My country, 'tis of thee
PERSONAL COLUMN ANTHONY BURGESS
When Dr Johnson called patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel, he undoubtedly had poli- ticians in mind. There has been, in the life of this present government, no more insolent ad- juration than that recent one of Mr Wilson's, when he identified country with party and said, in effect, that to knock his administration was an unpatriotic act. But to revile socialist incom- petence and socialist hypocrisy could be re- garded as very patriotic indeed. And, while we're at it, let's admit that the Back Britain movement—a candle quickly doused by the trade unions, in accordance with the true Labour faith—had really nothing to do with patriotism: it was a misguided programme of condonation of bad policies, a covering-up of the failures of our rulers, not an act of con- trition for the fancied sins of the ruled. It was cynical of Mr Wilson, whose true flag is red, to swathe himself in the union jack.
Strictly speaking, no executive, whatever its political persuasion, has the right to invoke the same of Britain or exhort the subjects of Britain to be patriotic. The nominal head of the execu- tive, the monarch, may claim the right and, in certain grave junctures of history exercise it, but no minister of state can, in honesty, pretend to speak for the country as a whole. His poli- tical trade is founded on a sectional bias; he has achieved temporary power through a temporary shift in that uncommitted margin of the electorate which lies Between opposed con- victions. A prime minister has a right to in- form or explain, but no right to exhort.
I speak of peacetime. With a wartime coali- tion the position is different, though even there the traditional head of, the executive has a larger claim to. speak to and for the country than his chief minister. My main concern here, however, is with the validity of the whole con- cept of patriotism as it is presented by the state —the meanings of such emotive counters as 'country,' loyalty,"treachery: Patriotic rhetoric, like John of Gaunt's dying speech, assumes certain powerful responses to lan- guage charged in a particular way. Have these responses a rational, as opposed to emotional, basis?
• I'd better avoid generalities and examine my own responses to patriotic stimuli. The term 'Britain,' whatever the context, tends to leave me cold. It denotes either the Celtic land colonised by the Romans—a country of purely mythical interest—or the artificial union of contiguous Teutons and Celts that came into being with the Stuarts. It is impossible to become worked up about Britain. 'A body of Britain's breathing British air . . .' That won't do at all. 'England' is different, but what does 'England' mean? It means a segment of temperate earth with no claim to geographical uniqueness. The exile's dream of an English spring can be as well real- ised in the rural periphery of Berlin or Paris as in Sussex or Hertfordshire. It can be better realised in, say, Connecticut or Massachusetts, where diesel poisoning has still some way to go. It can be realised best of all in Ireland. If, to this mushy rhapsody of meadowsweet and lark- tong, we add such Kipling properties as the white cliffs and red buses going down Regent Street, we are only amassing a Christnias parcel of sentimental perceptions. 'Die for England' means Die for one of-those cans of London fog you can buy near Westminster.'
'England' also means history. To me it's a vicariously repressive history. England burned one of my ancestors because he wished to re- main loyal to the faith of his own ancestors. Since the Reformation, England has been, in many ways, a country more foreign to me and my fellow-Catholics than Spain or Italy. The annual burning of Guy Fawkes is, when you come to think. of it, a pretty vindictive com- memoration. The Spanish Armada, whose de- feat still swells English breasts, was only the Counter-Reformation with teeth—an attempt to reimpose the true faith on the heretic and save his soul from burning. That was perhaps mis- taken, but it was noble. Drake's piracies, tacitly condoned by the head of the executive, were merely immoral. English colonial history is mostly sordid—gin and Bibles. England's treat- ment of Ireland still leaves me appalled. Any loyalty I feel to an England presented as his- tory must, to my dying day, remain heavily qualified. And yet, like the hero of HMS Pina- fore, I remain an Englishman.
'England' means English literature, but Eng- lish literature means literature in English. It means the Poles Joseph Conrad and Jerzy Peterkiewicz, the Africans Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwense, the American Jews Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, the Irishmen James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. 'England' means various kinds of imported architecture— Gothic, Norman and Palladian. 'England' means (and, by a strange irony, it is the most international of the arts that-it has made most national) Elgar, Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Byrd, Holst, Weelkes and Delius. If there were anything specifically English that I'd be willing to fight for, it would be English music. But the notion is absurd.
What else does 'England' mean? Kindness? England is the only country in- the world that has to have a national society for the preven- tion of cruelty to children. Fair play? There is talk of digging moats round football pitches. Political freedom? Our elected representatives must obey not our dictates but those of the party whips. Freedom of the printed word? Look at the Las? Exit to Brooklyn case. Courtesy? The Spaniards beat us there. Love of the civilised life? We're a puritanical lot who oscillate between dour repression and hysterical permissiveness; our pubs open too late and close too early; our cuisine is either grimly in- sular or pretentiously xenomaniacal. The virtues of hard work? Don't be silly.
What 'England' means is something quite simple, something that needs no rhetorical pro- motion from politicians. It is the place where English people best fulfil their communal needs. Life is, once we climb above the level of mere subsistence, chiefly a matter of communications —what the new French structuralists call semio- logical systems. We communicate through lan- guage, but also through codes of gesture, noise, dress, games, food, song. It is our understand- ing of the semiological complex we find around us that is what we mean when we say we feel at home in a place. Naturally, we feel -most at home at home. The smaller the community the better we can communicate. The semiological complex I understand best contains the follow- ing items : 'aye' for 'yes': thick seam tripe; a gill of beer meaning a half-pint of beer; 'I'm off to get my pan scraped,' meaning 'I'm going to confession'; steak-and-cowheel pie; a statue of St Anthony in the public bar; the poem that begins `Th' art welcome, little bonny brill.' I recognise a sort of involvement in Catholic Lancashire, though I'M exiled from it. I recog- nise also a kind of local patriotism. I would fight for Catholic-Lancashire against Protestant Oxfordshire. Terms like 'England' lose all their emotive power in such romantic and impossible contexts.
This sage of the superpowers is also the age s of the small nations (Lancashire is, potentially, as much a small nation as is Wales or Scotland). It is in the small nations that the really impor- tant faiths best flourish. Jacobitism is a joke in North London, but in North Britain it is a strong and sustaining dream. The bigger the political unit, the flimsier and more tepid are the ideas which make it a whole. 'Britain'—it means only a union jack on a Carnaby Street carrier-bag. 'England'—something vaguely Gals- worthian and Elgarian. When the dreadful sen- tence is executed and we find ourselves in Europe, there will be no unifying idea except a cloudy image of 'Western culture'—wine, which is inferior to bitter beer; Goethe, who is a. bore and unreadable; the- ideal of the full, free man, regularly suppressed by some conti- nental upstart. The real unification will be Napoleonic—driving on the right, a silly and obsolete coinage, abstract weights and measures, a supposed federation which is really a new (de Gaulle is only a portent) Carlovingian em- pire. Is it any wonder that Scots and Welsh nationalisms are rising? We fear these new cold economic agglomerations, the flavour of whose life is already being prefigured by a Whitehall whose image is somehow that of a frozen blanc- mange.
We have all been told to back Britain. Soon we shall hear the word loyalty'—which means supporting the executive. And then, when unions seek, quite rightly, all the money they can reasonably get hold of, holding to the truth that the value of work can be established only by free bargaining. there will be strangled cries of `treachery,' to be followed almost at once by fresh devaluation of the pound. Such terms are highly emotive but are presented as if they had, like `mother-love' and 'matricide,' absolute semantic values. My ancestors were once loyal, because they supported James II; they then be- came traitors, because they called the Hano- verians usurpers. Words mean what the de- magogues want them to mean; we must refuse to be moved. If 'Britain' means the Labour party, I glory in my lack of patriotism.
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