Britain's Change of Life
KRISTOL, IRVINC
WRITERS and WRITING Britain's Change of Life As with women, so with nations: A change of life is a kind of mute agony, punctuated by alternating flushes of aimless excitement and causeless...
...Social experiments lose their ideal appeal: Whether they succeed or fail, the world at large is not much interested or influenced...
...it is also, in mysterious ways we do not quite comprehend, an irredeemably personal one...
...Yet in this era of "super-states" even 50 million can count as small...
...as Middleton correctly emphasizes, the asset of belonging to a worldwide English-speaking community in which England can participate...
...I don't want to press the metaphor too far, but it does seem to me that much which is otherwise inexplicable about England today is connected with the fact that it is undergoing an experience of this order...
...But it is too easy to love it only for its differences from America: the even temper of its life, the intelligence and lack of demagogy in public affairs, the ubiquitous squares and gardens and parks that soften the hard urbanities, the general civility of manners, etc...
...290 pp...
...why don't you get a grip on yourself...
...That, and the dreary, impersonal, pre-digested style which the New York Times imposes on its correspondents...
...Even after the explanation has occurred to him, he will say: "Yes, it's a grim experience, but a natural and universal one, which is moreover not fatal...
...To an observer, the whole business seems puzzling and more than a little exasperating...
...but all of them, unfortunately, involve either the spending of American dollars or the deployment of Russian troops...
...the businessmen do well enough, despite their complaints...
...Otherwise, it is easily the best introduction to present-day England that has yet been made available to the larger American public that might be assumed to be interested in the subject...
...4.50...
...However, if history has passed by, it has not absconded...
...I have remarked that England is more "American" than is usually realized...
...England is, in this respect, much luckier than France, whose losses are irretrievable...
...The phenomenon of the "angry young men" in English art and letters is another These Are the British...
...the social services are excellent and available to all...
...England is not Sweden, of course, if only because it has 50 million people rather than 7 million...
...That could be misleading: I might just as well have said more "Scandinavian...
...But it is also becoming a less happy country, one less gratifying to its talented young and less rewarding to its successful middle-aged...
...case in point, though to suggest it to them would certainly make them angrier...
...All intimations of a higher national purpose and an ennobling common good are silenced...
...Not that there is any shortage of bright ideas for the reshaping of the world...
...The only complaint I would make against Drew Middleton's book is that it is a bit too hearty and masculine in outlook for an intimate appreciation of these circumstances...
...Why do the young people of Sweden itch to emigrate...
...WRITERS and WRITING Britain's Change of Life As with women, so with nations: A change of life is a kind of mute agony, punctuated by alternating flushes of aimless excitement and causeless melancholy...
...and the obstacles to its evolving into one are enormous, perhaps insurmountable: aggressive American nationalism, imperial nostalgia, the "progressive" myth of a multi-racial Commonwealth centered on London, the inevitably closer economic ties with a common European market...
...Neither in the United States nor Canada nor England can they expect to live as comfortably as at home...
...but their comfort so bores them that, in a country without high tragedy, they contrive to enact low personal tragedies of their own: drunkenness, suicide, divorce, etc...
...One cannot even bear to be articulate about it...
...There is still so much that life holds for you...
...and it is Middleton's capacity to repress mere nostalgia and fondly to contemplate England as it really is—Midlands, football pools, grim suburbias and all—that makes his book especially useful...
...They are almost all radical in temperament, think of themselves as "forward-looking"—only they cannot get around the blunt truth, the maddening truth, that no matter how bold their thoughts or passionate their imagination it doesn't in the end matter: Every protest inexorably becomes a form of acceptance, every indignant dissent a cunning reconciliation to their condition...
...The spiritual economy of a nation is even more profoundly affected than its political economy, in those deep areas of collective human psychology where we can see little and understand less...
...They are even in the way of becoming a tourist attraction...
...Middleton loves England—as does every American I have ever met who lives here...
...There are assets still available—above all...
...Reviewed by Irving Kristol By Drew Middleton...
...What is more difficult is to love it also as a modern, industrialized society, more "American" than an American tourist can realize...
...All of those grandiose notions about "the middle way" come down in practice to a parochial society with no higher purpose than providing slightly larger shares of the cake to be squabbled over by insatiable special interests...
...But she cannot get a grip on herself, because she is herself gripped from without by— well, call it Fate or the Eternal Flux, or what you will, but it is in any case something not-human, external, unreasonable, the last thing in the world one can be reasonable about...
...No less important are those other aspirations which are not so tangible or so easy to define: the feeling of "amounting to something" in the world, the sense of large expectations, even of risk and adventure...
...Edi(OTi «Encounter" (London) Knopf...
...The rise and decline of empire is not only an historical event...
...We tend to associate the idea of "Americanization" with a healthy marching forward...
...It is comprehensive, intelligent, fair, and there is no sentimental cant in it...
...England is certainly becoming a country more healthy, more egalitarian, more universally prosperous, more uniform in its tastes and more relaxed in its manners than it ever has been...
...The Suez affair immediately suggests itself as illustrative: the last, hopeless, pitiful assertion of virility, so soon discountenanced...
...But history has passed by, and has left an aching sense of loss and diminution, a chill of loneliness...
...Patriotism remains: but it is defensive, unabashedly self-interested, inward-turning...
...And there is no doubt that the observed "Americanization" of England today is also a "Swedenization"—there is a closing in of horizons, a voiding of possibilities, an oppressive atmosphere of in-effectuality...
...This will appear paradoxical only to those simple-minded souls who believe that an increase in the "standard of living" is the most crucial of human aspirations...
...The trade unions see to it that their members can afford larger television sets...
...This English-speaking community is not yet a real community...
...But it is nevertheless only within such a community that Britain can find a new way of life that will in some measure compensate for the loss of the old...
...it is not always such, or at least not entirely...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 42
