The Outgoing Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 24

self short. It is not certain that this would happen in New York. Irish builders also tend
to place coins in the foundations of houses for good luck. An American friend to whom
I mentioned this custom was adamant that it would never happen in the United States. It
was the waste, not the superstition, he thought was the problem. Perhaps American suburbs
would resound at night with the sound of people frantically digging up their neighbours'
foundations. There is an enormous amount of generosity in the States, but not much of it
extends to the financial sphere.
Even so, being so brashly explicit about money is part of America's openness. In Britain,
the oldest capitalist nation in the world, it is not done to discuss the stuff too often or too
loudly, whereas one knows one is back in the United States when everyone at the hotel
breakfast seems to be talking about dollars. The British can be coyly euphemistic about
what Americans candidly call the bottom line. British universities “appoint” their academic
staff rather than “hiring” them. One hires plumbers, not professors. (There are those of us
who find it gratifying, by the way, that another word for “godly” in early Puritan America
was “professor.”)
Perhaps one origin of this evasiveness is that aristocrats traditionally had so much money
that they did not need to think about it, and so did not need to talk about it either. This is
also true of Henry James's fabulously wealthy characters. True gentility means having only
the vaguest idea of where your income comes from, as true innocence means not know-
ing where babies come from. The middle classes make money, and are thus permanently
preoccupied with it, while the gentry spend it, and thus do not need to harp on it so much.
American talk about dollars may sometimes be brash, but at least is not conducted behind
one's hand, as though one is conspiring with a hit man to do away with one's spouse. Old-
fashioned Britons talk about money as discreetly as they do about sex. You do not discuss
it loudly, any more than you tell a passing stranger about your erectile dysfunction.
There is a similar reticence about the British brand of English. I was once a Fellow of an
Oxford college of which the Warden (Principal) was the legendary wit and bon viveur Sir
Maurice Bowra. It was this patrician rogue who, when invited to the wedding of a glamor-
ous young pair, is said to have remarked, “Lovely couple, slept with them both.” Though
famously gay, he once rather grudgingly contemplated marriage, and on being asked why
he had chosen a rather plain woman with whom to tie the knot, replied breezily, “Ah well,
buggers can't be choosers.”
Bowra's most superlative term of praise was “far from bad,” which is technically known
as litotes. In Americanese, this would be the equivalent of “wonderful” preceded by three
or four “verys.” Shakespeare was far from bad, so was Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and so was
lying naked on the banks of the river Isis in full, shameless view of passing boaters. One
suspects that in his more pious moments, which were admittedly somewhat rare, Bowra
thought that God was far from bad as well. Homer was “quite a clever fellow,” while the
more melancholic of the nineteenth-century novelists were “the gloomy boys.” Botticelli