To the Ends of the Earth

ONCE, FROM BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR, I HEARD AN ENGLISHWOMAN exclaim with real pleasure, “They are funny, the Yanks!” And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! They don’t give you bags in supermarkets! They say sorry when you step on their toes! Their government makes them get a hundred-dollar license every year for watching television! They issue drivers’ licenses that are valid for thirty or forty years—mine expires in the year 2011! They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! They drive on the left! They spy for the Russians! They say “nigger” and “Jewboy” without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! They sunbathe in their underwear! They don’t say “You’re welcome”! They still have milk bottles and milkmen, and junk dealers with horse-drawn wagons! They love candy and Lucozade and leftovers called bubble-and-squeak! They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowells! They have amazing names, like Mr. Eatwell and Lady Inkpen and Major Twaddle and Miss Tosh! And they think we’re funny?

The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, “It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot.” They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. “We’re awful,” they said. “This country is hopeless. We’re never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly.” But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.

And when an English person said “we,” he did not mean himself—he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be making decisions, and the people who should be following. “We” meant everyone else.

“Mustn’t grumble” was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. “I do some pretty incredible things” was not an English expression. “I’m fairly keen” was not American. Americans were show-offs—it was part of our innocence—we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn’t have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated—it was the way “wops” acted, it was “Chinese fire drill,” it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: A “bounder” was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long, merciless memories.

Rambler

AS SOON AS I HAD LEFT DEAL I SAW A LOW, FLAT CLOUD, iron-gray and then blue, across the Channel, like a stubborn fogbank. The closer I got to Dover, the more clearly it was defined, now like a long battleship and now like a flotilla and now like an offshore island. I walked on and saw it was a series of headlands. It was France, looking like Brewster across Cape Cod Bay.