them simply because they chose to be so unlikeable, and fornicating to excess. Yes, change has come; but has all that, really, been us? The answer, surely, is surely not. Indeed it has taken only three Argentinians, hard men in hotel doormen’s clothes, inflamed by the desire to assert their territorial rights over penguins, to reveal to us that, beneath the logo-ed T-shirts and the supporters’ scarves, the jogging knickers and the ra-ra skirts, we remain pretty much what we always were: bold, decent, nineteenth-century, unmistakably right and, in a word, British to the core. The surface may have changed, but, somewhere down in the subterranean currents where we keep what chaps used to call our souls, the old national self goes soldiering on, ready to emerge whenever Crisis calls, as Crisis, in the end, always does. But, if we are to face it properly, advice is called for. Which is why, at this very moment, we have such need of the book that follows.

Malcolm Bradbury

Norwich, 1982