R
oger! Have you met George? Cyril! Have you met George? Keith! Have you met George? Brian! Have you met George? Tony! Have you met George! Nigel! Have youâ
âoh god, he's doing a hell of a job of it, introducing everybody by their first names, first-naming the hell out of everybody, introducing them to George, who just arrived from New York: George is an American and the key man in the Fabrilex account. A hell of a job of introductions he is doing. He has everybody from the firm, plus a lot of other people, English and American, all calculated to impress and flatter American George, all piled into this sort of library-reception room upstairs at theââClub amid the lyre-splat chairs, bullion-fringe curtains, old blacky Raeburn-style portraits, fabulously junky glass-and-ormolu chandeliers, paw-foot chiffoniers, teapoys, ingenious library steps leading resolutely up into thin air, a wonderful dark world of dark wood, dark rugs, candy-box covings, moldings, flutings, pilasters, all red as table wine, brown as boots, made to look like it has been steeped a hundred years in expensive tobacco, roast beef, horseradish sauce and dim puddings.
The Americans really lap this Club stuff up, but that is not the point, the point is thatâChrist, Americans are childish in many ways and about as subtle as a Wimpy bender: but in the long run it doesn't make any difference. They just turn on the power. They have the power, they just move in and take it, introducing people by their first names as they go, people they've never laid eyes on,
pals
, and who gives a damn. They didn't go to Cambridge and learn to envy people
who belonged to the Pitt Club and commit the incredible gaffe of walking into the Pitt Club with a Cambridge scarf on. They just turn on the money or whatever it takes, and they take it, and the grinning first names shall inherit the earth, their lie-down crewcuts as firm and pure as Fabrilexâandâ
âhe has had a couple of highballs. Highballs! That is what they call whisky-and-sodas. And now he is exhilarated with the absolute
baldness
of putting on his glistening ceramic grin and introducing all of these faces to George by their first names, good old George, cleaned-and-pressed old George, big-blucher-shoed old George, popped-out-of-the-Fabrilex-mold old Georgeâthe delicious baldness of it!â
Karl! Have you met George? Alec! Have you met George? John! Have you met George? George, predictably, has a super-ingratiating and deferential grin on his face, shaking hands, pumping away, even with people who don't put their hands out at firstâMark! shake hands with George, he wants to sayâand as George shakes hands he always lowers his head slightly and grins in panic and looks up from under his eyebrows, deferentially, this kind of unconscious deference because he ⦠is meeting
Englishmen
â¦
Still! Why should George give a damn? He can throw away points like this right and left. That's the way Americans are. They can make the wrong gesture, make the most horrible malapropisms, use so many wrong forks it drives the waiter up the wall; demonstrate themselves to be, palpably, social hydrocephalics, total casualties of gaucherie and humiliationâand yet afterwards they don't give a damn. They are right back the next morning as if nothing had happened, smashing on, good-humored, hard-grabbing, winning, taking, clutching. George can scrape and bobble his eyeballs under his eyebrows all day and he will still make his £20,000 a year and buy and sell every bastard in this roomâ
Nicholas! Have you met George?
Harold! Have you met George?
Freddie! Have you met George?
“Pe-t-e-r ⦔
⦠Oh Christ ⦠the second syllable of the name just dribbles off his lips.
With Peterâsuddenly he can't go through with it. He can't do the first name thing with Peter, he can't hail him over and introduce him to this AmericanâPeter!âGeorge!âas if of course they're pals,
pals
. Peter? A pal? Peter is on precisely his level in the hierarchy of the firm, the same age, 33, yet ⦠in another hierarchyâclass, to call it by its right nameâ
Peter's fine yet languid face, his casual yet inviolate wavy thatchy hairâthat old, ancient thing, class, now has him and he can't introduce
Peter by his first name. It is as if into the room has burst the policeman, the arresting officer, from ⦠that world, the entire world of nannies,
cottages ornées
in Devonshire, honeysuckle iron balustrades, sailor suits, hoops and sticks, lolly Eton collars, deb parties, introductions to rich old men, clubs, cliques, horn-handled cigar cuttersâin short, the ancient, ineradicable anxiety of class in Englandâand he knows already the look of patient, tolerant disgust that will begin to slide over Peter's face within the next half second as he looks at him and his American friends and his ceramic grin and his euphoria and his
highballs.
In that instant, confronted by the power of the future on the one handâGeorge's eyeballs begin to bobble under the eyebrowsâand the power of the past on the otherâPeter's lips begin to curdleâhe realizes what has happened to himself. He has become a Mid-Atlantic Man.
He meets them all the time in London now. They are Englishmen who have reversed the usual process and ⦠gone American. The usual process has been that Americans have gone to England and ⦠gone English. Woodrow Wilson appoints Walter Hines Page ambassador to the Court of St. James's and tells him: “Just one word of advice, don't become an Englishman.” Page says, “Sure, O.K.,” but, of course, he does, he becomes so much an Englishman he can't see straight. The usual pattern is, he begins using his knife and fork Continental style, holding the fork in the left hand. He goes to a tailor who puts that nice English belly into the lapels of his coat and builds up suits made of marvelous and arcane layers and layers of worsted, welts, darts, pleats, double-stitches, linings, buttons, pockets, incredible numbers of pockets, and so many buttons to button and unbutton, and he combs his hair into wings over the ears, and he puts a certain nice drag in his voice and learns to walk like he is recovering from a broken back. But one knows about all that. The American has always gone English in order to endow himself with the mystique of the English upper classes. The Englishman today goes American, becomes a Mid-Atlantic Man, to achieve the opposite. He wants to get out from under the domination of the English upper classes by ⦠going classless. And he goes classless by taking on the style of life, or part of the style of life, of a foreigner who cannot be fitted into the English class system, the modern, successful, powerful American.
The most obvious example of the Mid-Atlantic Man is the young English show-business figure, a singer, musician, manager, producer, impresario, who goes American in a big way. A singer, for example, sings American rhythm and blues songs, in an American accent, becomes a â¦
pal
of American entertainers, studs his conversation with American slang, like, I mean you know, man, that's where it's at, baby,
and, finally, begins to talk with an American accent in an attempt to remove the curse of a working-class accent. But the typical Mid-Atlantic Man is middle class and works in one of the newer industries, advertising, public relations, chemical engineering, consulting for this and that, television, credit cards, agentry, industrial design, commercial art, motion pictures, the whole world of brokerage, persuasion, savantry and shows that has grown up beyond the ancient divisions of landowning, moneylending and the production of dry goods.
He is vaguely awareâhe may try to keep it out of his mindâthat his background is irrevocably middle class and that everybody in England is immediately aware of it and that this has held him back. This may even be why he has gravitated into one of the newer fields, but still the ancient drag of class in England drags him, drags him, drags him ⦠.
They happen to be watching television one night and some perfectly urbane and polished person like Kenneth Allsop comes on the screen and after three or four sentences somebody has to observe, poor Kenneth Allsop, listen to the way he says practically, he will never get the Midlands out of his voice, he breaks it all up, into practi-cally ⦠and he laughs, but grimly, because he knows there must be at least fifty things like that to mark him as hopelessly middle class and he has none of Allsop's fame to take the curse off.
He first began to understand all this as far back as his first month at Cambridge. Cambridge!âwhich was supposed to turn him into one of those inviolate, superior persons who rule England and destiny. Cambridge was going to be a kind of finishing school. His parents had a very definite idea of it that way, a picture of him serving sherry to some smart friends in his chambers, wearing a jacket that seems to have worn and mellowed like a 90-year-old Persian rug. Even he himself had a vague notion of how Cambridge was going to transform him from a bright and mousy comprehensive schoolboy into one of those young men with spread collars and pale silk ties who just â¦
assumes
he is in control, at restaurants, in clubs, at parties, with women, in careers, in life, on rural weekends, and thereby is.
And then the very first month this thing happened with the Pitt Club and the Cambridge scarf. His first move on the road to having smart people over to his chambers for sherry, and Cuban tobaccoâCuban tobacco was also included in this visionâwas to buy a Cambridge scarf, a nice long thing with confident colors that would wrap around the neck and the lower tip of his chin and flow in the wind. So he would put on his scarf and amble around the streets, by the colleges, peeking in at the Indian restaurants, which always seemed to be closed, and thinking, Well, here I am, a Cambridge man.
Â
Â
One day he came upon this place and a glow came from inside, red as wine, brown as boots, smart people, sherry-sherry, and so he stepped insideâand suddenly a lot of white faces turned his way, like a universe erupting with eggs Benedict, faces in the foyer, faces from the dining tables farther in. A porter with chipped-beef jowls stepped up and looked him up and down once, dubious as hell, and said:
“Are you a member, sir?”
Such a voice! It was obvious that he knew immediately that he was not a member and the question was merely, witheringly, rhetorical and really said, Why does a hopeless little nit like you insist on wandering in where you don't belong, and all the eggs Benedict faces turned toward him were an echo of the same thing. They all knew immediately! And it was as if their eyes had fastened immediately upon his jugular veinâno!âupon the Cambridge scarf.
He mumbled and turned his head ⦠there in the ancient woody brown of the place was a long coat rack, and hanging on it was every kind of undergraduate garment a
right
mind could think of, greatcoats, riding macs, cloaks, capes, gowns, mantles, even ponchos, mufflers, checked mufflers, Danish mufflers, camel-tan mufflers, ratty old aunt-knitty mufflersâeverything and anything in the whole woofy English goddamn universe of cotton, wool, rubber and leather ⦠except for a Cambridge scarf. This place turned out to be the Pitt Club, watering trough of the incomparables, the Cambridge elite. Wearing a Cambridge scarf in here was far, far worse than having no insignia at all. In a complex Cambridge hierarchy of colleges and clubsâif all one had was an insignia that said merely that one had been admitted to the universityâthat was as much as saying, well, he's here and that's all one can say about him, other than that he is a hopeless fool.
He did not throw the Cambridge scarf away, strangely enough. He folded it up into a square and tucked it way back in the bottom of his bottom drawer, along with the family Bible his grandfather had given him. From that day on he was possessed by the feeling that there were two worlds, the eggs Benedict faces and his, and never, in four years, did he invite a single smart person over for sherry. Or for Cuban tobacco. He smoked English cigarettes that stained his teeth.
Even years later, in fact, he held no tremendous hopes for the advertising business until one day he was in New Yorkâone day!âwith all Mid-Atlantic Men it seems to start one day in New York.
Practically always they have started flying to New York more and more on business. He started flying over on the Fabrilex account. Fabrilex was going to run a big campaign in England. So he began flying to New York and getting gradually into the New York advertising life, which turned out to be a strangely â¦
stimulating
âall Mid-Atlantic Men come back with that word for New York, stimulating ⦠strangely stimulating aura of sheer money, drive, conniving, hard work, self-indulgence, glamour, childishness, cynicism.
Â
Beginning with the reception room of theâââAgency. It was decorated with the most incredible black leather sofas, quilted and stuffed to the gullet, with the leather gushing and heaving over the edge of the arms, the back and everywhere. There was wall-to-wall carpet, not like a Wilton but so thick one could break one's ankle in it, and quite vermilion, to go with the vermilion walls and all sorts of inexplicable polished brass objects set in niches, candelabra, busts, pastille-burners, vases, etc., and a receptionist who seemed to be made of polished Fabrilex topped with spun brass back-combed hair. She didn't sit at a desk but at a delicate
secretaire
faced with exotic wood veneers, tulipwood, satinwood, harewood. She also operated a switchboard, which was made to look, however, like the keyboard of a harpsichord. There was one large painting, apparently by the last painter in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to copy Franz Kline. Three different members of the firm, Americans, told him the reception room looked like “a San Francisco whorehouse.” Three of them used that same simile, a San Francisco whorehouse. This was not said in derision, however. They thought it was crazy but they were proud of it. New York!