We, the British/The Kingdom by the Sea

...Britain is so much more than hedgerows and downs, tea and crumpets, harrumphing lords and tiara'ed ladies, and if I hadn't taken the trouble to find out as much, then I could expect whatever curved balls came my way...

...Paradoxically, each of these books tends to defeat its apparent purpose before the American reader...

...For the last dozen or so years Theroux has lived in London, so Britain is not precisely an exotic place for him...

...It is by one Bruce Weber, better-known in the trade for his pictures of bronzed young males wearing Calvin Klein underwear...

...Many of my fellow citizens, it would appear, are in need of similar instruction...

...But I have finally decided, after much reflection and a second visit, that the fault was my own...

...Not merely the remarks themselves (which were bad enough) but their very tone and intensity provoked considerable surprise in the United States...

...Anyone other than an erudite lover of Paris will find it difficult to follow reference upon reference to names that may not trigger pictures out of his memory at once...

...It so happens that Theroux's journey took place at the very same time as the British were at war with the Argentines in the South Atlantic...

...In a short romantic passage at the beginning of the book, Russell reveals the passion behind the erudition: "You can live half your life in Paris...

...To anyone less learned than John Russell I recommend he read that chapter, as well as most others, with the green Michelin Tourist Guide o f Paris at hand...

...or Princeton (N.J...

...For as a matter of fact, our information about that country runs far behind our sentiment...

...One can hear the teacups rattling at the Bennington (Vt...

...landings in Grenada...

...The Michelin shows additions made by Napoleon I, as well as those made by Catherine de Medici, Henry IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, and Napoleon III, by different colors in a diagrammatic perspective drawing of the Louvre...

...The first sentence reads: "The Louvre is the largest of Parisian monuments, and the most inscrutable...

...This is resumed in the statement, "By most standards other than those of crude commercialism, I am content that my country should be judged...

...An experience like that," he added, "puts its mark on you for the rest of your life...

...For some time after that I refused to set foot in their country, and would pointedly snub British visitors to the United States...

...Even when we miss the significance of a name, person, building, historical event, painting, composition, novel, or play, we are left amused, enriched, and 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984...

...Theroux's dreary tableaum abandoned factory towns, unemployment, bored and listless young people, the demoralization of survivors of Dunkirk and El Alemein, above all, the sheer fear of the future--is frankly heartbreaking...

...It also manfully attempts to explain the pervasive contradictions of British life-class consciousness together with increasing opportunities for "new men...

...He looks pensive, almost somber...

...This is part of what George Orwell once called the ferocious privateness of their lives, and Theroux rediscovered it on his jaunts...

...It purports to show the author, Taki Theodoracopulos...

...Let me quote just one from Sentimental Education: "His eyes, leaving the stone Pont de Notre-Dame and the three suspension bridges, invariably strayed in the direction of the Quai aux Ormes [now the Quai de l'H6tel-de-Ville], towards a clump of old trees which looked like the limetrees in the port of Montereau...

...In a lengthy, and, of course, deliberately provocative, interview with Bob Colacello in Interview magazine (yes, the same), he lambasts democracy as follows: "I think all men should have equal opportunity but that's where it stops...

...They raised the nagging question of how well we Americans really know Britain, as opposed to how deeply we feel about it...

...Some of what Richard tells us-particularly about the Ulster question--is sensible and wellfounded, and needs to be taken seriously by American readers, particularly those of Irish origin...

...This is no coffee-table book designed to be given away and not read, although the illustrations alone would make Paris worth treasuring...

...Believe me, in this area the British have not lost their winning edge...

...He was an executive of the Cadbury Candy Company who had "come over," as the expression had it, to promote the sale of his products in the United States...

...A nation, after all, cannot experience the kind of sharp reduction in international status such as Britain has undergone since 1939 without it registering in the lives of ordinary people...

...At times it reads as if portions were originally delivered as lectures before civic groups in the most unsophisticated quarters of the American South and West...

...The first is decline--not merely in economic or military might, but also in equipoise and national selfesteem...

...The second, very much related to the first, is the continuing impact of the Second World War...

...There are innumerable similar passages in French novels, perhaps none more explicit than Michel D~on's in Les gens de la nuit: At daybreak...

...indeed, if under such circumstances the English tried to act like Americans, they would drive each other mad...

...Greek history is both violent and vehement, as Taki makes plain in his first book, The Greek Upheaval (a title he chose after sensibly rejecting his first idea, Chicken Colonels...

...The format is somewhat similar to his other travel books, The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, in which the author moves virtually Last Class through an ambitious and highly improbable itinerary...

...Apart from the fact that it is exceptionaUy well written, and at times quite entertaining, The Kingdom by the Sea performs one greatly needed service for American readers--it disassembles Britain into its constituent ethnic parts--England, Wales, Scotland, and Ulster...

...A tall, florid gentleman, impeccably dressed and shod, he spoke in an accent which did not--to my acute disappointment-resemble the BBC...

...Whether such encounters ever took place is quite beside the point...

...So what constitutes a sometimes acute social irritation for the tourist or occasional visitor is in fact a virtual national necessity...

...PARIS John Russell/Harry N. Abrams/S50.00 Franz M. Oppenheimer "'Car la Seine est une amante, et Paris est dans son lit...

...What finally appeals to Richard about his country is precisely what attracts certain kinds of Eastern seaboard Americans--the exquisite combination of aristocracy and socialism, which keeps at bay (or rather, attempts to) the unwashed entrepreneur and selfmade man...

...Actually, the book contains only slightly more good humor and kindness of spirit than Dickens's vicious original...

...Such density, needless to say, does not conduce to random chumminess...

...Many other men have loved Paris like a woman even though, unlike Russell, they did not see themselves as outsiders...

...Hence their love, as he writes, of "squashy sofas and warm rooms and the prospect of tea...

...He is at his very best in Northern Ireland, where he manages to wend his way between the two contending parties with grace and sympathy, much as he did in Panama in The Old Patagonian Express...

...In some ways it is our long overdue revenge for Charles Dickens's American Notes (1842...

...How well ~lo these two new books provide it...

...I, a close friend, though, in certain respects, miles apart, suggest that you part with your $t4.95...

...This is quite a combination, and it shows: Theroux's accounts of far-off places make you glad you stayed at home...

...you can love Paris, marry a Parisian, raise Parisian children...

...La Seine John Russell, the art critic of the New York Times, has written a love letter to Paris, a love letter that has a life-long lover's knowledge of the heart and an awe-inspiring scholar's erudition...

...Here again we see the spirit of the heart and not that of geometry at work...

...Richard sets out to justify his country, to explain its quirks and gloss easily over its faults, to make us feel a bit sorry, as it were, that we too cannot be British...

...This book is truly one of a kind...

...Taki is able to harness his energies in the service of social comedy, fortunately for us, or for those of us who do not attract his scrutiny...

...But even in the Michelin I failed to locate the Pavilion de Rohan...

...Primarily, of course, he is Greek...

...A former Labour member of Parliament, Richard is self-evidently a man of culture, good humor, and considerable moderation...

...He makes his country sound like himself...

...This, clearly, is not the man we know...

...We are then plunged into the equivalent of a college course on the history of the Louvre, its surroundings, its architecture, and the monarchs, architects, artists, and politicians who made that history...

...That was in 1968...

...This is irksome, if you are by nature a joiner rather than a looker-on, but it gives Parisian life a tautness, an inner coherence,and a ferocious continuity...

...I f Richard's book seems a bit less critical of its subject than it should, Paul Theroux's travelogue more than makes up for it...

...I even sympathized with Argentine aspirations to recover those islands which I, too, persisted in calling the Malvinas...

...Even so, one cannot help wondering whether Theroux is playing quite fair by giving us our largest slice of England on the South Coast, where rickety Tories go to die...

...chapters of the English-Speaking Union...

...This is the emotion of Yeats about Maud Gonne, not that of Major MacBride about his wife...

...Only by referring to maps of Paris, and drawings in that Guide, could I follow sentences like "The part built under Napoleon extends from the Pavilion de Marsan to the Pavilion de Rohan...

...But Taki has targets other than those he considers improperly celebrated, and these include a whole slew of beliefs that we Wets have been brought up to regard as entirely sacrosanct...

...But for England alone, it is 356 per square kilometer, and for Southeast England, where fully a third of the population lives, it is 619...

...Richard has his Ur-American clearly fixed in mind: an unreconstructed Reaganite, a sort of primitive, rightwing troglodyte, a well-meaning sort, really, whose mind is clouded with all sorts of silly populist notions about Britain, and particularly about British socialism...

...the pressures to conform together with tolerance for individual eccentricity...

...The first is by Ivor Richard, the former British ambassador at the United Nations, now an official of the European Community in Brussels...

...in this case it is Britain by skirting its coastal margins...

...the cult of privacy and the urge toward 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 collectivism...

...The Proustian knows not only in what street Swann, the Guermantes, the Verdurins, and Odette lived, he also knows through what street Swann went to his dentist: the Rue Duphot...

...A traveler will have his own criteria for evaluating places...

...And the political triumph of Margaret Thatcher, dealt with only in passing in the pages of this book, raises further questions which its author and presumably some of his American readers would prefer not to face...

...Three themes dominate and unify this long and sometimes disjointed book, and they go a long way toward explaining today's Britain to Americans...

...His descriptions of Scotland and Wales are far more finely nuanced, partly, I think, because these are people of greater warmth and openness to outsiders...

...To such projects he brings a remarkable literary ability to evoke unfamiliar places and people, together with a real hatred of travel itself...

...Writing about the Seine, Russell echoes Flaubert's feelings when looking across, up, and down the river from the Ile de la Cit~: "Between the Pont d'Austerlitz in the east and the Pont d'I~na in the west it was difficult until quite lately to stand on either bank and point to anything ignoble...

...Moreover, as an American resident he has doubtless endured some pretty merciless comments from his neighbors...

...But demography plays a role as well...

...As Ivor Richard points out, the population density of the British Isles is 228 persons per square kilometer, compared to 98 for France and 24 for the United States...

...Poor Little Greek Boy," the longest section in the current oeuvre, is good-humored stuff...

...It subsequently cooledwand glacially Mark Falcoff is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...His mouth is closed...

...WE, THE BRITISH Ivor Richard/Doubleday/$16.95 THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA: A JOURNEY AROUND GREAT BRITAIN Paul Theroux/Houghton Mifflin/S16.95 Mark Falcoff Not long ago Encounter magazine ran some excerpts from the debates .in the British House of Lords in the wake of U.S...

...His characters are not, after all, Oxbridge academics or guttersnipe journalists, but ordinary folk who are not out to impress anyone or to put everyone down, simply decent if not very glamorous people...

...Anyone of sensibility must feel shy at the moment he discovers such a wellhidden secret...

...Oh no sir," I gushed, "not at all...

...This difficulty makes Paris a book that demands effort and discipline from its readers...

...In Sentimental Education Flaubert seems to have positive sentiments for none of his characters but only for Paris...

...Fortunately, these efforts have not been entirely successful, which explains much of what economic progress Britain has made since World War II...

...But comfortable as we are in this warm bath of condescension, some of us cannot help but wonder what the author sounds like when safely out of diplomatic earshot...

...Later in the same tirade he manages at the same time to attempt a demystification of fascism as "an Italian economic system" and a disembowelling of New York clubland yahoos, observing "they won't even be shot--they'll die of alcoholism by the time they're thirty-five...

...The Civil War of 1943-49 bred its own Furies, and furnished material in abundance that would rankle in countless hearts forever...

...Note that the chapters do not correspond to any symmetrical scheme of organization...

...in fact, in a facetious paraphrase of that work, he even dedicates his book to those English friends "who, loving their country, can bear the truth when it is told good humoredly and in a kind spirit...

...is decorated with a photograph...

...But none of that will make you a Parisian...

...so--before hard experience, which included expatriate academics, the New Statesman, Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, and finally, the sheer horror of being an American visitor to British university communities, where I experienced the blunt edge of English rudeness, and some peculiarly subtle forms of social cruelty...

...The few agreeable passages of that book read like passages of Russell's...

...Just because all men are created equal does not mean some junkie down the street should have the same vote as a Harvard professor...

...Was this my city, this trembling scene with its furtive shadows...

...Clearly, Richard likes these things, which means that sometimes he insists that they work, at other times that no one really knows whether they work or not, still others that even if they don't work, and even if they exact a larger social price than they should, still and all they serve other goals which he prefers...

...But the third point, and perhaps the most important, is that the English do not treat foreigners much differently from how they treat each other...

...I opened a window and found myself in an unknown land: the boulevard Saint-Germain lined with trash cans, plane trees with diffident leaves, chairs piled upon one another in front of the cafes, the deserted street...

...In this Richard largely succeeds...

...Further, while the postwar period for the United States began with unconditional surrender and continued with the baby boom, the rush to the suburbs, and a meteoric rise in living standards, for the British it commenced with national bankruptcy and went on to rationing, international retreat, and finally, when a measure of recovery was finally achieved, to a pale and inadequate copy of our own consumer revolution...

...Is he an American conservative...

...Well do I recall meeting my fh'st Englishman at the age of 10 in 1951...

...They are suspicious of all strangers and prefer not to deal with them altogether...

...I expect you think I talk oddly because I come from the other country," he volunteered...

...But since we are, after all, an urbane British diplomat, the thing must be done deftly, and without giving undue offense...

...The chap needs to be set right...

...The Kingdom by the Sea is apparently his way of returning the compliment...

...At daybreak there is in Paris such an uncertainty between the sordid and the glorious that one had to have been her lover for a long time not to be disappointed...

...Obsessed as we Americans seem to be with the pomp and paraphernalia of monarchy or the slightly ratty elegance of Britain's ancient university foundations, we miss much of the point about this countryadifficult, enigmatic, maddeningly close and yet impossibly far away...

...Franz M. Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...

...Peter Green, in reviewing Nicolas Gage's Eleni in the Times Literary Supplement, had this to say of the conservative Greek politician, Constantine Karamanlis: The oblivion (lethe) for which he called was never remotely in sight...

...Did I have the right to look at a woman who is waking up at that uncertain hour...

...He considers himself a conservative, but he is not a British conservative, not even, I think, in the Thatcherite mold...

...It is not dealt with here...

...Such the high noon of my passion...

...Perhaps other teaching aids and reference works are needed...

...Paris in this sense is a secret society...

...In Remembrance o f Things Past Proust refers to 68 Parisian streets by name...

...But if Theroux's account is supposed to make us dislike these people, he too fails...

...Even among the educated, few will know the architects Sebastiano Serlio, the brothers Le Breton, and Pierre Lescot, who are mentioned as having been or not having been employed by Francois I. The chapters on the different neighborhoods, the Grands Boulevards, Haussmann, the Paris of the First Empire, the Palais Royal, and the Com~die-Francaise present the same difficulties...

...As a matter of fact, I rather like your accent...

...the United Kingdom may be the only foreign nation Americans really like and trust, but this imposes no responsibility on the British to return the favor, and in fact many of them do not...

...The central problem for Americans is that their view of Britain is largely fantastic or nostalgic, or a combination of the two...

...Perhaps...

...Facing him, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the H6tel-de-Ville, Saint-Gervais, SaintLouis, and Saint-Paul rose among a maze of roofs, and the genie on the July Column shone in the east like a great golden star, while in the other direction the dome of the Tuileries stood out against the sky in a solid blue mass...

...In the case of Britain, however, there are some additional wrinkles...

...While a few members bravely supported that action--notably Lord Thomas of Swynnerton and Lord Home of the Hirsel--most of the comments were of a type one would normally expect to hear in the parliament of a nation with whom we were at war, soon would be, or jolly well should be...

...One last cautionary note, though...

...In spite of its small size, it manages to convey an astonishing range of information about British society--not merely things we should know but things we thought we knew and things we didn't even know we needed to know--along with a full discussion of the more arcane aspects of the honors system, the aristocracy, life in the House of Commons, elections, the civil service, and the monarchy...

...What right, after all, did I have to assume that an entire civilization could be resumed in Wuthering Heights, Sherlock Holmes movies, and Agatha Christie...

...No guide could be a substitute...

...Some deal with an arrondissement, some with a building, some with a historical period, and one with the impact of a city planner, Haussmann...

...It is also self-evident that We, the British was written for an American publisher and destined for American readers, since it repeatedly anticipates the kind of questions and objections which the author imagines Americans would raise--and perhaps often do raise--about his subject...

...Richard does the same, with an additional and very helpful chapter on "The Newcomers"--the East Indians, Hong Kong Chinese, Africans, Pakistanis, and others, without whom any portrait of present-day Britain would be incomplete...

...But his discussion of nationalized industries, the public health service, and the disincentives of the British tax system is rather more open to question...

...But Taki's Greekness should not be ignored...

...Back to your camera, Weber...

...This was especially the case along the Boston-Washington corridor, where Anglomania rages more fiercely than anywhere else on earth with the possible exception of Portugal or Chile...

...He deplores the ridiculous nature of Ulster's religious wars, yet still understands their peculiar, twisted logic...

...Indeed, what some of us have taken to be the snobbery, deceit, hypocrisy, above all the sheer unkindliness of the British is actually the family vice of only one branch of the clan...

...French writers in particular have shared Russell's fascination with every physical aspect of Paris...

...The problem, however, is not that England is not like the United States (e.g., "crude commercialism"), but rather, that it isn't more like West Germany, France, Belgium, even Italy, all of whom over the past generation have overtaken it in industrial growth, product innovation, and general welfare...

...This points to an essential difference in our national exTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 37 periences: For the English, World War II was endured on their own territory--midnight bomb attacks, the destruction of historic cities, the expectation at one point of a German invasion at any time...

...Conversations about the Falklands tended quickly to slide back in time, to nostalgic comment about rationing and the blitz...

...Here, after all is said and done, is a proud and ancient people who have given much to the world (and indeed to our own country) forced to retire, as it were, on a pittance of their former income...

...This is particularly helpful because although we Americans tend to confuse "England" with "Britain," the former is only one of several nations which make up the United Kingdom, and in fact is much the least attractive...

...They are not, however, for the most part what we see of Britain abroad, or even on the islands themselves when we happen to visit...

...Above all, there is the text, which defies summary and description, for how does one compress a universe...

...Indeed, having believed that I knew Paris well, I began to feel ignorant almost to the point of illiteracy when I reached its first descriptive and historical chapter, "The Louvre...

...All of which is merely to reiterate that Taki is not necessarily consistent...

...Small wonder we see the world so differently...

...These difficulties should discourage nobody from reading the book...

...But apart from some jingoistic newspaper headlines, he found the British "in private, ashamed and confused" about that conflict...

...One wonders whether we could do it so gently and so well, and one asks, too, whether our own persistent sniping at the Empire during and after World War II served the interests of any of the parties involved, not to mention our own...

...One elderly resident of Canterbury once recalled for me helping to gather up directional signs on the Dover road in the summer of 1940, to make life difficult for Hitler's legions once they had landed...

...And, as he says, nowhere else were people so inclined to burst out, "Come home for lunch...

...Greeks, like Irishmen, have an exceptional talent for what they call mnesikakia, the remembrance of ancient wrongs, and always have had, as the Oresteiea, with its dreadful pursuing Furies, eloquently testifies...

...In this he does not succeed, because if there are many things about his country we do not know, the things that we do are widely and informatively reported in this country, and they are not particularly flattering...

...I decided to become her lover...

...Some of it is probably due to the weather, which forces them to spend much of their time indoors...

...As we bloody well assumed they would...

...The back cover of Princes, etc...