British Cultural Fatigue

by KENNETH TYNAN

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AFTER a trip abroad, it is nowadays a gloomy experience for anyone whose life is bound up with the arts to return to Britain. In a way, of course, this has always been so: to dash south to the sun is the traditional British escape, and the chagrin of homecoming has cropped up in the pages of many literary journals. But in recent years, or so it seems to me, the feeling of dissatisfaction has grown more intense, and appears to spring from something more valid than mere reluctance to go back to work. “Glad to be home?” The question is invariably ironic: for most young people working in or around the arts the only possible answer is in the negative. The expatriate life looks more tempting than it ever did — and not, let me add, because of any lack of opportunity at home. There are more openings for writers, artists, and actors than anyone can remember. If they remain unfilled, it is because of a swelling suspicion on the part of British youth that their country is culturally out of touch, somehow shrunken and inhibited, desperately behind the times. Surveying the volcano of energy across the Atlantic, we feel much as the people of Pompeii must have felt as the lava inched closer: helpless, and in imminent danger of becoming history.

The reason for this state of affairs is a mystery for historians to unravel — I mean the strange process by which the center of gravity of Western civilization shifts westward, along a path of power leading from Egypt to Greece, Rome, Spain, and France, through Britain in the last century to America in this. This process has left Britain bewildered, dispossessed, and deeply unsure of herself. It has naturally affected her art; for if art is to be more than an arabesque in the dust, it needs rich soil in which to grow: accepted beliefs, axioms commonly held, ideas so pervasive that nobody bothers to question them; it needs, in fact, a background of security. When everybody in a given country has something in common with everybody else, it acts as a foil against which they can discuss the ways in which they differ. The analysis of those differences, so conducted as to enliven leisure, makes up a great deal of what we call art. Without that background, art exists only as a series of unconnected air pockets; and such is the case in Britain.

In the summer of 1953 Britain underwent a few weeks of artificial unity. For a short while, and for the first time since the end of the war, there was one sentence which could be uttered anywhere in the country without very much fear of contradiction. This sentence was not “I believe in God,” “I believe in Labor,” or “I believe in Capital”; all three were, and remain, controversial. It was, of course, “God save the Queen,” and it welded the country together in an ecstasy of surprised selfcongratulation. The pros and cons of royalism are not here in question: I mention it merely as a symptom of a condition. The fact is that since the coronation of Elizabeth II the crown has been above criticism to an extent practically unknown in the past. Its news value is gigantic; every magazine editor knows that by putting Princess Margaret on the cover he can double his circulation. Nobody doubts that the Queen is performing an awkward job with exemplary tact; what gives one pause is the change in the attitude of the people toward the crown in general. If Sir Max Beerbohm were to cartoon any member of the present royal family with half the trenchancy he devoted to Edward VII, there is a distinct chance that he would be lynched out of hand.

Standing in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace, a popular columnist overheard an Australian soldier describing the Queen, the Duke, and their two children as “just about the four most important people in the world” — a phrase which he quoted, with passionate endorsement, in his next article. Without verging too closely on treason, one might think that this was an opinion at least worth debating, but nobody debated it. A practiced hand had touched a chord which rang inviolable in every ear. The freedom with which, as late as fifty years ago, the Times commented on the public activities of royalty exists today only in the grubby bulletins of obscure anarchist sects. As a nation, we are on our dignity, and any attempt to shake it is greeted with the phrase which, more than any other, governs and intimidates the British mind: “bad taste.” It is the mark of insecure nations to venerate what is peculiar to them. San Marino has its postage stamps; Spain its bullfights; Britain its crown.

This persistent homage to royalty is only one aspect of a widespread nostalgia for the past, with its attendant aura of safe prosperity. This is particularly noticeable in leisured and/or cultivated people. Rather than admit a century which, they secretly feel, has “no foundations, all the way down the line,” they slam the door in its face and send it round to the tradesmen’s entrance. Their walls are adorned with Regency stripes; and until, derisively, teen-age gangsters copied the style, nothing would do for their menfolk but suits cut to Edwardian patterns. The curly-brimmed bowler has come back, and so has the velvet collar. Victorian churches have become the object of a cult, and Fabergé has replaced Picasso on the chimney piece. Here and there a few new apartment blocks have gone up, designed by architects who have obviously heard of Le Corbusier, but these are meant only for families of low income: the rich seek out Queen Anne cottages and Georgian squares.

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THE novel, meanwhile, has grown old and obese in its assumptions. Nothing is more comically revealing of the new post-war order than the emergence of Evelyn Waugh as a pillar of the Catholic gentry — “twenty thousand leagues,”as someone said, “below the Holy See.” As an American observer truly remarked, “In Britain there are still two classes: the educated and the uneducated.” The frontier between them is prickly. I do not deny that class distinctions have contributed to English literature some of its funniest pages; all the same, there is something dismaying in the common spectacle of a humane, intelligent, liberal writer unable to resist making class jokes at the expense of his characters. Admission to the higher literary circles still involves the adoption of a certain accent, and a certain set of attitudes toward those lamentable people who still, after all these years, don’t know better than to go to Cassis for the summer. These attitudes creep into the most unexpected novels, many of them by former left-wingers, and they are among the signs by which one sighs to recognize a successful British writer.

Snobbery on a far grander scale is of course the stock in trade of Nancy Mitford, whose jubilant prostration before the French aristocracy is in fact a much less vulnerable posture than one might think, since all criticism of it can quickly be labeled envy and thus dismissed. Miss Mitford is a very accomplished writer of lightweight prose; it is merely the position in which she works that provokes a qualm. A subtler form of snobbery is the suggestion that country houses before the First World War were exclusively inhabited by families of alarming but highly seductive eccentricity; the expert in this line is Ivy Compton-Burnett.

There is naturally a resistance movement against all this, a small band of novelists led by the larkish and irreverent Kingsley Amis, whose first novel, Lucky Jim, perfectly captured the impatience of the younger British intelligentsia with its environment. But the daunting impregnability of the fortress they are attacking has forced Amis and his friends into taking up a number of opposite attitudes just as stubborn as those of their enemies. They declare themselves provincial and proud of it ; they speak of the continent as “furrin parts”; they answer Blimpishness with pedantry. Perhaps these are just tactical measures; at all events, it is a pity that a writer of Amis’s gifts should be condemned to work in a country which, the evidence suggests, is pretty well worked out as a subject for novels. Reviewers cannot go on indefinitely praising novelists for their “brilliant evocation of the drabness and squalor of a Northern industrial town.” It is no accident that, outside D. H. Lawrence, the best British novels of the past thirty years have been futuristic fantasies, excursions into the past, or lacerating satires. The here and now of British life is frankly not enough fun for literature to be made out of it.

In the theater the talk is mostly of revivals — of the Poetic Revival, led by (and restricted to) T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, and of Shakespearean revivals, which take up most of the time and energy of actors like Gielgud and Olivier and directors like Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook, all of whom, given a few new playwrights, might well turn their talents into channels less stagnant. Meanwhile French and American plays captivate the critics; and the real money continues to be made by comedies about country-house families humorously facing up to the economic problems of living in country houses, and the social problems of living in the twentieth century at all. These plays are written in dialogue based on Pinero, Lonsdale, and Coward; as a matter of fact, Coward still writes many of them himself. Successful British plays about families who cannot afford a villa on the Riviera and a London season for their daughter are as rare as families who can afford them. The trouble is that colloquial speech is moribund in Britain; we need a few million immigrants to replenish the language. The only theatrically exciting dialogue spoken in Britain at present is thieves’ argot, and that is unintelligible to non-criminals.

The darkest cloud over the cultural landscape is that of steadily increasing xenophobia. The man without feet inevitably resents the man next door, who lacks only shoes. The test of a culture’s strength — and in part the reason for it — is its capacity to absorb, or at least to tolerate, alien cultures. In Britain, fear of the outsider is rife. Ebullience per se is suspect, since it may be due to American influence. Our mistrust of “Americanization” was heard at its most vocal in the virulence of left-wing opposition to commercial television in Britain, Calmer voices pointed out that Britain ought to be capable of working out safeguards which would ban from our screens the worst American excesses, but the enemies of the proposal had seen the cloven hoof and went on shrieking. The BBC, they said, was uniquely British and therefore sacrosanct. By a small majority the scheme passed through the Commons, and a curious fact then emerged: that only about one in a thousand of those who complained most bitterly had ever seen American television.

In ten short years, one realized, currency restrictions had transformed Britain into a country terrifyingly ignorant of its neighbors. Our tendency was always toward insularity; now that we are allowed only $280 a year to spend abroad, the process has accelerated alarmingly. One wonders whether the economic saving has compensated for the spiritual loss. Most of the population, of course, could not afford a trip to America in any circumstances; Britain, it seems, will always be full of people like the builder’s laborer who, in an argument recently reported in the Manchester Guardian, firmly contended that Eisenhower was the Generalissimo of the Russian army. It is the ignorance of more intelligent people that is shocking. Last spring a friend of mine, back from his first visit to New York, told me how satisfied he was at the advances American civilization had made. “Why.” he said, “in one night club I even saw colored men and white men playing in the same orchestra.”

If ignorance breeds complacency, it also breeds touchiness. The British do not like criticism. It is well known that the British film censor will not permit on the screen any serious criticism of the law, the Houses of Parliament, the schools, the armed services, and the government offices; also that the Lord Chamberlain, whose qualifications for the post of dramatic censor include a spell as Governor of Bombay, will not grant licenses to plays which parody politicians or in which any kind of sexual deviation is so much as implied. The popular error is to think of both men its tyrants. But oppressors, to deserve the name, must have something to oppress, some opposition to crush; and the truth is that in hiding so much of life from the public’s eyes the censors are carrying out the public’s wishes. Their function is to supply free sand for the ostriches who demand it. The recent spate of obscenity prosecutions, sometimes directed against the most reputable publishing houses, is another manifestation of this; so is the rigorous police drive to enforce the archaic laws against homosexuality.

An image is being built up, to what end I do not know, of the British as a people flawlessly ruled and morally above suspicion. No wonder, therefore, that intelligent youth feels a nagging desire to remove itself to a country of less fogged vision, where it is officially admitted that man is an imperfect creature. One day, no doubt, the false tribal image will crumble under volley after volley of laughter; it is beyond question a ruin in course of construction; but the fact that such an overwhelming majority of the British uphold it is a persuasive argument in favor of living elsewhere.

Not only generalities but small particular vexations combine to create an atmosphere in which art is hard put to flourish. The curbs, for instance, imposed by an income tax so drastic that last year only 190 people in the country were left with net incomes of more than $16,800; the liquor laws which compel most bars to close at 10 P.M. and the rest at 11 P.M.; the impossibility of obtaining food after that hour anywhere except in London, where even the latest restaurant shuts its doors at midnight. In day-to-day life these petty annoyances probably outweigh the larger ones.

Yet one stays; many of us stay, though we are often amazed at the traditional phlegm which enables us to do it. We stay, cultivating our gardens with moderate success, but aware, intermittently, that the earth is somehow waning in fertility. At first you blame yourself, and work harder; until, detaching yourself front the crowd one day to climb a nearby hill, you survey the panorama of British culture as a whole. It reveals itself as a holy eggshell, being jealously preserved by people without the energy and impetus that went to the making of the egg. In a hundred years’ time, I expect, men will still speak with affection of what C. S. Lewis has called “the fruitful, sheep-dotted, river-veined, legend-haunted expanse of England"; but something tells me that they may also be wondering what happened to the English imagination. They may even deliver pious obsequies. “When British culture died,” it will be said, “they broke the mold.“ Right now, I am awfully afraid, the mold could be broken with a nutcracker.