Blood Class, and Nostalgia, by Christopher Hitchens
Falcoff, Mark
I asked to review Christopher Hitch- 1 ens's Blood Class, and Nostalgia because I expected it to be hugely entertaining. After all, the only thing more distasteful to me than an American Anglophile...
...a sort of theme park for royal activities and romances...
...The antagonism terest, and leave it at that...
...The really better off under a local tyrant consequences were, of course, Ameri- dressed up as a Soviet general than as can intervention in both World Wars on a client state...
...If in South Africa were shattered and Hitchens were Irish, his views would at subjugated...
...Hitchens should ask the Mexicans—not Carlos Fuentes or members of the jet-set left, but real Mexicans, the ones fleeing from their marvelous leviathan of corruption, inequality, and violence —whether they think those traditions should cross the border with them and replace America's British connection...
...But I always found it odd that the émigré was in effect urging his countrymen not to follow his example of decamping to the New World—particularly when, alas, he showed no sign of planning to return himself...
...The plain truth is that the book is labored, ponderous, and ultimately boring...
...And while Hitchens can turn out an entertaining article, he simply cannot sustain his usual level of invective for nearly four hundred pages...
...The readership of the TLS is made up largely of teachers and lumpen-intellectuals in England and Ireland who need constant reassurance that—though their own country life is rife with racism, censorship, lack of "caring," etc.—things in America are far, far worse...
...The book disappointed me, however, on both counts...
...Things started to even out around the turn of the cen- T n fact, Hitchens is so single-minded tury, when an unholy alliance was 1 in his argument that he even puts struck between Washington and Lon- sinister construction on British efforts don to divide up parts of what today to lure the United States into giving it would be called the Third World...
...as an EnglishMeanwhile, something approaching man, they are unconscionable...
...Across a swath of the imagination of America, it seemed England was understood principally as the home of the Windsors...
...Moreover, with this book I expected to unmask the author's dark, lurking secret—that far from being a man of the left, Hitch-ens is actually a covert Tory who wants the U.S...
...In the bogus grate burns a phony, heatless log fire...
...The idea of two enemies set on a course of mutual destruction was simply too much to resist...
...For him the these chapters, but although some of English connection "has been used to the details are new, the broad outline seduce and corrupt America, the better of the story has been known for some to suborn itself...
...22.95 Mark Falcoff THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 37 This point is central to the other aM had been in its imperial heyday...
...Hitchens is certainly no English nationalist—he clearly despises his own country every bit as much as he does the United States (which, when one thinks about it, is saying quite a lot...
...times and fashions change rapidly...
...the other is a history of U.S.- British relations, with special emphasis on "imperial receivership...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990...
...Hitchens tells the story more or awful lot for a cultural and political less like this: relationship: why not admit that the Throughout much of the nineteenth United States (like Germany, France, century, Britain was a determined Russia, and other major powers of enemy of the United States—particu- the nineteenth century) simply sought larly as it attempted to expand from the to expand as an expression of its sense Eastern Seaboard across the North of destiny and notion of national in-American continent...
...Did we real-was reflected in strong anti-British cur- ly need to go to school in Britain to be rents in American politics, and in a bad...
...It also has about 7,000 American subscribers, most of them academics, who naturally agree with this idea...
...Pickwick is being hurriedly converted into an L.A.-style cocktail bar...
...In this case, I hasten to say, the recipient of new loyalties is not the Soviet Union, but the sensual, dusky tyrannies of the Third World...
...One finds it all over the former British Empire, as well as in countries where British influence has been traditionally strong, such as Portugal, Chile, and Argentina...
...least be understandable...
...What could be more cynical and sordid than that...
...What was so wonderful about curious inversion of the present situa- German, Italian, or Dutch colonialism, tion in Great Britain...
...In some ways he resembles an old-fashioned British radical, but with higher cultural and social pretensions...
...affinity with the British, including the Is Burma...
...In Santiago they still have a Prince of Wales Country Club, complete with a painting of the Duke of Windsor in the dining room...
...This wartime ter off under the mullahs than under association was not without its prob- the Shah...
...a "British accent"—not, certainly, the kind that comes out of the mouth of Christopher Hitchens —continues to distinguish those Argentines who have gone to the right prep schools from those who haven't...
...Here, for example, is his description of the Red Lion Bar of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Southern California: The simulacrum of an English country pub or "snug" has been lovingly faked...
...Terry Eagleton, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Tom Bottomore, Eric Hobsbawm, Antonia Fraser, Margaret Drabble, even Hitchens himself owe much of their success in the United States to the fact that certain kinds of Americans simply cannot resist any kind of foolishness when it comes wrapped in the proper cultural dressing...
...The invested as he is in the intellectual story has an unhappy ending: America equivalent of junk bonds—to write turns out to be just as bad as Brit- it...
...Hitchens attributes to Harold Macmillan the notion that the "special relationship" was to be "a relationship between conservative forces...
...So, by the way, ing the attention of their former colodid the intensity of America's "anti- nial powers...
...He thus chooses to omit from his analysis an inconvenient social fact: namely, that Anglomania is the religion of choice in the United States for not only the nouveaux riches right, but the academic and cultural left...
...For that matter, is Cuba Irish- and German-Americans...
...This also explains, by the way, why hatred of Thatcher is not restricted to American leftists...
...aspect of the book, which is a highly Whereas most books of this sort tendentious history of Britain's role in usually emphasize the degree to which world affairs and the gradual dis- America was unprepared to replace solution of Anglo-American rivalry by, Britain as a world power, Hitchens's as the saying goes, America in Britain's perspective is far less condescending to place...
...in those days the anyway...
...The lady is ruining their England by making it less feudal andbackward...
...More a "racial" or "cultural" understand- to the point, why is he so convinced ing—complete with its own mythology, that British rule (and American quasi-rituals, and public discourse—was be- imperial succession) has been such an ing reached between the two English- unmitigated disaster for the world, par-speaking peoples (over the heads and ticularly the Third World...
...The assistance during the summer of 1940...
...Eight time-zone hours ahead, in London, any pub with a trace of Sam Weller or Mr...
...Now that would be a sub-imperialist" longings, as it discovered ject for a book, but, I suppose it would that superpower status carried costs be unfair to expect Hitchens—deeply and burdens, not just benefits...
...In the lean and hungry early seventies, we used to just drop out of any academic job competition when a citizen of the United Kingdom entered it...
...It is also possible that Hitchens overestimates the residual hold of British archetypes on the American imagination...
...And in the Argentine Republic—a country where I have spent considerable time over the years—the author of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia should know that in spite of the recent nastiness over the Falklands, everybody there adores his country, or rather, what they imagine his country to be...
...For years it has been known, for example, that no history or English department at any American university was capable of resisting a British accent...
...America is a nation of fads...
...After all, the only thing more distasteful to me than an American Anglophile is Christopher Hitchens himself...
...most of Britain's (and Frances) former As the British gradually withdrew colonies, as well as America's quondam after World War II from their out- imperial clients in Latin America—posts in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, and having destroyed their economies with the Middle East, and the Americans silly socialist experiments and suftook their place, all traces of anti- focating authoritarianism—are desperBritish rivalry in the United States ately trying to find a way of attract-evidently disappeared...
...Beer pumps draw up franchised, tasteless American lagers with German names...
...But in others he evokes a less honorable tradition, by now unfortunately quite venerable in Britain, of former public schoolboys who have turned against their country...
...English-Speaking Union—has been used for generations in the United States to confer a cachet of class and old money on individuals and institutions that so clearly lacked both...
...It is obvious that Hitchens has the United States and far more wound-spent a great deal of time researching ing to his own country...
...when under cover of "anti-imperial- This is doubtless taking Hitchens's ism," the United States sought to arguments more seriously than they dismantle British rule in India and else- deserve...
...The first has certain virtues—Hitchens has a good observer's eye for cultural reportage, and a sense of irony that the subject evidently invites...
...This is asking an time...
...Will that be such a marvelous outcome...
...the prime minister is despised in almost equal measure by a surprising number of well-to-do Eastern Seaboard Wasps of the type one imagines reading the New Yorker...
...tural dimensions of American Anglomania...
...Moreover, Hitchens is wrong if he thinks this is a uniquely American phenomenon...
...Is Iran really bet-emerging world power...
...Unconvincing paneling combines with rounded and "aged" wooden tables and chairs to sham the dingy atmosphere of a "Dickensian" alehouse as shown off to willing American tourists...
...What some have called British style in the United States is, after all, the ultimate expression of anti-bourgeois sentiment, and as such is hugely attractive to the American intelligentsia...
...Is Pakistan...
...And who can argue with this...
...Central America, and the Americans And what was so wonderful about Hit-looked the other way while the Boers ler, except that he was anti-British...
...Is Egypt also the protests of many groups in the better off now than it was before the United States that found no particular British were driven out...
...to go socialist so it can be ruined, thus allowing him to feel better about his country's present reduced international circumstances...
...Only if you think that Britain's side, with important side anything is preferable to British (or benefits to American stature as an American) influence...
...This could be a metaphor for another, more sinister development: if present trends continue, our Mother Country will not be Britain at all but Spain (or more precisely, Mexico...
...Sometimes the irony is a bit mannered or forced, but the point is usually well taken...
...It is also humorless—it lacks even the kind of below-the-belt rapier wit we have come to expect from his regular contributions to the Nation or Harper's, that reliable house organ of progressive dentists and culturally aware divorcees everywhere.' I n any event, Blood Class,and Nostalgia is really two books that rub up against each other, somewhat uncomfortably, between the same set of covers...
...Without the monarchy, ran the unstated question, what would be the point of the old country...
...In his appointed task Hitchens did not disappoint...
...Hitchens should ask his lems, particularly during the 1940s, friend Salman Rushdie...
...left there was wildly, sometimes embarrassingly, pro-American...
...After all, at this late date where (as well as French rule in Indo- there is no point in flogging the dead china), the better to replace it with our horse of "anti-imperialism," now that own version...
...Autre temps, autre moeurs...
...As things have stood for the last two hundred years, our British heritage has been present not only (or even particularly) in the practice of social climbing, but rather in those features of the United States that even Hitchens might like—its tradition of local government and civil liberties to trial by jury, not to mention our language, some of the themes of our literature, architecture, and many perfectly worthwhile social customs...
...By way of contrast, France has never appealed very much to either American liberals or conservatives, and not just because they are largely incapable of crossing the language frontier: under all its regimes since 1870 France has been, after all, the ultimate aristo-bourgeois republic, deeply rooted in the notion of private property, particularly small private property...
...But we hardly require yet another book to explain to us that British cultural paraphernalia—from fascination with the Royals to phony pubs to that superannuated curiosity, the 'Until quite recently he also contributed a column entitled "American Notes" to the Times Literary Supplement which I used to read with mixed horror and fascination...
...BLOOD, CLASS, AND NOSTALGIA: ANGLO-AMERICAN IRONIES Christopher Hitchens/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/398 pp...
...British gave the Americans a free hand Surely even a left-wing Labour govern-in such places as the Philippines and ment would have done the same thing...
...The Reagans are gone, and the "English country house style" is already fading from House and Garden...
...One is an essay on the culMark Falcoff is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...as a certain liberal of my acquaintance once confessed, "I love England because it combines monarchy and socialism...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
