ONE OF THE THINGS that we English like to tell foreigners (if we speak to them at all) is that our society is democratic; but how miserable we should all be if it were. We do, in this country, affirm the principle that Everyone’s Opinion Is as Good as Anyone Else’s; our qualification is that some people need to be told what are the best opinions to have. The difference between the English and American patterns of democracy can be simply summed up; while America is broadly speaking a permissive society, England is authoritarian, by consent. Visiting Americans always notice how easily we fall into postures of command or submission. We are dragooned in teashops, post offices, buses, by people who have, always, something better to do, and say so. Likewise we are dragooned by our government, the Inland Revenue, the National Health Service. The reason that we accept it is that it seems to us always to have been like that, and if it always was, it must be right.
As Freud (‘that psychology nonsense’) would say, we are looking for our fathers or, alternatively, for our sons—because, in matters of authority, it takes, as with the tango, two to do it (a phogeyarch and phogeysite, let us call them). In fact neither is lost for long. Observe our respect for law and order, our desire not to cause trouble, our fondness for keeping ourselves to ourselves, our lack of complaint when we are obviously being lied to, or cheated. And indeed how else can one explain the fact that retired army generals are considered natural choices for the high management posts in nationalized industry—and the even stranger fact that retired railwaymen are almost never made generals? It is all, of course, because army generals are trained in authoritarianism. Why can’t we be like the Americans, and put our generals in positions where they can do no harm whatsoever—like the Presidency?
Democracy affirms that all men are rightly equal, and equally right. Since this is manifestly untrue, and since certain things are plainly and by divine plan morally right and others morally wrong, the phogey is in a firm position. Thus it is morally right that drainpipes should be on the outside of houses. I was there when an American asked an Englishman: ‘But why do you have your drainpipes on the outside of your houses?’ ‘Well, obviously,’ said the Englishman, with, in our direction, that amused smile that people have when they are asked silly questions, ‘so that we can get at them more easily when they freeze.’ (I do not deny the grain of truth here; English houses are so badly heated, by the same divine law, that the pipes might very well freeze indoors as well; after all, comfort isn’t everything, and if bedrooms were not cold in England there’d probably be no sex here at all.)
Whence springs the phogey mentality? It doubtless derives from the ancient picture of the Englishman, that national character which is the product of history, or rather, what phogeys have taught, and learned, as history. Summarizing this stock figure’s virtues and vices, we get something like this:
(a) STIFF UPPER LIPPERY, or steadiness under fire. Bertrand Russell says that people imitate their national heroes, and surely Drake was ours. The scholar was hero to the old Chinese; this could not happen in England.
(b) NON-OSTENTATION. What the English most dislike about the Americans is their celebration of their skills. Englishmen, never seeming to enjoy anything, never display either their talents or their wealth. English guidebooks say: ‘Looking above your head, you will see a somewhat imperfect hammerbeam roof, marred by the fact that the chimney is placed somewhat to the left of where it should be. There are far better examples of this type of architecture at …’ It is a proper modesty and since the other places cited are usually too far away to reach (since there are, in England, no roads), it costs nothing. In America, though, it would always be the best, and perfect. This attitude depends, of course, on the other persons present being informed enough to disagree with you. It has its roots, one suspects, in the conditions of the early nineteenth century, when the only way for the rich to avoid social revolution was to make it seem that it was enjoyable to be poor.
(c) SELECTIVE IGNORANCE. This is the theory that there are certain things it is better not to know. Most of these things are foreign anyway. The argument leads of course to an empirical view of the universe—try what was done before and, if it doesn’t work, muddle through. The world is full of information, but most of it the British prefer to ignore. Associated with this view is the notion of the gentleman amateur, who is not expert at anything, but contrives, when necessary, to know people who are.
(d) SUPERIORITY TO FOREIGNERS. This is because, once, we were. It is now impossible for an Englishman to believe that Americans have a superior material standard of life, or that Russia has a superior educational system, any more than it is possible for him to believe that women are intelligent.
(e) MUDDLING THROUGH. The twentieth century has done some strange things to England. Of course, it has not got off scot-free; England has done some strange things to the twentieth century. Yet somehow the new age has made its mark; it may even be making us adaptable. But we doubt it. Muddling through once did ring true, and was part of a Victorian modesty which cloaked flexibility, initiative and the capacity for brilliant improvisation. The fact now is that the new industrial age is upon us, and it requires planning; and planning is suspect, because they plan. So we continue to muddle through. Consider that in England there are no roads.* The real reason why England has been proof against invasion for so long is that it is impossible to get inland. There are only lanes, clogged with motionless traffic and blocked by herds of cows wandering home to be milked. In any case, if invaders did land, they would never get anywhere, because no one knows where anywhere is. They would ask their way of old men and be misdirected, or told: ‘If I was you I wouldn’t start from here.’ Frustrated and muddled, they would go back where they came from, leaving a dotard or two to speculate in the village snug about the snow on their boots.
These cannot be said to be undesirable traits. But since physical courage is now outmoded (there are no more victories), modesty inhibiting, ignorance fatal, superiority dangerous, and muddling through completely ineffectual, the British have responded to the challenge with their usual phlegm; in adversity, the traits have become heightened. Being improved by adversity is in fact
(f) THE LAST TRAIT, and much the most important. An Englishman arranges systems of manners and institutions which are, to him, unchallengeable. He admits there are two sides to every question (his, and one that no right-thinking person in full possession of his senses could possibly hold) and yet he will maintain for ever that certain things are manifestly true. This is the essence of phogey. The phogey is the man who maintains his equilibrium, under all circumstances, by the use of protocol. For the phogey, there are no new situations; everything has happened before. He is concerned with Institutionalizing Things, and Living by Rote. He depends on a voluntary authoritarian structure in which everyone knows his place, from high to low, and perceives this condition as essentially unchangeable; it was God who pointed out that, with tea, some social classes put milk in first, and others last, and that one way is inherently better than another.
Yes, there are certain characteristics of the English spirit which occur in both reactionaries and radicals, and make Englishmen different from any other race of men anywhere else on earth. It is in these residual, permanently nineteenth-century qualities that our society maintains itself; and herein lies phogey.
‘Our car costs so much to run now, we live in it.’ Things are in a pretty pass, I found, talking to the m.c. (middle class) young phogey whose comments culminated in the above admission; the old pretences are increasingly hard to keep up. The phogey is, to some extent, at bay. This is inevitable, of course; it is increasingly difficult, in this age of equality and relativism, to convey even valid notions of superiority. The phogey is oriented to values that no longer survive in their pure state. Essentially inner-directed and tradition-bound, he is the product of a society tooled up, so to speak, for Empire building. The building, however, has stopped, and he has no real place to exercise his talents. One foresees the end of all this in some small colony named, let us say, Umbala, in the heart of Africa. It is the last surviving colony and here they are all gathered—the hundreds of governors and the thousands of administrators, packed together in a few square miles, clutching the Colonial Office set of Kipling, governing and administrating each other and dressing each night for dinner. A sad but likely resolution.
The phogey’s values are inculcated in him from an early age, by his nanny or his public school or even his elementary (in phogey schools you sit on straight-backed chairs, good for the spine, and on wooden benches, chastening to the rump, and you play team games, because there is something moral about rugger). The author can remember the days when schools were grim buildings, with few toilets, and self-expression and finger painting had never been heard of. However, the Dewey-eyed system of permissive education, where children learn how to have well-rounded personalities and get on well with the group, has never caught on in England, and one doubts if it ever will. Phogeys have ill-rounded personalities and are proud of it; they suspect that people who get on well at parties and can Influence Friends and Make People are up to no good; they are usually right. The true phogey, in any case, has nothing to celebrate, and is much more at home at a funeral than at a party.
The phogey spends his life testing the universe against English institutions and if it isn’t somehow right, he asks for something to be done about it; after all, obviously, God is English. These days, it is less easy to convince foreigners that England is the centre of the world (because it isn’t) and that to behave in ways unlike the English is an aberration. The fact is that foreigners are learning that you get by more easily if you are less like the English, for the phogey, being stringently moral, lacks fluidity. Understand, I am not saying anything against foreigners; some of my best friends are foreigners and remember—they have not had our advantages.
The phogey is, then, Phineas Fogg; he expects foreign climes to give him special dispensation; Englishmen go out in the midday sun in the firm knowledge that, in a day or two, the sun will catch on. Climbing a very high mountain in remote America with an English phogey girl, author Bradbury was not surprised to hear her say, when they reached the top, sucking hard for oxygen, while black specks hovered menacingly in the sky above them, and nature seemed red in tooth and claw: ‘Looook, I say, look at that bird; isn’t that an English blackbird?’ Cut off from Ovaltine, life in America had been a hard fight for her, but with the stout English capacity for transmogrifying all American situations (and birds) into English ones, she had not felt the pinch at all. (The same girl once accompanied the same Bradbury to the film of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and at the point where Lady Chatterley’s head—all of her that was visible on screen—was expressing the highest access of bliss at what had happened to her when she and the gamekeeper had been caught by a rainstorm in a secluded hut, the girl turned with a distraught expression on her face: ‘Her horse is getting wet,’ she said.)
Phogey values come completely from inside, and are internalized by the age of eleven. Americans change their characters with their clothes, and whenever they go from one room to another; they will join a discussion condemning dirty jokes, go through a door, and tell dirty jokes. Phogeys are stuck with their characters all the time, and like it. Americans believe in being nice, and they do it by being whatever the majority of people want them to be; their view of character is that it’s a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. Phogeys dislike being nice, in case they are nice to someone who doesn’t deserve it. And, as the phogey says, if you are odious, why lie about it? Ask Americans what they believe in, and they say: ‘It depends who I’m with.’ English people don’t care whom they are with, and prefer not to be, anyway.
A nineteenth-century figure, then, the phogey survives into the twentieth and finds that his code no longer quite fits, and that people are doing things in other ways and getting away with it, even though it must be apparent that his way is best. The phogey is inner-directed—which means doing unto others because they did it unto you; and in these days of relativism, when you can’t blame anyone for anything because it was the fault of his environment or his toilet training, the inner-directed man is an anachronism. Inner-directed people make fine generals, managing directors and sado-masochists; they depend, however, on a society in which one code of values is universal. In short, they need no public relations men, because who needs relations with the public anyway? English government and American government is much the same, but the Americans explain why they do what they do; and this gives the public the illusion that they can interfere.
‘We’re bringing up Garth to be inner-directed,’ an American academic couple explained to me one day, when I found them flogging their child, in a most un-American way, with a carpet-beater. ‘The next generation’s going to need a few of them.’ But this is no good, for if you don’t have a phogey-speaking society there’s nothing you can do. ‘It’s no use,’ I told this couple, ‘if you’re going to understand him as well.’ They looked upset. ‘The trouble is, we understand him already. We wouldn’t have if we’d known … but well, I guess once you’ve read Spock you’ve read Spock, and that’s all there is to it.’ Other-direction is bringing up your children to be happy; in inner-directed England happiness is looked upon, quite properly, with universal distrust. I take these two categories from an American sociologist named David Riesman, who in his book The Lonely Crowd defined the two lifestyles in order that people could choose which brand they preferred. To sum it up simply, the difference between them is this; the inner-directed man says, ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like,’ while the other-directed man says: ‘I know all about art, but I don’t know what I like.’ With other-directed persons, you can never get through a door, because they all want to go through it last.
Think of Etonians. When you meet an Etonian in the street, you walking in one direction, he walking in the other, you will stop (if he cares to recognize you) and chat, and he will take you by the arm and you will walk on, chatting, both in the direction in which he was going; it can take you as much as half an hour to get away, by which time you are probably a good bus-ride out of your route. This is inner-direction, and is, to the phogey, as important as inner cleanliness. There are certain inherent truths about the universe which the phogey takes for granted, as common to all men, or all who matter. One, for example, is that everyone who needs to know knows where the Athenaeum is, so that it is wholly unnecessary to label it.
Visitors run into this difficulty constantly; thus, ‘It’s a wonder she didn’t call a bobby,’ said an American, describing a misadventure in an English fishmonger’s, when he went in to ask for some of the snails in the window. ‘There are,’ said the girl indignantly, ‘no snails in our shop.’ Aware that he had stepped on an obscure English prejudice, the American went carefully. ‘Snails to eat,’ he said. ‘People don’t eat snails,’ said the girl with a laugh. ‘In France …’ ‘Oh,’ said the girl, ‘don’t talk to me about France. You can’t even find a clean toilet …’ ‘Then what do you call those things over there?’ asked the American. ‘They’re winkles,’ said the girl. ‘Can I have some?’ asked the American. ‘They’re not snails, you know,’ said the girl. ‘That’s all right,’ said the American. ‘Those happen,’ said the girl, ‘to come out of the sea.’ ‘I’d like some,’ said the American. ‘What do you want them for?’ asked the girl. ‘To eat,’ said the American, and he added, too casually, ‘tell me—how do you eat these winkles?’ ‘Well, how do people eat winkles?’ cried the girl. ‘I don’t know,’ admitted the American. ‘How do you think?’ cried the girl, ‘With a pin, of course.’ ‘Of course,’ said the American.
By inner-directedness we mean that the phogey is a man with a response to situations that don’t even exist yet. This is because he will not admit the principle of change. All situations are commonplaces and the phogey lives by sleepwalking; thus in railway carriages a dry clearing of the throat and a piercing stare and slight re-arrangement of clothing will suffice for any eventuality, from complaints about smoking, down to persons who want to talk. I have been in railway carriages with phogeys and tried to tell them that their clothes are on fire (‘I say, I believe your clothes are on fire’) only to be withered by this treatment, so that I sat there uneasily while the man’s clothing smouldered all the way to Crewe. It seemed heartless, but I knew he would have wanted it that way. The symptoms of the sleepwalking manner are broadly those of drunkenness—loss of critical faculty and a sense of cosiness (gemütlich). It is the mood of the completely self-centred and assured, confident that things are always as they were. Observe a phogey faced, for the first time, by one of those contemporary chairs into which you insert your bum deeply and then, as it were, peer out over your kneecaps to spy out the land; he will find it absurd. He will find modern poetry absurd, and modern art. He cannot understand why people are not writing good poetry, like that fellow Tennyson, who really understood tears, idle tears, and why Edward Marsh ever stopped publishing Georgian Poetry. Yet notice the young phogey who has grown up with the new. He will not find the contemporaneous ridiculous (contemporary furnishing, which is in fact ten years out of date, is a phogey style; however, the idea behind it, that articles can be appreciated simultaneously with their creation, is new and anti-phogey) —but he will be amused, like Gilbert Pinfold, by things that are changed during his own lifetime. Thus to the phogey things are starting to go wrong just around now. Phogeys are not makers, and chart no new ways; they are too involved with the old ones, and know them to be right.
For phogeys are the instruments of tradition. (Tradition is a key phogey word, and here is how tradition works: ‘The Manor and most of the soil are the property of Captain Philip Bennett, MP, of Rougham Hall, a handsome castellated Tudor Mansion which was erected by his father.’ History, Gazetteer and Directory of Suffolk.) Tradition is also Joe Higgs, seconded from his dustcart during the summer months in order to act as town-crier for the American tourists. The phogey’s survival depends on the extent to which inherited manners and conventions remain unchallenged from outside. But his solidified tradition is in fact a recent one, and phogeyness a recent phenomenon, characteristic of a late stage in society when institutionalization and emphasis on manners become substitutes for active adjustments to new conditions. This is known as taking the long view, and depends on the doubtful proposition that the world will, at some point, take up again where it left off in 1914, and the sun will come out again. Phogeys hark back, back to the Good Old Days. This is a phrase used by phogeys without thought, because old days were all good, much gooder than the days they try to fob people off with now. You could have a good meal at the Savoy and a girl for the night, and still get change out of a bob, whatever that might be. Even working-class life was better; people starved, but they enjoyed it much more than they do now. British summers were always long and hot and filled with cucumber sandwiches; indeed it is quite clear that it is climatic change that has made the twentieth century since 1914 the miserable and chaotic affair it has so obviously been. And all this is why the favourite British sport is archaeology, a form of extended reminiscence, and why the high point of British sentiment is a garden with a sundial in it.
And so, the phogey tells us, ‘In my opinion all human affairs get worse as time goes on.’ From his point of view this is true, and it is not an entirely improper view of history to take, given what history gives us in return. Hence people who get involved with things like change are by definition unreliable; and the phogey naturally distrusts the young, and intellectuals, because they are principles of enquiry, and people who enquire about things tend to be articulate. And articulate is one thing phogeys are not. After all, there is little to articulate about, because one knows instinctively when things are as they should be. The way you know this is by experience, which is what the young and the intellectuals do not have. ‘I think one of the purposes of us old fogeys in life is to stop the young from being silly,’ said one phogey MP lately, representing a large constituency. ‘When I was young …,’ says the old phogey; when he was young he was, of course, a young phogey, a class of which there is never any lack. Faced by the mysterious phenomenon of the ‘Angry Young Men’, a new young phogey, a Mr Plantagenet Somerset Fry, spoke up for young phogeys everywhere: ‘Frankly, the “angry young man” never cut any ice at all, and it is ignored rather than reviled, as it ought to be in London.’ Clearly what was so irritating about the angry young men was not that they were angry but that they were young; it is, after all, the old who are entitled to be angry. And it must be said there is quite a lot of phogey even in the angry young men themselves—angry, after all, either because their fathers were not at Oxford, or because they were; angry, too, both because their protest was not understood, and because it was so immediately accepted. Not by everyone, of course: Mr Christopher Sykes, who is ‘tall, broad, ebulliently aristocratic in manner,’ says the press, accused them of being full of belly-aching and self-pity. But it could be, it could just possibly be, that it is the phogey spirit that has made them so.
Phogeys are of all age-groups, all social classes, all political and religious persuasions, all sexes. They can equally be top people who read the Daily Sketch (once you get to the top, you can stop reading The Times; that chore is over) and go beagling; or lib-labs who live on wheat germ and have petitions to sign whenever you go and see them. What they all possess is assurance, the assurance that they are superior to, or inferior to, someone else.
Let us note some of the characteristics of the phogey, that he be recognized. Throughout society he is ubiquitous, from the henna-haired harridans in teashops, for whom customers are an imposition, to those at the top—the Phogeyarchs, let us call them, in official power positions (members of Watch Committees, Lord Chamberlains, Hanging Judges, Diplomats, Dons, Scoutmasters, Youth Leaders, and the like). Below the phogeyarchs and existing in far greater numbers are the phogeysites. While the former is a phogey because he is in a phogey job, and is known to be such even before he acts or speaks, the latter have to work for years to attain general recognition. By their indifference to their fellows and their insistence on the letter (no juniors in the senior men’s washroom) they are marked. Their long wait has often made them morose … and afraid. Always they are careful but are they careful enough?
Phogeys are proper, orderly and well-mannered. ‘There should be a law …’ says the phogey. Actually there almost always is. The Americans distrust and resent their policemen; the English respect theirs, because they know they are looking after them. There is a story told of the philosopher T. E. Hulme, which shows how this respect is returned. Hulme was found by a policeman one night in Soho Square, urinating against a tree. ‘You’ll have to move on, sir,’ said the policeman. Hulme protested, ‘But I’m a member of the middle classes.’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the policeman, retiring in embarrassment.
The English treat life as they do their washrooms; they believe that you should leave society as you would wish to find it. For this reason even the most revolutionary persons cannot conceive of too much change, nor of fighting for it if it is going to disturb people. When people suggest change in England, the reply is always: ‘It wouldn’t work.’ Phogeydom is thus preserved by law and institutions even as it withers away in persons. This is in the cause of order and control, two principles of phogey gemütlichkeit, which holds that life is really nice, if you did but know it. Much of the famed English tolerance and respect for persons is because it’s too much trouble to go on about the thing. Argument only exposes the divisions. The thing to do is to shut one’s eyes. Thus many of the hostilities implicit in society are hidden in institutions that conceal behind an apparent relationship a fundamental indifference, or antipathy, or class hostility on either side. The great English kewing system is just such a pretence, as in this example:
BUS CONDUCTOR (collecting fares): Kew? Kew?
PASSENGER: Thrupny, please.
BUS CONDUCTOR: Kew. (Taking money.) Kew.
PASSENGER: Kew.
CONDUCTOR (handing ticket): Kew.
PASSENGER: Kew.
CONDUCTOR (handing change): Kew.
PASSENGER: Kew.
CONDUCTOR: Kew. (Going on down bus.) Kew? Kew?
This is made even more difficult if the passenger is going to Kew. This is pervasive politeness, and the present author was able to score as many as fifteen kews in the course of one transaction, the purchase of a packet of cigarettes.
‘You are liable …’ say the phogey notices; is there anywhere in the world where you are liable for so much, so often? Nowadays there are so many traffic police that motorists have to go about in pairs; and government by notice is rife—NO DANCING, NO SINGING, NO GRINNING. The story is even recorded of a notice, a phogey notice, which said: DO NOT THROW STONES AT THIS NOTICE. One young phogey of my acquaintance was driving through Bury St Edmunds where he lives and keeps a diary, when his car licence became unstuck from the windscreen. Rather than offend, he drove with one hand and held it up to view with the other. People ran for cover as he zig-zagged down the street. ‘You’re liable, you know,’ he said. It is my contention that if he had hit someone and been taken to court, he would have got off because he was obeying the law.
And every Englishman knows the feeling of guilt that washes over him when he has trespassed against some institution, even when it is some petty sin like having used it while the train was standing in the station or stamping on the top deck of a Nottingham bus. (DRIVER BELOW, PLEASE DO NOT STAMP FEET, say the notices. Nottingham residents are lucky in having, as far as we know, the only city council go-ahead enough to clamp down on the great foot-stamping menace, even though, in this case as with so many others, no one would have thought of the offence, until the notice suggested it.) The author and his friend Orsler were once caught together in a guilt situation of this kind; it was unauthorized pea-shelling. They were caught by a guard in a railway train at Dawlish, shelling peas in preparation for their dinner that evening. Though they were creating no litter (Orsler, ever meticulous, was actually swallowing the empty shells) and there was no law against it, it was apparent enough that this was morally wrong and that, unless something were done about it, pea-podding might run rife on British Railways. Therefore with supreme aplomb, ‘Sorry, sir, no pea-podding,’ said the guard. In such a situation, how deep the soul is seared. And that is it, the phogey in all of us.
One of the classic forms of phogeydom is the phogey pooh-pooh. In America, when an idea is suggested, people criticize the person who suggested it but then set about trying to do it; in England, when an idea is suggested, people praise the person who suggested it, regarding him as a useful man to have around, but never do anything about it. Americans do not like people who have ideas, because it’s hostile to the group (if one has an idea, one never says, as in Europe, ‘I happen to be an expert on this …’; one says, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about this, and this is just off the top of my head, but let’s put this one out on the step and see if the cat licks it …’); however, they do tend to use the ideas. In England it is possible to get to the top by having ideas that no one has ever done anything about. Americans are pragmatists, and the great American phrase is ‘So what?’—meaning all right, it’s an idea, but what can you do with it?
In England the phogey pooh-pooh works like this. Let us suppose that a weekend trip to Scotland has been suggested, or the building of a garage: the English reply is, ‘Good idea, old boy, but can’t be done. Who’ll look after the cat?’ or ‘Splendid thought, but we don’t know enough about alignment, do we?’ An Englishman’s first response to any suggestion is that it cannot, in any circumstances, be done. Like the regulations (‘Passengers are not allowed to stand if there are more than seven seats in the vehicle immediately following, in which case not more than four passengers are allowed to sit with the driver’), the phogey pooh-pooh adds to the strange sense of perpetual fog that one has in England. ‘Sorry, sir, the bar’s closed’; ‘Sorry, sir, no eating in the library’; ‘Sorry, can’t sweep a chimney under six months.’
One of the illuminating differences between England and America lies in the words used to describe the service that in America is called INFORMATION and in England is called ENQUIRIES. The English notice is descriptive of the people on one side of the counter, the American of those on the other. In England, that is, you are entitled to ask; in America you are entitled to be told. These are two very different freedoms descriptive of two very different kinds of democracy. For while American democracy is going towards something, ours seems to be coming away from something.
As an Englishman, one only comes to understand the pooh-pooh when one has visited America or has been visited by Americans in England. Americans think that anything is possible; they are swiftly disabused when they visit the English shore.
Englishmen, with their sense of propriety and order, know that there are God-given laws that say that shops should close at six in the evening and that it is morally improper to drink beer in public places between three and six in the afternoon and after eleven at night; they know that most things are impossible and that there is nothing to be done about them. It is only when they have American guests and run out of potatoes at ten o’clock at night, or want to buy a toothbrush on a Sunday, when the shops are allowed, by law, to be open but are not allowed, by law, to sell anything (or perhaps, one thing, like toothpaste), that they realize that their lives are bounded by an intrinsic sense of the limitations of the world. Only an American would dream of running out of potatoes at night in England, or suppose that there is a mechanical solution to the problem of switching off your television set without rising from your chair. Thus Englishmen, like myself, go to America simply in order to be able to find a place to eat at two in the morning.
People are asking: who, what, why is phogey? I have spoken of certain characteristics in the English spirit that occur both in reactionaries and radicals, and make Englishmen different from any other race of men anywhere on the earth. It is in these residual, permanently nineteenth-century qualities that our society maintains itself. The English are proper, rude, possessive, orderly, stingy and superior.
Not enough has been written about English rudeness. The phogey has a special sense of what is polite, which roughly corresponds in other nations with what is rude. It depends upon a simple contention; everyone has his place and can be put into it. Sir Harold Nicolson has in his book Good Behaviour a charming passage on Dr Johnson, in which he remarks that he cannot, alas, exhibit this great and good man as an example of English civility. ‘He was kind to his cat, “Hodge”, and bought him oysters; he was kind to his strange assortment of dependents; he was wonderfully kind to children, servants and beggars. But he was not kind to his equals or his superiors.’ One does not need to elaborate on the strangeness of a society in which civility is expressed by kindness to one’s superiors. The British are also good at a kind of rudeness in which they affect to be totally unaware that they are being rude; this is characterized by the ‘Hark at me! What am I saying?’ approach, and is condescending. Sir Harold himself is uncivil to the Americans in the same book, on the grounds that ‘although I have lived and travelled much in the United States, and although I account many Americans among my closest friends, I have not the arrogance to suppose that I understand them, in the sense that I understand the Athenians of 2500 BC’. To most Englishmen this would not seem rude; but it is, and most Americans would know it is.
Let us put it another way. The phogey is not nice. Americans are too nice, and they are nice to people who don’t deserve it; the English are too rude, and they are rude to people who don’t deserve it. (An exception proving the rule is the body of New York customs persons, undoubtedly the rudest set of people on earth.)
The phogey is stoical, and believes that people should be able to put up with anything—he himself recognizing that he is one of the things people have to put up with. He does not believe in happiness, and resents it in others, especially in Americans, who think of happiness as a human right, and have written it into their constitution. He believes, like the Anglo-Saxons, in endurance and patience. He is pessimistic, because the world is not his any more, and because he harks back to a golden age, when you could send a gunboat and it went. He believes that England will one day get back on the Gold Standard. He feels that change has gone further than it has and no one is more ready to deplore what has not yet happened.
He is also non-competitive, stingy, individualistic, anti-feminist, and afraid of his father. He is stingy because he is materialistic. The Americans, contrary to the popular view, are not materialistic, and the British are. Americans throw things away, but the English have attics full of bits of string, brown paper wrapping, old cans and toothbrushes and so on, on the grandmotherly principle that ‘it might come in for something’. The attic is the most important room in the English house, comparable with the bedroom in France and the playroom in America. It is problem-solving. The English love property, and respect it, and put fences round it, and wash it and scrub it, and make it last. They love a car that is twenty years old better than one which is two years old, because it has been around longer, and has stored up more affection. It is almost one of the family. They speak of my car, and my house, and my dog and my wife; ownership is all, and these things are the signposts of life, the proof that you really exist and are what you are. In consequence nothing ever gets thrown away but is kept or used again; and the economy fails to expand. The American economy is founded on waste, on beer cans being thrown away and left to rust, on paper handkerchiefs and disposable cartons. The English wonder how they can be used again. It may be protested that America is a richer society; the truth is, of course, that it is richer because it throws things away. In America advertisers claim for their products, among other things, that it is easy to jettison them. A large part of American industry is given over to workers and machines making parts of products which are contingent—which are never used, but are cast into the waste paper basket or put down the Dispose-All. Americans will build houses and leave them after one year. An American likes to acquire money, since this is a mark of success; but equally he likes to give it away. All the American business man really needs is a briefcase and an airline ticket. Public giving is traditional. Unfortunately giving things away in America can be dangerous, as they may get to the wrong organizations; so there are now foundations in America which offer to give money away for benevolent Americans and make the promise that they will never hear of it again. One of the reasons why socialism is functional in England is that charity is a favour rather than a custom (the one exception was the upper class, who now need charity themselves). Thus the English, in condemning Americans for their materialism, define the American attitude in terms of what their own would be if they behaved like that; for materials are things that Americans work with, but the English possess.
On the other hand, the phogey is non-mechanical. He does not understand machinery and would be lost in an American kitchen. He is suspicious of gadgets—of electric shoe polishers and electric can openers. Americans have machines for everything because it would be more expensive to employ people. In England, this stage will come and the phogey will be at a loss; confronted with apparatus, he will go and hide. He is also anti-convenience. The Americans developed a kind of shirt called the button-down shirt; at some point in American history there was a great wind-menace among executives, when gales blew up their shirt-collars in their faces. Meeting the problem with typical American know-how, the Americans developed a shirt which had buttons on the fabric to which the collar points can be fixed. Though these shirts are immensely neat and do not need to be starched, they have never been taken up in England. The best example is, of course, the English heating system, which doesn’t. All the heat of English coal fires goes up the chimney, and heats aeroplanes.
The phogey is modest. This is because he is simply not interested in discussing his accomplishments with other people, since they probably would not understand anyway. In any case accomplishments do not really matter, since they are only what you have done, not what you are; moreover, it is better to be a gentleman amateur than a specialist at anything, because specialists are too serious. Likewise the phogey is unenthusiastic. It was, I think, Sir John Squire who reviewed a book called Entertainment in Russia with the words: ‘A fascinating book. It can be heartily recommended even to those who are tepid about dancing and drama and who neither like nor understand the East.’
Phogeys believe in keeping themselves to themselves, unlike the Americans, who believe in keeping other people to themselves. The English are said to be sexless; this is not true. It is simply that sex involves a group of two, and the English know that the ideal social group is one. In America, people will come up and talk to you anywhere, even in the toilet; there is no privacy, because who needs to be private? What are you hiding when you are?*
Phogeys believe that communication is a very imperfect form of communication; or, to put it another way, that the function of speech is to conceal rather than to disclose ideas or emotions. There is a thing called PHATIC COMMUNION, which is communication at a sub-verbal level; animals have it. It is non-speech. It is the things that you say to someone when you are trying to say something else; phogeys have sub-verbal conversations with words. An excellent example is a phrase used by Americans called How Are You?, which is said to people when you don’t want to know. It is fatal to reply to it by telling people how you are. I have seen, in Colorado, a woman who had just returned from having a ski accident, with one leg in plaster after a spiral break, and with bruises on her face, replying to this question. ‘Fine, just fine,’ she said, giving the correct response.* This is the key to English conversation. The English equivalent is the phrase, ‘How do you do?’ ‘Do what?’ unschooled Americans reply, falling into the trap (the whole purpose of the exchange is to separate the sheep from the goats, Our Lot from Their Lot); the correct response is, naturally, ‘How do you do?’ Phogeys live by such phatic communion; to do it properly shows that a chap must be halfway decent. Thus, in England, if you know things about your friends, you discover that it is not because they have told you but because you have learned them by osmosis, gossip or inference. The English are non-communicative. Phatic communion is the exchange of meaningless words to work up a gemütlich atmosphere, so that afterwards it appears as if a conversation has actually taken place. I call this language phogeycant, that language of phogeys which performs all the functions of language except that of communicating meaning. There are certain key phrases which are the central commerce of phogeycant (‘What things are coming to I don’t know,’ ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ ‘It’s only human nature,’ ‘You’ll live to regret it,’ ‘It can’t be helped’), all of them having to do with the fact that things as they are, are best.
Phogey art is likewise meaningless. While detesting most serious art, because it creates discontent and malaise of the spirit, phogeys, working by Gresham’s Law, have devised a kind of phogey art that is institutionalized, official, and ineradicable. Phogeys are generally not democrats, but in the field of culture they tend to be; they point out that only 50,000 people listen to the Third Programme, so why not get rid of it (of course the Third Programme is, on the other hand, itself phogeyfied). This type of phogey ranges from the Manchester alderman (‘I don’t know anything about art … etc.’) to the phogey don for whom all art is by dead people. Note the Royal Academy, a phogey institution, and that Academician who attacked modern art, saying: ‘I am right—I have the Lord Mayor on my side—and all the Aldermen—and all the City Companies.’ When Picasso said, ‘I have never heard of Annigoni,’ Annigoni made a classical reply that must have endeared him to all phogey patrons of art. ‘I have never heard of Picasso,’ he said.
Phogey art is distinguished by its innocuousness; notice how phogeys tend to analyse a book or a play in terms of its ending (‘It didn’t have a proper ending’; ‘It left things in the air a bit’). Art should leave no residuum. Phogey art also has GOOD CHARACTERS and FINE WRITING; in phogey magazine stories girls run across the moors, unkempt, but marry a doctor or the boss’s son in the end. Phogeys dislike real art because it creates problems and leaves them unsolved. And phogeys do not like problems.
They dislike problems because they dislike people. They resent strangers, and consider always that they have enough friends, even if they have none. The Horatian tag—Caelum non animum mutant qui bans mare currunt (trans.: you can’t get a decent cup of tea in France)—was surely written of the English. Seventy-seven per cent of the English, claimed some statistician a few years ago, have never been abroad. Of course things are changing. Many phogeys do go Abroad (to the phogey, Abroad is usually France) and the numbers increase each year. But now that everyone can do it, the best people don’t need to any more; there is nothing conspicuous about it.
By and large, however, the New Continentalism, a rapidly growing phenomenon, is designed to provide all the advantages of being abroad without having to mix with all those foreigners. Espresso bars, motor scooters, Swedish furniture, Spanish music, Network Three Russian lessons, green raincoats—these are all part of the movement. How many of the mews cottage boys are having lasagna for dinner tonight? As a phogey young couple we observed (they wash their dog in Silvikrin, write away to Devonshire for spiced ginger advertised in the epicure columns of top papers) remarked, ‘There are so many more things for the young these days, and they all seem to come from abroad.’
Older phogeys know this is nonsense, but prefer it to Americanization. Actually it is Americanization, for Americanization is just-ization. It is when you take things out of other societies and make them over to your use—quite absurd to the real phogey, who knows that English things are better, and distrusts the European Common Market for the proper reason that the English are neither European, nor Common. As an American friend remarked: ‘What I admire about you Europeans is the way you’ve learned to live with other races …’ ‘This isn’t Europe, this is England,’ interrupted a phogey. ‘Quite different.’
Phogeys do not like people. Above all they do not like women, and have difficulty in thinking of them as people at all. Women are the ones who get out and open the garage doors. Phogeys are far more interested in animals and property, and quite prefer them to people. In Budleigh Salterton there are more dogs than people and, as they will tell you (hanging on to their dogs, in case you are from the Russians) they prefer it that way. In the streets of England you will find ikons in the shape of large plaster dogs, before which people can worship by placing offerings of coin of the realm in a slot in the mouth provided for that purpose. ‘What mischief have you been up to?’ they say indulgently to their dogs. Alas, poor creatures, if they only knew what mischief was, and how to make it.
The division of the universe into two sexes has never struck the phogey as a useful one, and he has spent much of his history making artificial distinctions which are much more interesting. The result is the class system and the relative dullness of British women. Phogeys prefer their women not to look attractive; they feel it ostentatious and competitive. The classical English look, for women, is to appear as if you have just that moment got off a horse—tweeds and flat shoes and a twinset.
In so far as phogeys are concerned with people, which is as little as possible, they are concerned with their status or function. They protect the machinery of institutions with all the power at their disposal—measuring the size of carpets for Civil Service offices, having one lavatory for clerical staff and another for managers, insisting that only three standing passengers be allowed instead of five. It goes on at all levels, and as long as such persons survive, we can be sure that even in a classless society the necessary distinctions will be made, that it will remain, in short, England their England.
* There is now one, but it stops before it gets there.
* Again, compare Sir Harold Nicolson, who puts the English view with regard to the Americans:
‘There is … the curious indifference to, or disregard of, what to us is one of the most precious of all human possessions, namely personal privacy. To them, with their proud belief in equality, with their rather ignorant affection for the pioneer spirit, privacy denotes something exclusive, patronizing, “un-folksey”, and therefore meriting suspicion. Thus they leave their curtains undrawn at dusk, have no hedges separating their front gardens, and will converse amicably with strangers about private things. How can a European dare to discuss the manners of a people who seem to ignore, or to be unconscious of, what to him is civilization’s most valued heritage?’
* Professor Howard Higman, a sociologist, suggests to us that, in the new American society, the phrase ‘How are you?’ should be amended to ‘How’s your group?’