Divided Languages - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 15

castic a tone. For a puritan civilisation, irony is too close to lying for comfort. A renowned
American philosopher once told me of a discomforting time he had spent at an Oxford High
Table. Throughout the entire evening, he had no idea whether a single word that was said
to him was meant to be serious or not. “Dammit!” he exploded to me, “I'm an American!”
And this was a philosopher for whom irony was a precious moral posture, though he did
not seem to appreciate the irony.
One of the gravest moral defects of Americans is that they tend to be straight, honest and
plain-speaking. There have been various attempts to cure them of these vices, including
the establishment of clinics where they can receive intensive therapy for their distressing
tendency to mean what they say. Even with compulsory daily readings of Oscar Wilde,
however, it is hard to rid them of the prejudice that there is something admirable about what
you see being what you get. (“I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood,” Wilde
once remarked, a statement it is hard to imagine on the lips of Pat Robertson.) For puritan
types, appearances must correspond with realities, the outer present a faithful portrait of the
inner, whereas irony involves a skewing of the two. To the puritan mind, appearances are
acceptable only if they convey a substantial inner truth. Otherwise they are to be mistrusted
as specious and superficial. Hence the familiar American insistence that what matters about
a person is what is inside them. It is a claim that sits oddly with a society obsessed with
self-presentation. There is no room here for what Lenin called the reality of appearances,
no appreciation of just how profound surfaces can be, no rejoicing in forms, masks and
signifiers for their own sake. Henry James writes in The American Scene of the country's
disastrous disregard for appearances. For the Calvinist, a delight in anything for its own
sake is sinful. Pleasure must be instrumental to some more worthy goal such as procreation,
rather as play on children's TV in the States must be tied to some grimly didactic purpose.
It can rarely be an end in itself. The fact that there is no social reality without its admixture
of artifice, that truth works in terms of masks and conventions, is fatally overlooked.
The philosopher Wittgenstein once remarked that “A dog cannot lie, but neither can he
be sincere,” meaning among other things that sincerity is as much something you acquire
socially as a large bank balance or a reputation for reclusiveness. Jane Austen knew well
enough that to be natural, rather like being ironic, is a form of social behaviour one has to
learn. For her, observing the social conventions was a question of respect and considera-
tion for others. No ceremony could be less empty. Nothing is more artificial than a cult of
shambling spontaneity. People who are self-consciously blunt, plain and forthright are in
the grip of an image of themselves quite as much as people who think they are Elvis Pres-
ley or Mother Teresa.
Language for the puritan is at its finest when it clings to the unvarnished facts. This pre-
judice has given rise in the States to a thousand creative writing classes in which sentences
like “And then we rolled into town still hauling the dead mule and Davy said how about
some fried eggs and he was still kind of sniggering at the thought of Charlie hollering at