TABLE TALK

That special relationship

DENIS BROGAN

As an example of the isolation from the world one acquires on a longish sea voyage, I was not aware till I got home that Mr Wilson was going to Washington. Eight agreeable days on the `Raffaello' left me in a state of indifference to all but the most world-shaking events. I listened to both the Italian and the English bulletins in a semi- daze. Nor, in the week I was in Washington before I sailed, did I, as far as I remember, ever hear anyone mention the visit, and I have therefore made no deep reflections on what Mr Nixon and Mr Wilson are going to talk about. In any case, the 'special rela- tionship' is an expression which, on the whole, I dislike. It had a meaning, say twenty years ago, but the meaning has more and more drained out of it, and you never hear it in Washington, from Americans.

Nevertheless, there is a special relation- ship which is permanent, usually helpful, sometimes misleading and sometimes mad- dening. Bismarck told young Austen Cham- berlain that the most important event of the nineteenth century was the fact that the United States spoke English. He may have been exaggerating a bit, but there is a great deal of truth in what he said. Of course, we have the problem .of whether what the Americans speak is English. As I have grave doubts whether the English speak English, it is not a controversy that excites me very much. There is also, unfortunately, an association of 'English-speaking' with a certain attitude to American politics, to Brit- ish politics, and to the rest of the world which, however well meant, can be irritating and sometimes mischievous. (I may say I am a life member of the English-Speaking Union.) I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that the only thing that divides us is a common language, but this was a boutade, not a serious contribution.

Most Americans are very bad linguists, and one reason for the fact that we receive more American tourists than any other country is that, after a few days, they can make themselves reasonably understood. I say in a few days. I find when I get to America that it takes some days before I can understand what is being said by people over the telephone and they can understand what I myself am saying. This is far more a question of intonation than of vocabulary or of accent. But it does not last very long. Also, some words are highly misleading and mean different things in the United States and Britain. But on the whole one can read most American newspapers and books with- out difficulty, and the Americans can read ours.

I should, of course, maintain that the minor stylistic differences between English and American prose style are unmistakable. I do not believe it is possible to write a page of English prose (either in the American or in the English sense of the words) without betraying on which side of the Atlantic you were brought up. One can be mildly irritated —I never get used to 'differing with' instead of 'differing from'. And I could name a good many other locutions which still, after many years of listening, strike me as odd. But on the whole the English language is a

real bond, and only occasionally a source of quarrels, anger, and misunderstanding. It is not on these levels of possible misunder- standing that the real problems arise.

What are the problems? It still astonishes me, after many years of visiting and living

for quite long periods in the United States, to discover how many of my fellow country- men living there have still an attitude of de haut en bas towards the ex-colonials. Be- cause most of the people they meet are A nolonhil for various good and bad reasons, they forget they are above all Americans, and the greatest source of irritation caused by visitors, and by residents, is the firm . refusal of many exiled 'Britons' to notice that they are living in a foreign country with its own standards, its own institutions and its own deep patriotism.

Some very eminent Americans have be- come partially anglicised: the most notable examples were Henry James and T. S. Eliot. But no one could have mistaken either James. whom I never met, or Eliot, whom I did, for an Englishman or even for a Scot, and it was not a question only of accent, but a question of a view of life corning naturally to the inhabitants of South Britain, or even the inhabitants of North Britain. I should maintain that Eliot was less at home in the English version of English than was Yeats. I should say the same of Henry James.

But it must be remembered that James did not come, as is far too often asserted, from a Yankee Bostonian family but from a New York family of Irish origins. Many of the habits attributed to James as a stylist, as a novelist, and, indeed, as a citizen, were imputed by censorious Bostonians like Henry Adams and, to some extent, by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to the fact that the James family was Irish. It is generally forgotten that his very remarkable sister was a violent Irish patriot and a kind of American Fanny Parnell, her sympathies deeply invOlved on the Irish side in the great controversies of the 'eighties. Never- theless, I do not know any parallel inside the United States of English (or British) writers of the eminence of James and Eliot settling down in the United States, becoming naturalised, and becoming parts of the English literary scene.

I am emphasising 'English'. One of the most distressing phenomena nowadays is the adoption by the American press, notably

by Time magazine, of the absurd Scotch

demand that everything to the credit of Britain should be called British even when it is in fact almost entirely English. whereas anything to the credit of Scotland (including some of the things which are not to the credit of Scotland) should at once be pre- emptively claimed as Scottish or Scotch or even Scots. (I hope I don't get indignant letters from Edinburgh for my use of Scotch, which is perfectly legitimately applied to many more things than whisky.) Again and again events in English history are described as British. For example, I have known Americans to write of the 'British' victory over the Spanish Armada. The Armada was defeated by the English, and the Scots were prudently neutral. I suppose we shall soon get an account of the Scotch victory at Bannockburn Etna the British victory at Flodden.

But that's another story. There is no point in dodging the truth that the institutions of the United States, as far as they are not the product of the American Revolution or of the introduction of the ideals of the Enlight-

enment into the revolting colonies in the late eighteenth century, are English. The greatest of these English exports is, of course, the common law. It is a pity that the colonists did not adopt the best legal system, i.e. Scots law, but they didn't.

There are a great many other very power- ful links which have no parallel in the rela- tionships between any European country and the United States. As I keep on telling my students, the United States may not be a Christian country., but it is a Protestant country, as no European country, not Sweden, not even Scotland, is. It has, for all practical purposes, no Catholic or Jewish background. Catholics and Jews resent this, but 'facts are chiels that winna ding'. And since most Americans read only books writ- ten in English and periodicals written in English and, so far as they do not patronise their own literature and arts, are still rather colonial in their attitude to English achieve- ments, this is the justification for the title 'English-Speaking Union' and for the over- whelming weight of English studies in American universities as compared with studies of French, German, Russian, etc.

French has a special prestige, but not necessarily for reasons that would please the French if they knew about it. Although there are millions of people in the United States of French origin, they are mainly Canadiens of Louisiana cajuns, i.e. descended from the Acadians over whose sad fate Longfellow wept. But French is often not a merely snob language. I can remember a very eminent English scholar of Scandinavian origin, born in America but a graduate of the University of Copenhagen, explaining that although the constitution of the Scandinavian state of Minnesota pro- vides that Scandinavian languages must be taught in the State University, it was hard to get students. When I asked why, he said, 'French is not in Minnesota a servants' language. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Ice- landic are'. So the overwhelming predomin- ance of English is a very important fact of cultural and political life.

But it is a great mistake to translate this

'How about a swop? You give me Spiro and I'll give you George:

fact of life into an uncritical admiration of Britain or, as I should prefer to say, of England. For example, the interest of the average American in the Royal Family is, if possible, greater than the interest of Englishmen in the Royal Family. I was asked again and again in my last long visit for information about the Prince of Wales.

I was fortunately able, since I remembered his career at Cambridge, to give, honestly, a highly attractive picture of the young Prince based on -what I was told by his teachers and by undergraduates. However, when I was asked when the Queen was going to abdicate in his favour, I looked completely blank: I had no reason to sup- pose she was going to abdicate. In any event, she had told me nothing about it.

Again, it is too easily assumed that the people who are hostile to or critical of British policy at any given moment are all

members of 'ethnic' groups. As Professor Max Beloff pointed out some time ago, the WASPS (i.e. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) are themselves an ethnic group. They are, in fact, a bogus ethnic group, many of them

because whatever their names may suggest they are not Anglo-Saxons (e.g. Vice-Presi- dent Agnew) and they are in many instances only recently Protestants. We have a long_ list of persons of German, Polish, Greek, Irish Catholic origin who have 'passed', as

the Negroes used to say before they became Blacks, into the WASP group. Having a good genealogical memory, I am often amazed by the vehement pro-British attitudes, and indeed Scotch Presbyterian attitudes, of people whose grandparents I knew as rather rich but definitely Jewish Jews.

It is, I think, a mistake for a statesman and still more for a reporter to identify WASPs with the natural friends of Britain. That kind of political support is not very valuable and does not wear very well; and I have thought a good deal in the last year or two about the approaching celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the independence of the United States. Is this to be dealt with. as I fear in many instances it will be, in England, as a mere family quarrel? It must always be remembered that if it was a family quarrel, few quarrels are more passionate than family quarrels, and for a very long time some of the most hostile Americans were of pure English stock. Some still are. And the identification of the reasonable qualification of English- speaking with English can produce irony or, indeed, resentment.

I can remember a dinner given by the English-Speaking Union shortly before the last great war to Colonel Theodore Roose- velt Jr. One of those interminably boring chairmen in whom we specialise went on for nearly forty minutes introducing Colonel Roosevelt. The colonel had to fly to Paris that night. He became more and more annoyed. He found himself with only two or three minutes to thank his hosts before he had to get away to catch his 'plane. He did this succinctly and, leaving the room, he turned round and said, 'Perhaps I ought to point out to you that Roosevelt is not an Anglo-Saxon name'.

The special cultural relationship, which is genuine, should not be talked about too much. It was Gambetta who said about is revanche, `Think about it always; talk about it never'. The less ostentatious scratching of each other's backs—I speak as a non-WASP —the better. The great thing about the special relationship is not that it is special, but that it is natural.