The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 84

ventions are stiff, heartless, recalcitrant affairs. They must be continually broken and re-
made to bring them into line with one's changing experience. Why not call your child Blip
before lunch and Cruddingsworth after dinner?
Traditions and conventions are impersonal, which for Europeans is what allows them to
bring different kinds of people together. For Americans, however, they smack too little of
the warm-blooded individual spirit. Individualist societies tend to find social forms unreal,
even though there would be no individuals without them. Manners in America, writes de
Tocqueville, “form, as it were, a thin, transparent veil through which the real feelings and
personal thoughts of each man can be easily seen.” They are “hampering veils put between
[Americans] and the truth.” Forms are valid only if they are directly expressive of con-
tent. Otherwise, there is something brittle and arthritic about them. America delights in the
rough-diamond cop or sheriff who is driven by his humanity to throw away the rulebook
and violate all the procedures. Heroes and outlaws in the States can be hard to tell apart.
There is sometimes little to choose between the visionary and the vigilante.
This has its undoubted virtues. There is a European fetishism of forms about which
America feels rightly uneasy. My Cambridge tutor used to refuse to shake hands with his
pupils during the vacations, as this apparently contravened some arcane, medieval regula-
tion. If we wished to consult him in his capacity as an officer of the university, rather than
as a college tutor, we were obliged to leave his room and come in again. Americans would
rightly consider such behaviour a form of insanity. They refuse to sacrifice feeling to form,
an attitude from which Europe has much to learn.
Yet a casualness about forms can overlook the fact that rules and procedures exist to pro-
tect the vulnerable as well as shield the privileged. In Robert Bolt's play about Sir Thomas
More, A Man for All Seasons , More's impetuous son-in-law Roper declares that he would
“cut down every law in Europe to get at the Devil himself.” “Oh?” replies More. “And
when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide,
the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—Man's
laws, not God's—and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—d'you
really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” Roper's attitude is
Protestant, while More's case is Catholic. More is a touch too respectful of laws and forms,
while Roper sees them simply as impediments. There are a lot of hot-headed young Ropers
in American movies.
As far as formality goes, the Dickens of American Notes is startled by an American who
“constantly walked in and out of the room with his hat on; and stopped to converse in the
same free-and-easy state; and lay down on our sofa, and pulled out his newspaper from his
pocket, and read it at his ease.” Wearing a hat scarcely strikes us nowadays as free and easy,
though Dickens obviously finds the act of wearing one indoors, not to speak of addressing
someone else while doing so, a faintly startling example of American laid-backness. He