The Outgoing Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 27

selflessness. The point is to be of service to others, not to lie around brooding and whining.
The negative side is that since the Duke of Edinburgh seems to have about as much inner
life as a fruit bat, courteously suppressing it is unlikely to prove much of a problem for him.
Americans may hype their emotions, but at least they do not regard them as something to
be kept under wraps, like a history of incest or a lunatic uncle.
Emotional reticence is hardly a quality of the U.S. media. In fact, Americans might
find themselves astonished at the untheatrical behaviour of Scandinavian TV weather fore-
casters, who when the camera alights upon them are sometimes to be found with their heads
buried shyly in their wall maps. They look as though they would prefer to be anywhere
but in front of the public, and mutter their script as though they are reluctantly disclosing
some dreadful news, which sometimes they are. No self-conscious joshing, heavy-handed
humour or cavorting around for them. British TV weather forecasters, by contrast, tend to
have an irritatingly cheerful bedside manner. They predict that the rain might not carry on
for quite the whole of the summer in the tones of a doctor trying to console you with the
news that the tumour is so far confined to only one of your kidneys.
Sentimentality
Overseas observers often feel that there is a compulsion in the States to get everything in-
stantly out in the open. No doubt there is a streak of puritan confessionalism in this habit.
But it is also part of the emotional forthrightness of Americans, in contrast to the shyness of
the British. Other nations sometimes regard Americans as lacking in complex inner depths,
which is of course a mistake. But the mistake is a significant one. It is not that Americans
exist only on the surface, but that their surface is where their depths are supposed to be.
They seem to have a more untroubled passage between inner and outer, a greater fluency
in translating the one into the other, than Scots or Swedes. Puritans may find spectacle and
razzmatazz distasteful, but this is not because these things are on the surface. It is because
they are surfaces which fail to manifest any depths.
The shy and socially awkward, who are plagued by a gap between their internal and ex-
ternal worlds, probably fare less well in the United States than they do in, say, Ulster or
Malaysia. Since the easy expressiveness of Americans is a great aid to social intercourse,
it is mostly a virtue. The country values honesty, directness and spontaneity, which are not
quite so high on Europe's list of moral priorities. They are virtues to which Europeans tip
their hats but fail to get excited about. At the same time, honesty and directness can in-
volve the tiresome assumption that keeping things to yourself is morbid and unsociable.
One should share one's emotions as one should share one's cookies. In a country which
dislikes the idea of living in a house which is attached to someone else's, one's inner space
is constantly at stake in the public sphere. In this view, whatever is unexpressed has no real
existence. What is inside you is valid only if it is externalised. This is why foreign visitors