Divided Languages - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 16

that goddam prairie dog and we landed up at Joey's place with the sun still warm on our
backs and the coffee was good and strong” are judged superior to anything that overhyped
Stratford hack ever managed to pull off. The United States is one of the few places in which
stylelessness has become a style, cultivated with all the passion and precision of a Woolf or
a Joyce. It is against this current that the likes of Bellow, Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich
are forced to swim.
It was not always thus. Jeffersonian Virginia was renowned for its oratory and rhetoric.
The genteel class of New England were praised for what one observer called their “intel-
lectual vigour, exalted morals, classical erudition, and refined taste.” Elegance was in high
regard. A fluency of speech and manner was thought by some Americans of the period
to provide a bulwark against the dangers of demagoguery. There were those, to be sure,
who regarded rhetoric as suspect. It was a form of manipulative speech typical of the rul-
ing powers of the Old World, and thus out of place in a genuine democracy. Even so, a
nineteenth-century American writer praised “the chaste and classical beauty” of the na-
tion's finest legal scholarship. The lawyer, wrote another commentator of the time, will
exhibit “that combination of intellectual power, brilliant but chaste images, pure language,
calm self-possession, graceful and modest bearing, indicative of a spirit chastened, en-
riched, and adorned” by a study of classical civilisation. It is a far cry from Judge Judy.
Henry James thought that America lacked mystery and secrecy, that its landscapes were
all foreground, but found just such an air of enigma in Europe. This was not, he considered,
by any means wholly to its credit. Civilisations which prize the mannered, devious, play-
ful and oblique generally have aristocratic roots, since it is hard to be mannered, devious
and playful while you are drilling a coal seam or dry-cleaning a jacket. And aristocratic
social orders, as James was to discover, can be full of suavely concealed brutality. A dash
of American directness would do them no harm at all. A culture of irony requires a certain
degree of leisure. You need to be privileged enough not to have any pressing need for the
plain truth. Facts can be left to factory owners.
Even so, there are times when irony is the only weapon one has at hand. Take, for ex-
ample, those freakish right-wing Christians in the States who brandish banners reading
“God Hates Fags” and gather to rejoice at the funerals of servicemen and women killed
in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such people relish nothing more than for some passing liberal to
engage them in indignant debate, denouncing their bigotry and homophobia. To do so is
surely a grave mistake. Instead, one should ask them why they are such a bunch of liberal
wimps. Why are they waving their banners when they could be acting as the Lord's aven-
ging arm by wiping his enemies from the face of the earth? Why don't they actually do
something for a change, have the courage of their convictions, rather than standing spine-
lessly around? Why are they such a gutless bunch of whingers?
One of the classic forms of American humour is the gag, which marks its distance from
the seriousness of everyday life rather as wearing a baseball cap marks the fact that the