Across the Pond (13 page)

FIVE

The Affirmative Spirit

Comedy and Compromise

The story is told in Ireland of a fiddlers’ competition out in the west, the winner of which would become All-Ireland champion. (The title “All-Ireland champion” is admittedly rather loose: one tends to bump into scores of All-Irish champion musicians up and down the country, as though every second woman on the street in the United States were to turn out to be Miss America.) The first contender for the award stepped on to the stage: a suave, distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman in evening dress, exquisitely coifed and bearing in his hand a genuine Stradivarius. Resting the instrument against his chin with a well-practised flourish, he drew the bow vigorously across the strings and began to play.

And by God he was useless.

The second candidate for stardom then turned to face the audience—a slick-haired, flashy-toothed type in a well-tailored grey suit, carrying in his hand an expensive but not classic violin. With an ingratiating smile, he placed the instrument under his chin and began to play.

And by God he was useless.

The judges were just on the point of declaring a no-winner when there was a slight commotion at the back of the room. Despite his evident reluctance, a third competitor was being forced to the front by his friends—a tiny, shrunken, octogenarian fellow in a crumpled old suit buttoned up with bits of string and hardly a seat to his trousers. In his withered claw lay a fiddle as decrepit as himself, its strings frayed and peeling, its wood leashed together by elastic bands. Shrinking from the crowd, but urged on loyally by his friends, he placed the fiddle beneath his chin with a quivering hand and softly drew the tattered bow across it.

And by God he was useless too.

There is a sense in which this is an anti-American story. For one thing, it represents a smack in the face for sentimentalists, of whom there are a good many in the United States. For another thing, it appeals to populist feelings only to deflate them. It panders to the champions of the Common Man, then turns on them with its last breath and leaves them disconcerted. Like a good deal in Irish culture, it builds up lofty expectations only to undercut them. It is also typical of that culture in its perversity. It promises to gratify our desire for a conventional upbeat ending, then pulls the rug out sadistically from under our feet. It trades on our liberal-minded assumption that appearances are no sure guide to reality, only to reveal that the fiddler is every bit as inept as he looks. Like a lot of Irish humour, the story is latently aggressive. It represents the revenge of those with a secret grudge against self-satisfied, smoothly predictable narratives. In typically Irish vein, it is about failure, not success, and failure as comic rather than as tragic.

Rather as the Irishman Oscar Wilde’s epigrams take a conventional piece of English wisdom and rip it inside out or stand it on its head, so this tale takes the traditional fairy story in which the beggar becomes king and leaves him even more of a loser than he was in the first place. In all these ways, the fable resembles not the humour of Americans in general but of American Jews in particular. It is not for nothing that the hero of the finest Irish novel ever written, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, is called Bloom. The fiddler joke works by bathos, one of the most typical of Irish literary devices. Hacking the world savagely down to size is a familiar Irish pastime. Deflation and debunkery are among the nation’s favourite pursuits. In this, Irish culture is very different in sensibility from the United States, which has been so generous to the country over the centuries. Debunkery is too negative an act for many Americans to feel easy about.

The Irish can be negative in the sense of satirical, but not in the sense of complaining too bitterly when things go wrong. This is partly because they live in a country which within living memory hovered somewhere between first and third worlds, and which has recently tipped back towards third-world status again. Life is thus not expected to be highly streamlined. Transport timetables, for example, are sometimes largely decorative, with only a loose relationship to observable fact. But the Irish reluctance to complain is also because it is imprudent to stand out as a trouble-maker in a small country where everyone knows everyone else. The British complain rather more, and have much to complain about; but they do so in a muttering, shamefaced sort of way, in case other people might complain in a muttering, shamefaced sort of way about their complaining.

Both comedy and tragedy are about coming unstuck. The difference lies in the way we respond to this debacle. Comedy is the art form which understands that coming unstuck is fairly commonplace. It is part of everyday existence to trip over your own feet from time to time, to fall apart at the seams, or fail to live up to your own grandiose ideals. If you do not aspire too high or expect too much, however, you will never have far to tumble, and will never be too crestfallen. By keeping your head down, refusing the seductions of greatness, you can survive. You will never be a saint or a conqueror, but your failures will be minor ones. In classical tragedy, those who aspire and fall make more of a splash because they tend to be privileged, heroic types. Comedy, by contrast, is the anti-heroic mode of those who accept the inevitability of things going awry, and have learnt to be stoical about it. It avoids the afflictions of tragedy by sacrificing its splendour. Comedy settles for half, tolerant and disenchanted, sceptical of all wide-eyed idealism and passionate intensity, adept at the art of compromise. It is not a cynical form, since it believes in the reality of human value; but it believes that such value is best preserved by not making too much of a fuss about it. It is a very British way of seeing.

Like comedy, the British are traditionally suspicious of the success ethic. Unlike Americans, they are not an affirmative nation. Among their national icons are a ship that sank (the
Titanic
) and a calamitous military defeat (Dunkirk). Defeat is what the British are particularly good at. They are maestros of utter disaster. No doubt there are bunkers deep below Whitehall where intensive seminars in how to screw up are secretly conducted. Glorious defeats, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, are almost to be elevated over stupendous victories. The British are not proactively heroic, but brave out of necessity. Unlike Americans, the only kind of heroism for which they have a sneaking admiration is one forced on you when the odds are hopeless and your back is to the wall. After such sporadic bursts of self-sacrificial glory, they resume their normal, grumpy, unheroic existence until the next catastrophe happens along. They need the occasional hardship in order to show what stuff they are made of, and suspect that American civilisation is too easy and flaccid in this respect. The States may be full of virile, chisel-jawed, bestubbled types, but all those stretch limos and Jacuzzis are fatally weakening. This is ironic, since quite a few Americans see the British themselves as effete. This is largely because their accents can sound vaguely gay, rather like their prose styles.

The British are no enthusiasts of extremes. They are not convinced that truth is what shines forth when you are driven to the outer edge. This can happen from time to time, as when German submarines are sinking your supply ships, but it is out of the ordinary. It should not be taken as a measure by which to characterise everyday life. The real self is the everyday, middle-of-the-road one. It is one that lends itself to the novel, a form at which the British have been adept, rather than to epic or tragedy. The British value freedom, for example, but tend to suspect that Americans make too much of a song and dance about it. Charles Dickens records in his
American Notes
an encounter he had with a doctor who insists he has no intention of leaving America. “Not yet awhile, Sir, not yet. You won’t catch me at that just yet, Sir. I am a little too fond of freedom for
that
, Sir. Ha, ha! It’s not so easy for a man to tear himself away from a free country such as this is, Sir! Ha, ha! No, no! Ha, ha! None of that, till one’s obliged to do it, Sir. No, no.” The doctor turns out to be a Scot who has only been in the country for three or four months. The national rhetoric is clearly contagious.

The middle of the road can be a dangerous place to stand. You are likely to get run over from both directions. It can also be an illusion. What is the middle way between racism and anti-racism, or tickling someone as opposed to torturing them? Even so, middle-of-the-roadism, which in Britain is almost as much an object of veneration as Manchester United, is probably less perilous than the sharper kinds of polarity one finds in the United States. Good guys and bad guys, for example. There are, in fact, no entirely good guys, which is not to say that there are no saints. It is just that saints are by no means entirely good guys. The Catholic Church allows that even they can have bouts of wrath and twinges of lust. Perhaps there are no completely bad guys either. Even monstrous despots weep over their sick children. The British believe that life is mixed and muddled, a view of the world that is exemplified by their weather. It is a supreme example of the pied and dappled nature of things, their chanciness and unpredictability, the way you can never really trust life when it is running smoothly because sunshine turns so often to showers. It is a metaphor for the nation’s mentality.

The British are fond of sayings like “It takes all kinds to make a world,” “There’s a bit of good and bad in everybody,” and “It would be a funny world if we all thought the same.” Fist fights can sometimes be avoided by telling your opponent that he has a right to his opinion and you have a right to yours. It is surprising how often this piece of threadbare liberal wisdom can prevent a punch in the face. It works partly by implying that people should leave each other alone, which the British are usually delighted to do. The British “muddle through,” meaning that they achieve their goals but don’t quite know how, and might just as easily not have done. The role of accident and approximation in human affairs is ruefully acknowledged. Things in the States are more conscious and clear-cut, rather like the layout of some of its cities. The aim is less compromise than achievement, so that you hatch your plan and put it efficiently into operation. The only problem with this is even if you do not mess it up, reality will probably do so for you. Such, at least, is the view of life across the Atlantic.

Grumbling and Grousing

The fact that the British are always grousing might suggest that they are gripped by a dream of perfection. But this is not so. They grouse largely because they enjoy doing so, and would be at a loss if their complaints were all to be satisfied. One reason why they talk about the weather so much is that it is often pretty bad, a fact from which, as chronic masochists, they reap a morose kind of pleasure. It also allows them to grumble without getting too personal in their protests, thus risking a broken rib. Since nobody is likely to take a bitter harangue about hailstones personally, one can vent one’s spleen without fear of being physically assaulted. The subject also appeals to the deep-seated fatalism of the British people, since there is no way of stopping a thunderstorm. This, too, is a secret source of self-lacerating joy among the citizenry. The British rather enjoy feeling helpless, as the Americans do not. The thought that there is absolutely nothing one can do is regarded by some in the United States as defeatist, nihilistic and in some obscure sense unpatriotic. In Britain, it brings with it a strange, luminous, semi-mystical kind of peace.

It is important to note that the British do not just complain about the weather when it is cold and damp. They complain about it when it is hot and dry as well. In their view, too much sunshine is almost as offensive as a tsunami. The British are not in general prima donnas, and tend to disapprove of any such capricious behaviour. When it comes to the weather, however, they can no more be satisfied than a pampered rock star who smashes the bottles of Moët & Chandon champagne backstage because he asked for apple juice. The weather, like seaside holidays and overseas football matches, is Britain’s occasion for infantile self-indulgence.

Another reason why the British talk about the weather so much is that it is one of the few things common to everyone in a socially divided nation. It is also because the weather in Britain is perpetually changing and wildly unpredictable, and thus lends itself to animated discussion rather more than the unwavering heat of the Sahara. Along with illness, it is one of the few dramatic aspects of everyday life. If the country were blessed with a calculable climate, its citizens would be struck dumb. Talking about rain and fog, however, is also a way of avoiding talking about more intimate matters, of which the British are notably shy. (So, indeed, are the Irish, who seem more frank and open than their former proprietors but who have all sorts of secret depths.) Sex as a topic of conversation is of general interest but too revealing, while the demography of sixteenth-century Portugal is unrevealing but not of general interest. So storm clouds and regions of low pressure must serve instead.