Divided Languages - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 17

American male is on vacation. Wearing a baseball cap signals “I Am Enjoying Myself”
even when you are not, rather as a bishop's mitre signals “I Am Holy” even when he is
indulging in indecent fantasies beneath it. Humour in this view represents a holiday from
reality, rather than a consistent stance towards it. Nobody is likely to mistake it for the real
world. Most gags do not force you to reassess your relationship to reality.
For a certain kind of English patrician, by contrast, irony is less a figure of speech
than a way of life. As a highly Europeanised American observes in Henry James's The
Europeans, “I don't think it's what one does or doesn't do that promotes enjoyment. . . .
It is the general way of looking at life.” The gentleman's amused, ironic outlook on hu-
man existence is a way of engaging with the world while also keeping it languidly at arm's
length. It suggests an awareness of different possibilities, one beyond the reach of those
who must immerse themselves in the actual in order to survive. The aristocrat can savour a
variety of viewpoints because none of them is likely to undermine his own. This is because
he has no viewpoint of his own. Opinions are for the plebs. It is not done to be passionate
about things. To have a point of view is to be as uncouth and one-sided as a militant trade
unionist. It would be a threat to one's sang froid , and thus to one's sovereignty. To find the
cosmos mildly entertaining has always been a sign of power in Britain. It is the political
reality behind Oxford and Cambridge wit. Seriousness is for scientists and shopkeepers.
One of the finest exponents of the English language in the United States today has been
the art critic T. J. Clark. Another was the late Christopher Hitchens. Both of them came to
the country from England. It can be claimed that to write as well as this, with such tonal
subtlety, verbal self-assurance and exquisite play of light and shade, you need a well-es-
tablished cultural tradition in your bones. In England, that culture has often enough been
snobbish, malevolent, and supercilious. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had all of these vices
to excess, yet they are also related in complex ways to the splendour of his style.
That permanent house guest of England, Henry James, pressed the nuance and ambiguity
of English writing to the point where his prose threatened to disappear up its own intrica-
cies. Among other things, it was a way of putting some daylight between himself and his
plain-speaking native land, as was his habit of sucking up to a set of boneheaded Eng-
lish aristocrats. Nothing, not even Communism, could be more anti-American than James's
mannered, fastidious, overbred later style, horrified as it would be at the very idea of telling
it like it is. Like James, the English upper classes value a certain verbal obliquity. This is
because to talk confessionally is considered unsophisticated, and people of this rank would
rather be thought wicked than naive. In this, they are at one with the natives of Paris. You
would not ask someone like this on first meeting how many children he had, not because it
is impertinent but because it is hard for him to return a stylish reply.
The style, they say, is the man. A friend of mine in New York once gave a copy of my
Literary Theory: An Introduction to a friend of hers, an American woman who belonged to
that wretched minority of creatures on the planet who have never heard of me. On handing